We need new forms of education that offset and

problematize the saturation of settler colonial knowledge

in the debate space, lacking there of creates debate as a
training ground for violent forms of knowledge.
WilliamV.Spanos,(WilliamV.Spanosondebatehttp://the3nr.com/2010/01/17/spanosondebate/WilliamSpanos
inJoeMillersbookCrossex(pg.467)Prof.AtBinghamton,knownballer2004,)
Dear Joe Miller, Yes, the statement about the American debate circuit you refer to was made
by me, though some years ago. I strongly believed then --and still do, even though a certain uneasiness about
"objectivity" has crept into the "philosophy of debate" -- that debate in both the high schools and colleges in this country is assumed to take
place nowhere, even though the issues that are debated are profoundly historical, which means that positions are always represented from the
perspective of power, and a matter of life and death. I

find it grotesque that in the debate world, it doesn't

matter which position you take on an issue -- say, the United States' unilateral wars of
preemption -- as long as you "score points". The world we live in is a world entirely
dominated by an "exceptionalist" America which has perennially claimed that it has
been chosen by God or History to fulfill his/its "errand in the wilderness." That claim is
powerful because American economic and military power lies behind it. And any
alternative position in such a world is virtually powerless. Given this inexorable
historical reality, to assume, as the protocols of debate do, that all positions are equal is
to efface the imbalances of power that are the fundamental condition of history and to
annul the Moral authority inhering in the position of the oppressed. This is why I have
said that the appropriation of my interested work on education and empire to this
transcendental debate world constitute a travesty of my intentions. My scholarship is not
"disinterested." It is militant and intended to ameliorate as much as possible the pain and
suffering of those who have been oppressed by the "democratic" institutions that have
power precisely by way of showing that their language if "truth," far from being
"disinterested" or "objective" as it is always claimed, is informed by the will to power
over all manner of "others." This is also why I told my interlocutor that he and those in the
debate world who felt like him [We] should call into question the traditional "objective"
debate protocols and the instrumentalist language they privilege in favor of a concept of
debate and of language in which life and death matter[s]. I am very much aware that the
arrogant neocons who now saturate the government of the Bush administration -- judges,
pentagon planners, state department officials, etc. learned their "disinterested" argumentative skills in
the high school and college debate societies and that, accordingly, they have become masters at
disarming the just causes of the oppressed. This kind leadership will reproduce itself (along with

the invisible oppression it perpetrates) as long as the training ground and the debate
protocols from which it emerges remains in tact. A revolution in the debate world must
occur. It must force that unworldly world down into the historical arena where positions
make a difference. To invoke the late Edward Said, only such a revolution will be capable
of "deterring democracy" (in Noam Chomsky's ironic phrase), of instigating the secular
critical consciousness that is, in my mind, the sine qua non for avoiding the immanent
global disaster towards which the blind arrogance of Bush Administration and his
neocon policy makers is leading.13

3rd: Other DA: Fighting coloniality in educational spaces is

the only ethical obligation, only internal link to
maintaining a relationship to the other, lacking thereof
creates educational spaces that justify violence toward
the other.
Maldonado-Torres 08 [Nelson. Professor at UC Berkeley. Against War. Pg
154-8]

The previous chapter concluded with the question of the possibility of love. A consistent account of this question

the self is primarily a gift that gives,

and who, as embodied, is also able to receive and to be hospitable. The consistent
expression of this subjectivity entails the restoration of an ordinary world where the
self can unfold that is, where giving and receiving can find non-pathological forms.
Subjectivity also means for Fanon agency and freedom. But this agency and freedom are not those
of a monad or an egocentric subjectivity. Freedom and agency show themselves in work, and
primarily in the loving humanizing work that Fanon took so seriously (see bswm 222). It is in this way also
entails an innovative view of subjectivity. For Fanon, as for Levinas,

that Fanon provides a response to the question of desire: As soon as I desire I am asking to be considered. I am
not merely here-and-now, sealed into thingness. I am for somewhere else and for something else. [ demand that
notice be taken of my negating activity insofar as I pursue something other than life; insofar as I do battle for the
creation of a human-world that is, of a world of reciprocal recognitions (bswm 218). From love to action and work
we are led then to political revolutionary activity. I do not carry innocence to the point of believing that appeals to
reason or to respect for human dignity can alter reality. For the Negro who works on a sugar plantation in Le Robert,

there is only one solution: to fight. He will embark on this struggle, and he will pursue it, not as the
result of a Marxist or idealistic analysis but qiiite simply because he cannot conceive of life
otherwise than in the form of a battle against exploitation, misery, and hunger .
(bswm 224) Confronting a reality where imperial politics violate the ordinariness of the
extraordinary, Fanon defended an ethico-political praxis of liberation. This praxis entails
a sort of teleological suspension of identity and of universality in the interest of the humanization of the world. In
this case, the suspension is not, as in Kierkegaards formulation, a suspension of the ethical.75 Both the
suspension and the telos are ethical for Fanon. The teleological suspension of identity and universality is at the
same time an ethico-political defiance of the telos of empire.

The formation of a truly human world

can only follow from committed, radical,

and paradoxical acts of love. Fanon unveils the need

for a pathos of love that stands against the ethos of empire. There are no recipes for political action. But Fanon
gives a clear sense of the priorities. He proposes that the struggle for recognition be taken primarily in the sense of
a struggle for genuine human intersubjectivity. Fanon anchors ideas of fraternity and intersubjectivity not in
equality, in common natural kind or in fe-cundity, but in the upsurge of a loving subjectivity toward one who is

metaphysical desire toward the Other who is above (in a

manifests itself concretely in the commitment for the improvement
of those who are "below" (faceless creatures of the world of empire) to the point
of giving ones life for the Other. Life and death acquire new meaning under the paradox of
substitution. Risking ones life surpasses the economy of recognition . At the end, Fanon is
more concerned about the death of the slave than about his own death. He is more
concerned about being an accomplice to murder than of confronting his own
demise. Nothing less is what he means when he says that he is answerable in [his] body and in [his] heart for
what happens to the Jew. His participation in the Second World War should leave no doubt about this. Fanon
lives his life, not anticipating his own death, but rather, as it were, going against it
so that he can have the time to respond to the Other. The teleological suspension of identity
below. In Levinasian terms,
position of highness)

ultimately involves then a teleological suspension of the destructive powers of death. Life in this sense is not

defined, as Levinas insistently argued, by anguish over ones own death, but by an affection more passive than a
trauma.76 The death of the Other becomes the veritable scandal . For Levinas, Deathas the
death of the other [autrui] cannot be separated from this dramatic character; it is emotion par excellence,
affection or being affected par excellence.77 Fanons existence gave clear expression to the trace of this affection.
This is made evident in a letter he wrote to a friend four weeks prior to his death: Roger, what I wanted to tell you
is that death is always with us and that what matters is not to know whether we can escape it but whether we have
achieved the maximum for the ideas we have made our own. What shocked me here in my bed when I felt my
strength ebbing away along with my blood was not the fact of dying as such, but to die of leukemia, in Washington,
when three months ago I could have died facing the enemy since I was already aware that I had this disease. We
are nothing on earth if we are not in the first place the slaves of a cause, the cause of the peoples, the cause of
justice and liberty. I want you to know that even when the doctors had given me up, in the gathering dusk I was
still thinking of the Algerian people, of the peoples in the Third World, and when I have persevered, it was for their
sake.78 In the deathbed, without having to anticipate death because it appears to be simply on his side waiting for
him, Fanon is primarily concerned for the Other.79 Once again the logics of recognition are dislocated when, in a

life is nothing if we do not make ourselves the

slaves of a cause. The desire to be master finds here its most direct and radical
opposite. It is as if Fanon has been taken hostage by the Other, living for him to the
point of substitution. It is as if he had become, out of love, the slave of the slave.R0 It is this
paradoxical position that I have been referring to as altericity. Altericity defines,
beyond Heideggerian care and the Hegelian life and death struggle, a unique mode of ethical
and ethico-political subjectivity.81 In Levinass formulation, "being affected by the death of the Other is
paradoxical act of love, Fanon declares that

a remarkable and essential event of my psychism insofar as it is a human psychism.82 Accordingly, Levinas
argues, Wo are raking up this term desire; to a subjoc! turned to itself, which, according to the Stoic formula is
characterized by . . . the tendency to persist in its being, or for which, according to Heideggers formula, there is in
its existence question as to this very existence, a subject thus defined by care for itself, which in happiness
realizes its for itself, we are opposing the desire for the other which proceeds from a being already gratified and in
this sense independent, which does not desire for itself. It is the need of him who no longer has needs. It is
recognizable in the need for an other who is another [Autrui], who is neither my enemy (as he is in Hobbes and
Hegel) nor my "complement, as he still is in Platos Republic, which is set up because something is lacking in the
subsistence of each individual. ... In desire the I is borne toward the other in such a way as to compromise the
sovereign self- identification of the I, for which need is but nostalgia and which the consciousness of need

When this desire takes

the form of a political struggle against the structures of dehumanization then we
can refer to it, following Chela Sandoval, as de-colonial love.85 De-colonial love is
positive, and not, like traditional conceptions of critique, only negative. Fanon makes clear his disagreement with
anticipates.83 Desire is primarily, for Levinas as for Fanon, desire for the Other.84

conceptions of subjectivity that privilege negativity: "Man is not merely a possibility of recapture or of negation. If it
is true that consciousness is a process of transcendence, we have to see too that this transcendence is haunted by

Desire is
the upsurge of the loving subjectivity. It is a Yes, or a radical affirmation of sociality
and interhuman contact. Altericity is the Yes of love expressed as non-indifference
toward the Other, primarily toward the Other who is "below (also sub-Other or subalter). The Yes of love thus leads to a conception of ethical struggle against the
dehumanization of the sub-alter. In this sense, altericity is another way of conceiving the de-colonial
the problems of love and understanding. Man is a yes that vibrates to cosmic harmonies (BSWM 8).

attitude, out of which the de-colonial reduction emerges and is sustained. As simultaneously affirmative of
generosity and critical of damnation, altericity and the de-colonial attitude are both affirmative and negative: I said

man is a yes. I will never stop reiterating that. Yes to life. Yes to love. Yes to
generosity. But man is also a no. No to exploitation of man. No to the butchery of
what is most human in man: freedom, (bswm 222)
in my introduction that