Cyclops

The Cyclopes made a deal with the devil. They would give up
one eye and they would be able to see the future. But the only
future they were able to see was the day they were going to
die. If they tried to change that future, like not to sleep under
the rock they saw fall on them, then they would die an even
more painful death that they did not see coming.
The affirmative is a Cyclops marching along their own
pathways of linear causality to a death that they have asked
you to postpone by voting for them, every round they ask
judges to save their lives, begging for the mercy of the ballot,
living under the rock of global catastrophe waiting for it to
crush them. Such an existence entrenches a form of depressive
melancholy in our consciousness that negates the pleasure of
being alive, setting the stage for a continuous repetition of the
atrocities of the 20th Century. This debate round is about
competing strategies for encountering the worlduse the
ballot to encounter the present, experience the pleasure of a
precarious existence and find the world as if you are
experiencing everything for the first time, like a scientist on an
alien planet.
And their homogenous view of politics causes policy failure,
turning the case
Srniceck 7 [Nick, Assemblage Theory, Complexity and Contentious Politics: The
Political Ontology of Gilles Deleuze]

This priority afforded to individuation also has important implications for the
ontological nature of laws and regularities throughout the political world. If
regularities are correlations between stable phenomena , then the theory of
individuation put forth here accounts for how these stable terms of a correlation first
emerge. The constant conjunctions of events and the patterns of behaviour from which laws derive their
evidence, are the secondary results of contingently habitual interactions between these constructed individuals.
Moreover,

a theory of individuation also provides an ontological account for the

variance of the correlation itself; since individuals are not simply instantiations of
universal properties (e.g. middle-class-ness), they are not simply carbon-copies of each

other. Instead, they must always be produced as a singular group with more or less
similarity to how political science eventually defines them. The correlation between, for
example, the rise of a middle class and the emergence of demands for democracy, is
therefore far from being a sure thing . Instead, the intensive relations that come
together to produce this singular middle class group and to produce a
democratizing system must also be taken into account. What tensions exist between
the emerging (more or less homogeneous) grouping of the middle class, and the other
significant (more or less homogeneous) groups in the region? What sorts of problematic relations exist
between the present moment of increasing wealth for the middle class, past traditions constituted in a milieu of

What sorts of disparities exist within the

middle class, such as the division between rural and urban, male and female, etc.? It is these types of
questions which enable the theorist to see the middle class, in its singular nature , as
the result of intensive differences between its emerging individuality and its
surrounding socio-politico-geographico- historical contex t.79 Focusing solely on the
properties of a constituted middle-class group overlooks not only the process
through which it came to exist, but also the recurring processes underlying the
changes (subtle or otherwise) that continue to recur.
relative poverty, and future potentials for change?

2NC Death
1. They dropped that death isnt an impact in the 1NC. No new answers in
the 1AR. Preserve the integrity of the block and punish them for 2AC sand
bagging.

2. We can never truly die as chaos and life goes on even at the
microscopic level. Only by disengaging ourselves with the future and only
concern ourselves with the present, we fail to see an end in our existence.
Death no longer seems to be an end to our living, and our evasive policies
dont take effect. Only by exploiting the uncertainty of the future can we
ensure happiness and avoid melancholy. Their plan only attempts to
protect life; life that has a definitive end thats Deleuze and Parnet.

3. Death is a fantasy our biology means we cannot truly die or cease to

be, rather we enter a new form of becoming: becoming earth. Becoming
decomposition. Even if we are all wiped from the face of the earth in a
hailstorm of nuclear bombs or asteroids the process of life goes on even at
the micro level. There is no unique warrant for why the biological
construct of human deserves a place higher than the construct of atoms.
This desire to be secure from death is the most personal level of
microfascism that negates our ability to live life to its fullest and breeds
ressentiment. We dont endorse the gendered language.
Deleuze and Guattari 1972, Anti-Oedipus, 330-39, Murray

But it seems that things are becoming very obscure, for what is this distinction between the experience of death

is it a death desire? A being-far-death? Or rather an

investment of death, even if speculative? None of the above. The experience of
death is the most common of occurrences in the unconscious, precisely because it
occurs in life and for life, in every passage or becoming, in every intensity as
passage or becoming. It is in the very nature of every intensity to invest within itself
the zero intensity starting from which it is produced, in one moment, as that which
grows or diminishes according to an infinity of degrees (as Klossowski noted, "an afflux is
and the model of death? Here again,

necessary merely to signify the absence of intensity"). We have attempted to show in this respect how the relations
of attraction and repulsion produced such states, sensations, and emotions, which imply a new energetic

the
unconscious as a real subject has scattered an apparent residual and nomadic
subject around the entire compass of its cycle, a subject that passes by way of all
the becomings corresponding to the included disjunctions: the last part of the
desiring-machine, the adjacent part. These intense becomings and feelings, these
intensive emotions, feed deliriums and hallucinations. But in themselves, these intensive emotions are
closest to the matter whose zero degree they invest in itself. They control the unconscious experience
of death, insofar as death is what is felt in every feeling, what never ceases and
never finishes happening in every becoming-in the becoming-another-sex, the
conversion and form the third kind of synthesis, the synthesis of conjunction. One might say that

becoming-god, the becoming-a-race, etc., forming zones of intensity on the body

without organs. Every intensity controls within its own life the experience of death,
and envelops it. And it is doubtless the case that every intensity is extinguished at
the end, that every becoming itself becomes a becoming-death! Death, then, does
actually happen. Maurice Blanchot distinguishes this twofold nature dearly, these two irreducible aspects of
death; the one, according to which the apparent subject never ceases to live and travel as a One-"one never stops

this same subject, fixed as I,

actually dies-which is to say it finally ceases to die since it ends up dying, in the
reality of a last instant that fixes it in this way as an I, all the while undoing the
intensity, carrying it back to the zero that envelops it. From one aspect to the other, there is not
at all a personal deepening, but something quite different: there is a return from the experience of
death to the model of death, in the cycle of the desiring-machines. The cycle is
closed. For a new departure, since this I is another? The experience of death must have given us
exactly enough broadened experience, in order to live and know that the desiringmachines do not die. And that the subject as an adjacent part is always a "one" who
conducts the experience, not an I who receives the model. For the model itself is not
the I either, but the body without organs. And I does not rejoin the model without the model starting
out again in the direction of another experience. Always going from the model to the experience,
and starting out again, returning from the model to the experience, is what
schizophrenizing death amounts to, the exercise of the desiring-machines (which is
and never has done with dying"; and the other, according to which

their very secret, well understood by the terrifying authors). The machines tell us this, and make us live it, feel it,
deeper than delirium and further than hallucination: yes, the return to repulsion will condition other attractions,
other functionings, the setting in motion of other working parts on the body without organs, the putting to work of

"Let him die in

his leaping through unheard-of and unnamable things: other horrible workers will
come; they will begin on the horizons where the other collapsed !"29 The Eternal
Return as experience, and as the deterritorialized circuit of all the cycles of desire.
other adjacent parts on the periphery that have as much a right to say One as we ourselves do.

How odd the psychoanalytic venture is. Psychoanalysis ought to be a song of life, or else be worth nothing at all. It
ought, practically, to teach us to sing life. And see how the most defeated, sad .song of death emanates from it:
eiapopeia. From the start, and because of his stubborn dualism of the drives, Freud never stopped trying to limit the
discovery of a subjective or vital essence of desire as libido. But when the dualism passed into a death instinct
against Eros, this was no longer a simple limitation, it was a liquidation of the libido. Reich did not go wrong here,
and was perhaps the only one to maintain that the product of analysis should be a free and joyous person, a carrier
of the life flows, capable of carrying them all the way into the desert and decoding them-even if this idea
necessarily took on the appearance of a crazy idea, given what had become of analysis. He demonstrated that
Freud, no less than lung and Adler, had repudiated the sexual position: the fixing of the death instinct in fact
deprives sexuality of its generative role on at least one essential point, which is the genesis of anxiety, since this
genesis becomes the autonomous cause of sexual repression instead of its result; it follows that sexuality as desire
no longer animates a social critique of civilization, but that civilization on the contrary finds itself sanctified as the

By in principle turning death

against death, by making this turned-back death (la mort ret aurneev into a force of
desire by putting it in the service of a pseudo life through an entire culture of guilt
feeling. There is no need to tell all over how psychoanalysis culminates in a theory of culture that takes up again
sale agency capable of opposing the death desire. And how. does. it do this?

the age-old task of the ascetic ideal Nirvana, the cultural extract, judging life, belittling life, measuring life against
death, and only retaining from life what the death of death wants very much to leave us with - a sublime
resignation. As Reich says, when psychoanalysis began to speak of Eros, the whole world breathed a sigh of relief':
one knew what this meant, and that everything was going to unfold within a mortified life, since Thanatos was now
the partner of Eros, for worse but also for better. Psychoanalysis becomes the training ground of a new kind of
priest, the director of bad conscience:

cure us!

bad conscience has made us sick, but that is what will

Freud did not hide what was really at issue with the introduction of the death instinct: it is not a

The death instinct is pure

silence, pure transcendence, not givable and not given in experience. This very point IS
question of any fact whatever, but merely of a principle, a question of principle.

remarkable: It IS because death, according to Freud, has neither a model nor an experience, that he makes of it a

transcendent principle."! So that the psychoanalysts who refused the death instinct did so for the same reasons as
those who accepted it: some said that there was no death instinct since there was no model or experience in the

We
say, to the contrary, that there is no death instinct because there is both the model and
the experience of death in the unconscious. Death then is a part of the desiringmachine, a part that must itself be judged, evaluated in the functioning of the
machine and the system of its energetic conversions, and not as an abstract
principle. If Freud needs death as a principle, this is by virtue of the requirements of the dualism that maintains
unconscious; others, that there was a death instinct precisely because there was no model or experience.

a qualitative opposition between the drives (you will not escape the conflict): once the dualism of the sexual drives
and the ego drives has only a topological scope, the qualitative or dynamic dualism passes between Eros and

the same enterprise is continued and reinforced-eliminating the machinic

element of desire, the desiring-machines. It is a matter of eliminating the libido,
insofar as it implies the possibility of energetic conversions in the machine (LibidoNurnen-Voluptas). It is a matter of imposing the idea of an energetic duality rendering
the machinic transformations impossible, with everything obliged to pass by way of
an indifferent neutral energy, that energy emanating from Oedipus and capable of being added to either
Thanatos. But

of the two irreducible forms neutralizing, mortifying life.* The purpose of the topological and dynamic dualities is to
thrust aside the point of view of functional multiplicity that alone is economic. (Szondi situates the problem clearly:
why two kinds of drives qualified as molar, functioning mysteriously, which is to say Oedipally, rather than n genes
of drives-eight molecular genes, for example-functioning machinically") If one looks in this direction for the ultimate
reason why Freud erects a transcendent death instinct as a principle, the reason will be found in Freud's practice
itself. For if the principle has nothing to do with the facts, it has a lot to do with the psychoanalyst's conception of
psychoanalytic practice, a conception the psychoanalyst wishes to impose. Freud made the most profound
discovery of the abstract subjective essence of desire-Libido. But since he re-alienated this essence, reinvesting it in
a subjective system of representation of the ego, and since he receded this essence on the residual territoriality of
Oedipus and under the despotic signifier of castration, he could no longer conceive the essence of life except in a
form turned back against itself, in the form of death itself. And this neutralization, this turning against life, is also

"The
ascetic ideal is an artifice for the preservation of life ... even when he wounds
himself, this master of destruction, of self-destructing-the very wound itself compels
him to live. . . ."32 It is Oedipus, the marshy earth, that gives off a powerful odor of
decay and death; and it is castration, the pious ascetic wound, the signifier, that
makes of this death a conservatory for the Oedipal life . Desire is in itself not a
desire to love, but a force to love, a virtue that gives and produces, that engineers.
(For how could what is in life still desire life? Who would want to call that a desire?) But desire
must turn back against itself in the name of a horrible Ananke, the Ananke of the
weak and the depressed, the contagious neurotic Ananke; desire must produce its shadow or
the last way in which a depressive and exhausted libido can go on surviving, and dream that it is surviving:

its monkey, and find a strange artificial force for vegetating in the void, at the heart of its own Jack. For better days
to come? It must-but who talks in this way? What abjectness-become a desire to be loved, and worse, a sniveling
desire to have been loved, a desire that is reborn of its own frustration: no, daddy-mommy didn't love me enough.
Sick desire stretches out on the couch, an artificial swamp, a little earth, a little mother. "Look at you, stumbling and
staggering with no use in your legs .... And it's nothing but your wanting to be loved which does it. A maudlin crying
to be loved, which makes your knees go all ricky."33 Just as there are two stomachs for the ruminant, there must
also exist two abortions, two castrations for sick desire: once in the family, in the familial scene, with the knitting
mother; another time in an asepticized clinic, in the psychoanalytic scene, with specialist artists who know how to
handle the death instinct and "bring off" castration, "bring off" frustration.

2NC Alt Ext (1:45)

As an empiricist, your business is the present, the flows of
matter and energy, the beauty of self-organized material into
cycles of creation and destruction that inspire one another.
Paradoxically, our 1NC Deleuze and Parnet evidence indicates
that creating artificial images of the future makes us less able
to effectively discuss or predict its twisted pathways because
we inevitably create visions of the future that our reflections
of ourselves. Lose yourself in these fluxes of material and let
them strip away what you thought you knew about reality and
about policy debate. Dont make interpretations, predictions or
good guesses as if the future can be measured or estimated
your best guess is less accurate than trying to figure out how
many jelly beans fill a jar that no one has ever seen. Instead
you should experiment, rigorously define your terms and their
relations and let your approach be fluid.
The 1AC is a system of control in search of the rationale for its
own continued necessity -- every facet of reality becomes
evidence of chaos from which the re-assertion of order is the
only antidote -- as an empiricist you should recognize this
impulse as a fascist attempt to reclaim the transcendent unity
of a dead God in the bureaucratic institutions of the State that
is both self-referential and dangerous
Chtelet 75 Francois, Les annes de dmolition p. 263
we call transcendence a priciple posed both as a source of all
explanation and as a superior reality. The word has a nice ring to it and I find it fitting. The
presumptuous, small or large , from the leader of a small group to that the president
of the United States, from a psychiatrist to a CEO can only function by recourse
(coups) to transcendence- just as a drunk might get by through sips (coups) of red
wine. The medieval God has spread himself thin, without losing his strength or his
profound formal unity. Science, the Working Class, the Motherland, Progress, Health,
Defense, Democracy, Socialism the list would be too long are all among his
avatars. These transcendences, which exercise with a heightened ferocity their
labors of organization and extermination, have taken his place (to such a degree
that we can say he is still there, omnipresent).
In our philosophical jargon,

2NC Impact
In reality they are in no position to provide our salvation
their reductionist thought is fascism. We should stop asking
what to do, and start asking how we got here. A focus on the
present over the future and past is preferable.
Schlag 91 (Pierre, Colorado law prof. 139 u. Pa. L. Rev.801, April)
it will seem especially urgent to ask once again: What should be
done? How should we live? What should the law be? These are the hard questions.
These are the momentous questions. And they are the wrong ones. They are wrong
because it is these very normative questions that reprieve legal thinkers from
recognizing the extent to which the cherished "ideals" of legal academic thought are
implicated in the reproduction and maintenance of precisely those ugly "realities" of
legal practice the academy so routinely condemns. It is these normative questions
that allow legal thinkers to shield themselves from the recognition that their work
product consists largely of the reproduction of rhetorical structures by which human
beings can be coerced into achieving ends of dubious social origin and implication. It is these very
normative questions that allow legal academics to continue to address (rather
lamely) bureaucratic power structures as if they were rational, morally competent,
individual humanist subjects. It is these very normative questions that allow legal thinkers to assume
For these legal thinkers,

blithely that -- in a world ruled by HMOs, personnel policies, standard operating procedures, performance
requirements, standard work incentives, and productivity monitoring -- they somehow have escaped the
It is these normative questions that enable them to represent
themselves as whole and intact, as self-directing individual liberal humanist subjects
at once rational, morally competent, and in control of their own situations, the
captain of their own ships, the Hercules of their own empires, the author of their
own texts. It isn't so. n5 And if it isn't so, it would seem advisable to make some
adjustments in the agenda and practice of legal thought. That is what I will be trying to do
bureaucratic power games.

here. Much of what follows will no doubt seem threatening or nihilistic to many readers. In part that is because this
article puts in question the very coherence, meaningfulness, and integrity of the kinds of normative disputes and

One question will no doubt recur to the

reader throughout this article: "But what should we do?" That question is not going to receive
a straightforward answer here, and I would like to explain why at the outset . Suppose that you are
walking on a road and you come to a fork. This calls for a decision, for a choice. So you ask
your companions: "Which fork should we take? Where should we go?" You all begin to talk
about it, to consider the possibilities , to [*806] weigh the considerations. Given these circumstances,
given this sort of problem, the questions, "Where should we go? What should we do?" are perfectly sensible. 6 But
now suppose that it gets dark and the terrain becomes less familiar . You are no longer
sure which road you are on or even if you are on a road at all. 7 So you ask, "where are we?" One of
your companions says "I don't know -- I think we should just keep going forward."
Another one says, "I think we should just go back ." Yet another says "No, I think we should go
left." Now given the right context, each of these suggestions can be perfectly
sensible. But not in this context. Not anymore. On the contrary, you know very well that
going forward, backward, left or in any other direction makes no sense unless you
happen to know where you are. So, of course, you try to figure out where you are.
discussion that almost all of us in the legal academy practice.

You look around for telltale signs.

You scan the horizon. You try to reconstruct mentally how you got

Meanwhile,
if your companions keep asking "But what should we do? Which road should we
take?," you are likely to think that these kinds of questions are not particularly
helpful. The questions (Where should we go? Which fork should we take?) that seemed to make so much sense a
short time back have now become a hindrance. And if your companions keep up this sort of
questioning (Which road should we take? Which way should we go?), you're going to start
wondering about how to get them to focus on the new situation, how to get them to
drop this "fork in the road" stuff and start using a different metaphor .
here in the first place. You explore. You even start thinking about how to figure out where you are.