Lacan BIG File

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THE INDEX
THE INDEX .............................................................................................................................................. 1
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Security Shell 2/6 .................................................................................................................................... 6
Security Shell 3/6 .................................................................................................................................... 7
Security Shell 5/6 .................................................................................................................................... 9
Security Shell 6/6 .................................................................................................................................. 11
A2 Generic Security good nonsense ...................................................................................................... 12
A2 Impact Calculus 1/2 ......................................................................................................................... 13
A2 Impact Calculus 2/2 ......................................................................................................................... 14
A2 Link Turn ......................................................................................................................................... 15
A2 That Robinson Dumbass 1/2 ............................................................................................................ 16
A2 That Robinson Dumbass 2/2 ............................................................................................................ 17
A2 Ontology of some sort ..................................................................................................................... 18
A2 "Our affirmative is a radical break from blah blah blah" ................................................................... 19
A2 State inevitable/Realism inevitable.................................................................................................. 20
A2 "Doesn't apply to the social"............................................................................................................ 21
A2 Permutation .................................................................................................................................... 22
A2 Pragmatism/Rorty ........................................................................................................................... 23
Framework shell 1/2 ............................................................................................................................. 24
Framework shell 2/2 ............................................................................................................................. 25
Kappeler ............................................................................................................................................... 26
Fantasy Link ......................................................................................................................................... 27
Fantasy Link ......................................................................................................................................... 29
Representations link ............................................................................................................................. 31
Fiat link ................................................................................................................................................ 32
Statism Link .......................................................................................................................................... 33
Statism Link .......................................................................................................................................... 34
Scarcity link/A2 Desire doesn't exist/A2 Desire good ............................................................................ 35
Identity link/A2 Identity Politics ........................................................................................................... 36
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Terrorism link ....................................................................................................................................... 40
Liberation link ...................................................................................................................................... 42
Ethics Link ............................................................................................................................................ 43
Ethics Link ............................................................................................................................................ 44
Ethics Link ............................................................................................................................................ 45
Ethics Link ............................................................................................................................................ 46
Ethics Link ............................................................................................................................................ 47
Obligation link ...................................................................................................................................... 48
Obligation link ...................................................................................................................................... 49
Compassion link ................................................................................................................................... 50
Guilt Link .............................................................................................................................................. 51
Guilt Link .............................................................................................................................................. 52
Otherness Link ...................................................................................................................................... 53
Link of Omission ................................................................................................................................... 54
Threat-con link ..................................................................................................................................... 55
Historicism Link .................................................................................................................................... 56
Post-Politics impact .............................................................................................................................. 57
Sham Joiussance Impacts ...................................................................................................................... 58
Death Drive Impacts ............................................................................................................................. 60
Alt: aff can never access it/A2 Perm/A2 Link Turn ................................................................................. 64
Shame Alternative ................................................................................................................................ 65
Queer Negativity Alternative ................................................................................................................ 66
Environment Section ............................................................................................................................ 67
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Reproductive Futurism Section ............................................................................................................. 77
Race Section ......................................................................................................................................... 83
Race Section ......................................................................................................................................... 84
Race Section ......................................................................................................................................... 85
Race Section ......................................................................................................................................... 86
Race Section ......................................................................................................................................... 87
Race Section ......................................................................................................................................... 88
Race Section ......................................................................................................................................... 89
Race Section ......................................................................................................................................... 90
Race Section ......................................................................................................................................... 91
Race Section ......................................................................................................................................... 92
Race Section ......................................................................................................................................... 93
Race Section ......................................................................................................................................... 94
Race Section ......................................................................................................................................... 95
Race Section ......................................................................................................................................... 96
Race Section ......................................................................................................................................... 97
Race Section ......................................................................................................................................... 98
A2 Derrida ............................................................................................................................................ 99
Shame Framework .............................................................................................................................. 102
Judge-as-analyst framework ............................................................................................................... 103
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PSYCHOANALYSIS GOOD..................................................................................................................... 106
LACAN SOLVES FEMINISM ................................................................................................................... 111
THEIR FRAMEWORK WORSE ............................................................................................................... 112
MORE STUFF....................................................................................................................................... 113
MORE STUFF....................................................................................................................................... 114
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The affirmative creates a utopian vision of the world where all we have to do is
_________________________________________________________________________________ and
all will be solved. This attempt at fantasy simply covers the Lack, ending in the extermination of those
who interrupt our strive for utopia.
STAVRAKAKIS VISITING FELLOW IN GOV'T, UNIV. OF ESSEX '99 [Yannis, Lacan and the Political, pg. 63-65]
What constantly emerges from this exposition is that when harmony is not present it has to be somehow introduced in order for our reality to be
coherent. It has to be introduced through a fantasmatic social construction. One should not get the impression though that this is a mere philosophical
discussion. In so far as our constructions of reality influence our behaviourand this is what they basically doour fixation on harmony has direct social and political
consequences. Reality construction does not take place on a superstructural level. Reality is forced to conform to our
constructions of it not only at the spiritual or the intellectual, but also at the material level. But why does it have to be
forced to conform? This is due, for instance, to the gap between our harmonious fantasmatic constructions of nature and
nature itself, between reality and the real. Our constructions of reality are so strong that nature has to conform to them
and not they to nature; reality is conceived as mastering the real. But there is always a certain leftover, a disturbing
element destabilising our constructions of nature. This has to be stigmatized, made into a scapegoat and exterminated.
The more beatific and harmonious is a social fantasy the more this repressed destabilising element will be excluded from
its symbolizationwithout, however, ever disappearing. In this regard, a vignette from the history of nature conservation can be revealing. As is well known nature
conservation was developed first in the United States; what is not so well known is that a major feature of the crusade for resource conservation was a deliberate campaign to destroy wild animalsone of the most
efficient, well-organized, and well-financed such efforts in all of mans history (Worster, 1994:261). All this, although not solely attributable to it, was part of a progressive moralistic ideology which conceived of
nature together with society as harbouring ruthless exploiters and criminals who should be banished from the land (Worster, 1994:265). The driving force behind this enterprise was clearly a particular ethically
distinctive construction of nature articulated within the framework of a conservation ideology. According to this construction what was had to conform to what should be and what should be, that is to say nature
without vermin (coyotes and other wild predators), was accepted as more naturalmore harmoniousthan what was: These conservationists were dedicated to reorganizing the natural economy in a way that would
fulfil their own ideal vision of what nature should be like (Worster, 1994:266). This construction was accepted by the Roosevelt administration in the USA (1901-9) and led to the formation of an official programme
to exterminate vermin. The job was given to a government agency, the Bureau of the Biological Survey (BBS) in the Department of Agriculture, and a ruthless war started (in 1907 alone, 1,700 wolves and 23,000
coyotes were killed in the National Parks and this policy continued and expanded for years) (Worster, 1994:263). What is this dialectic between the beatific fantasy of nature and the demonised vermin doing if not
illustrating the Lacanian dialectic between the two sides of fantasy or between fantasy and symptom? Since we will explore the first of these two Lacanian approaches to fantasy in Chapter 4, we will concentrate here
on the fantasy/symptom axis. As far as the promise of filling the lack in the Other is concerned, fantasy can be better understood in its relation to the Lacanian
conception of the symptom; according to one possible reading, fantasy and symptom are two inter-implicated terms. It is the symptom that interrupts the
consistency of the field of our constructions of reality, of the object of identification, by embodying the repressed
jouissance, the destabilising part of nature excluded from its harmonious symbolisation. The symptom here is a real kernel of enjoyment; it is the
repressed jouissance that returns and does not ever stop in imposing itself [on us] (Soler, 1991:214). If fantasy is the support that gives consistency to what we call reality (iek, 1989:49) on the other hand reality is
always a symptom (iek, 1992). Here we are insisting on the late Lacanian conception of the symptom as sinthome. In this conception, a signifier is married to jouissance, a signifier
is instituted in the real, outside the signifying chain but at the same time internal to it. This paradoxical role of the symptom can help us understand
the paradoxical role of fantasy. Fantasy gives discourse its consistency because it opposes the symptom (Ragland-Sullivan, 1991:16). Hence, if
the symptom is an encounter with the real, with a traumatic point that resists symbolisation, and if the discursive has to arrest the real and repress jouissance in order to produce reality, then the negation of
the real within fantasy can only be thought in terms of opposing, of stigmatising the symptom. This is then the relation
between symptom and fantasy. The self-consistency of a symbolic construction of reality depends on the harmony
instituted by fantasy. This fantasmatic harmony can only be sustained by the neutralisation of the symptom and of the
real, by a negation of the generalised lack that crosses the field of the social. But how is this done? If social fantasy produces the
self-consistency of a certain construction it can do so only by presenting the symptom as an alien, disturbing intrusion, and
not as the point of eruption of the otherwise hidden truth of the existing social order (iek, 1991a:40). The social fantasy of a harmonious social or natural order can
only be sustained if all the persisting disorders can be attributed to an alien intruder. To return to our example, the illusory character
of our harmonious construction of nature is shown in the fact that there is a part of the real which escapes its schema and
assumes a symptomatic form (vermin, etc.); in order for this fantasy to remain coherent, this real symptom has to be
stigmatised and eliminated. It cannot be accepted as the excluded truth of nature; such a recognition would lead to a
dislocation of the fantasy in question. When, however, the dependence of fantasy on the symptom is revealed, then the
playthe relationbetween the symptom and fantasy reveals itself as another mode of the play between the real and the
symbolic/imaginary nexus producing reality.

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Failure to account for the lack dooms their politics to failure and replicates violence
STAVRAKAKIS '99, Lacan and the Political, pg. 102-103

It could be argued that the roots of both demonisation and utopian thinking can be traced back to the shift from a cyclical to a unilinear representation of history
(Cohn, 1993a:227). However, we will start our reading of Cohns work by going back to Roman civilisation. As Cohn claims, a profound demonising
tendency is discernible in Ancient Rome: within the imperium, the Romans accused the Christians of cannibalism and the
Jews were accused by Greeks of ritual murder and cannibalism. Yet in the ancient Roman world, although Judaism was regarded as a bizarre
religion, it was nevertheless a religio licita, a religion that was officially recognised. Things were different with the newly formed Christian sect. In fact the
Christian Eucharist could easily be interpreted as cannibalistic (Cohn, 1993b:8). In almost all their ways Christians ignored or even negated the fundamental
convictions by which the pagan Graeco-Roman world lived. It is not at all surprising then that to the Romans they looked like a bunch of conspirators plotting to
destroy society. Towards the end of the second century, according to Tertullian, it was taken as a given that the Christians are the cause of every public
catastrophe, every disaster that hits the populace. If the Tiber floods or the Nile fails to, if there is a drought oran earthquake, a famine or a plague, the cry goes up
at once: Throw the Christians to the Lions!. (Tertullian in Cohn, 1993b:14) This defamation of Christians that led to their exclusion from
the boundaries of humanity and to their relentless persecution is a pattern that was repeated many times in later
centuries, when both the persecutors and the persecuted were Christians (Cohn, 1993b:15). Bogomiles, Waldensians, the Fraticelli movement and the
Catharsall the groups appearing in Umberto Ecos fascinating books, especially in The Name of the Rosewere later on persecuted within a similar discursive
context. The same happened with the demonisation of Christians, the fantasy that led to the great witch-hunt. Again, the conditions of possibility for this
demonisation can be accurately defined. First, some kind of misfortune or catastrophe had to occur, and second, there had to be someone who could be singled out
as the cause of this misfortune (Cohn, 1993b:226). In Cohns view then, social dislocation and unrest, on the one hand, and millenarian
exaltation, on the other, do overlap. When segments of the poor population were mesmerised by a prophet, their understandable desire to improve their
living conditions became transfused with fantasies of a future community reborn into innocence through a final, apocalyptic massacre. The evil onesvariously
identified with the Jews, the clergy or the richwere to be exterminated; after which the Saintsi.e. the poor in questionwould set up their kingdom, a realm
without suffering or sin. (Cohn, 1993c:14-15) It was at times of acute dislocation and disorientation that this demonising tendency
was more present. When people were faced with a situation totally alien to their experience of normality, when they were
faced with unfamiliar hazards dislocating their constructions of realitywhen they encountered the realthe collective
flight into the world of demonology could occur more easily (ibid.: 87). The same applies to the emergence of millenarian
fantasies. The vast majority of revolutionary millenarian outbreaks takes place against a background of disaster. Cohn
refers to the plagues that generated the first Crusade and the flagellant movements of 1260, 1348-9, 1391 and 1400, the famines
that preluded the first and second Crusade, the pseudo-Baldwin movement and other millenarian outbreaks and, of
course, the Black Death that precipitated a whole wave of millenarian excitement (ibid.: 282).

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The affirmative's advocacy is a focus on merely surviving for the next day. This focus on mere
survival means we do not focus on the miniscule things that make it worth living. Life absent those
things means we are not living life to the fullest, devaluing life and making catastrophe inevitable.
Zizek 2003, (Slavoj, Prof of Sociology @ Inst. For Sociology Ljjbljana Univ, Welcome to the Desert of the Real!, 94-99)

Insofar as death and life designate for Saint Paul two existential (subjective) positions, not objective facts, we are fully justified in raising the old Pauline
question: who is really alive today? What if we are really alive only if and when we engage ourselves with an excessive intensity
which puts us beyond mere life? What if, when we focus on mere survival, even if it is qualified as having a good time, what we
ultimately lose is life itself? What if the Palestinian suicide bomber on the point of blowing himself (and others) up is, in an emphatic sense, more alive
than the American soldier engaged in a war in front of a computer screen hundreds of miles away from the enemy, or a New York yuppie jogging along the
Hudson river in order to keep his body in shape? Or, in terms of the psychoanalytic clinic, what if a hysteric is truly alive in her permanent, excessive, provoking
questioning of her existence, while an obsessional is the very model of choosing a life in death? That is to say, is not the ultimate aim of his compulsive rituals
to prevent the thing from happeningthis thing being the excess of life itself? Is not the catastrophe he fears the fact that, finally,
something will really happen to him? Or, in terms of the revolutionary process, what if the difference that separates Lenins era from Stalinism is,
again, the difference between life and death? There is an apparently marginal feature which clearly illustrates this point: the basic attitude of a Stalinist Communist
is that of following the correct Party line against Rightist or Leftist deviation in short, to steer a safe middle course; for authentic Leninism, in clear contrast,
there is ultimately only one deviation, the Centrist onethat of playing it safe, of opportunistically avoiding the risk of clearly and excessively taking sides.
There was no deeper historical necessity, for example, in the sudden shift of Soviet policy from War Communism to the New Economic Policy in 1921 it
was just a desperate strategic zigzag between the Leftist and the Rightist line, or, as Lenin himself put it in 1922, the Bolsheviks made all the possible mistakes.
This excessive taking sides, this permanent imbalance of zigzag, is ultimately (the revolutionary political) life itselffor a Leninist, the ultimate name of the
counterrevolutionary Right is Center itself, the fear of introducing a radical imbalance into the social edifice. It is a properly Nietzschean paradox that the
greatest loser in this apparent assertion of Life against all transcendent Causes is actual life itself. What makes life worth living is the very excess of life: the
awareness that there is something for which we are ready to risk our life (we may call this excess freedom, honor, dignity, autonomy, etc.). Only when
we are ready to take this risk are we really alive. So when Hlderlin wrote: To live is to defend a form, this form is not simply a Lebens form,
but the form of the excess-of-life, the way this excess violently inscribes itself into the life-texture. Chesterton makes this point apropos of the paradox of courage:
A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange
carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not
merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious
indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.2 The post-metaphysical survivalist stance of the Last
Men ends up in an anemic spectacle of life dragging on as its own shadow. It is within this horizon that we should appreciate todays growing rejection of the
death penalty: what we should be able to discern is the hidden biopolitics which sustains this rejection. Those who assert the sacredness of life, defending it
against the threat of transcendent powers which parasitize on it, end up in a supervised world in which well live painlessly, safelyand tediously,3 a world in
which, for the sake of its very official goala long, pleasurable life all real pleasures are prohibited or strictly controlled (smoking, drugs, food. . .). Spielbergs
Saving Private Ryan is the latest example of this survivalist attitude toward dying, with its demystifying presentation of war as a meaningless slaughter which
nothing can really justifyas such, it provides the best possible justification for Colin Powells No-casualties-on-our-side military doctrine. On todays
market, we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without
fat, beer without alcohol. . . . And the list goes on: what about virtual sex as sex without sex, the Colin Powell doctrine of
warfare with no casualties (on our side, of course) as warfare without warfare, the contemporary redefinition of politics as the art of
expert administration as politics without politics, up to todays tolerant liberal multiculturalism as an experience of the Other deprived of its Otherness (the
idealized Other who dances fascinating dances, and has an ecologically sound, holistic approach to reality, while features like wife-beating remain out of sight)?
Virtual Reality simply generalizes this procedure of offering a product deprived of its substance: it provides reality itself deprived of its substance, of the hard
resistant kernel of the Realjust as decaffeinated coffee smells and tastes like real coffee without being the real coffee, Virtual Reality is experienced as reality
without being so. Is this not the attitude of the hedonistic Last Man? Everything is permitted, you can enjoy everything, but deprived of its
substance, which makes it dangerous. (This is also the Last Mans revolution revolution without revolution.) Is this not one of the two versions of Lacans anti-Dostoevsky motto If
God doesnt exist, everything is prohibited? (1) God is dead, we live in a permissive universe, you should strive for pleasure, you should avoid dangerous excesses, so everything is prohibited if it is not deprived of its
substance. (2) If God is dead, the superego enjoins you to enjoy, but every determinate enjoyment is already a betrayal of the unconditional one, so it should be prohibited. The nutritive version of this is to enjoy the
Thing Itself directly: why bother with coffee? Inject caffeine directly into your bloodstream! Why bother with sensual perceptions and excitation by external reality? Take drugs which directly affect your brain! And if
God does exist, then everything is permittedto those who claim to act directly on behalf of God, as the instruments of His will; clearly, a direct link to God justifies our violation of any merely human constraints
and considerations (as in Stalinism, where the reference to the big Other of historical Necessity justifies absolute ruthlessness). Todays hedonism combines pleasure with constraint: it is no longer the old notion of the
right balance between pleasure and constraint, but a kind of pseudo-Hegelian immediate coincidence of opposites: action and reaction should coincide; the very thing that causes damage should already be the remedy.
The ultimate example is arguably a chocolate laxative, available in the USA, with the paradoxical injunction: Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate! (that is, of the very thing that causes constipation).
Do we not find here a weird version of Wagners famous Only the spear which caused the wound can heal it, from Parsifal? And is not a negative proof of the hegemony of this stance the fact that genuine
unconstrained consumption (in all its forms: drugs, free sex, smoking) is emerging as the main danger? The fight against such danger is one of the principal motivations of todays biopolitics. Solutions are desperately
sought that would reproduce the paradox of the chocolate laxative. The main contender is safe sexa term which makes us appreciate the truth of the old saying Isnt having sex with a condom like taking a shower
with your raincoat on?
[Zizek continues no text deleted]
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The ultimate goal here would be, along the lines of decaffeinated coffee, to invent opium without opium: no wonder marijuana is so popular among liberals who
want to legalize itit already is a kind of opium without opium. In his scathing remarks on Wagner, Nietzsche diagnosed Wagners decadence as consisting in a
combination of asceticism and excessive morbid excitation: the excitation is false, artificial, morbid, hysterical, and the ensuing peace is also a fake, that of an
almost medical tranquilization. This, for Nietzsche, was the universe of Parsifal, which embodied Wagners capitulation to the appeal of Christianity: the ultimate
fake of Christianity is that it sustains its official message of inner peace and redemption by a morbid excitation, namely, a fixation on the suffering, mutilated
corpse of Christ. The very term passion here is revealing in its ambiguity: passion as suffering, passion as passionas if the only thing that can arouse passion is
the sick spectacle of passive suffering. The key question, of course, is: can Saint Paul be reduced to mixture of morbid excitation and ascetic renunciation? Is not
the Pauline agape precisely an attempt to break out of the morbid cycle of law and sin sustaining each other? More generally, what, exactly, is the status of the
excess, the too-muchness (Eric Santner) of life with regard to itself? Is this excess generated only by the turn of life against itself, so that it
actualizes itself only in the guise of the morbid undeadness of the sick passion? Or, in Lacanese: is the excess of jouissance over
pleasure generated only through the reversal of the repression of desire into the desire for repression, of the renunciation
of desire into the desire for renunciation, and so on? It is crucial to reject this version, and to assert some kind of
primordial excess or too-muchness of life itself: human life never coincides with itself; to be fully alive means to be larger
than life, and a morbid denial of life is not a denial of life itself, but, rather, the denial of this excess. How, then, are the two
excesses related: the excess inherent to life itself, and the excess generated by the denial of life? Is it not that the excess generated by the denial of life is a kind of
revenge, a return of the excess repressed by the denial of life? A state of emergency coinciding with the normal state is the political formula of this predicament: in
todays antiterrorist politics, we find the same mixture of morbid excitation and tranquilization. The official aim of Homeland Security appeals to
the US population in early 2003, intended to make them ready for a terrorist attack, was to calm people down: everything is
under control, just follow the rules and carry on with your life. However, the very warning that people must be ready for a large-scale
attack sustained the tension: the effort to keep the situation under control asserted the prospect of a catastrophe in a
negative way. The aim was to get the population used to leading their daily lives under the threat of a looming catastrophe,
and thus to introduce a kind of permanent state of emergency (since, let us not forget, we were informed in the fall of 2002 that the War on
Terror will go on for decades, at least for our life-time). We should therefore interpret the different levels of the Alert Code (red,
orange) as a state strategy to control the necessary level of excitation, and it is precisely through such a permanent state of
emergency, in which we are interpellated to participate through our readiness, that the power asserts its hold over us. In
The Others (Alejandro Amenabar, 2001), Nicole Kidman, a mother who lives with her two young children in a haunted house on Jersey Island, discovers at the
end that they are all ghosts: a couple of years before, she first strangled her children and then shot herself (it is the intruders who disturb their peace from time to
time who are the real people, potential buyers interested in their house).The only interesting feature of this rather ineffective Sixth Sense-type final twist is the
precise reason why Kidman returns as a ghost: she cannot assume her Medea-like actin a way, continuing to live as a ghost (who doesnt know that she is one)
symbolizes her ethical compromise, her unreadiness to confront the terrible act constitutive of subjectivity. This reversal is not simply symmetrical: instead of
ghosts disturbing real people, appearing to them, it is the real people who disturb the ghosts, appearing to them. Is it not like this when to paraphrase Saint
Paulwe are not alive in our real lives? It is not that, in such a case, the promise of real life haunts us in a ghostlike form? Today we are like the anemic Greek
philosophers who read Pauls words on the Resurrection with ironic laughter. The only Absolute acceptable within this horizon is a negative
one: absolute Evil, whose paradigmatic figure today is that of the Holocaust. The evocation of the Holocaust serves as a
warning of what the ultimate result of the submission of Life to some higher Goal is.

Threats are constructed the modern state creates fantasies to cover up the impossibility of security
and lack.
EDKINS SR. LECTURER, INT'L POLITICS @ UNIV. OF WALES-ABERYSTWYTH '3
Jenny, Security, cosmology, Copenhagen, Contemporary Politics, v. 9, no. 4, ebsco

When a security issue arises, what is happening is not that external threats are being recognized or new dangers assessed.
It is something quite different that is taking place. The inherent insecurity in the object concernedgenerally the stateis being
concealed. When something is impossible, one way of concealing that impossibility is to shift the blame somewhere else.
During the Cold War, state insecurity in the west was blamed on the Soviet Union. The west would have been secure but
for the Soviet threat. The impossibility of security appears contingent. If only we can get rid of the current impediment,
we can achieve a secure world. Another example, of course, is the rush to the discourse of security after 11 September. The
events of that day made very clear the impossibility of providing complete security for people and state institutions on the
US mainland. But rather than admit that impossibility as structural, and work within it, the state moved immediately to
declare war. The war is again supposed to produce what has always been and will remain an impossible fiction: security

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In the face of the impossibility of order, we should affirm disorder. This affirmation of democracy
institutes antagonism into the realm of the political, continually highlighting the distance between
every utopian order and the real it attempts to master. This acceptance of the human condition is the
only way to prevent genocide. Refuse the utopian politics of the Affirmative and embrace the lack in
the Other.
Stavrakakis, Lacan and the Political, pg. 135-140, 1999.

Slavoj iek starts Tarrying with the Negative by presenting the most striking and sublime expression of a political attempt to encircle the lack of the real, to show
the political within a space of political representation: the flag of the rebels in the violent overthrow of Ceausescu in Romania. In this flag, the red star, the
communist symbol constituting the nodal point of the flag and of a whole political order, the symbol standing for the organising principle of the national life is
cut out; what remains in its place is only a hole. It is in this brief moment, after the collapse of an order and before the articulation of another one, that it becomes
possible to attest to the visibility of the hole in the big Other, to sense the presence of the political. 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 stabilised and attempts to make invisible this lack in the
Other (iek, 1993:1-2). As far as political praxis is concerned our ethical duty can only be to attempt the institutionalisation 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 dimension 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). In this light,
what becomes fundamental in democracy is that it makes visible the political institution, the limit of all political forces. By instituting
antagonism it points to the distance between every utopian symbolisation and the real it attempts to master. But how exactly is this
distance marked and made visible? This visibility is only obtained in so far as opposite forms of institution (of the social) are possible, and this possibility is
revealed when those forms are actually postulated and fought for in the historical arena. For it is only in their antagonistic relation to other
projects that the contingency of particular acts of institution is shown, and it is this contingency that gives them their
political character. (Laclau, 1994:4) In other words, the conditions for maintaining the visibility of the constitutive lack and the contingent nature of a
structure are, according to Laclaus schema, the following: first, to make visible the (external) conflict between the different political projects, the different
contents that purport to fill this lack (none of which is pre-determined to perform this task); and second, to make visible the (internal) split marking each of these
projects, a split between their function as representatives of (universal) fullness and their concrete (particular) content (Laclau, 1993:285). Democracy
attempts to maintain this visibility, to institutionalise this lack by including as a part of its normal, regular
reproduction the moment of the suspension/dissolution of political reality. This particular moment of the eruption of the real is, as iek
points out, the moment of elections: At the moment of elections, the whole hierarchic network of social relations is in a way suspended, put in parentheses;
society as an organic unity ceases to exist, it changes into a contingent collection of atomized individuals, of abstract units, and the result depends on a purely
quantitative mechanism of counting, ultimately on a stochastic process: some wholly unforeseeable (or manipulated) eventa scandal which erupts a few days
before an election, for examplecan add that half per cent one way or the other that determines the general orientation of the countrys politics over the next few
years. In vain do we conceal this thoroughly irrational character of what we call formal democracy. Only the acceptance of such a risk, only such
a readiness to hand over ones fate to irrational hazard, renders democracy possible. (iek, 1989:147) This suspension of sedimented political reality,
this opening to the moment of the political, presupposes the institutionalisation both of the external antagonism between
competing political forces and, most importantly, of the internal split marking the identity of all these forces (ieks pure
antagonism), since the repetition of the moment of elections inscribes deep in our political culture the recognition that none of these forces can sublate its internal
split; if we need elections every once in a while it is because we accept that the hegemonic link between a concrete content and its
incarnation of fullness has to be continuously re-established and renegotiated. This is one of the ways in which democracy
identifies with the symptom (the constitutive antagonism of the social which is usually presented as a mere epiphenomenon) and traverses the
fantasy of a harmonious social order: by instituting lack at the place of the principle of societal organisation.
9
To recapitulate, the
starting point of this chapter was the disappointment and resentment caused by the ambiguity constitutive of democracy. We have pointed out that, contrary to
what anti-democratic discourses argue, this ambiguity, the existence of an original lack at the heart of the social field, is not due to democracy. Division and
disharmony are constitutive of the human condition. The experience of modernity, the Death of God, in other words the dislocation of external
universal markers of certainty, brought to the fore a sense of history with no guaranteed eschatological or other meaning and made visible the contingency of
existence in its naked horror. The place of power is no longer cosubstantial with the prince under the guarantee of God. In front of this development one can act in
two opposite directions. The lack of meaning that this process makes visible can lead to an attempted return to a pre-modern simulation of certainly; thus
modernity is reoccupying (in the Blumenbergian sense of the word) the place of pre-modernity. Totalitarianism and particularism move in such a direction. On the
other hand, democracy attempts to come to terms with that lack of meaning in a radically different way.It recognises in that lack the only
possibility of mediating between universalism and particularism in achieving a non-totalitarian sense of social unity. The
virtue of democracy is that it is not blind in front of the constitutivity of division, disharmony, lack; their recognition and institutionalisation is the only way of
coming to terms with the human condition after Auschwitz and the Gulags. Democracy is the political form of historical society where history as punctuated by
contingency, , lack, is no longer referred to as an external unifying principle of meaning. This fact alone which is stressed by Lefort shows that the virtue of
democracy, its resolve to face history, disharmony, lack and to attempt to institutionalise them also constitutes the greatest danger for democracy. As Mircea
Eliade has very clearly shown in The Myth of the Eternal Return, up to now, facing history in such a way was thought of as intolerable (Eliade, 1989). This is then
the task of modern democracy: to persuade us that what was thought of as intolerable has an ethical status.
10
This is also the reason why democracy can cause a
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generalised resentment or frustration and reinforce aporetic inactivity or even reactive politics. These developments are due to the fact that in the field of ethics
(and ontology) the ideal of harmony is still hegemonic; an ideal which is incompatible with democracy.
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Security Shell 6/6
What constantly emerges from this exposition is that for democracy to flourish the politics of generalised resentment must be subdued
(Connolly, 1991:211), and for that to be done the ethics of harmony must be replaced by an ethics compatible with democracy. It is here
that the ethics of psychoanalysis becomes crucial for democratic theory. As I have tried to show the ethics of psychoanalysis moves beyond traditional ethics
of the good, moves beyond the barrier of the fantasmatic ethics of harmony to come to terms with the impossible real, by
recognising its ultimate irreducibility and its structural causality. As argued earlier in this chapter, the Lacanian real and lack have a
thoroughly ethical dimension and both sublimation and identification with the symptom, by moving beyond traditional ethical identification with a certain
imaginary conception of the good, attest to the ethicality of recognising and institutionalising them. In that sense, with the help of psychoanalysis, democracy
can promote an ethical hegemony which is essential for its political survival and effectiveness
11
while Lacanian theory and Lacanian
ethics can find in democracy the field of an affinity which signals their relevance for socio-political analysis and political praxis. In that sense, achieving a better
(but not a perfect) society, a more democratic and just society, is possible but such a project cannot depend on the visions of the psychic imaginary as Whitebook
insists. Only the fracture of imaginary utopian visions can create the chance of pursuing a democratic course, a course
which is profoundly self-critical: The just polity is one that actively maintains its own interruption or ironization as that
which sustains it (Critchley, 1992:238). Such a standpoint seems to be at the antipodes of Whitebooks view, according to which without the input of the
imaginary, any such debate [on achieving a better society]is in danger of being empty (Whitebook, 1995:89). What Whitebook cannot realise is that it is exactly
the emptiness of the Lacanian lack in the Other, the emptiness in the locus of democratic power in Lefort, that becomes the point of reference for the articulation
of such a new political vision, a vision beyond imaginary lures.
12
To avoid any possible confusion, it must be stressed, however, that democracy cannot be
reduced to anarchy or chaos; it is a form of order. A principle of societal organisation exists. A society without a principle of organisation
would be a meaningless society; it would not be able to constitute itself as such. It would amount to a state of pure anxiety insofar as, according to Lacans
comments in Anxiety, the appearance of anxiety is the sign of the temporary collapse of all points of identificatory reference (seminar of 2 May 1962). As I have
pointed out, the importance of the democratic invention is that, in a double movement, it provides a point of reference, a point
de capiton for the institution of society, without reducing society to a positive content pertaining to this point of reference.
13
This is achieved because the
positive content of democracy is the acceptance of the constitutive lack and antagonism (and consequently hegemony) that splits
every total representation of the social field. And the status of this lack, as an encounter with the real, is ethical. If democracy entails,
as Niklas Luhmann argues, the principle of allowing opposition as a value-concept this means exactly that the lack acquires a
certain ethical dimension. This is an ethics without ideals; the place of the ideal is occupied by the dividing line of opposition and by the
undecidable moment of elections; in other words by the recognition of the real of our symptom, of the antagonistic nature of society. For Luhmann the place of the
ideal is occupied by a pure difference; that between government and opposition. Thus politics loses the possibility of [total] representation. It cannot presume to
beor even to representthe whole within the whole (Luhmann, 1990:233). In the democratic vision the whole of society is lacking, it is crossed, barr by the
impossible real. There are two more very brief points I would like to mention in bringing this chapter to a close. The first one concerns similar attempts to the one
presented here, based on the ethics of deconstruction (Critchley, 1992) or more simply on an ethics of difference (Connolly, 1991). The second one focuses on the
political consequences of my argument. First, it is certain that this text shares with both Connolly and Critchley the aspiration to articulate an ethics of
disharmony in order to enhance the prospects of democracy. Our difference is that they both think that an ethics founded on a recognition of
Otherness and difference is enough. Connollys argumentation is developed along the polarity identity/difference with the ethical sting being a recognition of
Otherness. For Critchley also, what seems to be at stake in deconstruction is the relation with The Otheralthough this Other is not understood in exactly the
same terms as the Lacanian Other (Critchley, 1992:197). Drawing on Levinasian ethics where the ethical is related to the disruption of totalising politics, he
contends that: any attempt to bring closure to the social is continually denied by the non-totalisable relation to the Other (Critchley, 1992:238). Thus, the
possibility of democracy rests on the recognition of the Other: The community remains an open community in so far as it is based on the recognition of
difference, of the difference of the Other (Critchley, 1992:219). Moreover, political responsibility in democracy has its horizon in responsibility for the Other
(ibid.: 239). This is also Touraines position: democracy entails the recognition of the other (Touraine, 1997:192). The problem with such an analysis
is that it presupposes the Other as a unified totality or, even if this is not always the case, it seems to be offering a positive point of
identification remaining thus within the limits of traditional ethical strategies or, in any case, not undermining them in a
radical way. What has to be highlighted is that it is precisely this relationthe identification with the Otherthat attempts to
bring closure to the social. In order to have a non-totalisable relation to the Other we must relateidentifywith the lack
in the Other and not with the Other per se. This is the radical innovation of Lacanian ethics. And this is what democracy needs today. Second, the
preceding argumentation does not mean that actually existing democracies constitute total embodiments of the Lacanian ethical standpoint. Such a view would be
totally alien to almost everything that has been articulated in this chapter: one must not restrict oneself to conceiving of democracy as an existent political form
(and, once again, certainly not as an apologetics for Western liberal democracy) (Critchley, 1992:240). From that point of view Derridas conception of a
dmocratie venir seems absolutely relevant. In doing so, however, one must be very careful not to idealise democracy by relapsing into traditional ethical
discourse or utopian politics.
14
Furthermore, in articulating a critique of present democratic institutions one must also keep in mind what iek has so successfully
formulated: It is true that democracy makes possible all sorts of manipulation, corruption, the rule of demagogy, and so on,
but as soon as we eliminate the possibility of such deformations, we lose democracy itself; if we want to remove these
deformations and to grasp the Universal in its intact purity, we obtain its very opposite. So-called real democracy is just another
name for non-democracy. (iek, 1989:148) In that sense, from a Lacanian point of view, one is entitled to conclude that a real and pure democracy does not
exist. The radicalisation of democracy can only be the result of a continuous ascesis, it depends on our ability to move
beyond the Scylla of conformity and the Charybdis of utopianism and maintain, in the fullness of time, our distance from both of
them.
15

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A2 Generic Security good nonsense

Group all of their security good stuff- it's bogus for three reasons:

First, they fail to take into account the Lack, or the gap in perception between the Real and the Symbolic
that prevents anything from being perfectly achieved. Security in its pure from only exists in the Real- what
we try to achieve within the confines of the Symbolic is only an imperfect representation of it. Because of
this, we can never really achieve true security on the scale that the affirmative wants us to. This means that,
even if security is a good thing as all their evidence states, it can never be actualized within the current state
of the Symbolic, so it doesn't matter anyway.

Second, they still play in to the hands of the symbolic. They are still presenting us with a forced choice-
secure or undergo some cataclysmic and tragic event. This forces us to attempt to securitize everything
around us, which only replicates the impacts and never actually changes anything. The only way to make
security a good thing would be to realign our current Symbolic coordinates, which only the alternative does.

Finally, they focus on mere survival instead of focusing on the minuscule things of life that bring us
enjoyment. Cross-apply the Zizek evidence- living life absent this enjoyment makes our lives meaningless,
which justifies all atrocities against us. This will always outweigh their reasons that securitization are good.

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First, utilitarian calculus is inherently egoistic and driven by desire. Their claims to utility are a ridiculous
attempt to claim the world owes them for their mere presence.
Alenka Zupancic, intellectual monster guru and researcher at the Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene
Academy of Sciences at Ljubljana, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan, 2000, pg. x-xi
In short, the utilitarian circle even the most refined one, in which my obedience to ethical norms is grounded not only in an
egotistic calculus but in the satisfaction brought about by the awareness that I will contribute to the well-being of the
whole of humankind is never squared; one always has to add an x, the unknown remainder, which, of course, is the
Lacanian objet petit a, the object-cause of desire. In this precise sense, for Lacan, ethics is ultimately the ethics of desire
that is to say, the Kantian moral law is the imperative of desire. In other words, what Lacan accomplishes, in an inherent
radicalization of the Kantian project, is a kind of critique of pure desire: in contrast to Kant, for whom our capacity to
desire is thoroughly patho-logical (since, as he repeatedly stresses, there is no a priori link between an empirical object and the
pleasure this object gener-ates in the subject), Lacan claims that there is a pure faculty of desire, since desire does have a
non-pathological, a priori object-cause this object, of course, is what Lacan calls objet petit a. Even the most egotistically
calculated exchange of favours has to rely on a first move which cannot be explained in these terms, in some grounding
gesture of giving, of the primordial gift (as Derrida would have put it) which cannot be accounted for in the terms of future
benefits.

Second, Much like the CTU agents of Foxs 24, The ethic of urgency implicit in their impact calculus
assures the duty to our country mentality which allows torture, and terrorism to thrive.
Slavoj Zizek January 27, 2006 Jack Bauer and the Ethics of Urgency
This brings up a crucial question: What does this all-pervasive sense of urgency mean ethically? The pressure of events is so
overbearing, the stakes are so high, that they necessitate a suspension of ordinary ethical concerns. After all, displaying
moral qualms when the lives of millions are at stake plays into the hands of the enemy. CTU agents act in a shadowy,
space outside the law, doing things that simply have to be done in order to save society from the terrorist threat. This includes
not only torturing terrorists when they are caught, but torturing CTU members or their closest relatives when they are
suspected of terrorist links. In the fourth season, among those tortured were the secretary of defenses son-in-law and his own son (both with the
secretarys full knowledge and support), as well as a female member of CTU, wrongly suspected of passing information to the terrorists. (After the torture, when
new data confirms her innocence, she is asked to return to work. And since this is an emergency and every person is needed, she accepts!) The CTU agents
not only treat terrorist suspects in this wayafter all, they are dealing with the ticking bomb situation evoked by Alan
Dershowitz to justify torture in his book, Why Terrorism Worksthey also treat themselves as expendable, ready to lay
down their colleagues or their own lives if this will help prevent the terrorist act.

And, this duty to our country mentality through the ethic of urgency is the ethic that allowed the agents of
the holocaust to continue their job worry free. Without this ethic the next great tragedy can never be carried
out. Slavoj Zizek January 27, 2006 Jack Bauer and the Ethics of Urgency.
This is the dilemma for those in power: How to obtain Kurtz without Kurtzs pathology? How to get people to do the
necessary dirty job without turning them into monsters? SS chief Heinrich Himmler faced the same dilemma. When
confronted with the task of liquidating the Jews of Europe, Himmler adopted the heroic attitude of Somebody has to do
the dirty job, so lets do it! It is easy to do a noble thing for ones country, up to sacrificing ones life for it. It is much
more difficult to commit a crimefor ones country. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt provided a precise description
of how the Nazi executioners endured the horrible acts they performed. Most of them were not simply evil; they were well
aware that their actions brought humiliation, suffering and death to their victims. Their way out of this predicament was
that, instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I
had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders! In this way, they were able
to turn around the logic of resisting temptation: Their ethical effort was directed toward the task of resisting the
temptation not to murder, torture and humiliate. Thus, the very violation of spontaneous ethical instincts of pity and
compassion was turned into the proof of ethical grandeur: Doing ones duty
meant assuming the heavy burden of inflicting pain on others.

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Third, the voyueristic ways in which we experience war in debate are the exemplification of our desire
to find the single biggest impact card. Their impact story is not an external journey to achieve
perfection just like hyping up and warranting down the biggest impact card is not external to our
mulitple invasions of Iraq.
Shapiro, 1993. [Michael j. The political subject of violence p.126-130]
Within a Lacanian frame, the objects of desire are substitutable signs related to the subject's self-constitution and
coherence. They are thus never destined to provide the self with satisfaction. Accordingly, during the recent Gulf War,
discursively engendered understandings and desires found distant objects of attention, not only for those involved in
combat however technologically mediated that involvement was but also for the viewing public, who watched the war on
television and experienced the destruction of people and things at another technological level of remove. The highly
mediated relationship, in which linguistic, and weapons technologies intervened, rendered the relationship between viewing and
fighting subjects complex, for the targets of violence were rarely available to anyone's direct vision and were hardly ever
available for direct contact. There was very little actual touching. It was indeed telling when one airforce pilot praised his sighting
devices and weapons by remarking of his recently vanquished enemy, 'we could reach out and touch him, but he could not touch
us' (a bit of discursive flotsam left over from AT&T's advertisement) one service remote touching of 'someone' was involved. In
most senses, then, the objects of violence in the Gulf War were obscure and remote, both in that they were removed from
sight and other human senses and that they emerged as appropriate targets through a tortuous signifying chain. More
generally, they were remote in terms of the meanings they had for their attackers and the attackers' legitimating and
logistical supporters. Because Lacanian desire operates through a series of substitutions, there is a compatibility between
the functioning of desire and logistical abstraction as they work together to locate targets of violence in modern warfare,
despite how recalcitrant those targets may actually be to the meaning frames that direct the enemy-perceiving gaze. The
operation of desire in a war works on the basis of a different process from that of an individual's search for erotic completion. It
is connected to a national-level rather than individual-level work on the production of a coherent self. As has already been
suggested in the analysis of Clausewitz's duplicitous discourse, what is represented as a quest for accomplishing political and
military objectives obfuscates a more fundamental, ontological quest, the attempt for the national subject at completion
through the display of courage and the lack of inhibition against using force in a violent confrontation with an enemy. For
a deeper appreciation of how desire complements the historically emerging, logistical narrative in which the enemy/object has
been derealised, it is necessary to recognise that within the Lacanian view, desire is formed at the time when the subject first
enters the realm of the symbolic. Residing as an infant in the domain of the imaginary, where there is no recognition of oneself
as separate from others, the subject's entry into the symbolic is a dual alienation. First, it is a separation from the maternal
source of satisfaction and, second, through becoming a named beings withal language, it is a loss of control over meaning
and the bonds of affect; it amounts to a subjugation to the law of the signifier. The compensation for this alienation is of
course the ability to participate in the domain of the symbolic, but it is also the birth of desire, which, given the
unlawfulness of achieving the satisfactions longed for but lost, takes the form of a series of substitutions. It is the always-
obscuring acts, based on the ways in which the subject is divided from itself, that impose significance on the objects of
desire, and within the Lacanian model, these impositions follow the twists and turns of linguistic, figural mechanisms.
More specifically, Lacan notes in one place, 'desire is metonymy, however funny people may find the idea'.' The
metonymical structure of desire is displayed unambiguously in Bunuel's film when Conchita gets in bed with Fabert in a chastity-
protecting undergarment tied tightly with little knots that he cannot undo. As he weeps in frustration, she names the various parts
of her that he already possesses and expresses puzzlement that he is so resolute in his quest for the one part denied him. During
the Gulf War, President Bush and many television commentators seemed caught in a similar signifying structure. What
eluded final consummation in their case was not someone's maidenhead. It was Saddam Hussein's destruction. All the parts
associated with him were possessed. Kuwait was freed, his army was routed, his 'weapons of mass destruction' largely
eliminated. But as long as Saddam remained the ruling leader of Iraq, the 'victory in the desert' seemed empty. The
narrative was left uncompleted. But perhaps 'Saddam Hussein' (the 'Hitler', the 'Arab fanatic', the 'ruthless dictator') needs to
survive. Without him, there would remain no arch-enemy. Without Saddam Hussein, perhaps the US would not be .able to
justify remaining so armed and alert. Indeed, this is precisely what Fabert says in response to his cousin, the arbiter/judge who
asks why he doesn't just marry Conchita. Fabert says, Si je'epousais, je serais desarme.' (If Saddam had been destroyed or
removed, no sense of fulfilment would have lasted because the conditions of possibility for producing desire would re-
emerge. For example, of late in the United States there is a national debate over towards whom the reduced nuclear
weapons arsenal ought to be aimed. National desire is searching for new dangerous objects).

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A2 Link Turn

Our fantasies are not neutral their very conception necessitates an external other whose very
existence threatens the destruction of our utopian vision
McGowan, 2007, (Todd, Prof of English @ Univ of Vermont, The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan,
pp. 99-100)

Through fantasy, a subject does not experience its own enjoyment but experiences an imaginary enjoyment through fantasizing
about the enjoying other. As Slavoj Zizek puts it in the The Plague of Fantasies, Fantasy provides a rationale for the inherent
deadlock of desire: it constructs the scene in which the jouissance we are deprived of is concentrated in the Other who
stole it from us.1 Because fantasy necessarily attributes our own enjoyment to the other, there is always a paranoid
dimension to fantasy: underlying the typical fantasy scenario is the idea that the other enjoys in our stead because of a
secret knowledge that she/he has illicitly obtained. The inherent paranoia of fantasy represents one of its chief dangers for the
subject; it is one of the most difficult obstacles for the subject to overcome, simply because the subject rarely experiences
the others lack or failure to enjoy, which would contradict it. This paranoia also leads to racism, sexism, homophobia,
and so on. We fantasize enjoyment in the other, and then we want to destroy it because this enjoyment often appears to
come at our expense. But the image of complete enjoyment we see in the other is our own fantasmatic image, and when we
invest ourselves in it, we miss the enjoyment that we can derive from the path of desire.

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A2 That Robinson Dumbass 1/2

Robinson is an epic fail the politics that bases itself upon a solid foundation is one that inevitably
loses its revolutionary status.
NEWMAN pf polisci @ univ. of western australia '4
Saul, Interrogating the Master: Lacan and Radical Politics Psychoanalysis, Culture, & Society, 2004, 9,
(298-314)

So it would appear that the event that can intervene in the transitional spaces between discourses is always potentially
dangerous, and that this would only seem to confirm Lacans original warning about radical politics that it will inevitably
end up invoking a new master. However, one could suggest here that rather than succumbing to the temptation to pass to
the act, immediately seeking to reinscribe the political event within the discourse of the master as a way of stabilizing the
revolution, perhaps instead one could remain faithful to its constitutive openness and its radically contingent possibilities.
This would imply a radical political ethics of suspension and indeterminacy that refuses to be grounded in a concrete
ontological order. Indeed, we might refer here to an anarchic politico-ethical position, one that distinguishes itself from classical
anarchism by rejecting the ontological ground, essentialist identities and utopian structures that it is founded upon. Schurmann
(1987, p 10) characterizes an-anarchic action as action without a why? that is, action that is not grounded in absolute
rationalist principles. In a similar way, we might characterize Lacanian an-anarchic action as action without a master in other
words, action that no longer invokes the master, instead remaining open to the indeterminacy of the political situation.

Robinsons characterization of Lacan is based on a flawed assumption of conservatism and embedded
in misreading
Thomassen 2004 (Lesse, British Journal of Politics & International Relations, Volume 6 Page 558 -
November 2004, Lacanian Political Theory: A Reply to Robinson)

According to Robinson, Lacanian political theory is inherently conservative. Such assertions are only possible if we believe
in the possibility of opposing exclusion to a situation of non-exclusion, which is exactly what post-structuralists have
challenged. Moreover, the post-structuralist (and Lacanian) view does not necessarily preclude the removal of any concrete
exclusion. On the contrary, the acknowledgement of the constitutivity of exclusion shifts the focus from exclusion versus
non-exclusion to the question of which exclusions we can and want to live with. Nothing in the post-structuralist (and
Lacanian) view thus precludes a progressive politics. There are similar problems with Robinson's characterization of
iek's 'nihilistic variety of Lacanianism':, according to Robinson, 'reflects an underlying conservatism apparent in even the
most radical-seeming versions of Lacanianism' (p. 268). Again, the constitutivity of exclusion and violence does not
necessarily mean that 'the new world cannot be better than the old' (p. 268). The alternative to guaranteed progress is not
necessarily conservatism or nihilism, and the impossibility of a perfect society does not exclude attempts at
improvementwith the proviso that what counts, as improvement cannot be established according to some transcendental
yardstick.

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Recognition of the constitutive lack spurs a radical democracy beyond the pitfalls of postmodernism
and utopianism your arguments about the conservatism of Lacanian politics are wrong
STAVRAKAKIS '99, Yannis, Lacan and the Political, pg. 119-121

Similarly, the radicality and political importance of the Lacanian critique depends on its ability to keep its distance from 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.
One final point before concluding our argumentation in this chapter. There is a question which seems to remains open. It is the following: if we
resist the reoccupation put forward by Homer and others does that mean that we accept the supposed political impotence of psychoanalytic
political theory? Assuming that psychoanalytically inspired political theory is based on the recognition of the political as an encounter with the
real (although he doesnt formulate it in exactly these terms), Rustin argues that it seems likely that a politics constructed largely on this
principle will generate paranoid-schizoid states of mind as its normal psychic condition. If we prioritise the negative what kind of
progressive political or social project can be built if the positivethat is concepts, theories, norms and consistent techniquesis to be refused
as innately inauthentic? (Rustin, 1995:241-3). Political impotence seems to be the logical outcome. Homers argument seems finally
vindicated. Yet this conclusion is accurate only if we identify progressive political action with traditional fantasmatic utopian politics.
This is, however, a reductionist move par excellence. This idea, and Homers whole argumentative construction, is based on the foreclosure
of another political possibility which is clearly situated beyond any reoccupations and is consistent with psychoanalytic theory instead
of deforming it. This is the possibility of a post-fantasmatic or less-fantasmatic politics. The best example is democratic politics. It is true
that democracy is an essentially contested term and that the struggle for a final decontestation of its meaning constitutes a fundamental
characteristic of modern societies. It is also true that in the past these attempts at decontestation were articulated within an essentialist,
foundationalist framework, that is to say, democracy was conceived as a natural law, a natural right, or even as something guaranteed by divine
providence. Today, in our postmodern terrain, these foundations are no longer valid. Yet democracy did not share the fate of its various
foundations. This is because democracy cannot be reduced to any of these fantasmatic positive contents. As John Keane, among others, has put
it, democracy is not based on or guided by a certain positive, foundational, normative principle (Keane, 1995:167). On the contrary, democracy
is based on the recognition of the fact that no such principle can claim to be truly universal, on the fact that no symbolic social construct
can ever claim to master the impossible real. Democracy entails the acceptance of antagonism, in other words, the recognition of the fact
that the social will always be structured around a real impossibility which cannot be sutured. Instead of attempting this impossible
suture of the social entailed in every utopian or quasi-utopian discourse, democracy envisages a social field which is unified by the
recognition of its own constitutive impossibility. As Chaitin points out, democracy provides a concrete example of what we would call a
post-fantasmatic or less-fantasmatic politics:
most significant [in terms of Lacans importance for literary, ethical and cultural theory and political praxis], perhaps, is the new
light his analysis of the interaction of the universal and the particular has begun to shed on the question of maintaining a
democratic social order which can safeguard universal human rights while protecting the difference of competing political and
ethnic groups.
(Chaitin, 1996:11)
Thus, a whole political project, the project of radical democracy, is based not on the futile fantasmatic suture of the lack in the Other but
on the recognition of its own irreducibility. And this is a political possibility totally neglected by Homer. Today, it seems that we have the
chance to overcome or limit the consequences of traditional fantasmatic politics. In that sense, the collapse of utopian politics should not be
the source of resentment, disappointment or even nostalgia for a supposedly lost harmony. On the contrary, it is a development that
enhances the prospects for radicalising modern democracy. But this cannot be done for as long as the ethics of harmony are still
hegemonic. What we need is a new ethical framework. This cannot be an ethics of harmony aspiring to realise a fantasy construction; it
can only be an ethics that is articulated around the recognition of the ultimate impossibility of such an idea and follows this recognition
up to its politicaland, in fact, democraticconsequences. In the next chapter I will try to show that Lacanian theory is absolutely crucial in
such an undertaking. Not only because some Lacanian societies tend to be more democratic than other psychoanalytic institutions (the cole
Freudienne de Paris was, in certain of its aspects, an extremely democratic society) nor because psychoanalysis is stigmatised or banned in
almost all anti-democratic regimes. Beyond these superfluous approaches, Lacanian ethics can offer a non-fantasmatic grounding for radical
democracy.

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A2 Ontology of some sort

This is a new link- Ontology treats the Lack incorrectly. Instead of embracing it, it simply engages in
infinite study.
Edkins, Professor of International Politics, University of Wales, 1999, Jenny, Poststructuralism &
International Relations pg. 141

To enact a repoliticization requires an acceptance of the impossibility of ontological fullness. This ontological paradox
appears in theoretical physics, where two complementary properties of a subatomic particle are mutually exclusiveit is only
possible to know one or the other to the necessary degree of accuracy. This notion of complementarity is reflected in the way the
subject is forced to choose and accept a certain fundamental loss or impossibility in a Lacanian act. As iek puts it, My
reflective awareness of all the circumstances which condition my act can never lead me to act: it cannot explain the fact of
the act itself. By endlessly weighing the reasons for and against, I never manage to actat a certain point I must decide to
'strike out blindly.'The act has to take place without justification, without foundation in knowledge, without guarantee or
legitimacy. It cannot be grounded in ontology; it is this crack that gives rise to ethics: There is ethicsthat is to say, an
injunction which cannot be grounded in ontologyin so far as there is a crack in the ontological edifice of the universe: at
its most elementary, ethics designates fidelity to this crack.

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A2 "Our affirmative is a radical break from blah blah blah"

The affirmatives discourse of redemption and dissent does not create a radical break with the
ontology of the state, but rather functions as business as usual.
Joan Copjec in 2006 (Department of English, Comparative Literature, and Media Study at the University
of Buffalo, where she is the Director of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture: Lacan: the
silent partners; May 68, the Emotional Month)

Emotions ran high in Paris in May '68, particularly among students in the universities. Sensing the peril of ignoring the
groundswell of emotion, faculty responded immediately, but variously. Some conservative old fossils attempted to quash
the rebellion, while more liberal-minded, avuncular types 'took to the barricades', casting their lot with the student
radicals. Both camps permitted themselves a little more passion than usual, precisely because 'usual' seemed to have evaporated
in the hurly-burly of dissent. In the upheaval, everything seemed to have been turned upside down and inside out, including
reason, which - suddenly agitated - became clouded with roily sediment. Less cool-headed and clear, reason became crimson-
faced. The response of Jacques Lacan did not fit, however, into either camp. Aligning himself neither against nor on the side
of the student radicals, he simply accused them of not being radical enough, of behaving like unwitting flunkies of the
university against which they imagined themselves to be in revolt. Detecting in their cries a plea for a new Master, he
warned that they were on the verge of getting one. The monitory finger he held in their faces assumed the form of a year-long
seminar, Seminaire XVII: L'envers de la psychanalyse [The Underside (or Reverse) of PsychoanalysisJ.1 In this seminar Lacan
maintained that although the students wanted to believe they were abandoning the university for the streets, the university
was not so easily abandoned; it had already begun to take them over - as well as the streets. Which is why even certain
elements of their revolt reflected academic business as usual.

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A2 State inevitable/Realism inevitable

This is a new link: to view the state as the inevitable outcropping of politics is wrong and dangerous
it is when we legitimize the state through retro-active narrations that we erase the political.
Edkins, Professor of International Politics, University of Wales, 1999, Jenny, Poststructuralism & International
Relations, pg. 7-9

For iek, the political moment can be seen as the moment of subjectivity. We have seen how the moment of the political is a
period where a new social and political order is founded, a moment that by definition takes place without the authority of
any existing political system or community. It institutes that which will henceforth count as political community, and at
the same time, as I discuss below, puts in place a narrative of its origins. At the time when the new order appears,
however, its origins are completely without foundation. The political moment, described elsewhere as a nonfounded founding
moment, is a turning point in history, a point when 'something is happening'open, undecidable. It is a point at which the
future is far from certain, a point at which anything can happen. Later, when a new social order has been established and the
events that led up to it incorporated into history, these events may appear as part of some general historical development. At the
time, however, far from the exposition of an underlying necessity, what happens is that participants find themselves
confronted with responsibility, the burden of decision pressing upon [their] shoulders. This situation is one in which people are
forced to make decisions, to act, in a manner for which they can find no guarantee in the social framework. That same
framework is precisely missing, suspended, because it is in the process of reinvention. It is only by presuming the new social
order, by positing its presuppositions, that the new order is brought into being, retrospectively. iek refers to the October
Revolution as a situation of this type, where the impassioned debates among the various protagonistsV. I. Lenin, Leon
Trotsky, the Mensheviksdemonstrate that for them, at least, the outcome was certainly not as obvious as it appears
when later described as arising out of a wider historical process. Similar accounts of the radical contingency experienced
at the time in contrast to a subsequent acceptance of the narration of events in a particular way can be found in relation to
the events of 1989 in Europe. However much historians may deny it, it was not obvious at the time what the outcome
would be. There was a moment of openness, a political moment, in which the absence of one social order had not yet been
succeeded by the presence of another, and at that time acts were precisely that: acts in the Lacanian sense
unsupported by any foundation of legitimacy in the social order. It is at this point that subjectivity arises. In iek's
words: This 'impossible' moment of openness constitutes the moment of subjectivity: 'subject' is a name for that
unfathomable X called upon, suddenly made accountable, thrown into a position of responsibility, into the urgency of
decision in such a moment of undecidability. Thus, moments of transition, where there is a sense of openness, of decision,
are both moments of the political and moments in which subjectivity is called into play. They are also moments that constitute the social or symbolic order. Or rather, moments at which,
through the presupposition of the existence of a new social system, such a system is brought into being. Not only is the new society founded, but it is produced as inevitable, authoritative, and legitimate: as if it has
always already existed or been prophesied. The contingency of its origin is concealed.
At that moment, once the foundational myth of the new social or symbolic order is (re) instated, the subject as such disappears, and with it the politicalto be replaced by politics. What is more, the interregnum,
where there was a brief openness, is forgotten: de-scribed or un-written by the writing of the history of the new state. The act of the subject succeeds by becoming invisibleby 'positivising' itself in a new symbolic
network wherein it locates and explains itself as a result of historical process, thus reducing itself to a mere moment of the totality engendered by its own act. This happens when events are read backward or
retroactively: at that point it is easy to explain objectively why certain forces were effective and how particular tendencies won. Indeed the Lacanian definition of act is just this: a move that, so to speak, defines
its own conditions; retroactively produces the grounds which justify it. This is where the notion of ideology as social fantasy, which I discuss in detail in Chapter 6, comes in. Once the new symbolic
order is in place, the contingencies that gave rise to it are obliteratedthey disappearand a new version of social reality
is established. The role of ideology here is to conceal the illegitimate, unfounded nature of what we call social reality, what
iek calls social fantasy. Ideology supports the principle of legitimacy upon which the new state is founded and
conceals its impossibility. It does this in part by defining politics as a subsystem of the social order and obliterating
the politicalits unfounded founding moment: 'Politics' as 'subsystem,' as a separate sphere of society, represents
within society its own forgotten foundation, its genesis in a violent abyssal actit represents, within the social space, what
must fall out if this space is to constitute itself. Or as iek expresses it more provocatively, Politics as subsystem is a
metaphor of the political subject, of the Political as subject. In other words, it is politics, viewed as one of the subsystems of
all the systems that go to make up the social order, that enables us to escape or forget the lack of the political and the
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absence of the possibility of any political action. We are confined by this process to activity within the boundaries set by
existing social and international orders, and our criticism is restricted to the technical arrangements that make up the
politics within which we exist as subjects of the state. The political subject and the international subject, too, are safely
caged and their teeth pulled.

A2 "Doesn't apply to the social"

Psychoanalytic theory understands the subject's relation to the social.
Stavrakakis '99 Yannis, Lacan and the Political.

This is not the case only with poststructuralism. It seems that the Lacanian subject can fill a lot of lacks and that lacks are
increasingly proliferating around us (or maybe today we are becoming more aware of their presence and alert to their persistence).
To provide only a few examples, giving particular attention to those having some political relevance, Rosalind Coward and John
Ellis point out that Lacans subject is therefore this new subject of dialectical materialism. The emphasis on language provides a
route for an elaboration of the subject demanded by dialectical materialism (Coward and Ellis, 1977:93). Michele Barrett, for her
part, argues that psychoanalysis [and she is mainly referring to Lacan] is the place one might reasonably start to correct the
lamentable lack of attention paid to subjectivity within Marxisms theory of ideology (Barrett, 1991:118-19, my emphasis), while
Mark Bracher concludes that Lacanian theory can provide the sort of account of subjectivity that cultural criticism needs
(Bracher, 1993:12). To sum up, the core idea of this argument is that Lacan is relevant for contemporary socio-political analysis
because of his vision of the human subject. As Feher-Gurewich states propos of social theory: Lacans psychoanalytic approach
is founded on premises that are in sharp contrast to the ones which have led to the failure of an alliance between psychoanalysis
and social theory. And what are these premises? Lacan provides social theory with a vision of the human subject that sheds new
light on the relations between individual aspirations and social aims (Feher-Gurewich, 1996:154).

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A2 Permutation

absolute rejection is key to prevent the problem from spreading.
Stavrakakis '99 Yannis, Lacan and the Political

Simply put, the Lacanian conception of subjectivity is called to remedy the shortcomings or supplementthis term is not used
here in its strictest Derridean sense, although a deconstructionist flavour is not entirely absentpoststructuralism, social theory,
cultural criticism, theory of ideology, etc. But isnt such a move a reductionist move par excellence? Although our own approach,
as it will be developed in the following chapters, is clearly located beyond a logic of supplementation, it would be unfair to
consider the Lacanian subject as the point of an unacceptable reduction. This would be the case only if the Lacanian notion of
subjectivity was a simple reproduction of an essentialist subject, of a subject articulated around a single positive essence which is
transparent to itself and fully representable in theoretical discourse. But this essentialist subject, the subject of the humanist
philosophical tradition, the Cartesian subject, or even the Marxist reductionist subject whose essence is identified with her
or his class interests, is exactly what has to be questioned and has been questioned; it cannot be part of the solution
because it forms part of the initial problem. The Lacanian subject is clearly located beyond such an essentialist, simplistic
notion of subjectivity. Not only is Lacan obviously the most distant from those who operate with essentialist categories or
simplistic notions of psychic cause or origin (Barrett, 1991:107), but the Lacanian subject is radically opposing and
transcending all these tendencies without, however, throwing away the baby together with the bath water, that is to say,
the locus of the subject together with its essentialist formulations.

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A2 Pragmatism/Rorty

Rorty and the oppositional left create a barrier to effectively criticising politics.
Burch '1 Kerry, The Significance of Critical Pedagogy for Cultural Studies

Giroux shows how some new Left theorists, while recognizing the importance of class, also "made visibleinterconnected
forms of oppression organized against women, racial minorities, gay men and lesbians, the aged, the disabled, and others"
(25). On this basis, Giroux argues that insurgent political movements in the United States during the 1960s and after were
positively affected by theoretical work which initially emerged from the cultural realm but which evolved into a more
classic political instantiation. According to Giroux, since Rorty and Gitlin privilege class at the exclusion of other sites of
identity construction, they overlook the vital pedagogical relation which can potentially transform sites of cultural
interpretation into a heightened political awareness, the obvious precondition for heightened political action. To support
this position, Giroux points to the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACTUP) and to feminist theorists, both of whom broadened
the scope of the political first through a cultural aegis. Giroux is persuasive in showing how Rorty and Gitlin's prescriptions,
taken to their logical conclusion, would result in a deculturalization of politics. The danger in adopting such a constricted
view of the political within the academy is that it tacitly erects a protective, curricular shield around the corporate
narratives which increasingly govern the production of youth identity and desire.
This discourse is troubling because it separates culture from politics and leaves little room for capturing the contradictions
within dominant institutions that open up political and social possibilities for contesting domination, doing critical work
within the schools and other public spheres, of furthering the capacity of students and others to question oppressive forms of
authority and the operations of power (31, emphasis added).

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Framework shell 1/2

Our interpretation is that the affirmative has to defend it's ontological assumptions versus our alternative,
and that they should be evaluated before policy considerations.

Resolved is to reduce through mental analysis
Random House Unabridged Dictionary 2006
(http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/resolved)
Resolve: 1.To come to a definite or earnest decision about; determine (to do something): I have resolved that I shall live to the full. 2.to separate into
constituent or elementary parts; break up; cause or disintegrate (usually fol. by into). 3.to reduce or convert by, or as by, breaking up or disintegration (usually fol.
by to or into). 4.to convert or transform by any process (often used reflexively). 5.to reduce by mental analysis (often fol. by into).

The colon focuses the readers attention on what to follow, and as a result, you should use it to introduce an
idea that somehow completes the introductory idea. Thats Peck 96.

Reasons to prefer:

First, the resolution is not a normative statement; instead it is your job to find a position relative to it.

Second, best limits: there are an infinite amount of random PICs and counterplans that the affirmative would
never be able to predict, yet there are a finite amount of philosophical alternatives.

Third, it's not abusive: the framework for debate is only caused by the time spent debating a certain way; as
long as their is evidence on both sides, it's not abusive because people will adapt to new assumptions of
debate.

Fourth, it's more real world: we don't have a magic wand to pass legislation because fiat is illusory. How we
determine our knowledge and make our decisions is infinitely more important that asking what we should
do.

Fifth, their framework is based on a false distinction: there is no real difference between political
assumptions and ontological assumptions; they are just arbitrarily excluding arguments that they don't want
to debate.

Sixth, cross-apply the second piece of Stavrakakis evidence from the 1NC- their framework arguments are
just another way they attempt to cover the Lack which only serves to replicate the violence of the status-
quo, cross-apply my analysis from above, this is an independent disad to their framework.

Seventh, extend the Stavrakakis alternative from the 1NC- trying to create the perfect form if policy debate
and forcing us to conform to it is the epitome of the status-quo liberal democracy- it resists changing ethical
framings of the Other by not indentifying with the Lack in the Other- this makes genocide inevitable and
serves as another independent disad to their framework.

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Framework shell 2/2

Finally, education outweighs fairness:

First, it's the reason we debate: people don't decide to join debate because it's really fucking fair, they join
debate because it's interesting and you learn things from it.

Second, fairness is just an internal link to education: if debate is more fair, then it only allows more
education. If we win that their education is bull shit then there is no reason for us to play fair.

Third, if we win our impact turns to their framework, even if everyone quit debate under our framework, it
would still be better than debating under their framework.

This is a new link to the K- their framework arguments are used to justify exclusion in the name of a
non-existant ideal of the perfect policy discussion.
STAVRAKAKIS '3, Yannis, Re-activating the Democratic Revolution: The Politics of Transformation
Beyond Reoccupation and Conformism

Three further points are crucial here. First, the passage into a post-democratic terrain results in part, from the gradual
colonization of democratic politics by the consumerist logic of advertising discourse. In a post-democratic regime, while
elections continue to exist and can change governments, public electoral debate becomes a tightly controlled spectacle,
managed by rival teams of professionals expert in the techniques of persuasion, and considering a small range of issues
selected by those teams.25 Second, this colonization is what turns the market, at least in the form it takes in late capitalism
(which is not the only possible form), from an ally to an adversary of democracy. As long as the utopian revolutionary option
was still considered alive, the other two options of responding to negativity we have discussed, (the spirit of the democratic
revolution and so-called free market liberalism) were more or less seen as distinct but allied in their fight against the spectre of
revolutionary utopia and its excesses. As soon as this spectre collapsed the alliance was dissolved. Capitalist consumerism started
colonizing democratic institutions in an unprecedented rhythm and crucially at a global scale, producing the hybrid of
consumerist postdemocracy. If modern existing democracies have always involved the paradoxical articulation of individual
liberty and pluralism, on the one hand, and popular sovereignty and equality on the second, as well as a continuous yet productive
struggle between these two dimensions what Mouffe calls the democratic paradox26 then these recent developments threaten
to re-signify democracy in a way that would make it synonymous with a post-democratic free market liberalism or liberal
capitalism. Third, by adopting a quasi-utopian dynamic which domesticates rather than attempting to eliminate negativity and
lack, consumerist post-democracy manages to avoid the extreme disasters caused by utopian reoccupations. Hence what Zizek
calls without any irony the great achievements of liberal capitalism: probably, never in human history have so many people
enjoyed such a degree of freedom and material standard of living as in todays developed Western countries.27 Indeed, even if
one can argue that capitalism harms human beings, this is carried out through neglect rather than through terror.
Compared to the personal will of a dictator, the structural violence of market forces appears benign.28 This picture is,
of course, revealed as partial and limited, especially if one takes into account the various forms of collateral damage
produced by consumerist post-democracy. As Alain Badiou has pointed out, Terror is [still] wielded against what is and
should not be: the impoverished planet, the distant rebel, the non-Western and the immigrant nomad driven by radical
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abandonment towards affluent metropolises.29 Nevertheless, it constitutes a (partial) reality with hegemonic appeal, a horizon
sustained by the hegemony of an administration of desire with seemingly unlimited resources.

Kappeler

The affirmatives focus on mega-spheres of action and what the state can do to eliminate all harm
eclipses questions of what we would do if we were simply ourselves, divorcing our own place in this
violence and eliminating our ability to question the social fantasy.
Kappeler 95 (Susanne, The Will to Violence: The politics of personal behavior, Pg. 10-11) SRM

Yet our insight that indeed we are not responsible for the decisions of a Serbian general or a Croatian president tends to
mislead us into thinking that therefore we have no responsibility at all, not even for forming our own judgment, and thus
into underrating the responsibility we do have within our own sphere of action. In particular, it seems to absolve us from
having to try to see any relation between our own actions and those events, or to recognize the connections between those
political decisions and our own personal decisions. It not only shows that we participate in what Beck calls 'organized
irresponsibility', upholding the apparent lack of connection between bureaucratically, institutionally, nationally, and also
individually organized separate competences. It also proves the phenomenal and unquestioned alliance of our personal thinking
with the thinking of the major power mongers, For we tend to think that we cannot 'do' anything, say, about a war, because
we deem ourselves to be in the wrong situation because we are not where the major decisions are made. Which is why
many of those not yet entirely disillusioned with politics tend to engage in a form of mental deputy politics, in the style of
'what would I do if I were the general, the prime minister, the president, the foreign minister or the minister of defense?' Since
we seem to regard their mega spheres of action as the only worthwhile and truly effective ones, and since our political
analyses tend to dwell there first of all, any question of what I would do if I were indeed myself tends to peter out in the
comparative insignificance of having what is perceived as 'virtually no possibilities': what I could do seems petty and
futile. For my own action I obviously desire the range of action of a general, a prime minister, or a General Secretary of the UN -
finding expression in ever more prevalent formulations like 'I want to stop this war', 'I want military intervention', 'I want to stop
this backlash', or 'I want a moral revolution. 'We are this war', however, even if we do not command the troops or participate in
co-called peace talks, namely as Drakulic says, in our non-comprehension': our willed refusal to feel responsible for our own
thinking and for working out our own understanding, preferring innocently to drift along the ideological current of
prefabricated arguments or less than innocently taking advantage of the advantages these offer. And we 'are' the war in
our 'unconscious cruelty towards you', our tolerance of the 'fact that you have a yellow form for refugees and I don't'- our
readiness, in other words, to build identities, one for ourselves and one for refugees, one of our own and one for the 'others.' We
share in the responsibility for this war and its violence in the way we let them grow inside us, that is, in the way we shape
'our feelings, our relationships, our values' according: to the structures and the values of war and violence.

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Fantasy Link

The affirmative creates a utopian vision of the world where all we have to do is spend a little money
and all will be solved. This attempt at fantasy simply covers the Lack, ending in the extermination of
those who interrupt our strive for utopia.
STAVRAKAKIS VISITING FELLOW IN GOV'T, UNIV. OF ESSEX '99 [Yannis, Lacan and the Political, pg. 63-65]
What constantly emerges from this exposition is that when harmony is not present it has to be somehow introduced in order for our reality to be
coherent. It has to be introduced through a fantasmatic social construction. One should not get the impression though that this is a mere philosophical
discussion. In so far as our constructions of reality influence our behaviourand this is what they basically doour fixation on harmony has direct social and political
consequences. Reality construction does not take place on a superstructural level. Reality is forced to conform to our
constructions of it not only at the spiritual or the intellectual, but also at the material level. But why does it have to be
forced to conform? This is due, for instance, to the gap between our harmonious fantasmatic constructions of nature and
nature itself, between reality and the real. Our constructions of reality are so strong that nature has to conform to them
and not they to nature; reality is conceived as mastering the real. But there is always a certain leftover, a disturbing
element destabilising our constructions of nature. This has to be stigmatized, made into a scapegoat and exterminated.
The more beatific and harmonious is a social fantasy the more this repressed destabilising element will be excluded from
its symbolizationwithout, however, ever disappearing. In this regard, a vignette from the history of nature conservation can be revealing. As is well known nature
conservation was developed first in the United States; what is not so well known is that a major feature of the crusade for resource conservation was a deliberate campaign to destroy wild animalsone of the most
efficient, well-organized, and well-financed such efforts in all of mans history (Worster, 1994:261). All this, although not solely attributable to it, was part of a progressive moralistic ideology which conceived of
nature together with society as harbouring ruthless exploiters and criminals who should be banished from the land (Worster, 1994:265). The driving force behind this enterprise was clearly a particular ethically
distinctive construction of nature articulated within the framework of a conservation ideology. According to this construction what was had to conform to what should be and what should be, that is to say nature
without vermin (coyotes and other wild predators), was accepted as more naturalmore harmoniousthan what was: These conservationists were dedicated to reorganizing the natural economy in a way that would
fulfil their own ideal vision of what nature should be like (Worster, 1994:266). This construction was accepted by the Roosevelt administration in the USA (1901-9) and led to the formation of an official programme
to exterminate vermin. The job was given to a government agency, the Bureau of the Biological Survey (BBS) in the Department of Agriculture, and a ruthless war started (in 1907 alone, 1,700 wolves and 23,000
coyotes were killed in the National Parks and this policy continued and expanded for years) (Worster, 1994:263). What is this dialectic between the beatific fantasy of nature and the demonised vermin doing if not
illustrating the Lacanian dialectic between the two sides of fantasy or between fantasy and symptom? Since we will explore the first of these two Lacanian approaches to fantasy in Chapter 4, we will concentrate here
on the fantasy/symptom axis. As far as the promise of filling the lack in the Other is concerned, fantasy can be better understood in its
relation to the Lacanian conception of the symptom; according to one possible reading, fantasy and symptom are two inter-implicated terms. It is the symptom
that interrupts the consistency of the field of our constructions of reality, of the object of identification, by embodying the
repressed jouissance, the destabilising part of nature excluded from its harmonious symbolisation. The symptom here is a real kernel of
enjoyment; it is the repressed jouissance that returns and does not ever stop in imposing itself [on us] (Soler, 1991:214). If fantasy is the support that gives consistency to what we call reality (iek, 1989:49) on the
other hand reality is always a symptom (iek, 1992). Here we are insisting on the late Lacanian conception of the symptom as sinthome. In this conception, a signifier is married to
jouissance, a signifier is instituted in the real, outside the signifying chain but at the same time internal to it. This
paradoxical role of the symptom can help us understand the paradoxical role of fantasy. Fantasy gives discourse its
consistency because it opposes the symptom (Ragland-Sullivan, 1991:16). Hence, if the symptom is an encounter with
the real, with a traumatic point that resists symbolisation, and if the discursive has to arrest the real and repress
jouissance in order to produce reality, then the negation of the real within fantasy can only be thought in terms of
opposing, of stigmatising the symptom. This is then the relation between symptom and fantasy. The self-consistency of a
symbolic construction of reality depends on the harmony instituted by fantasy. This fantasmatic harmony can only be
sustained by the neutralisation of the symptom and of the real, by a negation of the generalised lack that crosses the field
of the social. But how is this done? If social fantasy produces the self-consistency of a certain construction it can do so only by
presenting the symptom as an alien, disturbing intrusion, and not as the point of eruption of the otherwise hidden truth of the existing social order (iek, 1991a:40).
The social fantasy of a harmonious social or natural order can only be sustained if all the persisting disorders can be
attributed to an alien intruder. To return to our example, the illusory character of our harmonious construction of nature is shown in
the fact that there is a part of the real which escapes its schema and assumes a symptomatic form (vermin, etc.); in order
for this fantasy to remain coherent, this real symptom has to be stigmatised and eliminated. It cannot be accepted as the
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excluded truth of nature; such a recognition would lead to a dislocation of the fantasy in question. When, however, the
dependence of fantasy on the symptom is revealed, then the playthe relationbetween the symptom and fantasy reveals
itself as another mode of the play between the real and the symbolic/imaginary nexus producing reality.

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Fantasy Link
Social lives, ontology, language, life these things all contain a fundamental lack that prevents their
perfection. The subject, state and all other would be moral actors attempt to close this gap in
symbolization, yet it always fails and causes us to forget that there is another politics and another
way.
Jenny, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, pg. 11-14
In the psychoanalytic account the subject is formed around a lack, and in the face of trauma. We become who we are by
finding our place within the social order and family structures into which we are born. That social order is produced in
symbolic terms, through language. Language does not just name things that are already there in the world. Language
divides up the world in particular ways to produce for every social grouping what it calls 'reality'. Each language - each
symbolic or social order has its own way of doing this. Crucially, none of these are complete; none of them can find a place
for everything. This is a logical limitation, not a question of a symbolic or social order being insufficiently developed.
Completeness or closure is impossible. There is always, inevitably, something that is missed out, something that cannot be
symbolised, and this is one part of what psychoanalytic theory calls 'the real'. In its birth into the symbolic or social order,
into language, the subject is formed around, and through a veiling of, that which cannot be symbolised the traumatic real.
The real is traumatic, and has to be hidden or forgotten, because it is a threat to the imaginary completeness of the
subject. The 'subject' only exists in as far as the person finds their place within the social or symbolic order. But no place
that the person occupies as a mother, friend, consumer, activist can fully express what that person is. There is always something
more. Again, this is not a question of people not fitting into the roles available for them and a call for more person-friendly
societies. Nor does it concern multiple or fragmented identities in a postmodern world. It is a matter of a structural impossibility.
If someone is, say, a political activist, there is always the immediate question of whether they are sufficiently involved to count as
an activist: don't activists have to be more committed, to take part in more than just demonstrations, shouldn't they stand for
office? On the other hand, are they perhaps more than an activist does that description do justice to what they are, to their role in
the party? There is always an excess, a surplus, in one direction or the other. However, we choose on the whole to ignore this - to
forget this impossibility, and to act as if completeness and closure were possible. We hide the traumatic real, and stick with the
fantasy of what we call social reality. As I have argued elsewhere, the political is that which enjoins us not to forget the
traumatic real but rather to acknowledge the constituted and provisional nature of what we call social reality. Politics
refers to the sphere of activity and institutions that is called 'politics' as opposed to 'economics' or 'society'. Politics is part of what
we call social reality. It exists within the agendas and frameworks that are already accepted within the social order. The political,
in its 'properly traumatic dimension', on the other hand, concerns the real. It refers to events in which politics of the first
sort and its institutions are brought into being. This can be the day-to-day production and reproduction of the social and
symbolic order. This continual process has to take place; the social order is not natural, it doesn't exist unless it is
produced continually. The political also takes place at moments when major upheavals occur that replace a preceding
social and legal system and set up a new order in its place. At such points, the symbolism and ideology that concealed the
fragile and contingent nature of authority collapse altogether and there is a brief interregnum before the new order
imposes a different form of concealment.
The way that time figures in the psychoanalytic account is interesting. A certain non-linearity is evident: time no longer moves
unproblematically from past through present to future. In a sense, subjects only retrospectively become what they already are -
they only ever will have been. And the social order too shares this retroactive constitution. The subject and the social order in
which the subject finds a place are both in a continual process of becoming. Neither exists as a fixed entity in the present
moment, as the common-sense view in western culture might lead us to expect. Both are always in the process of formation.
This is because the two are so intimately related. The person is formed, not through a process of interaction with the social
order (since that would mean thinking of the social as already there), but by imagining or supposing that the social order
exists. This supposing by the individual is what brings the social into being. We have to imagine that others will respond to us
before we speak, but it is only our speaking, of course, that enables them to respond. But supposing that the social exists does not
only produce the social order, it also, simultaneously, brings the individual into existence too. When our speaking elicits a
response, we recognise ourselves as subjects in that response. This recognition is belated when viewed through the lens of a linear
temporality: it is not at the moment we decide to speak that we see who we are, but only a moment later, when we get a response.
The response tells us not who we are now, since we are no longer that - we have already changed. It tells us who we were, at the
moment when we spoke. This is the sense in which we never are, we only ever will hazy been. Like the distant stars, whose past
we know from the light that has taken millions of years to reach us but whose present we can only guess at, we can only know
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what we were, not what we are. And even that is also a guess, of course. In a similar way, when we listen to a sentence being
spoken, we can predict what is being said, but we cannot be sure we were right until the sentence is completed and over. Some
forms of speech - rhetoric and jokes for example - play on that unpredictability. The uncertainty and unpredictability that this
involves can be unsettling. In the rational west, we tend to seek certainty and security above all. We don't like not
knowing. So we pretend that we do. Or that if we don't we could, given sufficient scientific research effort and enough money.
We forget the uncertainties involved and adopt a view that what we call social reality - which Slavoj Zizek calls social
fantasy -- is basically knowable. We adopt an ontology a view of being and the nature of things - that depends on a
progressive linear notion of time. Things can 'be' in our modern western sense only in the context of this temporality. They 'are'
because they have a history in time, but they are at the same time separate from that history. But central to this solution to doubt
is forgetting, as we have seen. The fantasy is only convincing if, once it has been put in place, we can forget that it is a
fantasy. What we are forgetting some would say deliberately - is the real, that which cannot he symbolised, and that which is
produced as an excess or surplus by any attempt at symbolisation. We do not remember the trauma that lies at the root of
subjectivity, the lack or gap that remains, even within what we call social reality. This position leads to a depoliticisation.
We forget that a complete, non-antagonistic society is impossible. We strive for completion and closure, often at any price.
There are a number of ways in which this is done, according to Zizek.'' The first is communitarian attempts to produce a close
homogeneous society arche-politics. Political struggle disappears because everyone agrees on everything. 'The second, most
common in the liberal west, Zizek calls para-politics. Here the political is replaced by politics. Standardised competition takes
place between accepted political parties according to pre-set rules, the prize being a turn at executive control of the state
bureaucracy. Politics has become policing or managerial control. In the third meta-politics, political conflict is seen as a shadow
theatre, with the important events taking place in another scene, that of economic processes. Politics should be cancelled when
economic processes have worked themselves out (as scientific materialism predicts) and matters can he decided by rational debate
and the collective will. Finally, we have ultra-politics, where political struggle becomes warfare, and the military are called
in. There is no common ground for debate and politics is militarised. If we are to resist such attempts to 'gentrify' or
depoliticise the political we have to recall the constituted, provisional and historically contingent nature of every social
order, of every ontology. This position, which Zizek calls 'traversing the fantasy', 'tarrying with the negative' or fidelity to
the ontological crack in the universe, is uncomfortable." It involves an acceptance of the lack of trauma at the centre of
the subject and the non-existence of any complete, closed social order.

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Representations link

Representations of violent catastrophe arent attempts to access the Real theyre attempts to shield
ourselves from it. Their preoccupation with catastrophic scenarios is an attempt to avoid the real of
the political field.
Slavoj Zizek, Professor of Sociology at the Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana University, 2000, The Fragile
Absolute, p. 76-78
Another example from war can help us to clarify this point further. The ultimate lesson of the latest American military
inter-ventions, especially Operation Desert Fox against Iraq at the end of 1998, is that such operations signal a new era in
military history battles in which the attacking force operates under the constraint that it can sustain no casualties.
(The same point is repeated in every US discussion about military intervention abroad, from Somalia to ex-Yugoslavia one
expects a guaran-tee that there will be no casualties.) This tendency to erase death itself from war should not, however,
seduce us into endorsing the standard notion that war is rendered less traumatic if it is no longer experienced by the
soldiers (or presented) as an actual encounter with another human being to be killed, but as an abstract activity in front of a
screen or behind a gun far from the explosion, like guiding a missile on a warship hundreds of miles away from where it will
hit its target. While such a procedure makes the soldier less guilty, it is open to question if it actually causes less
anxiety this is one way to explain the strange fact that soldiers often fantasize about killing the enemy soldier in a face-
to-face confrontation, looking him in the eyes before stabbing him with a bayonet (in a kind of mili-tary version of the sexual
False Memory Syndrome, they even often remember such encounters when they never in fact took place). There is a long
literary tradition of elevating such face-to-face encounters as an authentic war experience (see the writings of Ernst
Junger, who praised them in his memoirs of the trench attacks in World War I). So what if the truly traumatic feature is not
the awareness that I am killing another human being (to be obliterated through the dehumanization and
objectivization of war into a technical procedure) but, on the contrary, this very objectivization, which then
generates the need to supplement it by fantasies of authentic personal encounters with the enemy? It is thus not the
fantasy of a purely aseptic war run as a video game behind computer screens that protects us from the reality of the
face-to-face killing of another person; on the contrary, it is this fantasy of a face-to-face encounter with an enemy
killed bloodily that we construct in order to escape the Real of the depersonalized war turned into an anonymous
technological operation. So our thesis should be clear now: the cruel reality of war relates to the notion of the virtualized
war with no casualties in precisely the same way as Festen relates to Benignis Lfe is Beautiful: in both cases, we are not
dealing with the symbolic fic-tion (of virtual bloodless warfare, of protective narrative) concealing the Real of a senseless
bloodbath or sexual violence in both cases it is, rather, this violence itself which already serves as a fantasized
protective shield. Therein lies one of the fundamental lessons of psychoanalysis: the images of utter catastrophe, far from
giving access to the Real, can function as a protective shield against the Real. In sex as well as in politics, we take refuge
in catastrophic scenarios in order to avoid the actual deadlock. In short, the true horror is not the rapist Urvater against
whom the benevolent maternal father protects us with his fantasy shield, but the benign maternal father himself the
truly suffocating and psychosis-generating experience for the child would have been to have a father like Benigni, who, with
his pro-tective care, erases all traces of excessive surplus-enjoyment. It is as a desperate defence measure against this father
that one fantasizes about the rapist father. And what if this is also the ultimate lesson of Schelling: that the horror of the
ultimate Grand, this monstrous apparition with hun-dreds of hands, this vortex that threatens to swallow everything, is a lure, a
defence against the abyss of the pure act? Another way to approach this same ambiguity and tension in the relationship
between fantasy and the Real would be via Heideggers theme of errancy/untruth as the innermost feature of the event of truth
itself. The very opening paragraph of John Salliss remarkable essay on the monstrosity of truth tackles this difficult point
directly.

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Fiat link

The affirmative's deployment of fiat is a fantasy that covers the up the drives that hold the subject
together and denies enjoyment which is the fuel that powers the self.
Jodi Dean. Enjoyment as a Category of Political Thought.Annual Meeting of American Political Science Association,
September, jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/files/aspa_05_enjoyment.doc 2005.

Thinking enjoyment in terms of fixity enables us to distinguish Zizeks account of subjectivity from other versions prominent
in political theory. First, his subject is clearly not the same as the liberal subject in so far as there is no notion of consciously
free and rational will. Rather, the Zizekian subject is an emptiness held in place by enjoyment. Second, for Zizek the subject
is not properly understood in terms of the concept of subject-position or the individual as it is constructed within the
terms of a given hegemonic formation (as a woman/mother, black/minority, etc). And, third, the subject is not the illusory
container of a potentially infinite plasticity or capacity for creative self-fashioning. Instead, of either a subject position or an
opportunity for re-creation, the subject is lack (in the structure, the other) marked by the limit point or nugget of an
impossible enjoyment. Although this idea of the subject of lack might appear at first glance rather bizarre and unhelpful, it
nonetheless affiliates well with notions congenial to thinkers convinced by critiques of a specific reading of the
enlightenment subject such as those offered by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud and extended in Foucauldian, feminist, and post-
Nietzschean thought. Zizeks account of the subject shares with these views the rejection of a primary will, rationality,
wholeness, and transparency. Similarly, it acknowledges the role of the unconscious, the body, and language, bringing
these three elements together in its account of enjoyment as it limits and ruptures language and provides the object that is the
very condition of the subject. As it emphases the object conditioning the subject, moreover, Zizeks discussion of enjoyment as a
political factor draws our attention to a certain fixity on the part of the subject. Far from the malleable self-creating subject
championed by consumer capital, the Zizekian subject finds itself in a place not of its choosing, attached to fantasies of which
it remains unaware that nevertheless structure its relation to enjoyment thereby fastening it to the existing framework of
domination.

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Statism Link

By trusting the state to save people, we give it yet another state of emergency to prove it's
capabilities. This depoliticizes decisions made as they will always err in favor of the state.
Edkins, Professor of International Politics at the University of Wales, 2003 [Jenny, Trauma and the
Memory of Politics, 211-212]

One reason why the tale of the concentration camp survivor is so com-pelling is that although it is presented as a space of
exception, the camp is nothing more than the coming to fruition of the horror contained in everyday existence under the
sway of sovereign politics in the west. Thus our response to the camps is in part a recognition of our own predica-ment as
participants in the reduction of life to bare life and politics to biopolitics. As Foucault reminds us `we are all governed and, to
that ex-tent, in solidarity'. But this is of no use if our invocation of the trope of humanitarian crisis repeats the metaphor
that reinforces the very power that produces the humanitarian emergency in the first place. As Agamben puts it: It is
almost as if, starting from a certain point, every decisive political event were double-sided: the spaces, the liberties, and
the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers always simultaneously prepared a tacit but increasing
inscription of individuals' lives within the state order, thus offering a new and more dreadful foundation for the very
sovereign power from which they wanted to liberate themselves. This double-sidedness, of course, recalls Jacques Derrida's
double con-tradictory imperative where the question, for example, of whether and in what way to intervene in a
humanitarian emergency is a dilemma that has to be resolved in any particular instance by a decision. Aid can-not be both
offered and withheld: only one course of action can take place. But to seek general rules, applicable overall to aid
organizations and their operations, is to duck the very question of the political that is inherently involved. Agamben's work
enables us to analyze what is at stake in the politics of the decision. He elaborates how sovereign power operates through the
state of emergency and how the very posing of the question through the trope of emergency is always already on the side of
sovereignty. The implication of the argument in the final part of the chapter is that although the power of the sovereign state
over the lives of its populations has been successfully challenged in the post-cold war period and the notion of
humanitarian concern as overriding sovereignty widely accepted, this is not a liberation or an emancipation but merely
the beginning of another and more authoritarian form of sovereign con-trol over life. Just as the role of the revolution in the
transition to modern state rule can be seen as an ironic strengthening of central authority, the role of humanitarian intervention
can be seen as a tightening of a global structure of authority and control.

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Statism Link

State sovereignty is just a fantasy that attempts to avoid confronting uncertainty, even to the point of
violent implosion.
Edkins, professor at Aberystwyth 2002 [Jenny The Subject of the Political Sovereignty and Subjectivity]

We have shown that the subject is of necessity incomplete, or impossi-ble. It is always in process; it never fully comes to
presence but is struc-tured around a lack. This lack arises, first, from the gap between the real and the imaginary in the
mirror phase and then from the gap between the imaginary and the symbolic, or social, during interpellation. Like the
sub-ject, the symbolic, or social, order is similarly constituted around a lack, one that in this case appears as a constitutive
antagonism.11 This antago-nism appears in a variety of guises in different social orders, but it is always there and cannot be
removed. A society without antagonism cannot exist: social reality can never be complete or whole. However, for life to go
on the lack must be concealed and the concealment hidden. This is accom-plished by the production of social reality. In
order for what we call social reality to be constituted, meaning has to be imposed. This is achieved through the "master
signifier," a signifier that stands in the place of the constitutive lack or antagonism at the heart of the social order.
Without such a signifier, the social order cannot constitute itself; the sliding of meaning cannot be arrested. This signifier is
the embodiment of lack; it enables us to account for the gap between result and intention. The act of imposing meaning, halting
the movement of free-floating signifiers, is an authoritative act, "a non-founded founding act of violence" that recalls the
violence of the founding decision in the work of Jacques Derrida.12 At this moment, the symbolic order comes into being, the
decision is taken, and the law is founded. The violence that is implicat-ed in this process then disappears: in the history of
what happened, what was brought into being with this foundational act is narrated as always already inevitable. Once the
decision has been taken, the moment of deci-sion disappears, though not entirely without trace. We are now in a position to
suggest how sovereignty and subjectivity implicate each other. As we have seen, subjectivity can only exist, or rather, be
constituted, in relation to a particular social or symbolic order. The social order itself is brought into existence, supposed
or posited, in relation to a particular signifier, which covers the hole or lack in the-social or sym-bolic order and provides
a nodal point around which meaning is articulated. In modernity, one of the signifiers that performs this function is
sovereign-ty. The concept of sovereignty is central to discourse and the International. It informs conventional notions of what
power might be: the relationship between sovereign and subject within the absolutist kingdom, or the sovereignty of a
government over the lives of its citizens in the modern nation state. Sovereignty also plays a foundational role in discussions of
international autonomy: the sovereign state is a bounded unit in the international system. This centrality testifies to its place as
the master signifier around which a particular symbolic order is constituted "Sovereignty" as a master signifier is not
free and autonomous here but stands implicated and embroiled in questions of "subjectivity." The authori-ty of the
master signifier derives only from its position in the social orderwhich itself derives only from the subjection of the
subjects that evoke it. It is an impostor, in a sense: any signifier that found itself at the place of con-stitutive lack in the
structure would dodivine providence, the invisible hand of the market, the objective logic of history, or the Jewish
conspiracy, for example.i3 Sovereignty performs this task for the social reality that is taken to be modern politics. It conceals
antagonism in a particular way and implicates particular subjectivities. For example, it produces politics as subjection and
sovereignty as absolute. Within the legal authority it establishes, violence is concealed. That same violence is banished to the
nonsoviereign realm of the international. The subjectivities it invokes (or rather, that invoke it) are the irresponsible camp
followers of power insofar as they naturalize a particular social order. Their actions respond to what they sup-pose are the desires
of authority.

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Scarcity link/A2 Desire doesn't exist/A2 Desire good

Human behavior is driven by desire- we strive for a world without scarcity, but unfortunately such a
world cannot be actualized within our current ideological coordinates.
Edkins, Lecturer in Politics at the University of Wales, 2000 [Jenny, Whose Hunger? Concepts of Famine,
Practices of Aid p. 123-124]

For Zizek, late-capitalist liberal-democracy has an impasse at its heart centering around the role of desire. In Lacan's work desire
is not something that can be satisfied as such. As Zizek expresses it, "desire is sustained by lack and therefore shuns its
satisfaction, that is, the very thing for which it 'officially' strives." Desire is sus-tained by the unattainability of its object and
by the gap between its official motivation and its actual function, which is to provide a way of accommodation with a
primordial lack, a lack inherent in the human condition as such. In Lacan, an empirical object fills out the role of the primordially
lost Thing and becomes the object-cause of desire. Whereas Freud might argue that the obstacles of convention that are put in
place to prevent the attainment of the object of desirethe sexual object, for exampleserve to heighten desire, in Lacan's
account these obstacles are there precisely to avoid the possi-bility of the discovery that the object is unattainable as such:
"exter-nal hindrances that thwart our access to the object are there precisely to create the illusion that without them, the
object would be directly accessiblewhat such hindrances thereby conceal is the inherent im-possibility of attaining the
object."
In late capitalism, the immediate satisfaction of desire through superabundance, permissiveness, and accessibility of objects
threatens to suffocate desire. We are approaching a position where for some of us the attainment of all possible empirical
objects of desire is con-ceivable in practice. This will become even more so, Zizek claims, with the advent of so-called virtual
reality. Superabundance threat-ens desire by supplying the means for its satisfaction; the function of the object-cause of desire
is thwarted by this. Although officially de-sire exists to be satisfied, in Lacanian terms desire provides a means of transcending
a primordial lack; it exists precisely because it has to be insatiable. By providing an impossible object, the impossibility of
fulfillment itself is sublimated. However, this superabundance is not without its opposite: scar-city and deprivation. For
Zizek, drawing on Hegel, universal abun-dance is impossible, since in capitalism "abundance itself produces deprivation."
Excess and lack are structurally interdependent in a capitalist economy. The system produces both together. Some live in
abundance and plenty while others live in scarcity and deprivation. Superabundance goes hand in hand with its opposite.
This does not mean that notions of desire are irrelevant in the context of a world where for large numbers of people the necessities
of life itselffood, water, shelter, and freedom from violenceare hard to come by. On the contrary, Zizek's account of notions
of de-sire as a concealment of an inherent lack and the need to sustain de-sire in conditions of superabundance can help us to
understand some of the paradoxes of responses to events such as famines and the sight of incredible suffering in these and other
disasters. The object of "Ending Hunger" functions as just such an impos-sible or unattainable object-cause of desire in the
Lacanian sense. Here we have the irony of a desire sustained by the object of remov-ing the very thingdeprivationthat is
indissolubly linked with the superabundance that threatens desire. Rather than the question of "Why, when there is such
an abundance of food, do so many people starve?" the question becomes "Why, when we are so well provided for with an
abundance of everything we can possibly desire, do we desire the one thing we cannot have, that is, a world without others
who are deprived?" At least part of the answer, I argue, can be found in the Lacanian account of desire. Not only do we
desire the thing we cannot attain, but we put ob-stacles of convention in the way of attaining it. These obstacles are seen in
arguments of developmentalists that portray famine as com-plex: it needs further research, we have to act carefully and
take into account the feelings of those we want to help, and so on. Thus in famine we have an answer to Zizek's question: "So the
big enigma is: how, through what kind of limitation of access, will capitalism suc-ceed in reintroducing lack and scarcity
into this saturation?" Lack and scarcity are reintroduced as someone else's lack and scarcityas hunger, the stranger
that waits outside some other door. For those of us who live in an excess of abundance, desire becomes the (impos-sible)
desire for a world free from scarcity: a hunger for a world free from hunger.

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Identity link/A2 Identity Politics

Identity politics is emblematic of the constitutive Lack- it is not politics but rather a search for Utopia.
STAVRAKAKIS '99 Yannis, Lacan and the Political, pg. 29

What are the implications of the constitutive alienation in the imaginary and the symbolic for a theory of subjective identity? The
fullness of identity that the subject is seeking is impossible both in the imaginary and in the symbolic level. The subject is
doomed to symbolise in order to constitute her- or himself as such, but this symbolisation cannot capture the totality and
singularity of the real body, the close-circuit of the drives. Symbolisation, that is to say the pursuit of identity itself,
introduces lack and makes identity ultimately impossible. For even the idea of identity to become possible its ultimate
impossibility has to be instituted. Identity is possible only as a failed identity; it remains desirable exactly because it is
essentially impossible. It is this constitutive impossibility that, by making full identity impossible, makes identification possible,
if not necessary. Thus, it is rather misleading to speak of identities within a Lacanian framework. What we have is only attempts
to construct a stable identity, either on the imaginary or the symbolic level, through the image or the signifier. The subject of lack
emerges due to the failure of all these attempts. What we have then, if we want to be precise and accurate, is not identities but
identifications, a series of failed identifications or rather a play between identification and its failure, a deeply political play.
The concept of identification becomes crucial then for any understanding of the Lacanian conception of subjectivity; it was
already crucial in Freudian theory. In Freud, identification emerges as a concept of major importance as it refers to the mechanism
through which subjectivity is constituted. Identification refers to the psychological process whereby the subject assimilates an
aspect, property or attribute of the other and is transformed, wholly or partially, after the model the other provides. It is by means
of a series of identifications that the personality is constituted and specified (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1988:205). What Lacan
adds to this picture is two qualifications. First of all the distinction between imaginary and symbolic identification, which clarifies
a lot of ambiguities in Freuds account, and, second, the important emphasis on the idea that identification cannot result in a
stable subjective identity: The ontic horizon of identification is that of ultimate failure; its ontological horizon that of
impossibility. 19 Yet this is not, strictly speaking, a failure of identification, but a failure of identity, that is to say a failure
to achieve identity through identification. It is, however, this same impossibility to achieve identity (substance) that makes
identification (process) constitutive. This is not only true for the life of the child but for the life of the adult as well, something
which reveals the relevance of the concept of identification for social and political analysis. Since the objects of identification in
adult life include political ideologies and other socially constructed objects, the process of identification is revealed as
constitutive of socio-political life. It is not identity which is constitutive but identification as such; instead of identity
politics we should speak of identification politics.

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Identity is a constantly negative relationship, an attempt to murder an identity forced upon you,
ending capitalism or rethinking paitrarchy are like the parents kiss to a childs injury-they make
us feel better but do nothing about the underlying paradoxes of identity.
Serge Leclaire, psychoanalyst and instructor at the institute du psychoanalytic Paris, A Child Is Being Killed: On Primary
Narcissism and the Death Drive, 1998, pg. 2-3
From where the analyst is sitting, what is at stake is the truth. There is no way out: reckoning with the absolute power of
the in-fans, he must never stop perpetrating the murder of the child, even as he recognizes that he cannot carry it out.
Psychoanalytic practice is based upon bringing to the fore the constant work of a power of deaththe death of the
wonderful (or terrifying) child who, from generation to generation, bears witness to parents dreams and desires. There
can be no life without killing that strange, original image in which everyones birth is inscribed It is an impossible but
necessary murder, for there can be no life, no life of desire and creation, if we ever stop killing off the always returning
wonderful child. The wonderful child is first of all the nostalgic gaze of the mother who made him into an object of
extreme magnificence akin to the Child Jesus majesty, a light and jewel radiating forth absolute power. But he is already the
forsaken one as well, lost in total dereliction, facing terror and death alone. In the extraordinary presence of the child in the
flesh, the radiant image of the infant-king, stronger even than his cries or laughter and counterbalanced by the sorrow
of the Pieta, compels attention. Through him shines the royal figure of our wishes, memories, hopes, and dreamsa
fragile and hieratic figure representing, in the secret the-ater where destiny is played out, the first- (or third-) person
position from which the unconscious speaks. For each of us, the wonderful child is the unconscious, primordial
representation in which, more densely than anywhere else, our wishes, nostalgia, and hopes come together. In the
transparent reality of the child, the Real of all our desires can be seen, almost without a veil. We are fascinated and can neither
look away nor grasp it. To give it up is to die, to no longer have a reason for living. But to pretend that we can hold on to it is
to condemn ourselves not to live. There is for everyone, always, a child to kill. The loss of a representation of fullness, of
motionless jouissance, must be relent-lessly mourned and mourned. A light must be eclipsed so it can shine and spread out
on a background of darkness. Whoever does not mourn, over and over, the loss of the wonderful child he might have
been remains in limboin the milky light of a shadowless, hopeless waiting. But whoever believes he has won the battle
against the figure of the tyrant once and for all cuts himself off from the sources of his creative spirit and thinks he is
strong when he stubbornly resists the reign of jouissance.

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The recognition of identity is an outlet for anxiety recognizing our being riveted to our identity not
because of our own choice but because we are born into these positions.

This discussion of the emergence of an 'immemorial past' within moments of anxiety permits me to observe an
intuition that barely surfaces Levinas text, where the sentiment of 'being riveted' seems sometimes to relate to issues of
race, ethnicity, and national identity. The immemorial act that shadows me and compels my anxiety also reawakens
me to the fact that I was born into an identity that I did not choose, but which chose me. That this intuition does indeed
subtly haunt the argument is verified when, in the first annotation to On Escape, Jacques Rolland reveals a striking similarity
between the language of this text and an essay Levinas wrote in the same year, 1935. In 'The Religious Inspirations of the
Alliance', Levinas wrote these sentences: "Hitlerism is the greatest trial...through which Judaism has to pass...The
pathetic destiny of being Jewish becomes a fatality. One can no longer flee it. The Jew is ineluctably riveted to his
Judaism.' And also these: a youth 'definitely attached to the sufferings and joys of the nation to which it
belongs...discovers in the reality of Hitlerism all the gravity of being Jewish': 'In the barbarous and primitive symbol
of race...Hitler recalled that one does not desert Judaism.'

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The attitude of restoring agency and living life good enough ensures continued oppression of other
bodies in our image-we continually succumb to the temptation to graft identity onto bodies in order to
fulfill our own narcissitic fantasy constructions.
Kaja Silverman, professor of rhetoric at the university of California-berkeley, The Threshold of the Visible World, 1996,
p. 4-5
One cannot characterize this motility of the look as agency since it resists our conscious attempts to direct it. Here
again, we need the assistance of aes-thetic texts, which can intervene where we cannot. Such texts abound in visual and
rhetorical images which, even before being psychically worked over, have the formal and libidinal properties of highly
charged unconscious memories. They are consequently capable of moving immediately to a privileged site with-in the
unconscious. At the same time, they are available to conscious scrutiny and interrogation. For the most part, representational
practice works through such mnemic implants to confirm dominant values. However, implicit in their exterior derivation is
the possibility for each of us of having psychic access to what does not belong to usof remembering other peoples
memories. And through these borrowed memories, we can accede psychically to pains, pleasures, and struggles which are far
removed not only from our own, but from what norma-tive representation validates, as well. In Chapter 2 of The Threshold
c/the Visible World, I argue at length that all of our attempts personally to approximate the ideal end in failure, and leave us in
a relation of fatal aggressivity toward others. I oppose to this vain narcissistic quest the active gift of love, or the provisional
conferral of ideality upon socially devalued bodies. However, I do not indicate in that chapter how the subject is psychically to
negotiate his or her resulting apprehension of lack or distance from the ideal. It might seem that the only alternative to self-
idealization is a determined self-revulsion. However, in the closing pages of this book, I am led by a series of important
images toward a concept with which it would seem possible to dis-mantle the binary opposition of ideality and
abjectionthe notion of the good enough. In so doing, I return to the topic with which I began: love. However, whereas I
am initially concerned with the terms under which we might idealize and so identify with bodies which we would otherwise
reject, I am by the end more concerned with the conditions under which we might ethically love our-selves. The good
enough is a paradigm through which ideals can be simultane-ously lived and deconstructed. To live an ideal in the
mode of the good enough is, first of all, to dissolve it into its tropesto grasp its fundamentally figural status.
Equally important, it is to understand that those tropes are only ever par-tially fulfillable. Finally, to embrace the
principle of the good enough is to realize that ones partial and tropological approximation of the ideal counts most
when circumstances most conspire against it. Once again, these are lessons that we can perhaps only learn from visual
texts, since they have the power to reeducate the look. We can only accede narcissistically to the principle of the good
enough after we have been taught to exercise it in relation to other bodies, and here the image is all-important.

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Terrorism link

Relying on the implicit threat of terrorism empowers the United States global strategy of conquest.
What we fight is not a central enemy with guns pointed at the U.S., but rather an unnamed faceless
foe somewhere beyond the horizon with the potential to become a threat. This logic is self-defeating
and justifies absolute control and scapegoating in order to protect the homeland
Savoj Zizek 2005 (Give Iranian Nukes a Chance, http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2280/)
Every power structure has to rely on an underlying implicit threat, i.e. whatever the oficial democratic rules and legal
constraints may be, we can ultimately do whatever we want to you. In the 20th century, however, the nature of this link
between power and the invisible threat that sustains it changed. Existing power structures no longer relied on their own
fantasmatic projection of a potential, invisible threat in order to secure the hold over their subjects. Rather, the threat was
externalized, displaced onto an Outside Enemy. It became the invisible (and, for that reason, all-powerful and omni-present)
threat of this enemy that legitimized the existing power structures permanent state of emergency. Fascists invoked the
threat of the Jewish conspiracy, Stalinists the threat of the class enemy, Americans the threat of Communism-all the way up to
todays war on terror. The threats posed by such an invisible enemy legitimizes the logic of the preemptive strike.
Precisely because the threat is virtual, one cannot afford to wait for it to come. Rather, one must strike in advance, before
it is too late. In other words, the omni-present invisible threat of Terror legitimizes the all too visible protective measures of
defense-which, of course, are what pose the true threat to democracy and human rights (e.g., the London polices recent
execution of the innocent Brazilian electrician, Jean Charles de Menezes). Classic power functioned as a threat that operated
precisely by never actualizing itself, by always remaining a threatening gesture. Such functioning reached its climax in the Cold
War, when the threat of mutual nuclear destruction had to remain a threat. With the war on terror, the invisible threat causes
the incessant actualization, not of the threat itself, but, of the measures against the threat. The nuclear strike had to
remain the threat of a strike, while the threat of the terrorist strike triggers the endless series of preemptive strikes against
potential terrorists. We are thus passing from the logic of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) to a logic in which ONE
SOLE MADMAN runs the entire show and is allowed to enact its paranoia. The power that presents itself as always being
under threat, living in mortal danger, and thus merely defending itself, is the most dangerous kind of power-the very model of the
Nietzschean ressentiment and moralistic hypocrisy. And indeed, it was Nietzsche himself who, more than a century ago, in
Daybreak, provided the best analysis of the false moral premises of todays war on terror: No government admits any more that
it keeps an army to satisfy occasionally the desire for conquest. Rather, the army is supposed to serve for defense, and one
invokes the morality that approves of self-defense. But this implies ones own morality and the neighbors immorality; for the
neighbor must be thought of as eager to attack and conquer if our state must think of means of self-defense. Moreover, the
reasons we give for requiring an army imply that our neighbor, who denies the desire for conquest just as much as our
own state, and who, for his part, also keeps an army only for reasons of self-defense, is a hypocrite and a cunning criminal
who would like nothing better than to overpower a harmless and awkward victim without any fight. Thus all states are
now ranged against each other: they presuppose their neighbors bad disposition and their own good disposition. This
presupposition, however, is inhumane, as bad as war and worse. At bottom, indeed, it is itself the challenge and the cause
of wars, because as I have said, it attributes immorality to the neighbor and thus provokes a hostile disposition and act.
We must abjure the doctrine of the army as a means of self-defense just as completely as the desire for conquests. Is not
the ongoing war on terror proof that terror is the antagonistic Other of democracy-the point at which democracys
plural options turn into a singular antagonism? Or, as we so often hear, In the face of the terrorist threat, we must all come
together and forget our petty differences. More pointedly, the difference between the war on terror with previous 20th
century worldwide struggles such as the Cold War is that the enemy used to be clearly identified with the actually existing
Communist empire, whereas today the terrorist threat is inherently spectral, without a visible center. It is a little bit like the
description of Linda Fiorentinos character in The Last Seduction: Most people have a dark side she had nothing else. Most
regimes have a dark oppressive spectral side the terrorist threat has nothing else. The paradoxical result of this spectralization
of the enemy is an unexpected reflexive reversal. In this world without a clearly identified enemy, it is the United States, the
protector against the threat, that is emerging as the main enemy-much like in Agatha Christies Murder on the Orient-
Express, where, since the entire group of suspects is the murderer, the victim himself (an evil millionaire) turns out to be the real
criminal.

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Liberation link

Politics of liberation are utter suicide it is a fantasy to believe these politics will be accepted when
the truth is that radical backlash from both the left and right will ensue
Lee Edelmen, No Future: Queer Theory and Death Drive. 2004 pp. 27-8
By denying our identification with the negativity of this drive, and hence our disident.ificar.ion from the promise of
futurity, those of us inhabiting the place of the queer may be able to cast off that queerness and enter the properly political
sphere, but only by shifting the figural burden of queerness to someone else. The structural position of queerness, after all,
and the need to fill it remain. By choosing to accept that position, however, by assuming the "truth" of our queer capacity to
figure the undoing of the Symbolic, and of the Symbolic subject as well, we might undertake the impossible project of
imagining an oppositional political stance exempt from the imperative to reproduce the politics of signification (the politics
aimed at closing the gap opened up by the signifier itself), which can only return us, by way of the Child, to the politics of
reproduction. For the liberal's view of society, which seems to accord the queer a place, endorses no more than the
conservative right's the queerness of resistance to futurism and thus the queerness of the queer. While the right wing
imagines the elimination of queers (or of the need to confront their existence), the left would eliminate queerness by shining
the cool light of reason upon it, hoping thereby to expose it as merely a mode of sexual expression free of the all-pervasive
coloring, the determining fantasy formation, by means of which it can seem to portend, and not for the right alone, the
undoing of the social order and its cynosure, the Child. Queerness thus comes to mean nothing for both: for the right wing
the nothingness always at war with the positivity of civil society; for the left, nothing more than a sexual practice in need
of demystification.

So long as we remain obedient to the faceless child, any attempt at liberation is doomed to failure
Lee Edelmen, No Future: Queer Theory and Death Drive. 2004 pp. 25-6

Bound up with the first of these death drives is the figure of the Child, enacting a logic of repetition that fixes identity
through identification with the future of the social order. Bound up with the second is the figure of the queer, embodying
that order's traumatic encounter with its own inescapable failure, its encounter with the illusion of the future as suture to
bind the constitutive wound of the subject's subjection to the signifier, which divides it, paradoxically, both from and into itself. In
the preface to Homoaraphesis I wrote that the signifier "gay," understood "as a figure for the textuality, the rhetoricity, of
the sexual . . . designates the gap or incoherence that every discourse of 'sexuality' or 'sexual identity' would master."3 0
Extending that claim, I now suggest that queer sexualities, inextricable from the emergence of the subject in the Symbolic, mark
the place of the gap in which the Symbolic confronts what its discourse is incapable of knowing, which is also the place of a
jouissance from which it can never escape. As a figure for what it can neither fully articulate nor acknowledge, the queer
may provide the Symbolic with a sort of necessary reassurance by seeming to give a name to what, as Real, remains
unnameable. But repudiations of that figural identity, reflecting a liberal faith in the abstract universality of the subject, though
better enabling the extension of rights to those who are still denied them, must similarly reassure by attesting to the seamless
coherence of the Symbolic whose dominant narrative would thus supersede the corrosive force of queer irony. If the queer's
abjectified difference, that is, secures normativity's identity, the queer's disavowal of that difference affirms normativity's
singular truth. For every refusal of the figural status to which queers are distinctively called reproduces the triumph of
narrative as the allcaorization of irony, as the logic of a temporality that always serves to "straighten" it out, and thus
proclaims the universality of reproductive futurism. Such refusals perform, despite themselves, subservience to the law
that effectively imposes politics as the only game in town, exacting as the price of admission the subject's
(hetero)normalization, which is accomplished, regardless of sexual practice or sexual "orientation," through compulsory
abjuration of the future-negating queer.

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Ethics Link

Attempts to create a rational world of good/evil dichotomies are doomed to failure and this failure
manifests itself in the endless murder that history has seen as the consequence of ethics
STAVRAKAKIS '99, Yannis, Lacan and the Political, pg. 129
In Lacans view, the sphere of the good erects a strong wall across the path of our desirethe first barrier that we have to deal
with (VII:230). Lacans central question is: what lies beyond this barrier, beyond the historical frontier of the good? This is the
central question that guides the argumentation in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. What lies beyond the successive conceptions of
the good, beyond the ways of traditional ethical thinking, is their ultimate failure, their inability to master the central
impossibility, the constitutive lack around which human experience is organised. In fact, this impossibility exercises a
structural causality over the history of ethical thought. Its intolerable character causes the attempts of ethical thought to
eliminate it. But this elimination entails the danger of turning good to evil, utopia to dystopia: the world of the good is
historically revealed to be the world of evilas epitomized not only by the famous reversibility of Kant with Sade but also
by the unending murders under the reign of the politics of happiness (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1997:58). On the other hand, the
irreducible character of this impossibility shows the limits of all these attempts. The name of this impossibility in Lacan is,
of course, the real.

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Ethics Link

Commonplace ethics is the ethics of desiring an other that doesnt exist-one who constantly tries to try
again and again to transform an other into the big Other that governs the construction of a field of
symbolic meaning-only a challenge to this pathology can reorient our relationships to ethics
Alenka Zupancic, researcher at the Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of Sciences at Ljubljana, Ethics of the
Real: Kant, Lacan, 2000, pg. 165-166
One can understand ethics as a pursuit of the desire of the Other, as a hunt for or an attempt to figure out the desire of
the Other before one moves into action. Here, however, the subject not only has to guess the desire of the Other, but
also and above all to see to it that the Other has a desire in the first place. The subject, of course, will never be
capable of satisfying the demands of the Other. It is precisely this series of failures (thats not it, try again, make
another effort . . that maintains the Other as the one who knows what It wants: if It doesnt want this, It apparently wants
something else, and knows very well what this something else is. The guilt that the subject experiences for not having done
what was demanded (for not having found the right answer to the enigma of the desire of the Other) and the self-accusations
that follow from it aim at making the Other forget that It doesnt exist. The subject knows very well that the Other doesnt
exist; this is, even, the only real certitude she has. Yet nothing changes if we tell such a subject: You are torturing
yourself for nothing. The Other that terrifies you so much does not exist, since the subject is tortur-ing herself
precisely because the Other does not exist. The certainty that the Other does not exist takes away from the subject
every other certainty (about what one has to do, how one is supposed to act or respond to things.. .), and the erection of the
law of the superego gives the subject at least access to a negative certainty (the thats not it), to some criterion or
compass for her actions. The subject who does not know whether what she wants to do (or is doing) is right or wrong,
whether it is pathological or not, whether it is really it or just a pretence such a subject finds in the superego a sort of
'practical guide that at least gives her the clue that the best of all possible actions is always the one that makes you suffer the
most. Thus the subject acts; she can even act (and suffer) persistently; yet all this activity can only maintain the subject
in a state of suffering in a state of passivity vis-a-vis the all-powerful Other. In relation to this, we should mention
yet another version of this path of passivity, which consists in trying to extort from the Other the 'right answer. Here,
the subject wants the Other to choose for him. For such a subject, the Other always appears in the form of some other
person. One could say that this subject aims at elevating some small other to the rank of the (big) Other. The subject spends
his life imposing choices upon others, reminding them that they are free individuals who must know what they really
want. To take an example: in the case of a love affair that does not suit him any more, such a subject will never break it
up, be will delegate this decision to the other. He will play the honest one, he will admit that he is cheating, that he is
indeed weak and that apparently he is not tip to a real relation-ship. He will tell the other: 'There, these are the facts,
this is how I am, Im laying myself bare before you what more can I do? and now its your turn to make a decision,
to make your choice. And if this other decides to leave, she leaves precisely as the (big) Other. We might even say that
all the activity of such a subject is leading towards this scene of a miraculous metamor-phosis of the other into the
Other (who knows what she wants or does not want, and acts accordingly).

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Ethics Link

Ethics is always posited as an obstruction to our desire-it is the interruption that we all must realize
to change our life-this understanding of ethics lacks the fundamental insight of the Lacanian Real that
something is inevitably excluded from our symbolic construction of reality. The ethics of the
affirmative is a basis for a return to the traditional values that both enable the politics of extremists
and fantatics and the depoliticization of postmodern identity claims
Alenka Zupancic,Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan, 2000, pg. 4-5
These two reference points are the basic themes of this book, which-by means of a reading of Kant, Lacan and several works
of literature seeks to outline the countours of what I would like to call an ethics of the Real. An ethics of the Real is not
an ethics oriented towards the Real, but an attempt to rethink ethics by recognizing and acknowledging the dimension
of the Real (in the Lacanian sense of the term) as it is already operative in ethics. The term ethics is often taken to refer to
a set of norms which restrict or bridle desire which aim to keep our conduct (or, say, the conduct of science) free of
all excess. Yet this understanding of ethics fails to acknowledge that ethics is by nature excessive, that excess is a
component of ethics which cannot simply be eliminated without ethics itself losing all meaning. In relation to the
smooth course of events, life as governed by the reality principle, ethics always appears as something excessive, as a
disturbing interruption. But the question remains of the cause I am following in this theoretical attempt at an ethics of the
Real. In Lacanian terms, the decline of the discourse of the master, Lacans understand-ing of the advent of modernity, forces
the discourse of ethics into an impasse. The ethical maxim behind the discourse of the master is perhaps best formulated
in the famous verse from Juvenal: Summum crede nefas animam praeferre pudori, et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas
[Count it the greatest of all sins to prefer life to honour, and to lose, for the sake of living, all that makes life worth
living]. Another version of this credo might be found in Paul Claudel: Sadder than to lose ones life is it to lose ones reason
for living. In Kant with Sade Lacan proposes his own translation of this ethical motto: Desire, what is called desire,
suffices to make life have no sense in playing a coward.
0
Modernity, it seems, offered no alternative to the discourse of
the master, besides the feeble maxim: The worst thing one can lose is ones own life. This maxim lacks both
conceptual force and the power to mobilize. This lack, in turn, is part of what makes political discourses that
proclaim a return to traditional values so seductive; it also accounts for much of the fascinated horror evoked by
extremists and fanatics, who want nothing more than to die for their cause. This book is an attempt to provide a
conceptual framework for an ethics which refuses to be an ethics based on the discourse of the master, but which
equally refuses the unsatisfactory option of a (post)modern ethics based on the reduction of the ulti-mate horizon of
the ethical to ones own life.

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Ethics Link

Ethics result in conservatism and the preservation of the status quo.
Jackson, Dept. of English, Wayne St. Univ, 2007. [Ken, The Great Temptation of Religion: Why Badiou has been so important to
iek IJZS Vol. 1 no. 2]

The reason our attention to ethics can be considered an ideology is two-fold. First, much of the academic world and, in
particular, the academic left does not recognize its attention to the other as ethics as such and, indeed, recoils from the
notion that they are engaged in primarily ethical pursuits. They are even more horrified when presented with the notion that
this ethics, our ethics, is connected somehow to religion. We are, in short, ethically interpellated subjects that can not see our
own ideological constitution clearly. Second, as the remarks from iek quoted above suggest, our ethics actually functions
in a conservative fashion, preserving the neoliberal status quo under the guise of challenging hierarchical power
structures. As Badiou puts it, the price paid by ethics is a stodgy conservatism. The ethical conception of man, besides
the fact that its foundation is either biological (images of victims) or Western (the self-satisfaction of the armed
benefactor), prohibits every broad, positive vision of possibilities.what ethics legitimates, is in fact the conservation
by the socalled West of what it possesses (2001: 24). We respect the other Badiou points out, but only inasmuch as that
other conforms to our vision: Respect for differences, of course? But on the condition that the different be
parliamentary-democratic, pro freemarket economics, in favour of freedom of opinion, feminism, the
environment(2001: 24). For this reason Badiou shockingly proposes that the whole ethical predication based upon
recognition of the other should be purely and simply abandoned (2001: 25).

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Ethics Link

Meaningful ethical or political action is impossible as long as the master-signifier of sovereignty
remains unchallenged.
Edkins, professor at Aberystwyth 2002 [Jenny The Subject of the Political Sovereignty and Subjectivity]

A symbolic order centered on sovereignty is not the only (im)possible solution; we could imagine other social realities.
However, once sovereign-ty is in place, an ethical-political challenge in the name of an alternative becomes illegitimate.
This difficulty arises because sovereignty as a master signifier conceals its status as will have been, constituting the social
order as always already. As such, sovereign as a political referent persists and endures almost as if it were an inevitable
and unavoidable _part of politics. Indeed, it functions to define politics in a particular way such that sover-eignty is the oily
referent by which one can understand the political. We will question this by asking whether another politics is possible,
one that does not invoke sovereignty or an alternative master signifier.

Arguably, without a master signifier either the social order nor the subject are possible. If this is accepted, emancipation as
such becomes impossible. Liberation is always to come. Revolution is a joyous but impossible moment, a singularity
outside time, where repressive authority has been overthrown and a new order has yet to be reimposed. There was such a
moment during the revolutions at the end of the cold war in Europe, with "rebels waving the national flag with the red star, the
com-munist symbol, cut out, so that instead of the symbol standing for the orga-nizing principle of national life, there was nothing
but a hole in its cen-tre." Zizek raises the prospect of "tarrying with the negative," although the logic of his Lacanian position
would repudiate that possibility. Derrida, in a parallel attempt to find a way of being outside the dichotomized vio-lence of
logocentrism, suggests an endless process of decisioning.I54"

Both of these would be a way of engaging with the political and return-ing to an ethicsin Derrida's case an ethics of
responsibility, and for Zizek an ethics of the real. Examining how an ethics of the real might operate leads to some
interesting conclusions about the role of sovereignty in pre-empting such a move. As a master signifier, sovereignty has
precisely the task of preventing the emergence of an ethics of the real. The imposition of meaning, which is what the
master signifier accomplishes, forecloses ethi-cal possibility,)

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Obligation link

Talk of obligation conflates our desire creating the ethic of debt towards the Other and the constant
need to take action in order to fulfill our guilty conscience.
We were pursuing hints in Levinas's text that the sentiment of being riveted was connected to the question of race, and all
those forms of identity which are ours by virtue of birth rather than choice. This connection is suggested in relation to
a specific characterization of anxiety or being riveted as the feeling of being burdened by a 'non-remittable obligation'.
From this sentiment to that of being weighed down by an inexpiable debt is a short step, but to take it without being
aware of the distance traversed leads to the inappropriate conflation of originary and moral anxiety. That Levinas
makes the error of too quickly conflating the experience of being riveted with experiences of culpability and debt
proves nothing so much as the effectiveness of the superego, of guilt, in the modern world. Why should our admittedly
infrangible attachment to that which precedes us and drenches our enjoyment in its indelible colors be characterized as a guilty
one? There is no good reason for It; but If the equation of the past with guilt and debt is endemic to modern thought, it is
because the superegoic evasion or recoil from anxiety retains so much influence over thought, up to and including
Freud's. Critiquing the familiar Freudian myth of the murder of the primordial father by sons who try to, atone for their cri me
by reinstating him in an idealized form (as all-loving and loved by all), Lacan disentangles guilt from originary anxiety, and
prepares the way for an alternative escape from the latter.

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Obligation link

The Affirmatives moral imperative constitutes a totalitarian paralysis and continuity of conservative
politics which replicate your case harms.
Stavrakakis, Prof Psychoanalysis @ U Essex, 03 [Yannis , parallax, 2003, vol. 9, no. 2, 5671 Re-
Activating the Democratic Revolution: The Politics of Transformation Beyond Reoccupation and
Conformism]

This brings us to the whole discussion around the ethical turn in contemporary political philosophy. Even if one concludes that
radical democracy can be a viable and fruitful project for a politics of transformation, what about the prioritization of ethics
within recent radical democratic discourse? For example, at a fairly superficial level, it seems as if Zizek questions the
importance of ethics in this field, and thus would also seem to question the deployment of the radical democratic attitude at
the ethical level. Consider, for example, his outright condemnation of the ethical turn in political philosophy: The return to
ethics in todays political philosophy shamefully exploits the horrors of Gulag or Holocaust as the ultimate bogey for
blackmailing us into renouncing all serious radical engagement.60 Surely, however, this cannot be a rejection of ethics in
toto. Even if only because Zizek himself has devoted a considerable part of his work elaborating the ethics of psychoanalysis
in the Lacanian tradition.61 It follows then that it must be a particular form of ethical discourse that constitutes his
target. The same is true of Alain Badious argument, to which we will now turn. Badious target is a particular type of
ethics, of ethical ideology, which uses a discourse of human rights and humanitarianism in order to silence
alternative thought and politics and legitimize the capitalist order. This is an ethics premised on the principle that
good is what intervenes visibly against an Evil that is identifiable a priori.62 What Badiou points to here, is what appears
as a strange inversion; here the Good is derived from the Evil and not the other way round.63 The result of such an
inversion is significant for the theory and politics of transformation: If the ethical consensus is founded on the
recognition of Evil, it follows that every effort to unite people around a positive idea of the Good, let alone identify Man
with projects of this kind, becomes in fact the real source of evil itself. Such is the accusation so often repeated over the
last fifteen years: every revolutionary project stigmatized as utopian turns, we are told, into totalitarian nightmare.
Every will to inscribe an idea of justice or equality turns bad. Every collective will to the Good creates Evil [] In
reality, the price paid by ethics is a stodgy conservatism.64 This ethic, which is revealed as nothing but a mindless
catechism, a miserable moralism,65 is an ethics that can have no relation to a transformative political agenda. 66 This
ethics is presented in Badious argument as a distortion of a real ethic of truths, which attempts to restore the logical priority of
Good over Evil. Badious ethic of truths is an ethics related to the idea of the event, a category central for his whole
philosophical and political apparatus. To put it briefly, the event here refers to a real break which destabilizes a given
discursive articulation, a pre-existing order.

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Compassion link

The ethics of caring and compassion are ultimately a secreted attempt to produce a unified pure
subject-thus the implicit command of caring is change from what you are in a radical project to
annihilate difference in capitalist humanitarianism
Alenka Zupancic, intellectual monster guru and researcher at the Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of Sciences at
Ljubljana, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan, 2000, pg. Xii

So how are we to break out of this vicious intertwining of the Good and its obscene supplement? Let us recall the final
scene of the first big Hollywood production about the Bosnian war, Welcome to Sarajevo, a film that was a failure (and,
incidentally, a film that Alenka Zupancic hates intensely!). In this scene, shot with minimal pathos, the broken-down
Bosnian mother renounces her beloved daughter: she signs the paper which gives full custody of her daughter to the
English journalist who wants to adopt her. The supreme act of maternal love is here identified as precisely the
Brechtian gesture of renouncing the maternal link of conceding that, in comfortable English sur-roundings, her
daughter will fare much better than in war-torn Bosnia. When she watches the video of her daughter playing with
other children in an English garden, she immediately understands that her daughter is happy in England; when, in
their last phone conversation, her daughter at first even pre-tends that she no longer understands Bosnian, the mother,
as it were, gets the message. ... This scene should also be read as a critical comment on the Western humanitarian
approach, revealing its ethical ambiguity: it gives a different twist to the simple narrative of a good English journalist
who just wants to save a Bosnian child from her war-torn country, fighting Serbian terrorists as well as the Bosnian
state bureaucracy for which the evacuation of children is capitulation and betrayal (i.e. doing the job of ethnic cleansing
for the Serbs). With its final twist, the film becomes a reflexive critical comment on what it pur-ports to be up to that point: a
humanitarian tale of a journalist doing his ethical duty by saving one person (a child) from the Bosnian war inferno
in a way, the Bosnian official who claims that evacuation is capitulation was right: such humanitarian acts ultimately
only add insult to injury by depriving Bosnians of their offspring. ... So, in the final confrontation between the
journalist and the mother, it is the mother who accomplishes the ethical gesture against the journalist, whose very
humani-tarian and caring behaviour is ultimately unethical.

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Guilt Link

The affirmative reveals the structure of desire through an immediate guilt for the acts this reveals an
underlying desire for the very thing they profess sorrow for-this repression reveals the underlying
pressure of freedom and possibility that carries with it the possibility of a new ethics that can arrest
the destruction of desire
Alenka Zupancic, intellectual monster guru and researcher at the Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of
Sciences at Ljubljana, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan, 2000, pg. 26-27
In order to clarify this point, we would do well to take a look at the findings of psychoanalysis. Cases of irrational guilt
are quite common in psychoanalysis cases where the subject feels guilty of something which was, strictly speaking,
beyond her control. For instance, a subjects friend dies in a car accident and the subject, who was nowhere near the
site of the accident, is nevertheless tormented by guilt. Such cases are usually explained on the level of 'desire and
guilt: the subject in question had an unconscious desire for her friends death, which she could not admit, and so the
actual death of this friend gives rise to feelings of guilt. However, there is yet another, even more interesting level of guilt
that needs to be considered. As Jacques-Alain Miller pointed out in one of his lectures, there are many patients who not only
suffer a variety of symptoms (includ-ing feelings of guilt) but feel guilty because of this very suffering. One might say that
they feel guilty because of the guilt they feel. They feel guilty not simply because of their unconscious desires but, so to
speak, because of the very frame which sustains this kind of psychological causality. It is as if they felt responsible for
the very institution of the psychological causality which, once in place, they cannot but submit to, to be carried along by.
With this we are approaching the notion of guilt as it figures in Kants account of freedom. The guilt that is at issue
here is not the guilt we experience because of something we may or may not have done (or desired to have done).
Instead it involves something like a glimpse of another possibility or, to put it in different terms, the experience of the
pressure of freedom. As a first approximation, we might say that guilt is the way in which the subject originally
participates in freedom, and it is precisely at this point that we encounter the division or split which is constitutive of
the ethical subject, the division expressed in I couldnt have done anything else, but still, I am guilty. Freedom
manifests itself in this split of the subject. The crucial point here is that freedom is not incompatible with the fact that
'I couldn't do anything else, and that I was carried along by the stream of natural necessity. Paradoxically, it is at the
very moment when the subject is conscious of being carried along by the stream of natural necessity that she also
becomes aware of her freedom. It is often noted that the Kantian conception of freedom has 'absurd consequences. For
instance, if only autonomous actions are free, then I can be neither guilty nor responsible for my immoral actions, since they
are always heteronomous. However, nothing could be further from Kants position on freedom and subjectivity As we have
already seen, the paradox his reflections force us to confront is strictly opposed to this: ultimately, I am guilty even if
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things were beyond my control, even if I truly could not have done anything else. Yet at this point we should push the
discussion a little further in order to account for how these two apparently opposite conclusions seem to follow from Kants
view how Kants argument leads in two apparently mutually exclusive directions. On the one hand, Kant seems persistent
in his attempt to persuade us that none of our actions is really free; that we can never establish with certainty the nonexistence
of pathological motives affecting our actions; that so-called inner or 'psycho-logical motives are really just another form of
(natural) causal-ity. On the other hand, he never tires of stressing, with equal persistence, that we are responsible for all our
actions, that there is no excuse for our immoral acts; that we cannot appeal to any kind of necessity as a way of
justifying such actions in brief, that we always act as free subjects.

Guilt Link

The superego imposes guilt upon the subject-this guilt must be dealt with by continuing to strive on
desire-hence the imposition of rules and regulations produces the exact opposite of its desire effect-
only the ethical act of following through on the superegos impositions can arrest this colonialist desire
gone out of control
Alenka Zupancic, intellectual monster guru and researcher at the Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of Sciences at
Ljubljana, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan, 2000, pg. xi
The further consequence of this key breakthrough is that the ethical act proper should be distinguished from the Ego-
Ideal (the Law of the public Good) as well as from the superego, its obscene supplement. For Lacan, the superego is not
the moral agency, since the guilt it imposes on the subject is precisely the unmistakable sign that the subject has
compromised his duty to follow his desire. To take a perhaps unexpected example from politics: the splitting into
Ego-Ideal and superego can be discerned in the fundamental paradox of ex-Yugoslav selfman-agement Socialism: all
the time, the official ideology exhorted people actively to participate in the process of self-management, to master the
conditions of their life outside the alienated Party and state structures; the official media deplored peoples
indifference, escape into privacy, and so on however, it was precisely such an event, a true self-managed articulation
and organization of peoples interests, which the regime feared most. A whole series of unwritten markers thus
delivered between the lines the injunction that the official exhortation was not to be taken too literally; that a cynical
attitude towards the official ideology was what the regime actually wanted the greatest catastrophe for the regime
would be if its own ideology were to be taken too seriously, and realized by its subjects. And on a different level, does
not the same go for the classic imperialist-colonialist exhortation which urged the colonized to become like their
civilized oppressors? Was this injunction not under-mined from within by a wise acknowledgement that the
colo-nized people are mysteriously and irreducibly other that, however hard they try, they will never succeed? This
unwritten superego injunction which undermines the official ideological stance makes it clear in what sense, in contrast
to the notorious right to difference to maintain ones specific cultural identity one should, rather, assert the right to
Sameness as the fun-damental right of the oppressed: like ex-Yugoslav self -management, the colonialist oppressor
also fears above all the realization of its own official ideological request.

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Otherness Link

Even the most liberal authors could never accept the total inclusion of the other this is because there
is a radical lack of the other that becomes fetishized to fill this void (this evidence is gender modified)
Betancourt-Serrano PF POL. Theory & Pol. Economy, Umass-Ahmherst - 2004
Alex, Let's bury a few liberals! (A Lacanian Gesture) The Symptom, Winter,
http://www.lacan.com/gesturef.htm
If there is a lesson to be learned here, I believe is the following: let's bury the liberal multiculturalist and the postcolonial
historian! This would certainly be considered to be a truly Lacanian gesture. Such gesture would reveal two fundamental points.
First, that the postcolonial historian can maintain his/her position, not only because there is an 'Other' that sustains and makes
possible the postcolonial discourse, but more importantly because the place of this 'Other' is constitutive, so that as long as
that 'Other' remains such, as long as nothing actually changes, the postcolonial discourse is secured. If there were to be a
truly radical change (let us say, in anachronistic fashion, a proletarian revolution bringing a democratization of the economy along
with a policy of redistribution), the first heads to roll would be those of the postcolonial intelligentsia and the liberal
multiculturalists. Their scrounging nature would become clear immediately (in Lacanesse aprs coup). That is why there is no
risk in arguing, a la Kant, as much as one wants as long as one obeys. The postcolonial historian and the political liberal are
secure in their positions. Only a truly structural change would unveiled the logic behind these positions and at the same time
probably even erase them. However, until such structural change take place in a sense we seem to live in a Kantian universe. As
we can remember Kant understood Enlightenment as the emergence of humanity from immaturity, where immaturity was the
"inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another." In the Kantian universe the only requisite for Enlightenment
is freedom, that is, the use of reason publicly in all matters. Hence, what Kant considered Enlightenment's proper command was
Frederick's motto "Argue as much as you like and about whatever you like, but obey!" The command provided freedom to the
subject as a scholar to call into question laws, believes, and commands but it required, from the same subject as passive
member of society, his [their] civic duty to obey. Liberals and postcolonial theorists depend on such discursive universe,
for a different and radical one would cost them their existence. I said earlier that the Lacanian gesture (or rather my sadistic
impulse) reveals two things. The second would be the radical lack of the 'other': in Lacanesse a constitutive lack. That is to
say, there is nothing transcendental about the 'other'. Only a materialist historical understanding about how this 'other'
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became subjugated politically and economically and how its otherness served as a scapegoat for such subjugation, only
such an approach can sustain one's authentic solidarity towards that 'other'. Rather than this, the postcolonial fetishistic
focus is with the ontological status of otherness and its epistemological contours. This approach, although some argue that
it historicizes the other, I believe that it effectively erases the possibility of a true solidarity. It erases this possibility
because it fetishizes that which is lacking in the 'other', and after such fetishization, it tries to fill that void.
Liberals, such as Martha Nussbaum, try to fill the void with a good dose of political liberalism to poor Indian women; the
Derrideans with the infamous difference; the Foucaultians with the microphysics of power, etc. However, a Freudian
understanding would allow us to avoid that fetishization, work through our own egotistic investment in otherness and be
effectively solidary.

Link of Omission

Failure to account for the lack dooms their politics to failure and replicates violence
STAVRAKAKIS '99, Yannis, Lacan and the Political, pg. 102-103

It could be argued that the roots of both demonisation and utopian thinking can be traced back to the shift from a cyclical to a
unilinear representation of history (Cohn, 1993a:227). However, we will start our reading of Cohns work by going back to
Roman civilisation. As Cohn claims, a profound demonising tendency is discernible in Ancient Rome: within the imperium,
the Romans accused the Christians of cannibalism and the Jews were accused by Greeks of ritual murder and
cannibalism. Yet in the ancient Roman world, although Judaism was regarded as a bizarre religion, it was nevertheless a religio
licita, a religion that was officially recognised. Things were different with the newly formed Christian sect. In fact the Christian
Eucharist could easily be interpreted as cannibalistic (Cohn, 1993b:8). In almost all their ways Christians ignored or even negated
the fundamental convictions by which the pagan Graeco-Roman world lived. It is not at all surprising then that to the Romans
they looked like a bunch of conspirators plotting to destroy society. Towards the end of the second century, according to
Tertullian, it was taken as a given that the Christians are the cause of every public catastrophe, every disaster that hits the
populace. If the Tiber floods or the Nile fails to, if there is a drought or an earthquake, a famine or a plague, the cry goes up at
once: Throw the Christians to the Lions!.
(Tertullian in Cohn, 1993b:14) This defamation of Christians that led to their exclusion from the boundaries of humanity
and to their relentless persecution is a pattern that was repeated many times in later centuries, when both the persecutors
and the persecuted were Christians (Cohn, 1993b:15). Bogomiles, Waldensians, the Fraticelli movement and the Catharsall the
groups appearing in Umberto Ecos fascinating books, especially in The Name of the Rosewere later on persecuted within a
similar discursive context. The same happened with the demonisation of Christians, the fantasy that led to the great witch-hunt.
Again, the conditions of possibility for this demonisation can be accurately defined. First, some kind of misfortune or catastrophe
had to occur, and second, there had to be someone who could be singled out as the cause of this misfortune (Cohn, 1993b:226).
In Cohns view then, social dislocation and unrest, on the one hand, and millenarian exaltation, on the other, do overlap.
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When segments of the poor population were mesmerised by a prophet, their understandable desire to improve their living
conditions became transfused with fantasies of a future community reborn into innocence through a final, apocalyptic
massacre. The evil onesvariously identified with the Jews, the clergy or the richwere to be exterminated; after which
the Saintsi.e. the poor in questionwould set up their kingdom, a realm without suffering or sin. (Cohn, 1993c:14-15) It
was at times of acute dislocation and disorientation that this demonising tendency was more present. When people were
faced with a situation totally alien to their experience of normality, when they were faced with unfamiliar hazards
dislocating their constructions of realitywhen they encountered the realthe collective flight into the world of
demonology could occur more easily (ibid.: 87). The same applies to the emergence of millenarian fantasies. The vast majority
of revolutionary millenarian outbreaks takes place against a background of disaster. Cohn refers to the plagues that generated the
first Crusade and the flagellant movements of 1260, 1348-9, 1391 and 1400, the famines that preluded the first and second
Crusade, the pseudo-Baldwin movement and other millenarian outbreaks and, of course, the Black Death that precipitated a whole
wave of millenarian excitement (ibid.: 282).

Threat-con link

Threats are constructed the modern state creates fantasies to cover up the impossibility of security
Jenny, Security, cosmology, Copenhagen, Contemporary Politics, v. 9, no. 4, ebsco

When a security issue arises, what is happening is not that external threats are being recognized or new dangers assessed.
It is something quite different that is taking place. The inherent insecurity in the object concernedgenerally the stateis
being concealed. When something is impossible, one way of concealing that impossibility is to shift the blame somewhere
else. During the Cold War, state insecurity in the west was blamed on the Soviet Union. The west would have been secure
but for the Soviet threat. The impossibility of security appears contingent. If only we can get rid of the current
impediment, we can achieve a secure world. Another example, of course, is the rush to the discourse of security after 11
September. The events of that day made very clear the impossibility of providing complete security for people and state
institutions on the US mainland. But rather than admit that impossibility as structural, and work within it, the state moved
immediately to declare war. The war is again supposed to produce what has always been and will remain an impossible
fiction: security

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Historicism Link

Historicization is an attempt to cure universalist tendencies which obliterate essentialism and
collapse into sexualized violence
Charles Shepherdson, Luce fellow at Claremont graduate school, Supposing the Subject, 1994, p. 165-166

Having distinguished between the historicist construction of subjectivity and the psychoanalytic constitution of the
subject, by reference to the terms role and imperative, we must consider one final point. We have suggested that current
accounts of the social construction of subjectivity replace sexual difference with the category of gendered subjectivity,
thereby confusing two different conceptions of the subject, while remaining bound to a specifically historicist conception
of history, one that avoids the question of the body, and particularly the question of sexed embodiment, treating
subjectivity as a historical invention. According to the historicist view, however, any reference to sexual difference will be
taken as an appeal to naturalism. Any reference to terms such as imperative, or the law, or embodiment will be regarded as a
return to the ahistorical category of sex a natural category which must then be resisted or denounced. But the
psychoanalytic emphasis on sexual difference is not a return to nature, nor is it a refusal of history, as the distinction between the
instinct and the drive should already indicate. To speak of embodiment and sexual difference as something other than a social
construction is immediately to invite, in todays context, the misunderstanding that the body is being construed as a biological
fact, and that psychoanalysis amounts to a return to that essentialism of which it has so often been accused. But it is precisely
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this opposition between biology and history, nature and culture, essentialism and historicism, that psychoanalysis
rejects. It should be recognized that phenomenology, too, begins by rejecting precisely this conceptual frame-work.6 In
this respect, the appeal to historicism, as a cure for the universalist tendencies of the tradition, remains bound to a
conceptual network that psychoanalysis does not support. When commentators debate whether psy-choanalysis is
genuinely historical or just another essentialism, one has a clear indication that the most basic theoretical challenge of
psychoanalysis has been obliterated. Our final point is therefore clear: if the contemporary discussions of sexual difference still
tend to be split between two concepts, sex and gender (the biological argument and the argument for social construction), we
may say that current discussions are strictly pre-Freudian. This is the great enigma, but also the theoretical interest, of
psychoanalysis: what Freud calls sexuality is neither sex nor gender. As we shall see, one consequence is that the body, from
the point of view of psychoanalysis, is neither a natural fact nor a cultural construction. One can see why French psychoanalytical
feminism has had such a difficult and conflicted reception in the United States, where it is acclaimed as an argument on behalf of
the symbolic or historical character of gender, and simultaneously denounced as another form of biological essentialism. Both
views amount to a confusion whereby the question of sexuality is either collapsed into the historicist argument or rejected
for its purportedly biological determinism. In both cases, and whether it is affirmed or repu-diated, the psychoanalytical
dimension of this work is avoided, and the entire question of sexuality is displaced into a familiar paradigm, governed by
the terms sex and gender, which are themselves inscribed in an opposition betweennature and culture inherited from the
nineteenth century. It is this entire configuration that psychoanalysis contests.

Post-Politics impact

Post-politics results in exceptionalism and violent exclusion.
Swyngedouw, Dept of Geography, School of Environment and Development, Manchester University, 2006.
[Eirk, Impossible Sustainability and the Post-Political Condition, Forthcoming in: David Gibbs and
Rob Krueger (Eds.) Sustainable Development,
http://www.liv.ac.uk/geography/seminars/Sustainabilitypaper.doc]

Difficulties and problems, such as environmental concerns that are generally staged and accepted as
problematic need to be dealt with through compromise, managerial and technical arrangement, and
the production of consensus. Consensus means that whatever your personal commitments, interests and values may be, you
perceive the same things, you give them the same name. But there is no contest on what appears, on what is given in a
situation and as a situation (Rancire, 2003; 4). The key feature of consensus is the annulment of
dissensus .. the end of politics (Rancire, 2001; 32). The most utopian alternative to capitalism left to our disposal is to
develop post-political alternatives to creating a more just and sustainable society, since it would not make any economic sense not to do so. Of
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course, this post-political world eludes choice and freedom (other than those tolerated by the consensus). And in the absence of real
politicization of particulars, the only position of real dissent is that of either the traditionalist (those stuck
in the past who refuse to accept the inevitability of the new global neo-liberal order) or the fundamentalist. The only way to
deal with them is by sheer violence, by suspending their humanitarian and democratic rights. The
post-political relies on either including all in a consensual pluralist order and on excluding radically
those who posit themselves outside the consensus. For them, as Agamben (20005) argues, the law is
suspended; they are literally put outside the law and treated as extremists and terrorists.

Sham Joiussance Impacts

The guilt-laden subject can experience only fake joy and beauty the impact is a lessened value to
life.

To continue translating into the terms of the present discussion: guilt takes flight from the enigma of our
jouissance-being, not from the jouissance as such. The guilt-laden, anxiety-relieved subject still
experiences jouissance, but this jouissance is characterized by Lacan in Seminar XVII as a 'sham', as
counterfeit. The fraudulent nature of this jouissance has everything to do with the fact that it gives
one a false sense that the core of ones being is something knowable, possessable as an identity, a
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property, a surplus-value attaching to one's person. Shame jouissance intoxicates on with the sense
that all our inherited, unchosen identities - racial, national, ethnic - root us in an actual past that may
be lost, but is not for all that inaccessible in so far as we can have knowledge about it, and about how to
restore it in an ideal future. What anxiety exposes as ungraspable or unclaimable jouissance is that
which the guilty shamelessly grasp for in the obsequious respect they pay to a past sacralized as their
future. The feverish pursuit of this future - conceived both as their due and as repayment of their
(unpayable) debt to the past - is the poor substitute, the Sweet 'n' Low, the guilty acceptance in the
place of the real sweetness of jouissance.

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Death Drive Impacts
What constitutes the modern subject is hardly a peachy-keen notion of bliss but rather an endless
drive to fulfill everything that we cannot have- the Lack makes sure of that. We call this drive the
death drive- we constantly repeat our failed attempts at utopia via quick fix promises that are the
epitome of objet a.
Daly, 2004, (Glyn, Risking the Impossible, http://www.lacan.com/zizek-primer.htm)
Zizek affirms that psychoanalysis is the direct descendant of German idealism and that it articulates this
dimension of self-relating negativity in terms of the idea of death drive (Zizek, 1999: 65-66). Death drive is
the existential consequence of the very gap in the order of Being identified in German idealism. It is neither a cancellation nor
any kind of physical death but is rather a certain excessive impulse that persists beyond mere existence or biological life.
As Zizek argues: "Human life is never just life, it is always sustained by an excess of life" (Zizek, 2001b: 104). The human
being is precisely that entity that is sustained by a "more than human". It is this "inhuman" excess - born of a fundamental
alienation - which is the death drive and which is constitutive of humanity as such. Death drive is a constant impulse to
resolve the gap, or heal the wound, in the order of Being; to overcome dislocation and establish the full presence of
subjectivity by finding its ultimate name/place in the world. In this context - and against the grain of standard postmodern
thinking - Zizek insists on the validity of the notion of subject (Zizek, 1999: 158-59). The subject is neither a positive entity nor
an identifiable locus but is thoroughly de-substantialised - it is precisely "this empty nothing" of which Hegel speaks. This is
why the Lacanian mark for the subject is $ (S-barred, the empty place or void that cannot be filled out in an ultimate sense). In
the earlier works of Zizek, the subject is presented in terms of an inherent point of failure (the limit) in all forms of subjectivity -
the bone stuck in the throat of signification - that shows the ontological gap of Being. The subject is the subject of the
signifier precisely because of its status of void/impossibility that is the very condition of possibility for an infinitude of
signification (Zizek, 1989: 175). Subject and subjectivity exist in a symbiotic and dynamic relationship. Subjectivity will be
more or less stable according to context. Under the impact of a traumatic experience, however, we experience a certain "night of
the world" where coherence and cohesion become radically undermined: that is, the condition of subject. In later works, Zizek
gives an added twist to the notion of subject. Thus the subject is not simply the gap/void in the order of Being, it is also "the
contingent-excessive gesture that constitutes the very universal order of Being" (1999: 160). As in Russell's paradoxical set
of sets, the subject also functions as an excluded particularity that nonetheless generates the frame of universality as
such. The frame of subjectivity is not constituted against an external force (the elimination of which would yield true
subjectivity) but through an inherent blockage which is the subject (Zizek, 1999: 159). We might say that the subject gets
caught in an impossible attempt to produce a framework of subjectivity (to find its name/place), but from which it is
already ontologically excluded. In this sense, the subject marks the site where an irresolvable economy of lack and excess
are played out. This economy is perhaps best illustrated by the relationship between subject and its objects a (objets petit a -
objects small Other). Lacan's object a refers to the object-cause of desire: that which is in the object more than the object and
which makes us desire it in the first place. It alludes to the originally lost object (the missing element that would resolve drive
and "restore" fulfilment) and, a the same time, functions as an embodiment of lack; as a loss positivised (Zizek, 1997: 81; Zizek,
1999: 107). Object a bears witness to an empty structure of desire - a structure that can never be filled out. Desire is
always elsewhere and alludes to an absence whose central reference is a fundamental void around which drive constantly
circulates and constantly misses its target. It is in this sense that Zizek refers to object a in terms of a Kantian "negative
magnitude": something that acts as a stand-in for Nothingness (Zizek, 1999: 107). There exists a metonymy of lack whereby any
empirical object can act as this stand-in. Object a is doubly paradoxical in that it refers to an original "lost" object (of
completion/unity) that never existed, and also in that its own existence depends on its very unattainability. The subject
subsists in a kind of diabolical symmetry with its object(s) a wherein the latter (partially) embodies the lack designated by the
former; a lack that constantly strives to be recognised/resolved in positive terms but which can never be fully achieved - subject
and object never coincide. A well known e-mail circular is illustrative. A mock audit of staff morale is sent as an
attachment in which the final exercise is one where you are asked to "click here" if you want a bigger salary, better
conditions and so on. Of course, when you move your cursor to the relevant box, the "click here" simply moves and pops
up somewhere else on the screen no matter how quickly or stealthily you try to approach it. In this sense, fulfilment (the
satisfaction of desire) is always just a click away; a promise that is sustained by the very lack/impossibility of (total)
fulfilment. The subject strives for a fullness in the object that it lacks. This accounts for the passionate attachment to certain
objects and toward which people may risk everything. Q. Tarantino's film, Pulp Fiction, is illustrative. In the boxer's story, the
Bruce Willis character refuses to take a dive in a fixed fight and as a result falls foul of a local gangster. Instead of leaving town
immediately, however, Bruce returns to his apartment to pick up his (dead) father's watch - thereby risking his life. Why do this?
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The answer is that this particular watch represents object a: a partial embodiment of the lost parent-child unity. It is this watch,
and no other, that holds the promise of an ultimate reconciliation (to restore "lost" unity) and, at the same time underscores the
fact that such reconciliation is always lacking; always a "click" away. Every object a is a reminder/remainder of a kind of
pre-big bang consummate unity that has never existed. It is here that both lack (subject) and excess (identifications) -
every "pathological" gesture to positivise void - may be said to coincide (Zizek, 1999: 107). The "many" identifications and
forms of collective objective life are made possible through the persistence of the "one" of radical negativity. The infinitude of
signification is the result ultimately of the one true signified...void. For Zizek this is the starting point of a new approach to
politics We are political animals not in the sense of Aristotle who understood by this a certain capacity to recognise a pre-
existing order of the good, but the opposite. It is precisely because there is no pre-existing order that we are "condemned"
to be political animals. Without an ecology of Being, we are confronted with what Zizek, in his discussion of Schelling
(1997), calls an unbridgeable abyss of freedom; an abyss that is simultaneously the source of universal rights and ethnic
cleansing.

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Death Drive Impacts
The death drive is an instinctual repetition that traps us into error replication and prevents the
actualization of idealized fantasy
Lee Edelman. No Future: Queer Theory and Death Drive. 2004 pp. 8-10

The drivemore exactly, the death driveholds a privileged place in this book. As the constancy of a pressure both alien and
internal to the logic of the Symbolic, as the inarticulable surplus that dismantles the subject from within, the death drive names
what the queer, in the order of the social, is called forth to figure: the negativity opposed to every form of social viability.
Lacan makes clear that the death drive emerges as a consequence of the Symbolic; indeed, he ends Seminar 2 with the
claim that "the symbolic order is simultaneously non-being and insisting to be, that is what Freud has in mind when he
talks about the death instinct as being what is most fundamentala symbolic order in travail, in the process of coming,
insisting on being realized."9 This constant movement toward realization cannot be divorced, however, from a will to
undo what it thereby instituted, to begin again ex nihilo. For the death drive marks the excess embedded within the
Symbolic through the loss, the Real loss, that the advent o f the signifier effects. Suzanne Barnard expresses this well in
distinguishing between the subject of desire and the subject of the drive: "While the subject of the drive also is 'born' in
relation to a loss, this loss is a real rather than a symbolic one. As such, it functions not in a mode of absence but in a
mode of an impossible excess haunting reality, an irrepressible remainder that the subject cannot separate itself from. In
other words, while desire is born of and sustained by a constitutive lack, drive emerges in relation to a constitutive surplus.
This surplus is what Lacan calls the subject's 'anatomical complement,' an excessive, 'unreal' remainder that produces an ever-
present jouissance."1 0 This surplus, compelling the Symbolic to enact a perpetual repetition, remains spectral, "unreal,"
or impossible insofar as it insists outside the logic of meaning that, nonetheless, produces it. The drive holds the place of
what meaning misses in much the same way that the signifier preserves at the heart of the signifying order the empty and
arbitrary letter, the meaningless substrate of signification that meaning intends to conceal. Politics, then, in opposing
itself to the negativity of such a drive, gives us history as the continuous staging of our dream of eventual self-realization
by endlessly reconstructing, in the mirror of desire, what we take to be reality itself. And it does so without letting us
acknowledge that the future, to which it persistently appeals, marks the impossible place of an Imaginary past exempt
from the deferrals intrinsic to the operation of the signifying chain and projected ahead as the site at which being and
meaning are joined as One. In this it enacts the formal repetition distinctive of the drive while representing itself as
bringing to fulfillment the narrative sequence of history and, with it, of desire, in the realization of the subject's
authentic presence in the Child imagined as enjoying unmediated access to Imaginary wholeness. Small Small wonder that
the era of the universal subject should produce as the very figure of politics, because also as the embodiment of futurity
collapsing undecidably into the past, the image of the Child as we know it: the Child who becomes, in Wordsworth's phrase,
but more punitively, "father of the Man." Historically constructed, as social critics and intellectual historians including Phillipe
Aries, James Kincaid, and Lawrence Stone have made clear, to serve as the repository of variously sentimentalized cultural
identifications, the Child has come to embody for us the telos of the social order and come to be seen as the one for whom
that order is held in perpetual trust.

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Death Drive Impacts
The death drive, while impossible to define drives all human action toward a goal. That goal is the
maintenance of human life. All of our actions are executed as part of an ideological chain tied to the
future. The textual violence exerted upon those who are not explicitly interested in the future is
inevitable as long as that chain continues to bind our fates to the future.

As the name for a force of mechanistic compulsion whose formal excess supersedes any end toward which it might seem to be
aimed, the death drive refuses identity or the absolute privilege of any goal. Such a goal, such an end, could never be
"it"; achieved, it could never satisfy. For the drive as such can only insist, and every end toward which we mistakenly
interpret its insistence to pertain is a sort of grammatical placeholder, one that tempts us to read as transitive a pulsion
that attains through insistence alone the satisfaction no end ever holds. Engaged in circulation around an object never
adequate to fulfill it, the drive enacts the repetition that characterizes what Judith Butler has called "the repetitive propulsionality
of sexuality." 2 4 The structural mandate of the drive, therefore, could be seen to call forth its object or end, indeed, the
whole register of sexuality itself, as a displacement of its own formal energies, as an allegorization of its differential force.
But that force can never be separated from, can never be imagined as existing before, the Symbolic order of the signifier that it
functions to transgress, which is why Lacan argues that " if everything that is immanent or implicit in the chain of natural
events may be considered as subject to the so-called death drive, it is only because there is a signifying chain."2 5 One
way to approach the death drive in terms of the economy of this "chain of natural events" thus shaped by linguistic
structuresstructures that allow us to produce those "events" through the logic of narrative historyis by reading the
play and the place of the death drive in relation to a theory of irony, that queerest of rhetorical devices, especially as
discussed by Paul de Man. Proposing that "any theory of irony is the undoing, the necessary undoing, of any theory of
narrative," de Man adduces the constant tension between irony as a particular trope and narrative as a representational mode that
allegorizes tropes in general. Narrative, that is, undertakes the project of accounting for trope systematically by producing, in de
Man's rehearsal of Schlegel, an "anamorphosis of the tropes, the transformation of the tropes, into the system of tropes, to which
the corresponding experience is that of the self standing above its own experiences." In contrast, as de Man makes clear, "what
irony disrupts (according to Friedrich Schlegel) is precisely that dialectic and reflexivity." The corrosive force of irony thus
carries a charge for de Man quite similar to that of the death drive as understood by Lacan. "Words have a way of saying
things which are not at all what you want them to say," de Man notes. "There is a machine there, a text machine, an
implacable determination and a total arbitrariness... which inhabits words on the level of the play of the signifier, which
undoes any narrative consistency of lines, and which undoes the reflexive and dialectical model, both of which are, as you
know, the basis of any narration." The mindless violence of this textual machine, so arbitrary, so implacable, threatens,
like a guillotine, to sever the genealogy that narrative syntax labors to affirm, recasting its narrative "chain of . . .
events" as a "signifying chain" and inscribing in the realm of signification, along with the prospect of meaning, the
meaningless machinery of the signifier, always in the way of what it would signify. Irony, whose effect de Man likens to the
syntactical violence of anacoluthon, thus severs the continuity essential to the very logic of making sense.

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Alt: aff can never access it/A2 Perm/A2 Link Turn
Our alternative is to do nothing and recognize that we cannot represent the Real. All efforts to
attempt to construct a social order will fail epically- thus any perm and link turn arguments that
they will inevitably make will fail just as epically.
STAVRAKAKIS VISITING FELLOW IN GOV'T, UNIV. OF ESSEX '99, Yannis, Lacan and the
Political, pg. 86

In the face of the irreducibility of the real we have no other option but to symbolise; but such a symbolisation can take at least two
forms: first, a fantasmatic one which will attempt to repress the real and to eliminate once and for all its structural causality.
Psychoanalysis favours the second and more complex one: the articulation of symbolic constructs that will include a recognition
of the real limits of the symbolic and will attempt to symbolically institutionalise real lack.
Let me illustrate this point by returning to one of the examples I used earlier, that of nature. The crucial question regarding our
access to the natural world becomes now: how can we then, if in fact we can, approach nature before it becomes Nature, the real
before it becomes reality, before its symbolisation? This is the question posed by Evernden: how can we return to things before
they were captured and explained, in which transaction they ceased to be themselves and became instead functionaries in the
world of social discourse [?] (Evernden, 1992:110). How can we encounter the pre-symbolic Other in its radical otherness,
an otherness escaping all our representations, if he is always beyond? (ibid.: 118). Well, in fact we cant; what we can do,
however, is acknowledge this failure, this constitutive impossibility, within our symbolisations. Trapped as we are within
the world of social meaning, all our representations of reality are doomed to fail due to their symbolic character. Every attempt
to construct what is impossible to be constructed fails due to our entrapment within the world of construction. The only
moment in which we come face to face with the irreducible real beyond representation is when our constructions are
dislocated. It is only when Nature, our construction of external reality, meets a stumbling block, something which cannot
be symbolically integrated, that we come close to the real of nature. Nature, constructed Nature, is nothing but a mode of
concealment, a cloak of abstractions which obscures that discomforting wildness that defies our paranoid urge to delineate the
boundaries of Being (Evernden, 1992:132). Only when these boundaries collapse, in that minute intermission before we
draw new ones, can we sense the unheimlich of real nature. It is in that sense thatas argued in Chapter 2Lacanian theory
opens the road to a realist constructionism or a constructionist realism; it does so by accepting the priority of a real which is,
however, unrepresentable, but, nevertheless, can be encountered in the failure of every construction. One final point before
concluding this section: when applied to our own discourse isnt this recognition introducing a certain ethical principle?
Recognising at the same time the impossibility of mastering the real and our obligation to recognise this impossibility
through the failure of our attempts to symbolise it, indeed seems to introduce a certain principle which cannot be by-
passed. Of necessity this is a principle affecting the structure of knowledge and science in late modern societies.

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Shame Alternative

The concept of anxiety splits itself into two emotions: guilt, as per the anxiety of the affirmative, and
shame. We can coerce the judge to sign the ballot because we feel guilty of what will happen were the
affirmative not to be passed. Our alternative asks you to instead reflect upon the 1AC and feel shame.
Shame cannot be avoided nor can it cannot be balanced. When one feels shame there is no option but
to abandon that which the shame is directed to. Much like the government in Washington, as another
faceless senator in congress, the affirmative produces guilt to achieve an end vis--vis a violent
aggression towards reality

It is only against this background that Lacans call to shame makes any sense. His is a recommendation not for a renewed
prudishness but, on the contrary, for relinquishing our satisfaction with a shame jouissance in favor of the real thing. The
real thing jouissance can never be dutified, controlled, regimented; rather, it catches us by surprise, like a sudden,
uncontrollable blush on the check. It is not possible here, in this brief conclusion, to do justice to the concept of shame, as I am
doing elsewhere. I do not want, however, to end quite so abruptly as Lacan ends his seminar, so I will say a few more words
only. Alain Badiou has identified a dominant trait of the last century as its passion for the Real, its frenzied desire to
remove every barrier that frustrates our contact with the Real. If this has a familiar ring, it is because a similar diagnosis was
proffered by Nietzsche, who complained that our age was one in which we sought to see through everything. Nietzsche
further characterized this passion as a lack of reverence or discretion, a tactless desire to touch, lick, and finger everything.
The passion for the Real treats every surface as an exterior to be penetrated, a battier to be transgressed, or a veil to be
removed. The violence of this passion insists in each penetration, transgression, and removal, which is only exacerbated
by the fact that each arrives on the other side, only to find that the Real has fled behind another barrier. It is hard not to
recognize in this logic subtending the University Discourse as Lacan presents it in Seminar XVII. Nor is it difficult to see, in this
contest, that the antidote of shame which Lacan proposes also follows Nietzsches leads, in addition to Freuds. Shame is, as
Freud put it, a mental dam against the aggressive instinct or the destructive passion for the Real. Unlike guilt, shame
does not seek to penetrate surfaces or tear away veils; rather, it seeks comfort in them, hides itself in them as in a safe
haven. Our relationships to the surface change in shame, as compared to guilt; we become fascinated with its maze-like
intricacies, its richness and profundity. This is where Lacans hontology, his suturing of ontology and shame, comes in, as if in
answer to Levinas. Shame is not a failed flight from being, but a flight into being, where being the being of surfaces, of
social existence is viewed as that which protects us from the ravages of anxiety, which risk drowning us in its borderless
enigma. Unlike the flight or transformation of guilt, however, shame does not sacrifice jouissances opacity, which is
finally what keeps it real. True jouissance never reveals itself to us, it remains ever veiled. But instead of inhibiting us,
this opacity now gives us that distance from ourselves and our world that allows us creatively to alter both; it gives us, in
other words, a privacy, an interiority unbreachable even by ourselves.

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Queer Negativity Alternative

The alternative is to do nothing, rather than simply rejecting the affirmative, we need to align
ourselves with queer negativity rather than take a stance for the sake of promoting a set of social
values, we must accept the value of our position for the sake of the position.

Rather than rejecting, with liberal discourse, this ascription of negativity to the queer, we might, as I argue, do better to
consider accepting and even embracing it. Not in the hope of forging thereby some more perfect social ordersuch a hope,
after all, would only reproduce the constraining mandate of futurism, just as any such order would equally occasion the
negativity of the queerbut rather to refuse the insistence of hope itself as affirmation, which is always affirmation of an
order whose refusal will register as unthinkable, irresponsible, inhumane. And the trump card of affirmation? Always the
question: If not this, what? Always the demand to translate the insistence, the pulsive force, of negativity into some
determinate stance or "position" whose determination would thus negate it: always the imperative to immure it in some
stable and positive form. When I argue, then, that we might do well to attempt what is surely impossibleto withdraw our
allegiance, however compulsory, from a reality based on the Ponzi scheme of reproductive futurismI do not intend to propose
some "good" that will thereby be assured. To the contrary, I mean to insist that nothing, and certainly not what we call the
"good," can ever have any assurance at all in the order of the Symbolic. Abjuring fidelity to a futurism that's always
purchased at our expense, though bound, as Symbolic subjects consigned to figure the Symbolic's undoing, to the
necessary contradiction of trying to turn its intelligibility against itself, we might rather, figuratively, cast our vote for
"none of the above," for the primacy of a constant no in response to the law of the Symbolic, which would echo that law's
foundational act, its self constituting negation. The structuring optimism of politics to which the order of meaning commits us,
installing as it does the perpetual hope of reaching meaning through signification, is always, I would argue, a negation of this
primal, constitutive, and negative act. And the various positivities produced in its wake by the logic of political hope depend
on the mathematical illusion that negated negations might somehow escape, and not redouble, such negativity. My polemic
thus stakes its fortunes on a truly hopeless wager: that taking the Symbolic's negativity to the very letter of the law, that
attending to the persistence of something internal to reason that reason refuses, that turning the force of queerness against
all subjects, however queer, can afford an access to the puissance that at once defines and negates us. Or better: can
expose the constancy, the inescapability, of such access to jouissance in the social order itself, even if that order can access
its constant access to jouissance only in the process of abjecting that constancy of access onto the queer. In contrast to
what Theodor Adorno describes as the "grimness with which a man clings to himself, as to the immediately sure and
substantial," the queerness of which I speak would deliberately sever us from ourselves, from the assurance, that is, of
knowing ourselves and hence of knowing our "good."4 Such queerness proposes, in place of the good, something I want to
call "better," though it promises, in more than one sense of the phrase, absolutely nothing. I connect this something better with
Lacan's characterization of what he calls "truth," where truth does not assure happiness, or even, as Lacan makes clear, the good.5
Instead, it names only the insistent particularity of the subject, impossible fully to articulate and "tending] toward the real."6
Lacan, therefore, can write of this truth: The quality that best characterizes it is that of being the true Wunsch, which was at the
origin of an aberrant or atypical behavior. We encounter this Wunsch with its particular, irreducible character as a modification
that presupposes no other form of normalization than that of an experience of pleasure or of pain, but of a final experience from
whence it springs and is subsequently preserved in the depths of the subject in anirreducible form. The Wunsch does not have
the character of a universal law but, on the contrary, of the most particular of lawseven if it is universal that this
particularity is to be found in every human being.7 Truth, like queerness, irreducibly linked to the "aberrant or atypical,"
to what chafes against "normalization," finds its value not in a good susceptible to generalization, but only in the stubborn
particularity that voids every notion of a general good. The embrace of queer negativity, then, can have no justification if
justification requires it to reinforce some positive social value; its value, instead, resides in its challenge to value as defined
by the social, and thus in its radical challenge to the very value of the social itself.

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Environment Section
The affirmative is a desire for a cohesive and stable nature. This desire ignores the need to radically
shift our ideological coordinates that lock us in a cycle of apocalyptic fear.

So, if Nature does not exist, what, then, to say about sustainability, a concept (and associated set of fuzzy practices) that is
deeply indebted and intensely connected to the particular imaginations of Nature suggested above. Since its early definition
in the Brundtland report of 1987, the concept (but not much of the practice) of sustainability has really taken off. A cursory
glance at both popular and academic publications will quickly assemble a whole array of sustainabilities: sustainable
environments, sustainable development, sustainable growth, sustainable wetlands, sustainable bodies, sustainable companies,
sustainable processes, sustainable incomes, sustainable cities, sustainable technologies, sustainable water provision, even
sustainable poverty, sustainable accumulation, sustainable markets, and sustainable loss. I have not been able to find a
single source that is against sustainability. Greenpeace is in favour, George Bush Jr. and Sr. are, the World Bank and its
chairman (a prime war monger in Iraq) are, the pope is, my son Arno is, the rubber tappers in the Brazilian Amazon are,
Bill Gates is, the labour unions are. All are presumably concerned about the long-term socio-environmental survival of
(parts of) humanity; most just keep on doing business as usual. The clear and present danger posed by the environmental
question is obviously not dramatic enough to be taken seriously in terms of embarking on a different socio-environmental
trajectory. That is left to do some other time and certainly not before the day after tomorrow. Of course, this cacophony of
voices and imaginations also points to the inability to agree on the meaning or, better, to the lack of a singular Nature.
There are obviously multiple imaginations that mobilise or appropriate sustainability as radically and truthfully theirs,
based on equally imaginative variations of what constitutes Nature.
Environmentalists (whether activists or scientists) invariably invoke the global physical processes that threaten our
existence, and insist on the need to re-engineer nature, so that it can return to a sustainable path. Armed with their
charts, formulas, models, numbers, and grant applications, to which activists usually add the inevitable pictures of scorched
land, factories or cars emitting carbon fumes, dying animals and plants, suffering humans, apocalyptic rhetoric, and calls for
subsidies and financial support, scientists, activists, and all manner of assorted other human and non-human actants enter
the domain of the social, the public, and, most importantly, the political. Thus natures enter the political. A particular
and symbolically enshrined nature enters the parliament of politics, but does so in a duplicitous manner. It is a
treacherously deceitful Nature that enters politics, one that is packaged, numbered, calculated, coded, modelled,
represented by those who claim to possess, know, understand, speak for the real Nature. In other words, what enters the
domain of politics is the coded and symbolised versions of nature mobilised by scientists, activists, industrialists and the
like. This is particularly evident in examples such as the debate over GMOs, global climate change, BSE, biodiversity loss,
and other equally pressing issues. Invariably, the acting of Nature -- as scripted by the bearers of natures knowledge
enters the political machinery as coded language that also already posits its political and social solution and does not
tolerate, in the name of Nature, dissent other than that framed by its own formulations. It is in this sense of course that the
argument about climate change is exclusively formulated in terms of believers and non-believers, as a quasi-religious faith,
but the weapons of the struggle in this case are matters of fact like data, models, and physico-chemical analysis. And the
solutions to the question of sustainability are already pre-figured by the way in which nature is made to speak. Creeping
increases in long term global temperatures, which will cause untold suffering and damage, are caused by CO
2
output.
Hence, the solution to future climate ills resides in cutting back on CO
2
emissions. Notwithstanding the validity of the role
of CO
2
in co-constituting the process of climate change, the problematic of the future calamities the world faces is posited
primarily in terms of the physical acting of one of natures components, CO
2
as is its solution found in bringing CO
2

within our symbolic (socio-economic) order, futilely attempted with the Kyoto agreement or other neo-liberal market-
based mechanisms. Questioning the politics of climate change in itself is already seen as an act of treachery, as an unlawful
activity, banned by Nature itself.

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Environment Section
Any attempt to make nature and the environment a security issue ignores the very thing that create
these disasters in the first place: the current socio-political coordinates that allow massive disasters.

Although there may be no Nature, there certainly is a politics of nature or a politics of the environment. The collages of
apparently contradictory and overlapping vignettes of the environmental conditions outlined above share one common
threat that many of us, Bush and Blair, my son and Greenpeace, Oxfam and the World Bank, agree on. The world is in
environmental trouble. And we need to act politically now.
Both the 2004 Tsunami and New Orleanss Katrina brought the politicisation of Nature home with a vengeance. Although
the Tsunami had everything to do with the earths geodetic acting out and with the powerless of South East Asia drowning
in its consequences and absolutely nothing with climate change or other environmentally degrading practices, the
Tsunami calamity was and continues to be staged as a socio-environmental catastrophe, another assertion of the urgent
need to revert to more sustainable socio-environmental practices. New Orleans socio-environmental disaster was of a
different kind. While there may be a connection between the number and intensity of hurricanes and climate change, that
of course does account neither for the dramatic destructions of poor peoples lives in the city nor for the plainly blatant
racist spectacles that were fed into the media on a daily basis in the aftermath of the hurricanes rampage through the city.
The imaginary staged in the aftermath of the socio-environmental catastrophe of New Orleans singled out disempowered
African Americans twice, first as victims, then as criminals. Even the New York Times conceded that 80% of the reported
crimes taking place in unruly and disintegrating New Orleans in the aftermath of the hurricanes devastations were
based on rumour and innuendo. A perverse example of how liberal humanitarian concern is saturated with racialised
coding and moral disgust with the poorest and most excluded parts of society. Of course, after the poor were hurricaned
out of New Orleans, the wrecked city is rapidly turning into a fairy-tale playground for urban developers and city
boosters who will make sure, this time around, that New Orleans will be rebuilt in their image of a sustainable capitalist
city: green, white, rich, conservative, and neo-liberal (Davis, 2006).
The popular response to Katrina, the barrage of apocalyptic warnings of the pending catastrophes wrecked by climate
change and the need to take urgent remedial action to engineer a retro-fitted balanced climate are perfect examples of
the tactics and configurations associated with the present post-political condition, primarily in the US and Europe. Indeed,
a politics of sustainability, predicated upon a radically conservative and reactionary view of a singular and ontologically
stable and harmonious Nature is necessarily one that eradicates or evacuates the political from debates over what to do
with natures. The key political question is one that centres on the question of what kind of natures we which to inhabit,
what kinds of natures we which to preserve, to make, or, if need be, to wipe off the surface of the planet (like the HIV
virus, for example), and on how to get there. The fantasy of sustainability imagines the possibility of an originally
fundamentally harmonious Nature, one that is now out-of-synch but, which, if properly managed, we can and have to
return to by means of a series of technological, managerial, and organisational fixes. As suggested above, many, from
different social, cultural, and philosophical positionalities, agree with this dictum. Disagreement is allowed, but only with
respect to the choice of technologies, the mix of organisational fixes, the detail of the managerial adjustments, and the
urgency of their timing and implementation. Natures apocalyptic future, if unheeded, symbolises and nurtures the
solidification of the post-political condition. And the excavation and critical assessment of this post-political condition
nurtured.

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Environment Section
The Threat of catastrophe utilized by the Affirmative in order to justify passage of the plan is not a
break from the Status Quo but instead is the sustaining force behind todays biopolitics. Life lived
under this constant threat of annihilation is a life lived in a permanent state of emergency, life
deprived of the substance that makes it worth living.
Zizek 2003, (Slavoj, Prof of Sociology @ Inst. For Sociology Ljjbljana Univ, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 94-99) SRM

Insofar as death and life designate for Saint Paul two existential (subjective) positions, not objective facts, we are fully
justified in raising the old Pauline question: who is really alive today? What if we are really alive only if and when we
engage ourselves with an excessive intensity which puts us beyond mere life? What if, when we focus on mere survival,
even if it is qualified as having a good time, what we ultimately lose is life itself? What if the Palestinian suicide bomber on
the point of blowing himself (and others) up is, in an emphatic sense, more alive than the American soldier engaged in a war in
front of a computer screen hundreds of miles away from the enemy, or a New York yuppie jogging along the Hudson river in
order to keep his body in shape? Or, in terms of the psychoanalytic clinic, what if a hysteric is truly alive in her permanent,
excessive, provoking questioning of her existence, while an obsessional is the very model of choosing a life in death? That
is to say, is not the ultimate aim of his compulsive rituals to prevent the thing from happeningthis thing being the
excess of life itself? Is not the catastrophe he fears the fact that, finally, something will really happen to him? Or, in terms of
the revolutionary process, what if the difference that separates Lenins era from Stalinism is, again, the difference between life and
death? There is an apparently marginal feature which clearly illustrates this point: the basic attitude of a Stalinist Communist is
that of following the correct Party line against Rightist or Leftist deviation in short, to steer a safe middle course; for
authentic Leninism, in clear contrast, there is ultimately only one deviation, the Centrist onethat of playing it safe, of
opportunistically avoiding the risk of clearly and excessively taking sides. There was no deeper historical necessity, for
example, in the sudden shift of Soviet policy from War Communism to the New Economic Policy in 1921 it was just a
desperate strategic zigzag between the Leftist and the Rightist line, or, as Lenin himself put it in 1922, the Bolsheviks made all
the possible mistakes. This excessive taking sides, this permanent imbalance of zigzag, is ultimately (the revolutionary
political) life itselffor a Leninist, the ultimate name of the counterrevolutionary Right is Center itself, the fear of introducing a
radical imbalance into the social edifice. It is a properly Nietzschean paradox that the greatest loser in this apparent assertion of
Life against all transcendent Causes is actual life itself. What makes life worth living is the very excess of life: the awareness
that there is something for which we are ready to risk our life (we may call this excess freedom, honor, dignity,
autonomy, etc.). Only when we are ready to take this risk are we really alive. So when Hlderlin wrote: To live is to defend
a form, this form is not simply a Lebens form, but the form of the excess-of-life, the way this excess violently inscribes itself into
the life-texture. Chesterton makes this point apropos of the paradox of courage: A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut
his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling
to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide,
and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink
death like wine.2 The post-metaphysical survivalist stance of the Last Men ends up in an anemic spectacle of life dragging on
as its own shadow. It is within this horizon that we should appreciate todays growing rejection of the death penalty: what
we should be able to discern is the hidden biopolitics which sustains this rejection. Those who assert the sacredness of
life, defending it against the threat of transcendent powers which parasitize on it, end up in a supervised world in which
well live painlessly, safelyand tediously,3 a world in which, for the sake of its very official goala long, pleasurable
life all real pleasures are prohibited or strictly controlled (smoking, drugs, food. . .). Spielbergs Saving Private Ryan is the
latest example of this survivalist attitude toward dying, with its demystifying presentation of war as a meaningless slaughter
which nothing can really justifyas such, it provides the best possible justification for Colin Powells No-casualties-on-our-side
military doctrine. On todays market, we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee
without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol. . . . And the list goes on: what about virtual sex as sex without
sex, the Colin Powell doctrine of warfare with no casualties (on our side, of course) as warfare without warfare, the
contemporary redefinition of politics as the art of expert administration as politics without politics, up to todays tolerant liberal
multiculturalism as an experience of the Other deprived of its Otherness (the idealized Other who dances fascinating dances, and
has an ecologically sound, holistic approach to reality, while features like wife-beating remain out of sight)? Virtual Reality
simply generalizes this procedure of offering a product deprived of its substance: it provides reality itself deprived of its
substance, of the hard resistant kernel of the Realjust as decaffeinated coffee smells and tastes like real coffee without being the
real coffee, Virtual Reality is experienced as reality without being so. Is this not the attitude of the hedonistic Last Man?
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Everything is permitted, you can enjoy everything, t deprived of its substance, which makes it dangerous. (This is also the
Last Mans revolution revolution without revolution.) Is this not one of the two versions of Lacans anti-Dostoevsky motto If God doesnt
exist, everything is prohibited? (1) God is dead, we live in a permissive universe, you should strive for pleasure, you should avoid dangerous excesses, so
everything is prohibited if it is not deprived of its substance. (2) If God is dead, the superego enjoins you to enjoy, but every determinate enjoyment is already a
betrayal of the unconditional one, so it should be prohibited. The nutritive version of this is to enjoy the Thing Itself directly: why bother with
coffee? Inject caffeine directly into your bloodstream! Why bother with sensual perceptions and excitation by external reality? Take
drugs which directly affect your brain! And if God does exist, then everything is permittedto those who claim to act
directly on behalf of God, as the instruments of His will; clearly, a direct link to God justifies our violation of any merely
human constraints and considerations (as in Stalinism, where the reference to the big Other of historical Necessity justifies absolute ruthlessness).
Todays hedonism combines pleasure with constraint: it is no longer the old notion of the right balance between pleasure and constraint, but a kind of pseudo-
Hegelian immediate coincidence of opposites: action and reaction should coincide; the very thing that causes damage should already be the remedy. The ultimate
example is arguably a chocolate laxative, available in the USA, with the paradoxical injunction: Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate! (that is, of
the very thing that causes constipation). Do we not find here a weird version of Wagners famous Only the spear which caused the wound can heal it, from
Parsifal? And is not a negative proof of the hegemony of this stance the fact that genuine unconstrained consumption (in all
its forms: drugs, free sex, smoking) is emerging as the main danger? The fight against such danger is one of the principal
motivations of todays biopolitics. Solutions are desperately sought that would reproduce the paradox of the chocolate laxative. The main contender is
safe sexa term which makes us appreciate the truth of the old saying Isnt having sex with a condom like taking a shower with your raincoat on? The ultimate
goal here would be, along the lines of decaffeinated coffee, to invent opium without opium: no wonder marijuana is so popular among liberals who want to
legalize itit already is a kind of opium without opium. In his scathing remarks on Wagner, Nietzsche diagnosed Wagners decadence as consisting in a
combination of asceticism and excessive morbid excitation: the excitation is false, artificial, morbid, hysterical, and the ensuing peace is also a fake, that of an
almost medical tranquilization. This, for Nietzsche, was the universe of Parsifal, which embodied Wagners capitulation to the appeal of Christianity: the ultimate
fake of Christianity is that it sustains its official message of inner peace and redemption by a morbid excitation, namely, a fixation on the suffering, mutilated
corpse of Christ. The very term passion here is revealing in its ambiguity: passion as suffering, passion as passionas if the
only thing that can arouse passion is the sick spectacle of passive suffering. The key question, of course, is: can Saint Paul be
reduced to mixture of morbid excitation and ascetic renunciation? Is not the Pauline agape precisely an attempt to break out of the
morbid cycle of law and sin sustaining each other? More generally, what, exactly, is the status of the excess, the too-muchness
(Eric Santner) of life with regard to itself? Is this excess generated only by the turn of life against itself, so that it actualizes
itself only in the guise of the morbid undeadness of the sick passion? Or, in Lacanese: is the excess of jouissance over
pleasure generated only through the reversal of the repression of desire into the desire for repression, of the renunciation
of desire into the desire for renunciation, and so on? It is crucial to reject this version, and to assert some kind of
primordial excess or too-muchness of life itself: human life never coincides with itself; to be fully alive means to be larger
than life, and a morbid denial of life is not a denial of life itself, but, rather, the denial of this excess. How, then, are the two
excesses related: the excess inherent to life itself, and the excess generated by the denial of life? Is it not that the excess generated
by the denial of life is a kind of revenge, a return of the excess repressed by the denial of life? A state of emergency coinciding
with the normal state is the political formula of this predicament: in todays antiterrorist politics, we find the same mixture of
morbid excitation and tranquilization. The official aim of Homeland Security appeals to the US population in early 2003,
intended to make them ready for a terrorist attack, was to calm people down: everything is under control, just follow the
rules and carry on with your life. However, the very warning that people must be ready for a large-scale attack sustained the
tension: the effort to keep the situation under control asserted the prospect of a catastrophe in a negative way. The aim
was to get the population used to leading their daily lives under the threat of a looming catastrophe, and thus to introduce
a kind of permanent state of emergency (since, let us not forget, we were informed in the fall of 2002 that the War on Terror
will go on for decades, at least for our life-time). We should therefore interpret the different levels of the Alert Code (red,
orange) as a state strategy to control the necessary level of excitation, and it is precisely through such a permanent state of
emergency, in which we are interpellated to participate through our readiness, that the power asserts its hold over us. In
The Others (Alejandro Amenabar, 2001), Nicole Kidman, a mother who lives with her two young children in a haunted house on Jersey Island, discovers at the
end that they are all ghosts: a couple of years before, she first strangled her children and then shot herself (it is the intruders who disturb their peace from time to
time who are the real people, potential buyers interested in their house).The only interesting feature of this rather ineffective Sixth Sense-type final twist is the
precise reason why Kidman returns as a ghost: she cannot assume her Medea-like actin a way, continuing to live as a ghost (who doesnt know that she is one)
symbolizes her ethical compromise, her unreadiness to confront the terrible act constitutive of subjectivity. This reversal is not simply symmetrical: instead of
ghosts disturbing real people, appearing to them, it is the real people who disturb the ghosts, appearing to them. Is it not like this when to paraphrase Saint
Paulwe are not alive in our real lives? It is not that, in such a case, the promise of real life haunts us in a ghostlike form? Today we are like the anemic Greek
philosophers who read Pauls words on the Resurrection with ironic laughter. The only Absolute acceptable within this horizon is a negative
one: absolute Evil, whose paradigmatic figure today is that of the Holocaust. The evocation of the Holocaust serves as a
warning of what the ultimate result of the submission of Life to some higher Goal is.

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Our alternative is to do nothing and refuse to take a stance. We must accept as inevitable the impacts
presented by the affirmative within out current ideological coordinates. Only by refusing to
participate in the forced choice of ideology can we find new routes of action.
McGowan 2007,
(Todd, Assoc. Prof of English @ Univ. of Vermont, The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan, p. 175-178) SRM

THE ALLIANCE BETWEEN the theorist and the cinema as such becomes most evident in the cinema of intersection. This cinema has an implicit political
urgency that derives from its effort to depict the gaze directly. By depicting the gaze directly, the films of the cinema of intersection aim at encouraging subjects to
recognize that they themselves, on the level of fantasy, hold the key to the secret at the heart of the Other. In clear contrast to the cinema of integration; this cinema
directs subjects away from their proclivity to seek fantasmatic support in the Other. The cinema of integration tends to produce subjects who believe in a non-
lacking Other. This cinema, as we saw in the case of Steven Spielberg, is one that posits; whether explicitly or implicitly, a symbolic father filling in the absence in
the Other. The filmic world of the cinema of integration fosters the belief that absence in the Other does not really exist. Each time it depicts an absence, this
cinema reveals a hidden presence. According to this cinema, the Other as such never fails. In the cinema of intersection, we encounter the absence in the Other
directly. The strict separation of the worlds of desire and fantasy in this cinema allows it to depict these worlds intersecting. At these moments, we experience the
absence in the Other in a privileged way. Hence, rather than producing dependence, the cinema of intersection produces an experience of freedom. The
encounter with the real is the encounter with the Other's failure, and this encounter traumatizes the subject because it
deprives the subject of support in the Other. The subject derives its symbolic identity from the Other, and as a result, the
encounter with the Other's lack leaves the subject without any sense of identity. The subject loses the security that derives
from its link to the Other. But at the same time, this loss of support in the Other frees the subject from its dependence on
the Other. Freedom depends on the recognition that the Other does not exist, that the Other cannot provide the subject a
substantive identity. The encounter with the gaze in the cinema of intersection permits us to experience directly the Other's insubstantial status. In none of
the cinematic structures that we have looked at thus far does the gaze appear as an object that we can encounter. Each type of cinema, in its own fashion, suggests
the impossible status of the gaze, though the cinema of integration does so unwittingly, through its failure to present the gaze as either an absence in the visible
field or as a distortion of that field. In this sense, these three types of cinema affirm Lacan's contention that "the real is the impossible," and they allow us to see
except in the case of the cinema of integrationthe lack in the Other and the incomplete status of ideology. Though the cinema of desire and the cinema of
fantasy affirm the impossible status of the gaze and its irreducibility to the field of the visible, neither is able to show us how we can experience and accomplish
the impossible. That is to say, both kinds of cinema conceive of the gaze as impossible in the strict sense of the term. However, Lacan's conception of the real as
impossible does not mean that the real cannot be reached, but that it does not fit within the logic of our symbolic structure. As he explains in Seminar XVII, it is
impossible "not on account of a simple stumbling block against which we bang our heads, but on account of what is announced as impossible by the symbolic. It is
from there that the real arises."2 Though the real marks the point of impossibility within any symbolic system, this point of
impossibility is not out of reach. The impossible status of the real stems from our inability to trace a path to it through the
symbolic order. We can identify itand we can mark it symbolically but we can't find a way to access the red in the way
that we access other empirical objects. The example of the square root of -1 indicates the problem that the real presents to
us. We can, of course, think and symbolize the square root of 1. But we cannot symbolize with real numbers what results
when we try to take the square root of 1 because no squared real number will be negative. The square root of 1
requires us to create an imaginary number that exists solely in order to be the solution to this operation. This imaginary
number is, in a sense, more real than any real number insofar as it indicates the point at which a certain mathematical
system of symbolization breaks down. This system invites us to take the square root of numbers, but it cannot
accommodate this operation being performed on every number. The square root of 1 represents what the system of real
numbers cannot symbolize, and when we create imaginary numbers in order to perform this operation, we do the
impossible and thereby radically transform the system of symbolization itself. To return from mathematics to ideology,
one can accomplish the impossible by refusing to accept the choices that ideology offers. Ideology functions by defining the
possibilities that subjects have, by creating options that remain within ideological bounds. One can choose today, for
instance, between fundamentalism and capitalist democracy, but both choices remain within the ideological orbit of
contemporary global capitalism. Even opting to combat capitalist democracy by choosing fundamentalism doesn't
challenge the ideological landscape. Even fundamentalist terror attacks affirm rather than question capitalist ideology as
they provide an opportunity for this ideology to align itself falsely with freedom. Capitalist democracy understands
fundamentalism as the other that allows it to function and to define itself. That is to say, ideology establishes the game so
that it wins no matter which side a subject chooses. Within an ideological structure, every possibility affirms the ideology
and feeds its overall logic. The only way to break from the controlling logic of the ideology is to reject the possibilities that
it presents and opt for the impossible. The impossible is impossible within a specific ideological framework, and the act of
accomplishing the impossible has the effect of radically transforming the framework. The impossible thus marks the
terrain of politics as such. As Slavoj Zizek points out, "Authentic politics is ... the art of the impossibleit changes the
very parameters of what is considered 'possible' in the existing constellation." If a political act is not impossible in this
sense, it is not really political because it lacks the ability to transform the contested ideological field.5 To create authentic
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change demands an act that does not fit within the possibilities that ideology lays out. Ideology prevents subjects from
opting for the impossible choice precisely by making it seem impossible to do so. That is to say, we tend to believe that the
impossible really is impossible because this is what ideology tells us again and. again. Herein lies the great value of the cinema of
intersection. Through enacting a traumatic encounter with the gaze, this cinema shows us that we can do the impossible. At the moment we encounter the gaze, we
see the field of representation thrown into relief and redefined. Everything outside of the gaze loses its former significance in light of this encounter. Through this
cinematic experience, we can glimpse the impossible. We see the filmic world from the perspective of the gaze rather than seeing the gaze from the perspective of
the filmic world (as occurs in the cinema of integration). After this encounter, the normal functioning of the world cannot continue in the same way and undergoes
a radical transformation. Though we can accomplish the impossible, we can't do so without simultaneously destroying the very ground beneath our feet. By
facilitating an encounter with the gaze, the cinema of intersection encourages the spectator to identify with this object. Though other forms of cinema push the
subject in the direction of freedom, it is only the cinema of intersection that emphasizes identification with the impossible object. In doing so, this cinema allows
the subject to grasp its own nothingnessto see itself in the nothingness of the object. The reduction of the subject to the nothingness of the objet petit a is the
most extreme form of freedom available to the subject. It implies a rejection of the world of the Other and an affirmation of the subject's private fantasmatic
response to that world. To identify with the object is to insist on one's particular way of enjoying at the expense of one's symbolic identity.

Only realigning our symbolic coordinates can create a new narrative of existence to challenge the
symbolic order that entrenches the politics of neoliberal control.

Rancieres notion of the political is characterised in terms of division, conflict, and polemic (Valentine, 2005: 46). Therefore,
democracy always works against the pacification of social disruption, against the management of consensus and stability
. The concern of democracy is not with the formulation of agreement or the preservation of order but with the invention
of new and hitherto unauthorised modes of disaggregation, disagreement and disorder (Hallward, 2005: 34-35). The
politics of sustainability and the environment, therefore, in their populist post-political guise are the antithesis of democracy,
and contribute to a further hollowing out of what for Rancire and others constitute the very horizon of democracy as a
radically heterogeneous and conflicting one.
Therefore, as Badiou (2005a) argues, a new radical politics must revolve around the construction of great new fictions that
create real possibilities for constructing different socio-environmental futures. To the extent that the current post-political
condition, which combines apocalyptic environmental visions with a hegemonic neoliberal view of social ordering,
constitutes one particular fiction (one that in fact forecloses dissent, conflict, and the possibility of a different future), there is
an urgent need for different stories and fictions that can be mobilised for realisation. This requires foregrounding and
naming different socio-environmental futures, making the new and impossible enter the realm of politics and of
democracy, and recognizing conflict, difference, and struggle over the naming and trajectories of these futures. Socio-
environmental conflict, therefore, should not be subsumed under the homogenizing mantle of a populist environmentalist-
sustainability discourse, but should be legitimised as constitutive of a democratic order.

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Environment Section

Ecological discourse is not neutral the notion of fact in ecology is laughable as all rhetoric is
inherently skewed
Biro, 2006 (Andrew Biro holds a Canada Research Chair in Political Ecology, and is an Assistant Professor
in the Department of Political Science at Acadia University, in Wolfville, NS, Canada; Human Needs and
the Crisis of the Subject, MUSE) SRM

In some ways, we might argue that there are clear connections between these two developments: that a mediatized society (not to
mention one that is increasingly urbanized, with a highly specialized and increasingly globalized division of labour, and so on)
creates a sort of bubble-like existence, serving to alienate people both from the natural world and from the ecological
consequences of their actions.3 No doubt there is some truth to this. At the same time, however, this mediated world has an
ontological logic of its own. Rather than simply being seen as the obstacle to the realization of a less alienated form of
existence, the sheer density of presence of new communications media in our society have served to highlight the
problematic of mediation in its broadest sense, including language and even conceptual thought itself, as a structural
feature of any form of recognizably human experience. What is constantly rediscovered in our mediated society that we deal
in representations of reality rather than directly with reality itself is a feature (which still might be termed one of "alienation
from nature") that always existed. And from this vantage point, contemporary socio-political challenges, whatever specific
content they might take, because they are necessarily mediated, need to be constructed as socio-political challenges, rather
than simply posited as such. There can be no value-neutral description of facts: the postmodern condition, as Jean-Francois
Lyotard famously diagnosed it, is one of "incredulity toward metanarratives."4 Thus, "ecological crisis," on this line of
reasoning, can only exist through its discursive construction, and cannot simply be read off the facts of nature themselves.

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Their visions of the natural apocalypse are nothing more then a lesson in the sublime-always
incomplete and structured by jouissance-we constantly desire external destruction to invoke the
destruction intrinsic within our desire.
Sciences at Ljubljana, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan, 2000, pg. 155-157 SRM
At this point another question demands an answer. The sublime is often said to lie at the edge of the ridiculous. Quite
frequently we encounter formulations like It is sublime or ridicu-lous, depending on how we look at it+~ As we have
already seen with the episode from the film The Meaning of Life, it is enough to he a disinterested observer of someone
overwhelmed by the feel-ing of the sublime for this very feeling to he transformed immediately into a farce. How, then, do we
account for this convergence of opposites? Simply enough: what is sublime from the point of view of the superego is
ridiculous from the point of view of the ego. The feeling of the sublime, however, consists not only in its indication of
the proximity of a Thing (that is threatening to the subject); it is at the same time a way to avoid actually encountering
it. That is to say, it is the very inflation of the superego that plays the crucial role in the strategy of avoiding the Thing
[das Ding], the death drive in its pure state, even though this inflation itself can lead straight to death. (Kant, as we saw,
claims that the subject in this state is ready to give up property, health and even life.) In his own way, Kant also comes to the
point where moral agency emerges in the element of the sublime. He does so while he is dealing with the problem of
universality. The discussion in question concerns the fact that even though the sublime and the beautiful as aesthetic
categories can never attain the univer-sality of law, there is nevertheless a kind of universality that can be attributed to
them, a universality other than the universality of law. It is upon this paradoxical universality that the notion of
Urteilskraft (the power of judgement) is based. When we are judging an aesthetic phenomenon, we do not, according to
Kant, postulate everyones agreement rather, we require agree-ment from everyone.
30
It is the judgement itself (for
instance, this image is beautiful) that constitutes its own universality. Better yet, in our judgement we constitute the 'universe
within which this judgement is universally valid. Yet by thus requiring agreement from everyone, we are forced to rely on
something else, and this something else is, in the case of the sublime, precisely moral agency: [A judgement about the
sublime] has its foundation in human nature: in something that, along with common sense, we may require and
demand of everyone, namely, the predisposition to the feeling for (practical) ideas, i.e. to moral feeling.
3
In this passage
we can already detect the superegoic face of the moral law in the predisposition ... to moral feeling. As we shall see, this
face of the moral law gradually attains a great deal more importance. At this point, we may wonder: what exactly is the
relation between what the subject sees in front of her (a hurricane, for instance) and what she then discovers in herself (a still
greater force)? What is it that makes the first evoke the second? Our thesis is that in the Kantian perspective, a confrontation
with something that is terrifying in itself (to take Kants own example: hurricanes with all the devastation they leave
behind) strikes the subject as a kind of bodying forth of the cruel, unbridled and menacing superego the real or reverse
side of the moral law (in us), of the superego as the place of jouissance. The destructive power of natural phenomena is
already familiar to the subject, so the devastating force above me easily evokes a devastating force within me. The
feeling of the sublime develops through this metonymy. It is clear that the devastating force within me cannot really
refer to the moral law in the strict sense, but it corresponds very well to the agency of the superego, that is, to the law
equipped with the gaze and voice which can make even the boldest sinner tremble. We are now in a position to spell out
the major difference between the beautiful and the sublime. Kant defines the beauti-ful in terms of purposiveness without
purpose. Beauty always has the form of purposiveness, yet it never actually has a purpose a concept to which it
corresponds. This is why craft objects can never be judged truly beautiful their function or usefulness gets in the way.
Things of beauty, On the other hand, have no purpose outside themselves, yet they are structured as if they had one.
Beauty is possible only if it is fortuitous, if it serves no antecedently given purpose. This is why, for Kant, the examples
par excellence of the heautiful are natural formations. What makes a natural formation (a crystal form, for example) beautiful,
however, is the fact that it gives us the impression of a knowledge on the part of Nature. We get the feeling that Nature knows
what it is doing, that there is some significance or sense in what it is doing, even though we are well aware that this is not the
case. The simplest definition of beauty is thus that it is a sense-ful fonn which draws its fascination from the fact that we know
this form is entirely coincidental, contingent, or unintentional. The sub-lime, on the other hand, is explicitly a senseless
form; it is more of an incarnation of chaos (the eruption of a volcano, a turbulent ocean, a stormy night. . .). It appears
as pure excess, as the eruption of an inexplicable jouissance, as pure waste. In other words, if the beautiful is
characterized as the place where Nature knows, the sublime is the place where Nature enjoys. It is precisely this
jouissance of the Other, a jonissance that does not serve any (real or apparent) purpose, that is so fascinating about the
sublime.
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Watching ecological catastrophe is the process of distancing ourselves from ourselves this produce the
sublime feeling where we are safe in the distance wrapped in the blanket of ideology we come to
accept our own powerlessness relative to the given situation this window of fantasy impairs our ability
to tear at the very fabric of social reality necessary for violent constructions of nature to exist in the
first place
Sciences at Ljubljana, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan, 2000, pg. 158 SRM
Nature, we ourselves have to be somewhere safe, out of immedi-ate danger. Watching a hurricane from a distance is
sublime. If a hurricane destroys the house where we are sheltering, how-ever, we will not see this as sublime; we will
feel nothing hut horror and fear. In order for the feeling of the sublime to emerge, our (sensible) powerlessness and
mortality have to he staged down there somewhere, in such a way that we can observe them quietly. The necessary
condition of the feeling of the sublime is that we watch the hurricane through the window; this is nothing other than what
Lacan calls the window of fantasy: thunderclouds piling tip in the sky and moving about accompanied by lightning
and thundcrclaps, volcanoes with all their destructive power, hurricanes with all the devastation they leave behind . .
compared to the might of any of these, our ability to resist becomes an insignificant trifle. Yet the sight of them
becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, provided we are in a safe place. Thus it is as if, through the
window, I were observing myself being reduced to an insignificant trifle, a toy in the hands of forces enormously more
powerful than myself. Here we can discern Kants fundamental fantasy the pathos of apathy, which is the reverse side of
the autonomous and active subject, and in which the subject is entirely passive, an inert matter given over to the enjoyment of
the Law. This constellation where we are at one and the same time inside and outside, where we are both an
insignificant trifle, a grain of sand toyed with by enormous forces, and the observer of this spectacle is closely connected
to the change that the feeling of respect undergoes in Kantian theory. This is because, as we have already seen, what in late
Kant provokes the feeling of respect is the fact that the subject watches herself being subjected to the law that she
watches herself being humiliated and terrified by it.
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The ethical act is a necessary evil since it transgresses every notion of the good-this idea of the good is
inevitably portrayed in an ideological manner that expresses the true ethical dilemmas of our time
that repress the considerations of an ethics of the Real such a position sets the tone for a non-political
end
Sciences at Ljubljana, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan, 2000, pg. 95-96 SRM

This is why we propose to maintain the concept of the act developed by Kant, and to link it to the thematic of overstep-ping
of boundaries, of transgression, to the question of evil. It is a matter of acknowledging the fact that any (ethical) act,
precisely in so far as it is an act, is necessarily evil. We must specify, however, what is meant here by evil. This is the
evil that belongs to the very structure of the act, to the fact that the latter always implies a transgression, a change in
what is. It is not a matter of some empirical evil, it is the very logic of the act which is denounced as radically evil in
every ideology. The fundamental ideological gesture consists in providing an image for this structural evil. The gap
opened by an act (i.e. the unfamiliar, out-of-place effect of an act) is immediately linked in this ideological gesture to an
image. As a rule this is an image of suffering, which is then displayed to the public alongside this question: Is this what
you want? And this question already implies the answer: It would be impossible, inhuman, for you to want this! Here
we have to insist on theoretical rigour, and separate this (usually fascinating) image exhibited by ideology from the real source
of uneasiness from the evil which is not an undesi-red, secondary effect of the good but belongs, on the contrary, to its
essence. We could even say that the ethical ideology struggles against evil because this ideology is hostile to the good,
to the logic of the act as such. We could go even further here: the current saturation of the social field by ethical
dilem-mas (bioethics, environmental ethics, cultural ethics, medical ethics . . .) is strictly correlative to the repression
of ethics, that is, to an incapacity to think ethics in its dimension of the Real, an incapacity to conceive of ethics other
than simply as a set of restrictions intended to prevent greater evil. This constellation is related to yet another aspect of
modern society: to the depression which seems to have became the social illness of our time and to set the tone of
the resigned attitude of the (post)modern man of the end of history. In relation to this, it would be interesting to
reaffirm Lacans thesis according to which depression isnt a state of the soul, it is simply a moral failing, as Dante, and even
Spinoza, said: a sin, which means a moral weakness.
15
It is against this moral weakness or cowardice [lachete morale] that
we must affirm the ethical dimension proper.

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Reproductive Futurism Section
Reproductive Futurism keeps us terroristically beholden to the Child. Life itself is deferred to a
phantasmic tomorrow as human freedom is sacrificed to the fascism of the baby's face. Furthermore,
this ideology obligates us to identify and root out all those individualities and lifestyles which are
perceived to threaten the endless repetition of the social order.
Lee Edelman. No Future: Queer Theory and Death Drive. 2004 pp. 19-22 SRM

The Child, in the historical epoch of our current epistemological regime, is the figure for this compulsory investment in
the misrecognition of figure. It takes its place on the social stage like every adorable Annie gathering her limitless funds of
pluck to "stick out [her] chin/ And grin/ And say: 'Tomorrow!/ Tomorrow!/1 love ya/ Tomorrow/ You're always/ A day/ Away.'
" 2 0 And lo and behold, as viewed through the prism of the tears that it always calls forth, the figure of this Child seems to
shimmer with the iridescent promise of Noah's rainbow, serving like the rainbow as the pledge of a covenant that shields
us against the persistent threat of apocalypse nowor later. Recall, for example, the end of Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia
(1993), his filmic act of contrition for the homophobia some attributed to The Silence of the lambs (1991}. After Andrew
Beckett (a man for all seasons, as portrayed by the saintly Tom Hanks), last seen on his deathbed in an oxygen mask that seems
to allude to, or trope on, Hannibal Lecter's more memorable muzzle (see figures 1 and 2), has shuffled off this mortal coil to
stand, as we are led to suppose, before a higher law, we find ourselves in, if not at, his wake surveying a room in his family
home, now crowded with children and pregnant women whose reassuringly bulging bellies (see figure 3) displace the bulging
basket (unseen) of the Hiv-positive gay man (unseen) from whom, the filmic text suggests, in a cinema {unlike the one in which
we sit watching Philadelphia) not phobic about graphic representations of male-male sexual acts, Saint Thomas, a.k.a. Beckett,
contracted the virus that cosegerous "lifestyles" on the Internet; the Child who might choose a provocative book from the
shelves of the public library; the Child, in short, who might find an enjoyment that would nullify the figural value, itself
imposed by adult desire, of the Child as unmarked by the adult's adulterating implication in desire itself; the Child, that
is, made to image, for the satisfaction of adults, an Imaginary fullness that's considered to want, and therefore to want
for, nothing. As Lauren Berlant argues forcefully at the outset of The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, "a nation
made for adult citizens has been replaced by one imagined for fetuses and children."2 2 On every side, our enjoyment of
liberty is eclipsed by the lengthening shadow of a Child whose freedom to develop undisturbed by encounters, or even by
the threat of potential encounters, with an "otherness" of which its parents, its church, or the state do not approve,
uncompromised by any possible access to what is painted as alien desire, terroristically holds us all in check and
determines that political discourse conform to the logic of a narrative wherein history unfolds as the future envisioned
for a Child who must never grow up. Not for nothing, after all, does the historical construction of the homosexual as
distinctive social type overlap with the appearance of such literary creations as Tiny Tim, David Balfour, and Peter Pan, who
enact, in an imperative most evident today in the uncannily intimate connection between Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort, a
Symbolic resistance to the unmarried men (Scrooge, Uncle Ebenezer, Captain Hook) who embody, as Voldemort's name makes
clear, a wish, a will, or a drive toward death that entails the destruction of the Child. That Child, immured in an innocence
seen as continuously under seige, condenses a fantasy of vulnerability to the queerness of queer sexualities precisely
insofar as that Child enshrines, in its form as sublimation, the very value for which queerness regularly finds itself
condemned: an insistence on sameness that intends to restore an Imaginary past. The Child, that is, marks the fetishistic
fixation of heteronormativity: an erotically charged investment in the rigid sameness of identity that is central to the
compulsory narrative of reproductive futurism. And so, as the radical right maintains, the battle against queers is a life-
and-death struggle for the future of a Child whose ruin is pursued by feminists, queers, and those who support the legal
availability of abortion. Indeed, as the Army of God made clear in the bombmaking guide it produced for the assistance
of its militantly "pro-life" members, its purpose was wholly congruent with the logic of reproductive futurism: to
"disrupt and ultimately destroy Satan's power to kill our children, God's children.

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Political actions taken in the name of a better tomorrow engender the politics of futurism where all
actions are justified under the faceless child of the future generations. This ideology scapegoats and
stigmatizes those who endanger our perfect envisionment of the far off world at large.
Lee Edelmen, No Future: Queer Theory and Death Drive. 2004 pp. 112-113 SRM

Ignore for a moment what demands to be called the transparency of this appeal. Ignore, that is, how quickly the spiritualizing
vision of parents "nourishing and growing . . . small bodies and . . . small souls" gives way to a rhetoric affirming instead
the far more pragmatic (and politically imperative) investment in the "human capital . . . essential to the health and wealth
of our nation." Ignore, by so doing, how the passage renominates those human "souls" as "capital" without yielding the fillip
of Dickensian pathos that prompts us to "cherish" these "capital"- ized humans ("small" but, like the economy in current usage,
capable of being grown) precisely insofar as they come to embody this thereby humanized "capital." Ignore all this and one's
eyes might still pop to discover that only political intervention will "allow," and the verb is crucial here, "parents to
cherish their children" so as to "ensure our collective future - or ensure, which comes to the same in the faith that
properly fathers us all, that our present will always be mortgaged to a jantasmatic future in the name of the political
"capital" that those children will thus have become. Near enough to the surface to challenge its status as merely implicit,
but sufficiently buried to protect it from every attempt at explicitation, a globally destructive, child-hating force is
posited in these linesa force so strong as to disallow parents the occasion to cherish their children, so profound in its
virulence to the species as to put into doubt "our collective future"and posited the better to animate a familial unit so
cheerfully mom-ified as to distract us from ever noticing how destructively it's been mummified. No need to trick out that
force in the flamboyant garments of the pedophile, whose fault, as "everyone" knows, defaults, faute de mieux, to a fear of
grown womenand thus, whatever the sex of his object, condemns him for, and to, his failure to penetrate into the circle of
heterosexual desire. No need to call it names, with the vulgar bluntness of the homophobe, whose language all too often is
not the bluntest object at hand. Unnamed, it still carries the signature, whatever Hewlett and West may intend, of the crime
that was named as not to be named ("inter christianos non nominandum") while maintaining the plausible deniability allowing
disavowal of such a signature, should anyone try to decipher it, as having been forged by someone else. To be sure, the
stigmatized other in general can endanger our idea of the future, conjuring the intolerable image of its spoliation or
pollution, the specter of its being appropriated for unendurable ends; but one in particular is stigmatized as threatening
an end to the future itself. That one remains always at hand to embody the force, which need never be specified, that
prohibits America's parents, for example, from being able to cherish their children, since that one, as we know, intrudes
on the collective reproduction of familialism by stealing, seducing, proselytizing, in short, by adulterating those children
and putting in doubt the structuring fantasy that ensures "our collective future."

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This is not an empty theoretical gesture toward ontological violence. The logic of reproductive
futurism literally compels us to constantly identify new threats to the eternal reproduction of the
ordered polity. REAL VIOLENCE is visited upon these queers who must be eliminated lest they
endanger the Child and the future for which this celebrity stands.
Lee Edelman. No Future: Queer Theory and Death Drive. 2004 pp. 115-7 SRM

On October 12, 1998the evening of the death of Matthew Shepard, a twenty-one-year-old gay man then enrolled at the
University of Wyoming who was lured from a bar by two straight men and taken in the dark to a deserted spot where he
was savagely beaten, pistol-whipped, and then tied to a wooden fence and abandoned to the brutal cold of the night (from
which he would not be rescued until some eighteen hours later, when he was discovered, already comatose, by a bicyclist who
thought the limp, bloody body lashed to a post was a scarecrow)on that evening of Matthew Shepard's death a hospital
spokesman, "voice choked with emotion," made the following statement to the national press: "Matthew's mother said to me,
'Please tell everybody who's listening to go home and give your kids a hug and don't let a day go by without telling them
you love them.'" These words of a grieving mother, widely reported on the news, produced a mimetic outpouring of grief
from people across the country, just as they had from the spokesman whose own voice choked as he pronounced them.
But these words, which even on the occasion of a gay man's murder defined the proper mourners as those who had
children to go home to and hug, specified the mourning it encouraged as mourning for a threatened familial futuritya
threat that might, for many, take the form of Matthew Shepard's death, but a threat that must also, for others, take the
opposite form: of Shepard's life.5 Thus, even as mourners gathered to pray at the bier of a mother's slain child, others
arrived at his funeral to condemn a "lifestyle" that made Matthew Shepard, for them, a dangerous bird of prey. An
article printed in the New York Times speculated that the symbolic significance, for the killers, of leaving his body strung up
on a fence might be traced to "the Old West practice of nailing a dead coyote to a ranch fence as a warning to future
intruders."6 The bicyclist who mistook him for a scarecrow, then, would not have been far from the mark; for his killers, by
posing Shepard's body this way, could be understood to be crowing about the lengths to which they would go to scare away
other birds of his feather: birds that may seem to be more or less tameflighty, to be sure, and prone to a narcissistic preening
of their plumage; amusing enough when confined to the space of a popular film like The Birdcage (1996) or when, outside the
movies, caged in the ghettos that make them available for ethnographic display or the closets that enact a pervasive desire to
make them all disappear but birds that the cognoscenti perceive as never harmless at all.7 For whatever apparent difference in
species may dupe the untrained eye, inveterate bird-watchers always discern the tell-tale mark that brands each one a chicken-
hawk first and last. In an atmosphere all atwitter with the cries that echo between those who merely watch and those who hunt
such birds, what matter who killed Cock Robin? The logic of sinthomosexuality justifies that violent fate in advance by insisting
that what such a cock had been robbing was always, in some sense, a cradle. And that cradle must endlessly rock, we've been
told, even if the rhythm it rocks to beats out, with every blow of the beating delivered to Matthew Shepard's skull, a counterpoint
to the melody's sacred hymn to the meaning of life. That meaning, continuously affirmed as it is both in and as cultural
narrative, nonetheless never can rest secure and, in consequence, never can rest. The compulsive need for its repetition, for the
drumbeat by which it pounds into our heads (and not always, though not infrequently, by pounding in a Matthew Shepard's) that
the cradle bears always the meaning of futurity and the futurity of meaning, testifies to something exceeding the meaning
it means thereby to assure: to a death drive that carries, on full-fledged wings, into the inner sanctum of meaning, into
the reproductive mandate inherent in the logic of futurism itself, the burden of the radically negative force that
sinthomosexuality names.

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The alternative is to do nothing, rather than simply rejecting the affirmative, we need to align
ourselves with queer negativity; rather than take a stance for the sake of promoting a set of social
values, we must accept the value of our position for the sake of the position.

Rather than rejecting, with liberal discourse, this ascription of negativity to the queer, we might, as I argue, do better to
consider accepting and even embracing it. Not in the hope of forging thereby some more perfect social ordersuch a hope,
after all, would only reproduce the constraining mandate of futurism, just as any such order would equally occasion the
negativity of the queerbut rather to refuse the insistence of hope itself as affirmation, which is always affirmation of an
order whose refusal will register as unthinkable, irresponsible, inhumane. And the trump card of affirmation? Always the
question: If not this, what? Always the demand to translate the insistence, the pulsive force, of negativity into some
determinate stance or "position" whose determination would thus negate it: always the imperative to immure it in some
stable and positive form. When I argue, then, that we might do well to attempt what is surely impossibleto withdraw our
allegiance, however compulsory, from a reality based on the Ponzi scheme of reproductive futurismI do not intend to propose
some "good" that will thereby be assured. To the contrary, I mean to insist that nothing, and certainly not what we call the
"good," can ever have any assurance at all in the order of the Symbolic. Abjuring fidelity to a futurism that's always
purchased at our expense, though bound, as Symbolic subjects consigned to figure the Symbolic's undoing, to the
necessary contradiction of trying to turn its intelligibility against itself, we might rather, figuratively, cast our vote for
"none of the above," for the primacy of a constant no in response to the law of the Symbolic, which would echo that law's
foundational act, its self constituting negation. The structuring optimism of politics to which the order of meaning commits us,
installing as it does the perpetual hope of reaching meaning through signification, is always, I would argue, a negation of this
primal, constitutive, and negative act. And the various positivities produced in its wake by the logic of political hope depend
on the mathematical illusion that negated negations might somehow escape, and not redouble, such negativity. My polemic
thus stakes its fortunes on a truly hopeless wager: that taking the Symbolic's negativity to the very letter of the law, that
attending to the persistence of something internal to reason that reason refuses, that turning the force of queerness against
all subjects, however queer, can afford an access to the puissance that at once defines and negates us. Or better: can
expose the constancy, the inescapability, of such access to jouissance in the social order itself, even if that order can access
its constant access to jouissance only in the process of abjecting that constancy of access onto the queer. In contrast to
what Theodor Adorno describes as the "grimness with which a man clings to himself, as to the immediately sure and
substantial," the queerness of which I speak would deliberately sever us from ourselves, from the assurance, that is, of
knowing ourselves and hence of knowing our "good."4 Such queerness proposes, in place of the good, something I want to
call "better," though it promises, in more than one sense of the phrase, absolutely nothing. I connect this something better with
Lacan's characterization of what he calls "truth," where truth does not assure happiness, or even, as Lacan makes clear, the good.5
Instead, it names only the insistent particularity of the subject, impossible fully to articulate and "tending] toward the real."6
Lacan, therefore, can write of this truth: The quality that best characterizes it is that of being the true Wunsch, which was at the
origin of an aberrant or atypical behavior. We encounter this Wunsch with its particular, irreducible character as a modification
that presupposes no other form of normalization than that of an experience of pleasure or of pain, but of a final experience from
whence it springs and is subsequently preserved in the depths of the subject in anirreducible form. The Wunsch does not have
the character of a universal law but, on the contrary, of the most particular of lawseven if it is universal that this
particularity is to be found in every human being.7 Truth, like queerness, irreducibly linked to the "aberrant or atypical,"
to what chafes against "normalization," finds its value not in a good susceptible to generalization, but only in the stubborn
particularity that voids every notion of a general good. The embrace of queer negativity, then, can have no justification if
justification requires it to reinforce some positive social value; its value, instead, resides in its challenge to value as defined
by the social, and thus in its radical challenge to the very value of the social itself.

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Political actions taken in the name of a better tomorrow engender the politics of futurism where all
actions are justified under the faceless child of the future generations. This ideology scapegoats and
stigmatizes those who endanger our perfect envisionment of the far off world at large.
Lee Edelmen, No Future: Queer Theory and Death Drive. 2004 pp. 112-113 SRM

Ignore for a moment what demands to be called the transparency of this appeal. Ignore, that is, how quickly the spiritualizing
vision of parents "nourishing and growing . . . small bodies and . . . small souls" gives way to a rhetoric affirming instead
the far more pragmatic (and politically imperative) investment in the "human capital . . . essential to the health and wealth
of our nation." Ignore, by so doing, how the passage renominates those human "souls" as "capital" without yielding the fillip of
Dickensian pathos that prompts us to "cherish" these "capital"- ized humans ("small" but, like the economy in current usage,
capable of being grown) precisely insofar as they come to embody this thereby humanized "capital." Ignore all this and one's
eyes might still pop to discover that only political intervention will "allow," and the verb is crucial here, "parents to
cherish their children" so as to "ensure our collective future - or ensure, which comes to the same in the faith that properly
fathers us all, that our present will always be mortgaged to a jantasmatic future in the name of the political "capital" that
those children will thus have become. Near enough to the surface to challenge its status as merely implicit, but sufficiently
buried to protect it from every attempt at explicitation, a globally destructive, child-hating force is posited in these lines
a force so strong as to disallow parents the occasion to cherish their children, so profound in its virulence to the species as
to put into doubt "our collective future"and posited the better to animate a familial unit so cheerfully mom-ified as to
distract us from ever noticing how destructively it's been mummified. No need to trick out that force in the flamboyant
garments of the pedophile, whose fault, as "everyone" knows, defaults, faute de mieux, to a fear of grown womenand thus,
whatever the sex of his object, condemns him for, and to, his failure to penetrate into the circle of heterosexual desire. No need to
call it names, with the vulgar bluntness of the homophobe, whose language all too often is not the bluntest object at hand.
Unnamed, it still carries the signature, whatever Hewlett and West may intend, of the crime that was named as not to be named
("inter christianos non nominandum") while maintaining the plausible deniability allowing disavowal of such a signature, should
anyone try to decipher it, as having been forged by someone else. To be sure, the stigmatized other in general can endanger
our idea of the future, conjuring the intolerable image of its spoliation or pollution, the specter of its being appropriated
for unendurable ends; but one in particular is stigmatized as threatening an end to the future itself. That one remains
always at hand to embody the force, which need never be specified, that prohibits America's parents, for example, from
being able to cherish their children, since that one, as we know, intrudes on the collective reproduction of familialism by
stealing, seducing, proselytizing, in short, by adulterating those children and putting in doubt the structuring fantasy that
ensures "our collective future."

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Discourse of the future reproduces the obsession with the children and causes us to forget the current
problems of the status quo.

In its coercive universalization, however, the image of the Child, not to be confused with the lived experiences of any historical
children, serves to regulate political discourseto prescribe what will count as political discourseby compelling such
discourse to accede in advance to the reality of a collective future whose figurative status we are never permitted to
acknowledge or address. From Delacroix's iconic image of Liberty leading us into a brave new world of revolutionary
possibilityher bare breast making each spectator the unweaned Child to whom it's held out while the boy to her left,
reproducing her posture, affirms the absolute logic of reproduction itselfto the revolutionary waif in the logo that miniaturizes
the "politics" of Its Mis (summed up in its anthem to futurism, the "inspirational" "One Day More"), we are no more able to
conceive of a politics without a fantasy of the future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the
Child. That figural Child alone embodies the citizen as an ideal, entitled to claim full rights to its future share in the
nation's good, though always at the cost of limiting the rights "real" citizens are allowed. For the social order exists to
preserve for this universalized subject, this fantasmatic Child, a notional freedom more highly valued than the actuality of
freedom itself, which might, after all, put at risk the Child to whom such a freedom falls due. Hence, whatever refuses this
mandate by which our political institutions compel the collective reproduction of the Child must appear as a threat not
only to the organization of a given social order but also, and far more ominously, to social order as such, insofar as it
threatens the logic of futurism on which meaning always depends. So, for example, when P. D. James, in her novel The
Children of Men, imagines a future in which the human race has suffered a seemingly absolute loss of the capacity to reproduce,
her narrator, Theodore Faron, not only attributes this reversal of biological fortune to the putative crisis of sexual values in late
twentieth-century democracies"Pornography and sexual violence on film, on television, in books, in life had increased and
became more explicit but less and less in the West we made love and bred children," he declaresbut also gives voice to the
ideological truism that governs our investment in the Child as the obligatory token of futurity: "Without the hope of posterity,
for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live," he later observes, "all pleasures of the
mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruins."12
While this allusion to Eliot's "The Waste Land" may recall another of its well-known lines, one for which we apparently have
Eliot's wife, Vivian, to thank"What you get married for if you don't want children?" it also brings out the function of the child
as the prop of the secular theology on which our social reality rests: the secular theology that shapes at once the meaning of our
collective narratives and our collective narratives of meaning. Charged, after all, with the task of assuring "that we being dead yet
live," the Child, as if by nature (more precisely, as the promise of a natural transcendence of the limits of nature itself), exudes
the very pathos from which rhe narrator of The Children of Men recoils when he comes upon it in non reproductive
"pleasures of the mind and senses." For the "pathetic" quality he projectively locates in nongenerative sexual
enjoymentenjoyment that he views in the absence of futurity as empty, substitutive, pathologicalexposes the fetishistic
figurations of the Child that the narrator pits against it as legible in terms identical to those for which enjoyment without
"hope of posterity" is peremptorily dismissed: legible, that is, as nothing more than "pathetic and crumbling defences
shored up against our ruins." How better to characterize the narrative project of The Children of Men itself, which ends, as
anyone not born yesterday surely expects from the start, with the renewal of our barren and dying race through the miracle of
birth? After all, as Walter Wangerin Jr., reviewing the book for the Neu? York Times, approvingly noted in a sentence delicately
poised between description and performance of the novel's pro-procreative ideology; "If there is a baby, there is a future, there
is redemption."1 3 If, however, there is no baby and, in consequence, no_future, then the blame must fall on the fatal lure
of sterile, narcissistic enjoyments understood as inherently destructive of meaning and therefore as responsible for the
undoing of social organization, collective reality, and, inevitably, life itself.

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Race Section
The structure of racial discourse is totalizing and attempts to overcome difference and control what it
means to be human
Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, assistant professor of English at Boston College, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian analysis of
race, 2000, p. 55-56 SRM

Guillaumins terms are useful not so much in distinguishing between pre-modern and contemporary notions of race, as she
suggests, but rather in discerning the emergence of race through the self-splitting referred to earlier. Guillaumins failure to
discern the notion of Whiteness as the organizing principle of Eurocentrism (as distinguished from banal ethnocentrisms)
enables her to exonerate both ethnocentrism and aristocratism as not true racism. But proper attention to the crucial element
of class at play in Whiteness reveals that it is not about aristocratism, but about the people the yolk, with precisely the sense
of its own naturalness that Guillaumin disavows as an element in auto-referential systems. I would also suggest that the
altero-referential system does not so much displace but is founded on the auto-referential notion of Whiteness. Thus the
discourse of race as we understand it today is an effect of that internal splitting that we identified earlier as the cause of race.
The structure of race is totalizing, and attempts to master and overcome all difference within its boundaries. The
dichotomy of self and other is within Whiteness in the competition over who properly possesses Whiteness, or
sovereign humanness. H. F. K. Gunthers (1927) classification along physiognomic lines is a part of the logical nucleus of
racial visibility grounded in the narcissism of small differences that grounds racial visibility. Thus in Gunthers
classification, other European races such as the Mediterranean can carry the Negro strain, or the Tartar may carry the
Asiatic. The signifier Whiteness is about gaining a monopoly on the notion of humanness, and is not simply the
displaceable or reversible pinnacle of the great chain of being.
22
However, one must not forget that as the unconscious
principle or the master signifier of the symbolic ordering of race, Whiteness also makes possible difference and racial inter-
subjectivity. It orders, classifies, categorizes, demarcates and separates human beings on the basis of what is considered to be
a natural and neutral epistemology. This knowledge is also the agency that produces and maintains differences through a
series of socially instituted and legally enforced laws under the name of equality, multiculturalism, anti-
discrimina-tion, etc. Anti-racist legislations and practices, in other words, work ultimately in the service of race, which
is inherently, unambiguously, struc-turally supremacist. The structure of race is deeply fissured, and that is discernible in
the constitutive tension, or contradiction between its need to establish absolute differences, and its illegal desire to assert
sameness. In fact, race establishes and preserves difference for the ultimate goal of same-ness, in order to reproduce the desire
for Whiteness. As Foucault might have put it, race separates in order to master. However, unlike the technologies of power
that Foucault so painstakingly detailed, the analysis of race cannot be exhausted through its historicization. Race produces
unconscious effects, and as a hybrid structure located somewhere between essence and construct, it determines the
destiny of human bodies. It is our ethical and political task to figure out how destiny comes to be inscribed as anatomy,
when that anatomy does not exist as such.

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Race Section
Securing whiteness and race is an impossibility-all forms of racial inquiries are doomed to failure
race, 2000, p. 77-78 SRM

In conclusion, I suggest that we view Leggatt as the extimate object that provides the fantasy of overcoming castration and
maintaining ones subject status in the symbolic. Leggatt positions himself beyond the law, as the exti-mate core of the law
which exposes its lack. How, then, does Leggatt function as an objet a delivering recognition, or more properly as the
pathological cure for the captain? Leggatts appointing himself beyond the Law is also very much in antinomy with the law,
insofar as he almost successfully evacuates the Other when he drops off the side of the ship. The captain, in trying to ease
Leggatts escape, steers his ship precariously close to the black hills of Koh-ring, thereby endangering his entire crew, the
ship, and his command. Language, words, speech are all expunged at that moment when Leggatt drops into the sea: Such a
hush had fallen on the ship that she might have been a bark of the dead floating slowly under the very gate of Erebus (402).
The problem that insists upon us as readers is the question of how such an object, which Miller asserts is incompatible with
the presence of the subject, insofar as the object cancels the subject, can provide a cure for the captain. It is inevitable that
we read the story as the delineation of the impossible fantasy at the core of Whiteness. An important reason why this
tale should be read as a fantasy, not of the captain as a character in the text, or of the implied author Conrad, but of the
discourse of race itself, is that it is ultimately a fantasy about trans-gressing the law in relation to race. The storys construal of
Archbold as the tenacious executor of the law also valorizes the mere juridical prohibition against racial domination into the
moral law (the commandment against murder) that makes desire possible. Let us recall that the historical John Anderson,
according to Lubbock, was permitted to escape by the kind hearted Captain Wallace, and that when he was finally captured
his sentence was far from being commensurate with his crime. Thus when read by the traces of Whiteness, The secret
sharer can be interpreted as a story about the successful reaching of the goal of Whiteness the jouissance of
absolute mastery and fullness. While the inevitable failure of such a goal could produce anxiety, and the captain is
often on the brink of such an affect, it is here presented as triumphant. Finally, as the thing that will fill up the lack in the
law, Leggatt promises a fantasy of completion of almost psychotic fullness to the captain. Thus in the end, driven by
Leggatts white hat the spot of light on the surface of the current the gaze of Whiteness saves the ship as it guarantees
certainty to the captain. This time the captains yearning stare in seeking the objet a alights not on something expelled from
the Other, but on something that is his very own: What was that thing? ... I recognised my own floppy hat. It must have fallen
off his head ... and he didnt bother. Now I had what I wanted the saving mark for my eyes (403). The object has been fully
(impossibly) introjected as his own, investing him with a certainty that no subject of the symbolic can properly have. The
captains certainty is not to be confused with the imagi-nary sense of unity in overcoming ones fragmentation. Rather,
it is the certainty of having Whiteness as the object of desire (of recognizing or fantasizing a lack in the symbolic order
of race), of possessing it in and as his unconscious, that permits him to take up the command of his ship again with
renewed vigor.

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Race Section

Race operates according to the empty Master Signifier of Whiteness and is sexed in such a way that it
ensures domination, power, and the eradication of difference
race, 2000, p.7-8 SRM

I am suggesting two things: first, the order of racial difference attempts to compensate for sexs failure in language;
second, we must not therefore analogize race and sex on the sexual model of linguistic excess or contradic-tion. The signifier
Whiteness tries to fill the constitutive lack of the sexed subject. It promises a totality, an overcoming of difference itself.
For the subject of race, Whiteness represents complete mastery, self-sufficiency, and the jouissance of Oneness. This is
why the order of racial difference must be distinguished from, but read in relation to, sexual difference. If sex is charac-terized
by a missing signifier, race, on the contrary, is not and cannot be organized around such an absence a missing signifier that
escapes or confounds language and inter-subjectivity. Race has an all-too-present master signifier Whiteness which
offers the illegal enjoyment of absolute wholeness. Race, therefore, does not bear on the paradigm of failure or success of
inter-subjectivity on the model of the sexual relation. The rationale of racial difference and its organization can be under-stood
as a Hobbesian one. It is a social contract among potential adversaries secured to perpetuate singular claims to power and
dominance, even as it seeks to contain the consequences of such singular interests. The shared insecurity of claiming absolute
humanness, which is what race as a system manages, induces the social and legal validation of race as a discourse of neutral
differences. In other words, race identity can have only one function it establishes differential relations among the
races in order to constitute the logic of domination. Groups must be differentiated and related in order to make
possible the claim to power and domination. Race identity is about the sense of ones exclusiveness, exceptionality and
uniqueness. Put very simply, it is an identity that, if it is working at all, can only be about pride, being better, being the best.
Race is inextricably caught up in a Hobbesian discourse of social contract, where personal (or particular) interest masquerades
as public good. Sexual difference, on the other hand, cannot be founded upon such a logic. The values attached to male and
female are historically contingent as feminists have long suggested, but power cannot be the ultimate cause of sexual
difference. Racial difference, on the other hand, has no other reason to be but power, and yet it is not power in the sense
of material and discursive agency that can be reduced to historical mappings. If such were the case, as many have
assumed, then a historicist genealogy of the discursive construction of race would be in order: Foucault not Lacan, discourse
analysis not psycho-analysis. But race organizes difference and elicits investment in its subjects because it promises
access to being itself. It offers the prestige of being better and superior; it is the promise of being more human, more
full, less lacking. The possibility of this enjoyment is at the core of race. But enjoyment or jouissance is, we may recall,
pure unpleasure. The possibility of enjoyment held out by Whiteness is also horrific as it implies the annihi-lation of
difference. The subject of race therefore typically resists race as mere social construction, even as it holds on to a
notion of visible, phenotypal difference.

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Race is set apart from history and conflict because of its physical demarcation differentiating it from
other struggles and requiring a new venue of analysis
Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, assistant professor of English at Boston College, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian analysis of race,
2000, p. 8 SRM

Visible difference in race has a contradictory function. If it protects against a lethal sameness, it also facilitates the
possibility of that sameness through the fantasy of wholeness. Insofar as Whiteness dissimulates the object of desire,
10
any encounter with the historicity, the purely symbolic origin of the signifier, inevitably produces anxiety. It is necessary for
race to seem more than its historical and cultural origin in order to aim at being. Race must therefore disavow or deny
knowledge of its own historicity, or risk surrendering to the discourse of exceptionality, the possibility of wholeness and
supremacy. Thus race secures itself through visibility. Psychoanalytically, we can perceive the object cause of racial anxiety
as racial visibility, the so-called pre-discursive marks on the body (hair, skin, bone), which serve as the desiderata of race. In
other words, the bodily mark, which (like sex) seems to be more than symbolic, serves as a powerful prophylactic
against the anxiety of race as a discursive construction. We seem to need such a refuge in order to preserve the investment
we make in the signifier of Whiteness. Thus race should not be reduced to racial visi-bility, which is the mistake made by
some well-meaning and not-so-well-meaning advocates of a color blind society Racial visibility should be understood as
that which secures the much deeper investment we have made in the racial categorization of human beings. It is a lock-
and-key relation, and throwing away the key of visibility because it happens to open and close is not going to make the lock
inoperable. By interrogating visibility we can ask what the lock is preserving, and why the capacity of visibility to secure an
investment in identity also distinguishes race from other systems of difference such as caste, class, ethnicity, etc. These
latter forms of group identity, insofar as they cannot be essentialized through bodily marks, can be easily historicized and
textualized. Nothing prevents their deconstruc-tion, whereas in the case of race, visibility maintains a bulwark against the
historicity and historicization of race. (In fact, Brennan suggests that the egos era is characterized by a resistance to
history) It is this function of visibility that renders cases of racial passing fraught and anxious.

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Race as s system perpetuates itself on the basis of racial identification as a method to purge racism
ignoring the broader desire for Whiteness. Such an investment of power relations leads to inevitable
violence and disastrous politics.
Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, assistant professor of English at Boston College, Desiring Whiteness: A
Lacanian analysis of race, 2000, p. 8-9 SRM

My contention that the category of race is inherently a discourse of supremacy may seem inattentive to the advances
that our legal systems and liberal social ideologies have made precisely in relation to racism and racist" practices.
Modern civil society refuses to permit its subjects the enjoyment of supremacist rhetoric, the rhetoric of exceptionality,
by distin-guishing between race and racism. It draws this distinction between a supposed ontology (the study of physical
or cultural differences) and an epistemology (discriminatory logic) in the name of preserving a semblance of inter-
subjectivity Race, it suggests, is a neutral description of human difference; racism, it suggests, is the misappropriation
of such difference. The liberal consensus is that we must do away with such ideological mis-appropriation, but that we must
celebrate difference. It is understood as a baby and the bath water syndrome, in which the dirty water of racism
must be eliminated, to reveal the cleansed and beloved fact of racial iden-tity. This rather myopic perspective refuses to
address the peculiar resiliency of race, the subjective investment in racial difference, and the hyper-valorization of
appearance. It dismisses these issues or trivializes them because race seems a historical inevitability. The logic is that people
have been constituted for material and other reasons as black and white and that this has had powerful historical consequences
for peoples thus constituted. Whether race exists or not, whether race and racism are artificial distinc-tions or not,
racialization is a hard historical fact and a concrete instance of social reality We have no choice, according to this
reasoning, but to inhabit our assigned racial positions. Not to do so is a form of idealism, and a groundless belief that
power can be wished away In making this ostensibly pragmatic move, such social theorists effectively reify race. Lukacs,
who elaborated Marxs notion of reification in relation to the commodity form in History and Class Consciousness, is worth
recalling here: Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing, and thus acquires a phantom
objectivity, an autonmy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature:
the relation between people (1923: 89). To arrest analysis of race at the point where one discerns and marks its historical
effects is to reproduce those very relations of power that one intends to oppose. It is to render race so objective that it is
impossible to conceive human difference or inter-subjectivity anew. Modern civil society engages in such reification
because ultimately its desire is to keep the dialectic between races alive. It must thus prohibit what it terms racism in
order to prevent the annihilation not so much of the inferior races but of the system of race itself. This is how the
system of desiring Whiteness perpetuates itself, even in the discourses that are most pragmatically aimed against
racism. The resilience and endurability of race as a structure can thus be attributed to its denials and disavowals. On
the one hand, it is never in the place that one expects it to be: it disavows its own historicity in order to hold out the promise of
being to the subject the something more than symbolic a sense of wholeness, of exceptionality. On the other hand, as a
social law, it must disavow this object in order to keep the system viable and to perpetuate the dialectic: the race for
Whiteness. Exploring the structure of race requires a toleration of paradox, an appreciation of the fact that it is an
inherently contradictory discourse, and a willingness to see beyond relations of power in order to mine the depth of
subjective investment in it.

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Utilizing the concept of race relations ensures a constant purification of the race
race, 2000, p. 16-18 SRM

While both Appiah and Goldberg offer persuasive analyses of the (academic) discourse of race, as representatives of what are now
entrenched positions on the race term, they fail to confront the fact that racial practice is not fully covered by racial theory There is a hiatus
between racial theory and practice in that the two can function quite independently of each other. Thus to proceed as if an engagement with
racial theory were to undermine the foundations of racial practice is to misrecognize the structure of the discourse of race. Etienne Balibar
suggests that we regard shifts in doctrine and language [in race theory] as relatively incidental matters, given the fact that from the point of
view of the victims of racist practice, these justifica-tions simply lead to the same old acts (Balibar 1991: 18). This does not mean that race
theory is irrelevant, or that we must focus entirely on racism and racist practice at the cost of ignoring its more institutionalized forms.
Rather, as a first step, we must begin to recognize the double-edged aspect of the rhetoric of race, where so-called theory
and practice do not always coin-cide to produce the effect of causality. The inadequacy of critical race theory with
reference to practice is most evident in relation to cases such as that of little Koen, with which I began. Interestingly, what
is precisely at play in this case is nature and culture, or biology and the social problems of inclusion and exclusion that Appiah and Goldberg
focus on respectively. For instance, given Appiahs view that race evaporates with the exposure of races scientific or genetic fallibility, it is,
interestingly enough, genetics itself which is at the heart of this little racial mistake. In his argument with the Dutch-African-American
philosopher W E. B. Du Bois, Appiah demon-strates that race cannot be invoked, except through a specious use of genetics, to define the
destiny of a so-called people, or to delineate group aspirations. However, what Koen as a Dutch-Afro-Caribbean child seems to represent is
precisely the relation between genes and destiny. At one level, we may say that at the age of eight months, he has already been disqualified
to borrow at a bank. But more seriously, the irony of this particular case is that genetic theory here does not serve to discredit racial identity;
rather, the DNA test establishes Koen as black boy (though born of a white mother). Admittedly, Koens parents are not suggesting that
Koen is inher-ently incapable of borrowing at a bank, and neither is the DNA test a verification of race as much as of paternity; identity and
destiny here are socially interpreted rather than genetically determined. However, the issue remains that destiny is not uncorrelated to
genetics. And no amount of argumentation disarticulating the two will do away with the fact that because something is inherited as race,
your life is predetermined for you. As the Dutch parents testify, most of us continue to harbor deep-seated notions of racial inheritance,
despite its scientific untenability simply due to genetic theorys claims to heritabilty as such. Some of us, as committed social
constructionists, may perhaps disclaim this notion because science tells us that the relation between genes and racial identity and destiny is
not one of simple predication. DNA tests can establish parentage, but they cannot establish a trans-historical racial identity Nevertheless, the
DNA test in this case does determine Koens racial identity (and his non-creditworthiness), though not directly The relation between genes
and identity/destiny is no longer one of predication but implication. The notion of race as genetic inheritance can continue to be entertained
when mediated by kinship relations: Koens father is a black man from Aruba. It is a question, it seems of the signifier, of the Name of the
Father, which imparts not only sexual and familial identity, but also racial. Thus the signifier establishes race at the same moment that
genetics establishes kinship, and it is this synchrony that enables the simultaneous articulation of genes and identity/destiny, though not
causally None of this alters the fact that the bottom line in both arguments, whether that of predi-cation or articulation, is of genetic
inheritance. Thus I would affirm Appiahs argument that race is inextricably linked to inheritance. If we reduce the position of Du Bois and
that of Koens father into simple propo-sitions, we see their logical similarity: Black people (because they are born black) have an
inherently valuable message for the world (as this message is a factor of their racial inheritance); and Black people (because they are born
black) will always be poor (which is a factor of their social inheri-tance based on their racial identity). Both statements leave intact the
implication of race as inheritance and destiny However, my skepticism is directed not at the contents of Appiahs argument but at its utility
Appiahs impulse to undermine race by interrogating its scientific grounds is academi-cally valuable, but it does not address the way in
which race recoups inheritance through other rhetorical means, such as articulation with kinship and recourse to visibility It seems that,
given the power of the notion of heritability as such, no amount of disputation with racial theory can dislodge the association one makes of
race with inheritance. Race will continue to be articulated with kinship, with ethnicity, with culture, in ways that will
require repeated purges of its claims to inheritance. Theoretical expurgations may be useful at one level, but they do
not undercut the emotional force of an ethnos that race so effectively and resiliently enables. I argue that this effect is
made possible primarily through races ability to combine with narratives of the family and kinship in order to appear
as a factor of inheritance. Race, then, derives its power not from socially constructed ideologies, but from the dynamic
interplay between the family as a socially regulated institution, and biology as the site of essences and inheritances. In
fact, the more one attempts to render race as merely a social construct, the more it contributes to the naturalization of
that construct.

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Race orients itself around the master signifier of Whiteness, which creates a constant exclusion
race, 2000, p. 24-25 SRM

Thus the unconscious is to be conceived not so much as an individual construct as an entity that bridges the subject to the
general economy of signification. In other words, the necessary insertion of the subject into language implies his/her
subjection to the general or shared universe of signifiers, which must come to represent ones desire. The important
point here is that insofar as language pre-exists each of us, the subject in his or her specificity can come into existence only by
borrowing the signifiers of its desire from the Other.
10
It follows then, that desire is always desire of the Other. Thus it
becomes logically impossible to conceive of the atomized individual with an unconscious interior. On the contrary, in
Lacan, the unconscious is outside rather than inside, in that it is the discourse of the Other, which is primarily meaningless,
that produces subjective effects. Given this perspective of the subject in language, the discourse of race and so-called
racial identity is necessarily a function of language that situ-ates the subject as raced within an economy of linguistic
difference and meaning. It follows that the analysis of race should not be confined to the level of the ego and the ego ideal
with its attendant mechanisms such as identification and introjection (and/or incorporation) of an object. In Seminar I, Lacan
insists that introjection is always accompanied by a symbolic denomination. Introjection is always introjection of the speech
of the Other (83). Thus bodily identity as well as ones own historical identity is engendered by the symbolic. What we
introject as race is a signifier, a certain structure of signification, a way of slicing the world, of making meaning and of
representing difference, that has its own logic or law that invests us as subjects with a semblance of coherence. My argument
is that Whiteness should be discerned as an unconscious signifier, one that generates a combinatory with its own set
of inclusions and exclusions that determine the subject. To be a raced subject is to be subjected to the signifier
Whiteness. The law of Whiteness establishes race as a neutral description of human difference. Thus, as a mode of
ordering the world, the signifier Whiteness installs a system of racial difference that is unconsciously assimilated by all
raced subjects as a factor of language, and thus as natural. In other words, Whiteness, as the inaugural term of
difference, is the primary signifier of the symbolic order of race. In this sense, Whiteness is the transindividual aspect
of the unconscious which subjects us all equally to the logic of race. The law of the symbolic order must be grasped in its
dual function as the determinant of the structure of speech and as the inexorable term of prohi-bition. In fact, language
depends upon prohibition or a logic of exclusion, which gets manifested as cultural organization through the taboo against
incest. We must therefore understand the discourse of race as a law with a certain structure, or productive capacity to
organize difference founded upon a prohibition or exclusion of some sort. (I will take up the interdictory aspect of the law
in the section on the racial symbolic and the moral law.) Let us here follow, very briefly, Lacans thinking on the law as
structuration in its pertinence to race."

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Racial visibility and identity requires a certain type of racial being that denies universality of being
race, 2000, p. 29-30 SRM

In the deployment of Lacans theory of the subject of the symbolic to the subject of race, it is necessary to inquire what the
subject of race desires. Also, what kind of access does race, as a chain of signifiers that determines the symbolic subject,
have to being, or that which is excluded by the chain? I will be suggesting that racial visibility is to be located precisely
at this point of interrogation: it is the level at which race, or more properly its master signifier Whiteness aspires to being.
The above questions suggest that the model of the subject as determined by a chain of signifiers is necessarily incomplete
insofar as it cannot account for sexual difference or more properly for the body. More questions emerge: If the unconscious is
structured like a language, then how is the body consti-tuted? If sexual difference is merely a question of the signifier, how do
we account for the bodys drives, or for sexuality that is often at odds with the logic of sexual difference? In relation to
race, to stop with the account of the symbolic function of Whiteness would be too premature, for it does not address
the issue of visibility, or the relation of the signifier to the visible body, which is, after all, the inaugural point of this
inquiry. In order to take up in earnest the question of the body and of its consti-tution as raced, it is necessary to
clarify the relation between the ego as body image and racial visibility. First, one must repudiate the notion that race is
merely a process of specular identification, where a pre-discursive and pre-raced entity assumes a racial identity on the
basis of certain familial others whose image it identifies with in a mirror relation. Such a notion is based on a simplified
account of Lacans concept of the imaginary and the mirror stage. I undertake the following discussion of the imaginary for
two reasons: to suggest that insofar as the symbolic underwrites the imaginary, race must be understood as a symbolic
phenomenon. It is a logic of difference inaugu-rated by a signifier, Whiteness, that is grounded in the unconscious
structured like a language. This signifier subjects us all equally to its law regardless of our identities as black,
white, etc. Racial visibility is a remainder of this symbolic system. Second, the process of becoming racially visible is
not coterminous with the organization of the ego or the acquisition of the body image. In other words, the visibility of
the body does not neces-sarily have to be a racial visibility It is important that one disarticulate the two processes;
otherwise racial visibility will seem to be an ontological necessity that is a universal verity of subjective existence as
such.
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Racial signifiers do not operate in an equivocal relationship with one another-Whiteness creates a
hierarchy that leads to domination
race, 2000, p. 35-36 SRM

It is important that we not mistake the moment of the constitution of the bodily ego as the necessary moment when the
body becomes racially visible. To do so would not be a sufficient departure from the erroneous belief that race is
purely a question of misrecognition or identification with a mirror image. We would merely have added the factor of
the racial signifier to the account of the mirror stage. There is no doubt that one can be constituted as a subject with a
unified bodily ego without necessarily identifying with a racial signifier, or seeing oneself as racially marked. (The
large point here is that race is not like sex. Not all are subject to the racial signifier.) We only have to consider the numerous
accounts from literature and autobiography that enact the scene of becoming racially visible to oneself Besides Fanon, who
speaks of discovering that he is black during his first visit to France, there is Stuart Hall, who in Minimal selves says that
for many Jamaicans like himself, Black is an identity which had to be learned and could only be learned in a certain moment
(1996b: 116). This process of introjecting the signifier is repeated by other characters such as Janie in Zora Neal Hurstons
Their Eyes Were Watching God, James Weldon Johnsons protagonist in Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, and by
Oulaudah Equiano in his autobiographical narrative. There are doubtless numerous other examples that one could cite. The
fact that the secondariness of race seems to apply only to so-called people of color, and that there are rare, or
virtually no instances of a so-called white person discovering his or her race may lead to several specious
speculations such as: black people identify with whites as the latter are more powerful and define the norm. Such
misidentification on the part of blacks leads to trauma when they discover the reality of their blackness (Fanons
thesis). Other problematic views might be that white people impose an identity upon those they have colo-nized in
order to justify their dominance, or whites have no race or race consciousness; whites are not racially embodied,
and this is an index of their transparency and power, etc. While some of these propositions might make some
ideological sense, all of these conclusions nevertheless presume the pre-existence of black and white as if these were
natural and neutrally descriptive terms. I would suggest that the difference among black, brown, red, yellow and white
rests on the position of each signifier in the signifying chain in its relation to the master signifier, which engenders
racial looking through a particular process of anxiety. Perhaps the more effective ideological stance may be not to raise
race consciousness among so-called whites, as scholars in Whiteness studies suggest, but to trouble the relation of the
subject to the master signifier. One must throw into doubt the security and belief in ones identity, not promote more
fulsome claims to such iden-tity.

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Race functions purely in the symbolic excluding undergirding factors of identification and a continual
fear of moral law
race, 2000, p. 41-42 SRM

Insofar as the racial law is purely symbolic, to be a raced subject is to be symbolically determined. The racial
symbolical cannot be said to be missing a signifier. Rather it supplies a master signifier (Whiteness) that appears in
the place of the object of desire (that must remain absent for desire to be possible). Insofar as it is purely symbolical, the
racial law cannot in itself bespeak the subjects, or more properly the bodys, potential for that Other jouissance, which
emerges at the site of a lackin the symbolic order. The law of race is not lacking; it supplies its own guarantee by equating
Whiteness with being. Thus the doubled aspect of the moral law that makes possible an enjoyment even as it forbids it in the
name of the good should not be thought as having a parallel in the law of race; rather the racial symbolic calculates its success,
as we shall see shortly, upon the doubleness of the moral law. Also, racial law does not have the moral authority of the incest
taboo. Its good, expressible only as purity, and eugenic health, cannot lend itself to the structure of the categorical imperative
that characterizes the moral law. The good or the morality of race does not so much slide into its opposite, as itself being
subject to continual interrogation as a good. The law of race is groundless, without a foundation of truth, but it is not
indeter-minate. Thus we can say that the moral law, insofar as it can provide no guarantee of its meaning, indexes the
radical indeterminacy of the subject, while the racial law in its function as social or symbolic determinacy (Whiteness
is its guarantee) is necessarily groundless (a function of citation) but not indeterminate. We can deconstruct race as
performativity, but not sex. The moral law given its own lack renders sex unknowable. Finally, it is in its bearing on kinship
that the racial symbolic discloses its parasitic dependence upon the moral law. The prohibition of miscegenation must be
understood not as a law that resembles the incest taboo, but rather as one that threatens it. The law of race undoes the moral
law. In the racial realm, the taboo against incest plays no role, as those racially other can never be admitted or
acknowledged within the family structure. In slave regimes, particularly the type that prevailed in North America, slave
women, we may recall, were fair game for their owners. The master could cohabit with his slaves, and the children he bred
upon his slaves, with absolute impunity. The strict separation between those who were kin (racially similar people) versus
slaves (racially dissimilar people) rendered the incest taboo void ci propos the latter group. The slave owner could play out his
fantasy of the primal father of the original horde whose murder Freud posits at the origin of the moral law. Thus the racial
symbolic, and the taboo of miscegena-tion make incest, or the time before the moral law possible even as it upholds
the law at another level. If the incest taboo dictates who one may or may not cohabit with or marry, it presupposes the
boundaries of the family, whereas the racial symbolic intervenes at a more fundamental level and presents a selected
view of the family which considerably limits the effectivity of the moral law. The threat that miscegenation poses to the
moral law explains the horror and fear that Levi-Strauss alludes to as one of the inducements to collective vengeance.
All raced subjects have cause to fear miscegenation as it could render the moral law inoperative.
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Race is founded by the basis and interrelationship to whiteness which is sexed and cannot be basis for
a stable desire of the Other
race, 2000, p. 45-46 SRM

How does race articulate itself with sex? How does it produce extra-symbolic effects? I would suggest that race aims for the
body in its otherness15 by disavowing its own historicity. For what the racial symbolic promises the subject is precisely
access to being. Whiteness offers a totality, a fullness that masquerades as being. Thus for the raced subject, to
encounter the historicity of Whiteness is particularly anxiety-producing. In other words, the cause of the raced subject is
its own disavowed historicity. I refer not so much to the fact that race is historiciz-able (that it has at its origin some historical,
cultural or social cause) but rather to the phenomenon of its Historicity (which is the delimitation of race as a regulative norm
at the expense of its natural universality) that radically exposes the subject to its own linguistic limit. To encounter ones
subjectivity as an effect of language, and not as an enigma, is anxiety-producing not because one is reduced to a construct
(what would that really mean experientially?) but because it implies the foreclosure of desire and the possibility of being. It is
to discover that the law of racial differ-ence is not attached to the Real. What the raced subject encounters, in a given moment
of anxiety, is the law as purely symbolical. This is to confront the utter groundlessness of the law of racial difference, to
discover that the question of ones being is not resolved by Whiteness, but that Whiteness is merely a signifier that
masquerades as being and thereby blocks access to lack. To pose the question of being in relation to race is to face that
there is not one. It is here that we must situate social and juridical laws against discrimination as well. Like the
prohibition against miscegenation, our legal prohibitions, couched in the language of respect for difference, ultimately
serve to protect the paradox of Whiteness. The paradox is that Whiteness attempts to signify the unsignifiable, i.e.
humanness, in order to preserve our subjective investment in race. The Other of race, in short, is not lacking; there is no hole
where being could be promising ]ouissance. All of race is expressed and captured by language. Thus the raced subject
experiences anxiety, which is a consequence of encountering the lack of a lack. It is as if the jigsaw puzzle were complete, but
there were still a piece left over for which there is no place. Anxiety is an affect, according to Lacan, that appears when there
is no possibility of desire, when there is a lack of a lack. For the raced subject, the anxiety experienced by its encounter with
historicity produces an object. Anxiety, Lacan maintains, is not without an object .. the object petit a is what falls from the
subject in anxiety. It is precisely the same object that I delineated as the cause of desire. For the subject, there is substituted,
for anxiety which does not decieive, what is to function by way of the object petit a (Television: 82). The objet a that race
produces is a lethal object, its own disavowed historicity, produced out of the lack of a lack a phobic object that tries
to make the barred Other, the desire of the symbolic, exist. This phobic objet a I suggest is localized as the pre-
discursive mark on the surface of the body. The effect of nature that race produces emerges from its anxiety, its
disavowal of its own historicity. This is the peculiarity of race which is neither in the Real, like sex, nor wholly
discursive, like class or ethnicity To recapitulate: race has no Other jouissance, no lack, no barred Other. Its
symbolical origin, however, does not render it simply historical for it relies for its effectivity on a phobic object that
exceeds biological and histor-ical explanations of identity. What this means is that one encounters the limits of ones
subjectivity as an effect of language, and the question of being as not so much that which escapes articulation, but as one that
is extin-guished or foreclosed. Thus what the study of race offers to psychoanalysis is a view of historicity that is not only
about the ungraspable, non-signifiable limit, but about the horrific confrontation of the subject with its own signi-fying
totality, the anxiety of suffering the recognition that there is no enigma to racial difference or to the raced subject. Thus what
we see repeatedly in cases of racial anxiety is the attempt to constitute that enigma through an object that has no real
consistency. An analysis of the prohibitions of misce-genation and incest reveals the intricate entwinement of race and
sex as a struggle waged in the subject for a desire that can never be its own.

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Racial jokes are indicative of the way Whiteness functions to suppress race by creating antagonistic
relationships between people of different races
race, 2000, p. 91-92 SRM

In other words, hostile jokes substitute for the violence that is forbidden expression in a homogeneous, civil society, just
as obscene jokes substitute for the spontaneous touching that is also forbidden by moral law. Thus jokes which thrive
on symbolic and legal interdiction are only possible, in Freuds view, when the joker, victim, and listener share the
same nation-ality or race, whereas with a foreign people there is no necessity to displace the aggression into a joke;
we permit ourselves to express it physi-cally.
3
Thus, in Freuds seemingly narrow conception of hostile jokes, racist jokes,
whether in a modern sovereign state or in colonialism, become redundant if not actually impossible. Thus, on the subject of
anti-Semitic jokes, for instance, Freud is quite perfunctory: The jokes made about Jews by foreigners are for the most part
brutal comic stories in which a joke is made unnecessary by the fact that Jews are regarded by foreigners as comic figures
(111). The peculiar disavowal of the racist joker (he implies that there is no such person, as there are no racist jokes, per se),
or more properly the comedian as a foreigner(!), once again nulli-fies the existence of racist jokes per Se. But there are
racist jokes that are not merely comic stories. There is enough wordplay in racist jokes to qualify them technically as
jokes and not comic stories. A cursory glance at a popular collection of jokes such as Blanche Knotts Truly Tasteless Jokes
VI (1985) proves that one can make hostile jokes about foreigners, and that racial or cultural difference within a given society
is no hindrance to joking either. Freuds peculiar blind spot with regard to this brand of hostile jokes pertains to his inability
to conceive of (or acknowledge) a multiracial society. Thus we have to resituate the function of aggression and its relation to
jokes in the disparate contexts of a modern multiracial society and in colonialism. A study of racist jokes in a multiracial
society should not be under-taken as a sociological inquiry into race relations. Christie Davies (1990) and Elliot Oring (1992)
have usefully criticized attempts to read ethnic jokes as crude indicators of social relations and levels of hostility against
specific groups, as founded on inaccurate and inconsistent assumptions. While their arguments are generally persuasive in that
they wish to preserve the spon-taneity of the joking relationship, the debate itself is largely misconceived insofar as it focuses
on the content of jokes rather than on the mechanism of joking, which reveals how Whiteness functions. Assertions to
the effect that jokes are responsible for or innocent of racial oppression displace the emphasis from the jokes
unconscious dependence on the prohibition of the law to intentionality and the conscious deployment of the joke as
insult. (Indeed, to debate this issue is perhaps to be deflected by the comic and to miss the joke.) Such a deflection would
considerably impoverish an understanding of how variations in the dialectical pressure of aggression and inhibition
(from which the joke originates) produce differing joke situations, which are indicative of shifts in the working order
of race as common sense.

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Race relies on rigid signifiers which require rigid historical practices to constitute their identity.
However, the way race is articulated always relies on certain bodily features which attempt to create a
basis for contingent identity. This denies the historicization of race and dooms both politics and
identification.
race, 2000, p. 155 SRM

What kind of an identity statement is Maggie is black? I have cited Kripkes thesis regarding names as rigid designators, and
we have extended that thesis to race designators such as black and white to suggest that these nouns also function as
names, insofar as they merely determine refer-ence without recourse to qualitative descriptions that may serve as criteria for
identity Like proper names, black and white have no meaning, and neither is their reference determined through a
cluster of concepts such that they are true in all situations. Race identity, then, is not contingent; it is necessary, even
essential, insofar as it is a rigid designation without quali-tative criteria that can be true in all situations. We have
further extended the absence of the signified in this notion of the signifier to Lacans notion of identity, particularly in relation
to the place of woman in sexual differ-ence, as something that exceeds the symbolic. If the signified is a symbolic construct,
it is precisely in its absence or failure that identity is made possible. With reference to woman and sexual difference, this is the
excluded possibility of jouissance, the lack in the Other, that determines the subject of desire as such. However, racial
identity insofar as it is entirely symbolic has no bearing on the lack in the Other. Thus the absence of the signified here
does not mean that the symbolic has failed; it is rather that it has succeeded too well. There is no question of mapping
racial difference onto the graph of sexual difference. Black, white, etc. are rigid designators, and whatever
qualities or signifieds we may attempt to attach to them will be determined by history. This does not mean that racial
identity is contingent; it is so only if we think of identity in qualitative terms. And as Kripke says, everyone knows that there
are contingent identities. Racial identity is necessary in that it rigidly designates a referent without need of qualitative
properties. To return to the context of the story, what does it mean to say that Maggie is black? What effect does it have,
especially in relation to the fact that such reference is precisely refused, by the narrator, for Twyla and Roberta? I have
suggested that one of the effects of such narrative reticence is to exemplify racial names as rigid designators without
qualitative properties. Therefore trying to decode the narrative to read one of the other characters as black or white is to
elide the fundamental proposition of the story: racial signifiers do not mean anything in the strong sense of having no
sense. Therefore, what is the effect of Robertas fixing of Maggie as black, given that Twyla was unaware of Maggies
identity as black?
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Race Section
The practices of the Third Reich are the consequences of racial visibility
race, 2000, p. 38 SRM
When the signifier of race, Whiteness, positions itself in the place of the minus phi as the object of desire, that is when
its historicity is most apparent and productive of anxiety. This is because Whiteness, by attempting to signify that
which is excluded in subject constitution, the more-than-symbolic aspect of the subject the fact that he/she is not
entirely determined by the symbolic or the imaginary produces anxiety. There is a lack of a lack as it appears in that
place that should have remained empty. It is a false door opening not onto a nowhere, but to an all-too-concrete wall. This
anxiety then produces the uncanny object of race, the arbitrary marks on the body, namely hair, skin and bone. These marks
then are properly the desiderata of race; they serve the function of the objet a. Uncanny and phobic, they make desire possible
again by producing lack on another level. The difference between the visible body as an ego function, and the visible body as
a function of Whiteness or racialization, can be understood as the difference between seeing and being seen. The subject of the
imaginary is constituted as seeing by the signifier, whereas the subject of race is consti-tuted as seen, the subject of the gaze,
through a certain logic of the signifier. If racial identity is produced by the signifier, racial visibility is produced as a
remainder, a phobic object, in order, paradoxically, to give consistency to the signifier. Racial visibility is always a
function of anxiety, but ones place in the chain may determine what form that anxiety may take. Consider for
instance, the Third Reich, where the system of race is installed as the promise of being. The lethal result is, of course,
the policy of anti-Semitism that finds its locus in that most anxious regime of visibility that finds its object in minute
and arbitrary bodily marks. By providing a psychical account of the regime of visibility, I suggest that we view the
logic of anti-Semitism not as a racist aberration of difference, but as the kernel of all racial practice as a mode of
looking.

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Race Section
Racial identification results in stereotyping and the creation of loving-hating relationships that
invariably collapse into violent regimes
race, 2000, p. 143-144 SRM

We must ask what consequence race names as rigid designators have for the psychoanalytic examination of race identity. I
suggest that insofar as race identity, unlike sexual identity, has no bearing on the real, such rigid designation is better
understood not as an indication of the failure of the symbolic (a symptom that escapes meaning or the possibility of
interpreta-tion), which would be the Lacanian translation of rigid designation, but of its agency. Black and white and other
racial signifiers do not fail to signify properties (as the woman does in her position as objet a or the symptom); they
perform the only function they can: they designate rigidly this or that individual (everything is what it is and not another
thing). Does this mean that race names as rigid designators cannot be translated into Lacanian terms, that they have no
psychoanalytic valence? That race names are rigid designators is, first of all, a counterintuitive claim. If we consider
how and why racial signifiers are used in everyday speech, we encounter not only the ideological production of specific
racial content (usually referred to as stereotypes), but the fraught status of the racial referent as such. One points with
a word black man, white woman but this pointing cannot be inno-cent in the sense that it merely establishes
reference as in: no other than Nixon might have been Nixon (Kripke 1982: 48). The pointing in this case involves the
whole regime of racial visibility which, as I have been delin-eating it, is founded on a certain anxiety This relation between
racial naming as meaning, or the description of properties, and racial naming as reference, or pure designation, is not one of
misreading the logical func-tioning of names; rather, I suggest that racial naming as referring to properties (or the
stereotype) acts as an envelope, a cover for the anxiety of racial reference which literally means nothing. (This is the
very definition of the stereotype as a form of discourse that attempts to produce meaning where none is possible.) There is
something anxiety-producing about the fullness of the signifier/referent relation that bypasses the signified, or the concept,
that would properly produce meaning and thus desire. This anxious relation between the racial signifier as rigid designation
and the racial signifier as a cluster of concepts founded on anxiety is brilliantly disclosed in the only short story ever written
by Toni Morrison, Recitatif. In the following, I read the storys technique as a working out of the Kripkean logic of naming
in relation to the Lacanian gloss on rigid designa-tors as a certain writing which indicates the failure, or the limit, of the
symbolic. I choose this text for its singular meditation on names, rigid and non-rigid, and its device of refusing to deploy the
racial name for signifi-cant purposes. This story, which is about love between women as much as it is about race, demands
that we read identity as a gendered and raced phenomenon simultaneously. The contrapuntal relation, which I have been
arguing for thus far, between race and sexual difference is sharply thema-tized in this narrative, with reference to a set of
relations that will be delineated among naming, the body, knowledge, racial ambiguity, love and hatred. I shall be arguing that
the import or the force of rigid designation in relation to race serves not so much to point up the impossibility of language
founded on the impasse of sexual difference, but the anxiety of reference inherent in racial visibility as meaningless
designation. In Recitatif, both these themes of rigid designation as an impossible writing, and as anxious reference are
braided together as unconscious knowledge, or an ignorant knowing. To expand on Morrisons musical metaphor: I read the
story as possessing the structure of an antiphony, where there is a responsive alterna-tion between racial anxiety and the
impasse of sexual difference. Approaching the referent involves a recitatif with the impossibility of language, and when
the impasse of language seems most insistent, then the referent performs an encore. The keynote being the letter of love
figured as an emptiness, a nothing to know. The two themes are reconciled only in that space of hateloving, where the
(w)hole of identity forms a paradoxical ground for what Lacan calls true love.

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Race Section
The affirmatives discourse is like a racist joke it engages in a forum for discursive colonialism
race, 2000, p. 89-90 SRM

This notion of the joke as principally dissident and of the comic as repro-ductive of power relations, then, explains why
there seems to be a predominance of comedy in colonialism and why jokes can become deeply suspect. It is a
commonplace to observe that jokes and wordplay are never tolerated by totalitarian regimes, primarily because linguistic
ambivalence may expose the hollow absolutism of regimes based on political and psycho-logical repression. But jokes are
not simply subversive, that is, they are not always the weapons of the weak against the strong. According to Freud,
jokes can thrive only when and where there is an inhibition or repression of instincts, and insofar as tendentious jokes are
concerned, it is the inhibition of aggression that fuels the witticism. However, there is the species of joke called the racist
joke, whose relationship to aggression is rather more complex than Freud seems to acknowledge. Insofar as they are
extreme examples of tendentious jokes, racist jokes reveal in greater detail the way in which they are determined by a
certain attitude to aggression its inhibition and its expression within a particular society A brief examination of
aggression in jokes in general, and in racist jokes in particular, will serve the purpose of situating in a precise fashion
the all-important function of ambivalence and aggression for the uncanny joke, which is characteristic of the scenario
of colonialism.

Attempts to utilize the state reinforce the problematic aspects of identity politics-reifying the racial
viewpoint that ignores broader systems of oppression
race, 2000, p. 158 SRM

In presenting my hypothesis to various interlocutors in formal and informal settings, I have been asked how my theory of
race as a symbolic system sustained by a regime of visibility translates into social policy. How does it affect our
thinking about affirmative action, about anti-discrimination legis-lations, about those particularly powerful modes of
political mobilization that have aggregated around identity? It is sophisticated and easy to be dismissive of identity
politics because it seems naive and essentialist. But the immeasurable weightiness of, say, the black power movement or
the womens rights movement in pushing back the forces of exploitation and resuscitating devalued cultures through the
redefinition of identity must give us pause. Identity politics works. However, the argument of this book is that it also
ultimately serves to reinforce the very system that is the source of the symptoms that such politics confines itself to
addressing. It is race itself that must be dismantled as a regime of looking. We cannot aim at this goal by merely
formulating new social policies. In fact, my theory is anti-policy for two reasons: first, any attempt to address race
systematically through policy, and by that I mean state policy, will inevitably end up reifying race. Second, the only
effective intervention can be cultural, at the grassroots level. Such intervention can and should work, sometimes in
tandem and at others in tension with state policy, but the project of dismantling the regime of race cannot be given
over to the state. Gramsci speaks of the necessity of trans-forming the cultural into the political; where race is
concerned, it is imperative that we turn what is now political, an issue of group interests, into the cultural, an issue
of social practice.

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A2 Derrida
Despite Derridas attempt to embed levinas-style ethics within the empirical world of politics, it
retains all the trappings of Abrahamic religiosity reifing the power relations that allow for the
domination of the other
Jackson, Dept. of English, Wayne St. Univ, 2007. [Ken, The Great Temptation of Religion: Why Badiou has been so important to
iek IJZS Vol. 1 no. 2]

Derridas very different (from Badiou) fascination with Levinasian religious gestures was particularly visible in his later years, a
matter evidenced institutionally by the attention he garnered from the countrys theology and religious studies departments. The
efforts of Levinas suggested to Derrida a certain messianism, a way to stay open to the other yet to come, the infinite, the
other of Being that haunts philosophy, without conceding philosophy to the traditional, religious messianisms and without
conceding the Levinasian desire to stay open to the other strictly to the ream of the religious at least as we traditionally
understand the term. It is ultimately Derridas efforts to explicate how this was possible that led Badiou to St. Paul and, as
suggested, it was St. Paul that led iek to Badiou. In 1992, in between the publication of Badious Being and Event and his 1997
St. Paul book, Derrida published Donner la mort in Lethique du don, Jacques Derrida et la pensee du don. The work was
translated in 1995 as The Gift of Death and is largely an extended reading of Soren Kierkegaards Fear and Trembling, itself, of
course, the most famous and influential modern interpretation of Genesis 22 an increasingly important text in our times in that it
ultimately unites Judaism, Christianity, and Islam around the common figure of Abram/Abraham/Ibrahim. As Derrida hinted as
long ago as 1967, Fear and Trembling can be read as an attempt on Kierkegaards part to stay open to the other, the absolute
other, in the figure of certain Abraham. Kierkegaard locates in the Genesis 22 description of Abraham a figure who eludes the
ethical, which is to say the universal of Hegelian thought. For Hegel, identity and difference, self and other, pass into one
another, and thus ultimately there is no difference, there is no other no justified incommensurability -- in his dialectical
logic. In Abraham, Kierkegaard identifies a figure who responds to the absolutely other in a way that suspends the Hegelian
ethical or universal (for Kierkegaard the two are the same thing) if only for an instant. In other words, he locates in Genesis 22 a
rupture or cut in Hegels ontological framework, a teleological suspension of the ethical. Derrida, in turn, identifies a
messianic structure in Kierkegaards philosophical gesture, a messianic structure that may determine, but is not
equivalent to, the traditional messianisms. For Abraham to respond to Gods demand to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham must kill
Isaac without believing he will get anything in return salvation, for example. Abraham must move towards the absolute other,
God, without any sense of a deal having been struck. The exchange relationship implied in any reading that emphasizes obedience
for salvation also implies some level of equality and thus negates the otherness of the absolute other, the distinction of divine
from human. To distinguish Abrahams aneconomic movement from the economy of sacrifice or exchange, Derrida
identifies in Kierkegaard the figure of the gift. The gift is the impossible, the instant when the economic circle of
exchange is interrupted and Abraham gives death (or almost gives death) without expecting anything from God in return.
The gift identifies that which is not an exchange, that which stands outside even a sacrificial economy that which is
absolutely other. The Abrahamic gift thus suggests a way to think the religious without the religions, pointing
simultaneously to a founding messianic gesture for all three monotheisms that is not specific to one tradition and a potential
obliteration of differences something other yet to come. The to come is critical here, particularly as it works its way
into Derridas more explicitly political writings like Spectres de Marx (1993) where he begins talking about a democracy to
come, a concept and phrase that still draws the comic ire of iek. Like Kierkegaard, Derrida is above all else interested in
keeping the possibility of the impossible open. However, Derrida does not simply dispense with a general obligation toward
others to fulfill the obligation toward the absolute Other (God), the tout autre. Instead he seeks to "weaken the distinction"
between the other individual and the absolutely Other. Derrida admires Kierkegaard's reading of the Abraham story in its
insistence on the difficult sacrificing of general ethics, but he is more truly tracing and refining the work of Levinas who, again,
insists on the ethical, the call of the other as manifested in (other) individuals. The call Abraham hears to sacrifice Isaac is not
from some extraordinary other, but something we all confront everyday when we protect our own children at the expense of
others, an infinite number of others whom we, in some sense, sacrifice. To put this another way, in this impossible
contradictory instant Derrida seeks to find a relationship between religious obligation and everyday ethical obligation, an
absolute obligation and a calculated, rational one. Quite simply, like Badiou, Derrida seeks to confront the problem of divine
alterity in Levinass other and, quite provocatively, he does this by juxtaposing Levinas to Kierkegaard. The Derridean hope, I
would suggest, is that if one positions Levinas next to Kierkegaard the transdescendence or materialist aspects of the Levinasian
position becomes more distinct to critics who would dismiss him as simply religious. Indeed, when Derrida begins talking
about a democracy to come he is trying to maintain the very same Abrahamic relation between the absolute and the
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everyday, the impossibly an-economic and the calculated or rational, the idealist and the materialist. Rather than simply
expose or demystify the gap between an ideal democracy and neo-liberal democracies as they actually exist, Derrida
wants to concentrate on the failure of the actual to achieve the ideal; not unlike iek, he wants to concentrate on the gap
between the ideal and the factual because this failure and this gap characterizes A priori and by definition, all democracies,
including the oldest and the most stable of so-called Western democracies. At stake here is the very concept of democracy as
concept of a promise that can only arise in such a diastema (failure, inadequation, disjunction, disadjustment, being out of
joint [here Derrida employs Hamlet]). That is why we always propose to speak of a democracy to come, not of a future
democracy in the future present, not even of a regulating idea, in the Kantian sense, or of utopia at least to the extent that their
inaccessibility would still retain the temporal form of a future present, of a future modality of the living present. [Even beyond the
regulating idea in its classic form, the idea, if that is still what it is, of democracy to come, its idea as event of a pledged
injunction that orders one to summon the very thing that will never present itself in the form of full presence, is the
opening of this gap between an infinite promise (always untenable at least for the reason that it calls for the infinite
respect of the singularity and infinite alterity of the other as much as for the respect of the countable, calculable, subjectal
equality between anonymous singularities) and the determined, necessary, but also necessarily inadequate forms of what
has to be measured against this promise. (1994: 64-65) Derrida suggests that his democracy to come, then, involves a spirit
of Marxism, a desire for justice. To this extent, the effectivity or actuality of the democratic promise, like that of the communist
promise, will always keep within it, and it must do so, this absolutely undetermined messianic hope at its heart, this eschatological
relation to the to come of an event and of singularity, of an alterity that cannot be anticipated. (1994: 65) In some sense, for those
who know Derrida, this is a reworking of differance in a specifically political context. But like differance, Derridas democracy
to come was destined to be interpreted, despite his continual rebuttals, as deferral, lateness, delay, postponement and thus
politically it suggested, at best, quietism, at worst, complicity.5 There has been some rapprochement between and Derrida and
Marxism in the making, a rapprochement that became more explicit with his death (as such things tend to go) in 2005. Badiou, for
example, in a recent talk titled as Homage to Derrida, talks of Derrida not as the messianic, waiting for something other, at odds
with materialist thought figure that many know, but as someone captivated by the problem of inexistence as the extreme of
existence. Similarly, in the opening pages of TheParallax View, iek is even willing to concede some relationship between his
notion of addressing the gap as such and Derridean differance. Since I have written many pages in which I struggle with the
work of Jacques Derrida, now when the Derridean fashion is fading away is perhaps the moment to honor his memory by
pointing out the proximity of this minimal difference to what he called differance, this neologism whose very notoriety
obfuscates its unprecedented materialist potential. (2006: 11) But like any rapprochement, this one is complicated, partial at best.
In discussing his rapprochement with Derridean thought iek ultimately offers this line of distinction: This reappraisal [of
difference] is intended to draw an even stronger line of demarcation from the usual gang of democracy-to-come
deconstructionist-postsecular- Levinasian-respect-for-Otherness suspects. So . . .as usual, I would like to point out that, as
usual (and, as usual, several sensitive people I like will look huffy), the democracy-to-come delegation has not been invited. If,
however, a resolute democrat-to-come manages to slip in, he or she, should be warned that a number of cruel traps have
been set here and there throughout the book. (2006: 11) One is never quite sure what to do with this brand of iekian humor.
The problem, again, is that even Derridas materialist refinements of Levinas were not sufficient for Badiou (or later iek).
In the figure of Abraham and the messianic openness of democracy to-come there lingered a hint of the absolute
Other, the deified rather than thoroughly laicized infinite. Even more, in the figure of Abraham the common patriarch of
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam there was the hint of the universalism of the one, a totality of Being to come, a totality
of Being that had once been accessible somehow and would be again. In presenting St. Paul in the context of Being and
Event, then, Badiou made a decisive cut between the Abrahamic Levinasian crowd and himself. In the figure of Paul
Badiou quite simply identifies the most striking contrast possible to Derridas Abraham, a distinctive gesture of
immanence to counter Derridas messianic openness. The historical Paul argues Abrahams covenant with God has been
supplanted by the resurrection of Christ. In so arguing, he helps invent the tradition of Christian typology, the practice of reading
the Hebrew Bible as only a foregrounding for what happens in the Christian New Testament. That is, Paul marks not a relation to
Abraham, but a point of non-relation, absolute difference. Paul is an apostle, not a prophet, announcing that the event has
already come not that it is perennially to- come. Indeed, for Paul, a certain notion of Judaism never was at all. Badiou
knows this biblical scholarship well. On can detects notes of the forthcoming Paul book in Being and Event. There Badiou
suggests that not only is Levinass path of thought religious, it is somewhat ironically a religious path of thought that always
ultimately follows a certain Christian route: From the point of view of experience, this path consecrates itself to mystical
annihilation; an annihilation in which, on the basis of the interruption of all presentative situations, and at the end of a negative
spiritual exercise, a Presence is gained, presence which is exactly that of the being of the One as non-being, thus the annulment of
all functions of the count of One (2005: 26). Badiou begins to suggest here that the Levinasian Jewish openness to the other
will always lead to some Christian presence or immanence. The Other (God) never stays sufficiently Other; he always
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becomes some version of the same or self (man). Here we need to tread carefully because we risk occluding the larger
discussion with the ancient divide between Jew and Christian. Badiou is not criticizing Judaism or the role Judaism played in
Levinass intellectual life. He is, again, illustrating the Great Temptation of philosophical ontologies and, in particular, the
fundamental flaw of beginning thought with a deified notion of the infinite. Badious materialist point, again, is that
there is no one, there is no God, and certainly no other (again, only a masquerade for God); there is only a multiple
without one, an infinite multiplicity with which we somehow need to come to terms -- mathematical terms. Consequently,
the sooner we give up altogether on The Great Temptation of religion to stay open to the other and the suggestion of
non or otherwise than Being the better off we will be. Thus he begins to foreground in Being and Event the way in which the
other always moves from the transcendent beyond of Being to the imminent. I nfinite multiplicity is what there and is there is
nothing else (other) and there never has been anything else (other).

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Shame Framework

The call for shame meets the race to the middle we interact with the states lack of shame by
rejecting their faulty jouissance.
Jodi Dean in 2006 (psychoanalyst, probably something in Sussex, a writer for Long Sunday, her article is
titled For Shame written April 15, 2006) SRM

Joan Copjec's discussion of shame in the new collection, Lacan: The Silent Partners provides an valuable counterpoint to Taylor's
remarks. I. Here is part of the article from the WSWS: Finally, Harry Taylor, seated in the balcony, was called on. He spoke
slowly and soberly. You never stop talking about freedom, and I appreciate that, he told Bush. But while I listen to you talk
about freedom, I see you assert your right to tap my telephone, to arrest me and hold me without charges, to try to preclude me
from breathing clean air and drinking clean water and eating safe food. If I were a woman, youd like to restrict my opportunity to
make a choice and decision about whether I can abort a pregnancy on my own behalf. You are Bush interrupted him,
facetiously, Im not your favorite guy. Go ahead. Go on, whats your question? Taylor continued, Okay, I dont have a
question. What I wanted to say to you is that Iin my lifetime, I have never felt more ashamed of, nor more frightened by my
leadership in Washington, including the presidency, by the Senate, and Some in the audience booed. Bush intervened,
benevolently, No, wait a seclet him speak. Taylor went on, in the same deliberate fashion, And I would hopeI feel like
despite your rhetoric, that compassion and common sense have been left far behind during your administration, and I would hope
from time to time that you have the humility and the grace to be ashamed of yourself inside yourself. Taylor voices his own
shame and in confronting Bush with this hopes to incite a sense of shame in the President. The President refuses--or is
pathologically unable to feel any shame at all.II. Copjec's chapter on shame, anxiety, and affect, "May '68, The Emotional
Month,' begins by recounting Lacan's plea that his students display some shame. She writes: The final aim of psychoanalysis, it
turns out, is the production of shame. In fact, the analyst should herself provoke shame, be an agent of it. Thus, Copjec traces the
topic of shame in Lacan's writing and finds that Shame marks not the social link as such, but that particular link which analysis is
intent on forging. Indeed, For Lacan, shame is the subject's ethical relation towards being, his own and the other's. Avoiding
shame is precipitated by superego, that is, by a transformation of anxiety into guilt and the accompanying provision of a sham
jouissance (with this I've far too briefly encapsulated a more intricate argument--it involves in part the unbearableness of anxiety,
an interesting discussion of the university discourse, and a critique of Levinas that is beyond the discussion I want to introduce
here). At any rate, Copjec writes: Lacan's call to shame What anxiety exposes as ungraspable or unclaimable jouissance is that
which the guilty shamelessly grasp for in the obsequious respect they pay to a past sacralized as their future. The feverish pursuit
of this future ... is the poor substitute...the guilty acceptance in the place of the real sweetness of jouissance. She concludes that
should thus be understood in terms of a call to relinquish our attachment to a sham jouissance. Shame is not a failed flight
from being, but a flight into being, where being--the being of surfaces, of social existence--is viewed as that which protects us
from the ravages of anxiety ... Unlike the flight or transformation of guilt, however, shame does not sacrifice jouissance's opacity,
which is finally what 'keeps it real' ... But instead of inhibiting us, this opacity now gives us that distance from ourselves and our
world that allows us creatively to alter both; it gives us, in other words, a privacy, an interiority unreachable even by ourselves.
Harry Taylor attempts to induce in Bush a sense of shame. This attempt is an attempt to establish a different kind of social
link, one that is more ethical, more in keeping with Bush's rhetoric regarding freedom. It is remarkable that Taylor
confronts his own shame, taking responsibility for his position as a citizen within a country whose electoral procedures led
to Bush. He doesn't simply blame the President. Nor does he engage him with a question. That is, he doesn't carry on the
pretense of some kind of democratic deliberation--having already articulated the very factual reasons that democracy is clearly
the wrong word for the politics that goes on in the US today. Instead, Taylor rejects the faulty jouissance offered by the
President--and eagerly lapped up by the crowd and the msm as is described in the WSWS article--indicating the possibility of
something more than what we have, something that was promised, something gestured to rhetorically, but missing
nonetheless. The crudeness, the obscene, stupid cruelties of Bushs remarks are indications of his shamelessness. He has no
interiority to speak of, to speak from, or to fasten a speaking that would not grasp for the horrifying future we see unfoldi ng
before us. We should take seriously the words spoken to Senator Joe McCarthy: "have you no shame sir, have you no
shame?" But, what do we do when the answer is, "No--I have none"?

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Judge-as-analyst framework

Our framework for the round is that the judge should invoke the role of the psychoanalyst. The very
role of the analyst is to invoke shame placing ourselves in the position of the object cause of desire,
the team who must be listened to whether to beat or to learn from, puts us in a position of respect. By
utilizing this respect in an unfortunate position of power, we have created shame via our
confrontation with the implications of the affirmatives speech act.
silent partners; May 68, the Emotional Month) SRM

For the most part, the reversals or upendings referred to in the seminar's title produce something other than psychoanalysis,
another kind of discourse, namely, that of the Master, the Hysteric, or the University. That is, the specific operation of 'reversal'
referred to in the title is that of the 'quarter-turns' or rotations which produce the four discourses, of which psychoanalysis is only
one.2 Yet there is also a sense in which the reversal does take place within psychoanalysis itself, as Lacan turns classical
Freudian theory upside down and inside out to produce a more revolutionary version of it, and thus to redefine the
'analytic discourse' as a new social bond. At the end of the seminar, this social tie is rendered in a distilled formula that
exposes the intimate ambition of the analyst - who, in her impossible role as analyst, operates on the analysand - as rather
unseemly. The final aim of psychoanalysis, it turns out, is the production of shame. That which Lacan himself describes as
unmentionable, even improper to speech as such, is mentioned (and mentioned only) on the threshold of the seminar's close.
The seamy underside of psychoanalysis, the backside towards which all the twists and turns have led, is finally shame: that affect
whose very mention brings a blush to the face. 3 Why is shame given such a place of honour, if we may put it that way, in the
seminar? And what should the position of the analyst be with respect to it? Should she try to reduce it, get rid of it, lower
her eyes before it? No; Lacan proposes that the analyst make herself the agent of it. Provoke it. Looking out into the
audience gathered in large numbers around him, he accounts for their presence in his final, closing remarks thus: if you
have come here to listen to what I have to say, it is because I have positioned myself with respect to you as analyst, that is:
as object-cause of your desire. And in this way I have helped you to feel ashamed. End of seminar.

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Engaging in the role of the analyst can displace social fantasy and begin to challenge stable notions of
truth
Shoshana Felman, professor of comparative studies at Yale university, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight:
Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture, 1987, p. 43-44
In what sense, then, does the second scene in Poes tale, while repeating the first scene, nonetheless differ from it? In the
sense, precisely, that the second scene, through the repetition, allows for an understanding, for an analysis of the first. This
analysis through repetition is to become, in Lacans ingenious reading, no less than an allegory of psychoanalysis. The
intervention of Dupin, who restores the letter to the queen, is thus compared to the intervention of the analyst, who rids
the patient of the symptom. The analysts effectiveness, however, does not spring from his intellectual strength but
insists Lacanfrom his position in the repetitive structure. By virtue of his occupying the third positionthat is, the
locus of the unconscious of the subject as a place of substitution of letter for letter (of signifier for signifier)the
analyst, through transfer-ence, allows at once for a repetition of the trauma and for a sym-bolic substitution, and thus
effects the dramas denouement. It is instructive to compare Lacans study of the psychoanalytical repetition compulsion in
Poes text to Marie Bonapartes study of Poes repetition compulsion through his text. Although the two analysts study the
same author and focus on the same psychoan-alytic concept, their approaches are strikingly different. To the extent that
Bonapartes study of Poe has become a classic, a model of applied psychoanalysis, I would like, in pointing out the
differ-ences in Lacans approach, to suggest the way in which those dif-ferences at once put in question the traditional
approach and offer an alternative to it. i. What does a repetition compulsion repeat? Interpretation of difference as
opposed to interpretation of identity. For Marie Bo-naparte, what is compulsively repeated through the variety of Poes texts
is the same unconscious fantasy: Poes sadonecrophiliac desire for his dead mother. For Lacan, what is repeated in the text is
not the content of a fantasy but the symbolic displacement of a signifier through the insistence of a signifying chain; repetition
is not of sameness but of difference, not of independent terms or of anal-ogous themes but of a structure of differential
interrelationships, in which what returns is always other. Thus, the triangular structure repeats itself only through the
difference of the characters who successively come to occupy the three positions; its structural significance is perceived
only through this difference. Likewise, the significance of the letter is situated in its displacement, that is, in its
repetitive movements toward a different place. And the second scene, being, for Lacan, an allegory of analysis, is important
not just in that it repeats the first scene, but in the way this repetition (like the transferential repetition of a psychoanalytical
experience) makes a difference: brings about a solution to the problem. Thus, whereas Bonaparte analyzes repetition as the
insistence of identity, for Lacan any possible insight into the reality of the unconscious is contingent on a perception of
repetition, not as a confirmation of identity, but as the insistence of the indelibility of a difference. z. An analysis of
the signifier as opposed to an analysis of the signified. In the light of Lacans reading of Poes tale as itself an allegory of
the psychoanalytic reading, it might be illuminating to define the difference in approach between Lacan and Bonaparte in
terms of the story. If the purloined letter can be said to be a sign of the unconscious, for Bonaparte the analysts task is to
uncover the letters content, which she believesas do the policeto be hidden somewhere in the real, in some secret
biographical depth. For Lacan, on the other hand, the analysts task is not to read the letters hidden referential content,
but to situate the superficial indication of its textual movement, to analyze the paradoxically invisible symbolic
evidence of its displacement, its structural in-sistence, in a signifying chain. There is such a thing, writes Poe, as being
too profound. Truth is not always in a well. In fact, as regards the most important knowledge, I do believe she is
invariably superficial.18 Espousing Poes insight, Lacan makes the principle of symbolic evidence the guideline for an
analysis not of the signified but of the signifierfor an analysis of the unconscious (the re-pressed) not as hidden but
on the contrary as exposedin lan-guagethrough a significant (rhetorical) displacement.

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Analytic analysis of signifiers can reveal alternative textual modes of representation that can solve for
unconscious violence
This analysis of the signifier, the model of which can be found in Freuds interpretation of dreams, is nonetheless a
radical reversal of the traditional expectations involved in the common psychoan-alytical approach to literature and its
invariable search for hidden meanings. Indeed, not only is Lacans reading of The Purloined Letter subversive of the
traditional model of psychoanalytic read-ing: it is, in general, a type of reading that is methodologically unprecedented in the
history of literary criticism. The history of reading has accustomed us to the assumptionusually unques-tionedthat reading
is finding meaning, that interpretation can dwell only on the meaningful. Lacans analysis of the signifier opens up a radically
new assumption, an assumption that is an insightful logical and methodological consequence of Freuds discovery: that what
can be read (and perhaps what should be read) is not just meaning but the lack of meaning; that significance lies not just in
consciousness but, specifically, in its disruption; that the signifier can be analyzed in its effects without its signified being
known; that the lack of meaningthe discontinuity in conscious under-standingcan and should be interpreted as such,
without neces-sarily being transformed into meaning. Lets take a look, writes Lacan: We shall find illumination in what at
first seems to obscure matters: the fact that the tale leaves us in virtually total ig-norance of the sender, no less than of the
contents, of the letter. (p. 57) The signifier is not functional. . . . We might even admit that the letter has an entirely
different (if no more urgent) meaning for the Queen than the one understood by the Minister. The sequence of events
would not be noticeably affected, not even if it were strictly incomprehensible to an uninformed reader. (p. 56) But
that this is the very effect of the unconscious in the precise sense that we teach that the unconscious means that man is
inhabited by the signifier. (p. 66) Thus, for Lacan, what is analytical par excellence is not (as is the case for Bonaparte)
the readable but the unreadable and the effects of the unreadable. What calls for analysis is the insistence of the
unreadable in the text.

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PSYCHOANALYSIS GOOD
Psychoanalysis can be a method of crafting new knowledge and challenging violent conceptions of
subjectivity
Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture, 1987, p. 76
Psychoanalysis is a pedagogical experience. As a process that gives access to new knowledge previously denied to
consciousness, it affords what might be called a lesson in cognition (and in miscog-nition), an epistemological
instruction. Psychoanalysis institutes in this way a unique and original mode of learning: original not only in its
procedures but in the fact that it gives access to information unavailable through any other mode of learning
unprecedented information, hitherto unlearnable. We learnt, writes Freud, a quantity of things which could not have been
learnt except through analysis (SE 22.147). This new mode of investigation and learning has, however, a very different
temporality from the conventional linearcumula-tive and progressivetemporality of learning, as it has traditionally been
conceived by pedagogical theory and practice. Proceeding not through linear progression but through breakthroughs,
leaps, dis-continuities, regressions, and deferred action, the analytic learning process puts in question the traditional
pedagogical belief in in-tellectual perfectibility, the progressist view of learning as a simple one-way road from
ignorance to knowledge. It is in effect the very concept of both ignorance and knowl-edgethe understanding of what to
know and not to know may really meanthat psychoanalysis has modified, renewed. And it is precisely the originality of
this renewal which is central to Lacans thought, to Lacans specific way of understanding the cul-tural, pedagogical
and epistemological revolution implied by the discovery of the unconscious.

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PSYCHOANALYSIS GOOD
Analysis investigates the basis for homogenous individual identity-it is a reflexive position which
challenges violent relationships between self and other
What Lacan thus brings to light is the fact that what Freud s in-augural stephis constitutive procedureinaugurates
and later institutes is a new and unprecedented mode of reflexivityof the process through which something turns
back upon itself: a new mode of reflexivity that necessarily incorporates a passage through the Other, not as a
reflection of the self but as a radical difference from the self, a radical difference to which, paradoxically, the very
movement of reflexivity is addressed; a reflexivity whose self-ref-erence, whose process of turning back upon itself, is
not based on symmetry but on asymmetry: asymmetry between the self departed from and the self returned to;
asymmetry between the turn and the return; a reflexivity, therefore, which, passing through the Other, returns to itself
without quite being able to rejoin itself; a reflexivity which is thus untotalizable, that is, irreducibly dialogic, and in
which what is returned to the self from the Other is, paradoxically, the ignorance or the forgetfulness of its own
message; a reflexivity, therefore, which is a new mode of cognition or information gath-ering whereby Ignorance itself
becomes structurally informative, in an asymmetrically reflexive dialogue in which the interlocutors through
languageinform each other of what they do not know. What Lacan also points out for the first time is the way in which
this new Freudian mode of reflexivity differs from the traditional humanistic mode of reflexivity, from the classical
psychological and philosophical epistemology of self-reflection. Self-reflection, the tra-ditional fundamental principle of
consciousness and of conscious thought, is what Lacan traces back to the mirror stage, to the symmetrical dual structure of
the Imaginary. Self-reflection is al-ways a mirror reflection, that is, the illusory functioning of sym-metrical reflexivity,
of reasoning by the illusory principle of symmetry between self and self as well as between self and other; a symmetry
that subsumes all difference within a delusion of a unified and homogenous individual identity. But the new Freudian
mode of reflexivity precisely shifts, displaces, and unsettles the very bound-aries between self and other, subverting by the
same token the symmetry that founds their dichotomy, their clear-cut opposition to each other. By shifting and undercutting
the clear-cut polarities between subject and object, self and other, inside and outside, analyst and analysand,
consciousness and the unconscious, the new Freudian reflexivity substitutes for all traditional binary, symmetrical
con-ceptual oppositionsthat is, substitutes for the very foundations of Western metaphysicsa new mode of interfering
heterogeneity. This new reflexive modeinstituted by Freuds way of listening to the discourse of the hysteric and
which Lacan will call the in-mixture of the subjects (E
4i5)divides
the subjects differently, in such a way that they are
neither entirely distinguished, separate from each other, nor, correlatively, entirely totalizable but, rather, interfering
from within and in one another.

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PSYCHOANALYSIS GOOD
The analytic process can detach textual knowledge from its social production
Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture, 1987, p. 81
In anaylsis, what sets in motion the psychoanalytical appren-ticeship is the peculiar pedagogical structure of the
analytic situ-ation. The analysand speaks to the analyst, whom he endows with the authority of the one who possesses
knowledgeknowledge of what is precisely lacking in the analysands own knowledge. The analyst, however, knows
nothing of the sort. His only competence, insists Lacan, lies in what I would call textual knowledge, so as to oppose it to the
referential notion which only masks it (Scilicet zi). Textual knowledgethe very stuff the literature teacher is supposed to
deal inis knowledge of the functioning of language, of symbolic structures, of the signifier, knowledge at once derived
fromand directed towardinterpretation. But such knowledge cannot be acquired (or possessed) once and for all: each case,
each text, has its own specific, singular symbolic functioning and requires a different interpretation. The analysts, says Lacan,
are those who share this knowledge only at the price, on the condition of their not being able to exchange it (Scilicet 59).
Analytic (textual) knowledge cannot be exchanged, it has to be usedand used in each case differently, according to
the sin-gularity of the case, according to the specificity of the text. Textual or analytic knowledge is, in other words,
that peculiarly specific knowledge which, unlike any commodity, is subsumed by its use value, having no exchange
value whatsoever. Analysis thus has no use for ready-made interpretations, for knowledge given in ad-vance. Lacan
insists on the insistence with which Freud recom-mends to us to approach each new case as if we had never learnt
anything from his first interpretations (Scilicet zo). What the analyst must know, concludes Lacan, is how to
ignore what he knows.

Only the analytic space can reveal the non-spoken elements of desire-such methods of speaking of the
repressed can begin to fracture the ordering engendered in social fantasy
Serge Leclaire, psychoanalyst and instructor at the institute du psychoanalytic Paris, A Child Is Being Killed: On Primary
Narcissism and the Death Drive, 1998, pg. 58-59
I dont believe in the neutralizing illusion of the impassive mask and in this instance find no need to defend myself against
what could be construed as seduction. Analytical listening implies bring-ing into play the spot of silence that is the place of
transference. What is given there is the space for an act of real intelligence in terms of the logic of exclusion, a passage
beyond the web of repre-sentatives, a way of passing through the mirror. The analysts pres-ence, kindness, neutrality, and
silence are merely inadequate or ap-proximate ways of marking this point of no resistance to which his own analysis
must at least have brought him, with no turning back. Whether we call this, paradoxically, conscious awareness or
describe it as the advent of the subject or the recognition of castra-tion, what we can absolutely demand of an analyst is
a knowledge of what speaking means, what decisive shadows words can hide, and how they can show the subject crossing
their web. To have experi-enced it is to discover, in repeated phantasies, their forever new grains of origin. It is to set free what
is locked up in our knowl-edge; in dealing with our analysands, to recognize without hold-ing back what cuts to the quickin
short, nothing less than to take account of the unaccountable, to perpetrate the death of the word-image and to undermine the
all-powerful unconscious rep-resentative. These are necessary operations through which the (re)birth of the subject can
be realized. Words are prey to the uni-versal work of repression in which every family unit, group, or so-cial order
takes part, and they never stop reverting to muteness. Only by giving the most vigilant attention to questioning the
un-conscious representative, and above all by calling into question the tyrannical primary narcissistic representative, can
speaking be kept alive. Here another side of the killing-the-child phantasy is revealed: by naming the child infans, the
discourse of repression pounces on the fact that he does not use words, so it can make of him, unfairly, the one who
does not speak. It is true that it would be convenient for princes, parents, and teachers of all sorts if each subject
were only to repeat faithfully what he is told and if the child did not dis-turb the order of repression by speaking the
truth. Be quiet, you dont know what youre saying is what the so-called analyst repeats in his own way when he orders
magisterially, Speak, I know what you are saying! And yet, well before a child can put words to-gether, he speaks and lays
bare what speaking means, in an orgy of jubilation and rage, smiles and cries. The little interloper must be made to behave,
to look, precisely like the picture of good behav-ior:5 a first killing perpetrated well-meaningly and in good con-science
and whose result (the very image of a nonspeaking infans or rehearing parrot) will constantly have to be killed in order to
re-trieve what it represents through its fascinating image, in renewed power and engendering force.
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PSYCHOANALYSIS GOOD
Psychoanalysis challenges the stable notion of the subject and its interaction with death
What, then, is psychoanalysis if not precisely a life usage of the death instincta practical, productive use of the
compulsion to repeat, through a replaying of the symbolic meaning of the death that the subject has repeatedly
experienced, and through a recog-nition and assumption of the meaning of this death (separation, loss) as a symbolic
means of the subjects coming to terms not with death but, paradoxically, with life? The game is already played, the dice
are already thrown, with this one exception, that we can take them once more in our hand and throw them once again (S
11.256). This is what a practical psychoanalysis is all about. And this is what Freud tells us in his later speculative narrative,
which seeks its way beyond the pleasure principle, beyond his earlier discovery of wish fulfillment, beyond his earlier wish-
fulfilling way of dreaming Sophocles. The Oedipus complex, says Lacan in one of those suggestive, richly understated
statements (pronounced in an unpublished sem-inar), the Oedipus complex isa dream of Freuds. This ap-parently
transparent sentence is in effect a complex restatement of the way psychoanalysis is staked in the discovery that The
Inter-pretation of Dreams narrates: a complex restatement both of Freuds discovery of the theory of wish fulfillment as the
meaning of dreams and of Freuds discovery of the narrative of Oedipus as validating the discovery of the theory. It was
through his self-analysis, out of his own dream about his father which revealed to Freud his own Oedipal complexity, that
Freud retrieved the founding, psychoan-alytic meaning of the literary Oedipus. The Oedipus complex is a dream of Freuds.
Now a dream (to a psychoanalyst, at least) is not the opposite of truth; but neither is it truth that can be taken literally, at face
value. A dream is what demands interpretation. And interpretation is what goes beyond the dream, even if
interpretation is itself noth-ing more than another dream, that is, not a theory, but still another (free-associated)
narrative, another metaphorical account of the discourse of the Other.

Only psychoanalysis addresses the gaze of the Other which makes possible political action.
Jodi Dean. Enjoyment as a Category of Political Thought.Annual Meeting of American Political Science Association,
September, jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/files/aspa_05_enjoyment.doc 2005.
Zizek also differs from Foucault with respect to the status or place of the subjectivized practices. Whereas Foucault accounts
for the unity of disciplinary practices by referring to the dispersion of specific logics of power (logics around confession and
speaking, observation and surveillance, examination and judgment as they take material form in architectures, urban planning,
and designs for education and punishment, for example), Zizek addresses a peculiar fact about the subjects performance
of its practices: the gaze before which it imagines itself performing. This gaze constitutes the Other who registers my
acts in the symbolic network.
19
Following Lacan, Zizek understands this gaze as the ego ideal, as a point of symbolic
identification. The gaze is more than the product of a particular architecture intended to install normalizing judgment
and discipline the behavior of the observed (for example, the panopticon as introduced by Jeremy Bentham and elaborated by
Foucault). Instead, for Zizek, the gaze is a crucial supposition for the very capacity to act at all. Identifying with the gaze
enables the subject to be active. The gaze is the point from which one sees ones actions as valuable and worthwhile, as
making sense. Absent that gaze, one may feel trapped, passive, unsure as to the point of doing anything at all. This
gaze, then, structures our relation to our practices. Instead of experiencing the state as myriad forms and
organizations, branches, and edicts, presences and regulations, say, in our daily activities we posit the state as a kind of
entity, an other, aware of what we are doing (a positing that, unfortunately, makes ever more sense as it is materialized in
surveillance technologies). Similarly, we may posit an enemy assessing our every action. The point, then, is that through
symbolic identification the subject posits the very entity it understands itself as responding to. And how it imagines this
other will be crucial to the kinds of activities the subject can undertake.

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LACAN SOLVES FEMINISM
Lacanian politics open up the space for the agency of the feminine
Slavoj Zizek, professor of philosophy at university of Ljubljana, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and
Related Matters, 1996, pg. 157-158

This situation is analogous to the common notion of God as a person criticized by Spinoza: in their endeavour to
understand the world around them by formulating the network of causal connections between events and objects,
people sooner or later reach the point at which their understanding fails, encounters a limit, and God (conceived as an
old bearded wise man, etc.) merely gives body to this limit we project into the personalized notion of God the hidden,
unfathomable cause of all that cannot be understood and explained via a clear causal connection. The first operation of the
critique of ideology is therefore to recognize in the fascinating presence of God the filler of the gaps in the structure of
our knowledge that is, the element in the guise of which the lack in our positive knowledge acquires positive presence.
And my point is that it is somewhat analogous to the feminine non-all: this non-all does not mean that woman is not
entirely submitted to the Phallus; rather, it signals that she sees through the fascinating presence of the Phallus, that
she is able to discern in it the filler of the inconsistency of the big Other. Yet another way to put it would be to say that
the passage from S (A) to the big Phi is the passage from impossibility to prohibition: S(A) stands for the impossibility of the
signifier of the big Other, for the fact that there is no Other of Other, that the field of the Other is inherently
inconsistent; and the big Phi reifies this impossibility into the Exception, into a sacred, prohibited/unattainable agent
who avoids castration and is thus able really to enjoy (the primordial Father, the Lady in courtly love).
73

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THEIR FRAMEWORK WORSE
The affirmative situates politics entirely within the state and ignores the crucial nature of psychology.
Refusal to accept the nature of the symbolic order means their framework forecloses any productive
political actions.

Like the network of signifying relations that forms the Lacanian Symbolic the register of the speaking subject and the order of
the law - politics may function as the framework within which we experience social reality, but only insofar as it compels
us to experience that reality in the form of a fantasy: the fantasy, precisely, of form as such, of an order, an organization,
that assures the stability of our identities as subjects and the coherence of the Imaginary totalizations through which those
identities appear to us in recognizable form. Though the material conditions of human experience may indeed be at stake
in the various conflicts by means of which differing political perspectives vie for the power to name, and by naming to
shape, our collective reality, the ceaseless conflict of their social visions conceals their common will to install, and to install
as reality itself, one libidinally subtended fantasy or another intended to screen out the emptiness that the signifier embeds
at the core of the Symbolic. Politics, to put this another way, names the space in which Imaginary relations, relations that
hark back to a misrecognition of the self as enjoying some originary access to presence (a presence retroactively posited
and therefore lost, one might say, from the start), compete for Symbolic fulfillment, for actualization in the realm of the
language to which subjectification subjects us all. Only the mediation of the signifier allows us to articulate those Imaginary
relations, though always at the price of introducing the distance that precludes their realization: the distance inherent in the
chain of ceaseless deferrals and substitutions to which language as a system of differences necessarily gives birth. The signifier,
as alienating and meaningless token of our Symbolic constitution as subjects (as token, that is, of our subjectification through
subjection to the prospect of meaning); the signifier, by means of which we always inhabit the order of the Other, the order of a
social and linguistic reality articulated from somewhere else; the signifier, which calls us into meaning by seeming to call us to
ourselves: this signifier only bestows a sort of promissory identity, one with which we can never succeed in fully coinciding
because we, as subjects of the signifier, can only be signifiers ourselves, can only ever aspire to catch up to whatever it is
we might signify by closing the gap that divides us and, paradoxically, makes us subjects through that act of division
alone. This structural inability of the subject to merge with the self for which it sees itself as a signifier in the eyes of the
Other necessitates various strategies designed to suture the subject in the space of meaning where Symbolic and
Imaginary overlap. Politics names the social enactment of the subject's attempt to establish the conditions for this
impossible consolidation by identifying with something outside itself in order to enter the presence, deferred perpetually,
of itself. Politics, that is, names the struggle to effect a fantasmatk order of reality in which the subject's alienation would
vanish into the seamlessness of identity at the endpoint of the endless chain of signifiers lived as history.

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MORE STUFF
Language has a dialectic relationship which mediates social relations of domination
Slavoj Zizek, researcher at the institute for sociology at Ljubljana, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 1989, pg. 212

Ernesto Laclau was quite right to remark that it is language which is, in an unheardof sense, a Stalinist phenomenon' The
Stalinist ritual, the empty flattery which holds together the community, the neutral voice, totally freed of all psychological
remnants, which pronounces the confessions in the staged political processes they realize, in the purest form to date, a
dimension which is probably essential to language as such. There is no need to revert to the pre-Socratic foundation if we
want to penetrate the origins of language; the History of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) is more than sufficient. Where
can the subject who is thus emptied find his objective corre-lative? The Hegelian answer is: in Wealth, in money obtained in
exchange for flattery. The proposition Wealth is the Self repeats at this level the proposition The Spirit is a bone: in
both cases we are dealing with a proposition which is at first sight absurd, nonsensical, with an equation the terms of
which are incompatible; in both cases we encounter the same logical structure of passage: the subject, totally lost in the
medium of language (language of gestures and gtimaces; language of flattery), finds his objective counterpart in the
inertia of a non-language object (skull, money). The paradox, the patent nonsense of money this inert, external,
passive object that we can hold in our hands and manipulate serving as the immediate embodiment of Self, is no
more difficult to accept than the proposition that the skull embodies the immediate effectivity of the Spirit. The
difference between the two propositions is determined solely by the difference in the starting point of the respective
dialectical move-ment: if we start from language reduced to gestures and grimaces of the body, the objective
counterpart to the subject is what at this level presents the total inertia the skullbone; but if we conceive language as
the medium of the social relations of domination, its objective counter-part is of course wealth as the embodiment,

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MORE STUFF
We must use the basis of understanding the universe in terms of the real and the symbolic because
they are the driving force behind human experience
Slavoj Zizek, professor of philosophy at university of Ljubljana, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and
Related Matters, 1996, pg. 227-228

Is not this virtual state of an electron which, upon admitting its mistake and acknowledging its unreality, returns to non-
existence, equivalent to what Lacan describes as the state between the two deaths? An entity exists only so long as it does not
register, take note of, its nonexistence like the proverbial cartoon cat which, although it has no ground under its feet, is
unaware of this, and so calmly continues to walk in the air.. . . What is thereby attested is the discord between knowledge and
being: knowledge always involves some loss of being and, vice versa, every being is always grounded upon some ignorance.
The supreme example of this discord in psychoanalysis, of course, is the notion of symptom: a symptom, in its very painful
reality, disappears as the result of a successful interpretation. In quantum physics, this same discord is in force not only at
the level of micro-particles but also at the macro level: the hypothesis of quantum cosmology is that the universe as such
resulted from a gigantic vacuum fluctuation the universe in its entirety, its positive existence, bears witness to some
global pathological disturbed balance, to a broken symmetry, and is therefore doomed to return to a primordial Void.
The difference between quantum cosmology and the New Age mythology of cosmic balance is insurmountable here: the New
Age attitude engages us in an endeavour to set our derailed world right by re-establishing the lost balance of cosmic
principles (Yin and Yang, etc.), whereas the ontological implication of quantum cosmology and its notion of vacuum
fluctuation is that something exists at all only in so far as the universe is out of joint. In other words, the very existence of
the universe bears witness to some fundamental disturbance or lost balance: something can emerge out of nothing
(the vacuum) only via a broken symmetry. Quantum physics and cosmology are thus within the tradition of what Althusser
called aleatoric materialism, the tradition that begins with Epicurus, accord-ing to whom the cosmos was born out of the
declination fklinamen] of falling atoms. The lesson of Lacan (and of Hegel, pace the usual platitudes about the complementary
relationship of opposites in dia-lectics) ultimately amounts to the same: hubris is constitutive; the bias of our experience
accounts for its fragile consistency, balance is another name for death. Quantum physics therefore cuts off the very
possibility of a retreat into the New Age mythology of natural balance: nature, the universe in its entirety, results from
a pathological tilt; as such, it also is only in so far as it does not take note of its nonexistence.... That is to say: here, at
this crucial point, we must draw all the consequences from the fundamental impasse of quantum cosmology: the wave
function collapses that is to say, reality as we know it is constituted when the quantum event is registered in its
surroundings, when an observer takes note of it; so how does this collapse take place when the event in question is the
universe in its entirety? Who, in this casey is the observer? Here, of course, there is a strong temptation to introduce God in
the role of this universal Observer: the universe actually exists because its existence is registered by Him.... The only
consistent way to resist this temptation while remaining within the co-ordinates of the quantum universe is fully to
embrace the paradox that the universe in its entirety is feminine: like Woman in Lacan, the universe in its entirety does
not exist, it is a mere quantum fluctuation without any external boundary that would enable us to conceive it as
actual.

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