***Psychoanalysis – MAGS***

**Neg**
 General 1NC
The aff’s piecemeal criticism of surveillance is a kind of enjoyment,
precisely what maintains the larger structure of state control—
repealing surveillance laws can’t change the underlying structure of
enjoyment so we should instead overconform to reveal the obscene
underside of the surveillance fantasy
KRIPS 2010 (Henry, Professor of Cultural Studies and Andrew W. Mellon all Claremont Chair of Humanities
at Claremont Graduate University; “The Politics of the Gaze: Foucault, Lacan and Žižek”, Culture Unbound,
Volume 2, 2010)
It is clear that the film theoretic account of Foucault that Copjec uses, misrepresents Foucault’s concept of the panoptic gaze, and that this
misrepresentation, in turn, is responsible for her insistence upon a gap between the Foucauldian and Lacanian concepts of the gaze. By correctly
representing Foucault, I have closed this gap. A fortiori I have changed the exclusively conservative political valence that, in virtue of its function
as a disciplinary tool that supports the status quo, has come to be associated with the panopticon. In particular, I allow that, like the Lacanian
gaze, and depending on context, the Foucauldian gaze may have either disruptive, Dionysian effects or conservative, Apollonian effects.5
Foucault’s “practices of freedom” are one way of thinking the possibility of disruptive effects . Rather than
pursuing this line of thought at an abstract level, however, I turn finally to Slavoj Žižek’s work, in particular his concept of overconformity,
in order to show that, by reconceiving the panoptic gaze along the lines that I have suggested, new political possibilities
arise for opposing modern regimes of surveillance.
Central to Žižek’s account of the modern state is the concept of “an obscene underside of the law ”, namely widespread
practices – petty tax evasion, speeding, walking on the grass, etc – which, although strictly speaking illicit, are unofficially
tolerated. This network of practices is sustained thanks to what Žižek calls an “ideological phantasy” that keeps them an “open secret” –
everyone knows about and participates in them in private, but no one mentions them, let alone publicly flaunts participating
in them. Such practices constitute points of failure of the law in so far as they fall in an indeterminate zone in relation to legal categories: on the one hand, in so far
as they are tolerated they are not straightforwardly illegal, but, on the other hand, neither are they legal; and as such, constitute a fundamental illegality at the heart of
the legal system. Žižek’s point is that, rather
than undermining the law, the obscene underside of the law sustains it –
the law is tol-erated because of the little secret pleasures that people derive from its obscene underside . In
Lacanian terms, we may say that the obscene underside of the law is the set of necessary but repressed points of failure of
the legal system – in short, it is the symptom of the legal system. In particular, in the context of a legal state apparatus that is
held in place by a panoptic system of surveillance, the obscene underside of the law is a liminal zone of
high anxiety that, like the Emperor’s body under his new clothes, is obscenely visible to each of his
subjects in the privacy of their own visual field, yet must be shrouded in a cloak of invisibility in the
public realm. This is the site of the gaze. How are we to oppose such a system, which seemingly coexists with, indeed
depends upon its own systematic transgression? According to Žižek, not by acts of resistance, since the system is
readily able to accommodate, indeed depends upon such acts .6
Instead, Žižek suggests opposition through acts of overconformity, which, rather than protesting let alone breaking
the law, insist upon it to the letter, even when ideological “common sense” suggests otherwise . In particular,
this means a refusal to turn a “blind eye” from manifestations of law’s obscene underside . As Žižek puts it:
“Sometimes, at least – the truly subversive thing is not to disregard the explicit letter of Law on behalf of the
underlying fantasies, but to stick to this letter against the fantasy which sustains it ….Is not an exemplary case of such
subversion-through-identification provided by Jaroslav Hǎsek’s The Good Soldier Schweik, the novel whose hero wreaks total havoc by simply
executing the orders of his superiors in an overzealous and all-too-literal way (Žižek 1997: 30, 22, 31).
What constitutes such strategies of overconformity in the context of a modern panoptic regime of
surveillance? Answer: openly/publicly sticking to the letter of the law by refusing the cloak of invisibility
that shrouds the law’s points of failure; in other words, by refusing to indulge what Žižek calls “the ideological
fantasy ”, orchestrating a direct encounter with the objet a qua gaze. To put it in Žižek’s terms, it is a matter of
“actively endorsing the passive confrontation with the objet a , bypassing the intermediate role of the screen of fantasy”
(Žižek 1997: 31). To be specific, it is matter of not merely saying but also acting out publicly what everyone
knows in private but dares not say: not merely announcing in public that the Emperor is naked, but
arresting him for indecent exposure. By Lacanianizing Foucault, as I have done here, we are able to understand the logic behind
such heterodox strategies for opposing modern regimes of surveillance.

The aff’s political project is impossible—the plan stands in for a future

world without surveillance, but there is always some obstacle to our
political visions which will met with violence and ultimately risks
extinction—examining the structure of desire and enjoyment rather
than projecting better political worlds is the only means of channeling
the death drive away from catastrophe
McGowan 2013 --- Associate Professor at the University of Vermont (Todd, Enjoying What We Don’t
Have, Project Muse)//trepka
There is no path leading from the death drive to utopia. The death drive undermines every attempt to construct
a utopia; it is the enemy of the good society. It is thus not surprising that political thought from Plato onward has largely ignored
this psychic force of repetition and negation. But this does not mean that psychoanalytic thought concerning the death drive has only
a negative value for political theorizing. It is possible to conceive of a positive politics of the death drive. The
previous chapters have attempted to lay out the political implications of the death drive, and, on this basis, we can sketch
what a society founded on a recognition of the death drive might look like . Such a recognition would not
involve a radical transformation of society: in one sense, it would leave everything as it is. In contemporary social
arrangements, the death drive subverts progress with repetition and leads to the widespread
sacrifice of self-interest for the enjoyment of the sacrifice itself. This structure is impervious to change and to
all attempts at amelioration. But in another sense, the recognition of the death drive would change everything.
Recognizing the centrality of the death drive would not eliminate the proclivity to sacrifice for
the sake of enjoyment, but it would change our relationship to this sacrifice. Rather than being
done for the sake of an ultimate enjoyment to be achieved in the future, it would be done for
its own sake. The fundamental problem with the effort to escape the death drive and pursue the good is that it leaves us
unable to locate where our enjoyment lies. By positing a future where we will attain the ultimate enjoyment (either through the
purchase of the perfect commodity or through a transcendent romantic union or through the attainment of some heavenly paradise),
we replace the partial enjoyment of the death drive with the image of a complete enjoyment to come. There is no question of fully
enjoying our submission to the death drive. We will always remain alienated from our mode of enjoying. As Adrian Johnston rightly
points out, “Transgressively ‘overcoming’ the impediments of the drives doesn’t enable one to simply enjoy enjoyment.”1 But we
can transform our relationship to the impediments that block the full realization of our drive. We
can see the impediments as the internal product of the death drive rather than as an external limit. The enjoyment that the
death drive provides, in contrast to the form of enjoyment proffered by capitalism, religion, and utopian
politics, is at once infinite and limited. This oxymoronic form of enjoyment operates in the way that the concept does
in Hegel’s Logic. The concept attains its infinitude not through endless progress toward a point that
always remains beyond and out of reach but through including the beyond as a beyond
within itself. As Hegel puts it, “The universality of the concept is the achieved beyond, whereas that bad infinity remains
afflicted with a beyond which is unattainable but remains a mere progression to infinity.”2 That is to say, the concept
transforms an external limit into an internal one and thereby becomes both infinite and limited .
The infinitude of the concept is nothing but the concept’s own self-limitation. The enjoyment
that the death drive produces also achieves its infinitude through self-limitation. It revolves around a
lost object that exists only insofar as it is lost, and it relates to this object as the vehicle for the infinite unfurling of its movement.
The lost object operates as the self-limitation of the death drive through which the drive
produces an infinite enjoyment. Rather than acting as a mark of the drive’s finitude, the limitation that the lost object
introduces provides access to infinity. A society founded on a recognition of the death drive would be one that
view ed its limitations as the source of its infinite enjoyment rather than an obstacle to
that enjoyment. To take the clearest and most traumatic example in recent history, the recognition of the death
drive in 1930s Germany would have conceived the figure of the Jew not as the barrier to the
ultimate enjoyment that must therefore be eliminated but as the internal limi t through
which German society attained its enjoyment. As numerous theorists have said, the appeal of Nazism lay
in its ability to mobilize the enjoyment of the average German through pointing out a threat
to that enjoyment. The average German under Nazism could enjoy the figure of the Jew as it
appeared in the form of an obstacle, but it is possible to recognize the obstacle not as an external
limit but as an internal one. In this way, the figure of the Jew would become merely a figure for
the average German rather than a position embodied by actual Jews. Closer to home, one
would recognize the terrorist as a figure representing the internal limit of global capitalist
society. Far from serving as an obstacle to the ultimate enjoyment in that society, the terrorist provides a barrier
where none otherwise exists and thereby serves as the vehicle through which capitalist society
attains its enjoyment . The absence of explicit limitations within contemporary global capitalism necessitates such a
figure: if terrorists did not exist, global capitalist society would have to invent them. But
recognizing the terrorist as the internal limit of global capitalist society would mean the end
of terrorism. This recognition would transform the global landscape and deprive would-be
terrorists of the libidinal space within which to act. Though some people may continue to blow up buildings,
they would cease to be terrorists in the way that we now understand the term. A self-limiting society would still have real
batt les to fight. There would remain a need for this society to defend itself against external threats and against the cruelty of the
natural universe. Perhaps it would require nuclear weapons in space to defend against comets or meteors that would threaten to
wipe out human life on the planet. But it would cease positing the ultimate enjoyment in vanquishing an
external threat or surpassing a natural limit. The external limit would no longer stand in
for a repressed internal one. Such a society would instead enjoy its own internal
limitations and merely address external limits as they came up. Psychoanalytic theory never
preaches, and it cannot help us to construct a better society. But it can help us to subtract the illusion of the
good from our own society. By depriving us of this illusion, it has the ability to transform our
thinking about politics. With the assistance of psychoanalytic thought, we might reconceive politics in a direction
completely opposed to that articulated by Aristotle, to whichZizalluded in the introduction. In the Politics, Aristotle asserts: “Every
state is a community of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some good; for everyone always acts in order
to obtain that which they think good. But, if all communities aim at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest
of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good.”3 Though later
political thinkers have obviously departed from Aristotle concerning the question of the content of the good society, few have
thought of politics in terms opposed to the good. This is what psychoanalytic thought introduces. If we act on the basis of
enjoyment rather than the good , this does not mean that we can simply construct a society
that privileges enjoyment in an overt way. An open society with no restrictions on sexual activity, drug use, food
consumption, or play in general would not be a more enjoyable one than our own. That is the sure path to impoverishing our ability
to enjoy, as the aftermath of the 1960s has made painfully clear. One must arrive at enjoyment indirectly . A society
centered around the death drive would not be a better society, nor would it entail less suffering. Rather than continually
sacrificing for the sake of the good, we would sacrifice the good for the sake of enjoyment. A
society centered around the death drive would allow us to recognize that we enjoy the lost
object only insofar as it remains lost.

The act of demanding government change is doomed to failure

because situating our demands with the state creates an addiction to
refusal that maintains the worst elements of our political structure—
their framework arguments are only coherent within this perverse
commitment to the status quo, and all of the purported benefits to
their model of debate require the intervention of our alternative first
Lundberg 12 --- Professor and Communication Strategies Consultant (Christian, Lacan in Public,
Published by The University of Alabama Press, Project Muse)//trepka
On Resistance: The Dangers of Enjoying One’s Demands The demands of student
revolutionaries and antiglobalization protestors provide a set of opportunities for interrogating
hysteria as a political practice. For the antiglobalization protestors cited earlier, demands to be added
to a list of dangerous globophobes uncannily condense a dynamic inherent to all demands for
recognition. But the demands of the Mexico Solidarity Network and the Seattle Independent Media
project demand more than recognition: they also demand danger as a specific mode of representation .
“Danger” functions as a sign of something more than inclusion, a way of reaffirming the
protestors’ imaginary agency over processes of globalization . If danger represents an assertion of
agency, and the assertion of agency is proportional to the deferral of desire to the master upon whom the demand is placed, then
demands to be recognized as dangerous are doubly hysterical. Such demands are also demands for a certain kind
of love, namely, the state might extend its love by recognizing the dangerousness of the one who makes the
demand. At the level the demand’s rhetorical function, dangerousness is metonymically connected with the
idea that average citizens can effect change in the prevailing order, or that they
might be recognized as agents who, in the instance of the list of globalophobic leaders, can
command the Mexican state to reaffirm their agency by recognizing their dangerousness . The
rhetorical structure of danger implies the continuing existence of the state or governing
apparatus’s interests, and these interests become a nodal point at which the hysterical demand is
discharged. This structure generates enjoyment of the existence of oppressive state policies as a
point for the articulation of identity. The addiction to the state and the demands for the state’s
love is also bound up with a fundamental dependency on the oppression of the state:
otherwise the identity would collapse. Such demands constitute a reaffirmation of a hysterical
subject position: they reaffirm not only the subject’s marginality in the global system but the
danger that protestors present to the global system. There are three practical implications for
this formation. First, for the hysteric the simple discharge of the demand is both the beginning
and satisfaction of the political project. Although there is always a nascent political potential in performance, in this
case the performance of demand comes to fully eclipse the desires that animate content of the demand. Second, demand
allows institutions that stand in for the global order to dictate the direction of politics . This is
not to say that engaging such institutions is a bad thing; rather, it is to say that when antagonistic engagement with certain
institutions is read as the end point of politics, the field of political options is relatively constrained. Demands to be
recognized as dangerous by the Mexican government or as a powerful antiglobalization
force by the WTO often function at the cost of addressing how practices of globalization
are reaffirmed at the level of consumption , of identity , and so on or in thinking through
alternative political strategies for engaging globalization that do not hinge on the state and the
state’s actions. Paradoxically, the third danger is that an addiction to the refusal of demands creates a paralyzing disposition
toward institutional politics. Grossberg has identified a tendency in left politics to retreat from the “politics of policy and public
debate.”45 Although Grossberg identifies the problem as a specific coordination of “theory” and its relation to left politics, perhaps a
hysterical commitment to marginality informs the impulse in some sectors to eschew engagements with institutions and
institutional debate. An addiction to the state’s refusal often makes the perfect the enemy of the good,
implying a stifling commitment to political purity as a pretext for sustaining a structure of
enjoyment dependent on refusal, dependent on a kind of paternal “no.” Instead of seeing
institutions and policy making as one part of the political field that might be pressured for
contingent or relative goods, a hysterical politics is in the incredibly difficult position of taking
an addressee (such as the state) that it assumes represents the totality of the political field;
simultaneously it understands its addressee as constitutively and necessarily only a locus of
prohibition . These paradoxes become nearly insufferable when one makes an analytical
cut between the content of a demand and its rhetorical functionality . At the level of the
content of the demand, the state or institutions that represent globalization are figured as
illegitimate, as morally and politically compromised because of their misdeeds . Here there is an
assertion of agency, but because the assertion of agency is simultaneously a deferral of
desire, the identity produced in the hysterical demand is not only intimately tied to but is
ultimately dependent on the continuing existence of the state, hegemonic order, or
institution. At the level of affective investment, the state or institution is automatically figured as
the legitimate authority over its domain. As Lacan puts it: “demand in itself . . . is demand of a presence or of an
absence . . . pregnant with that Other to be situated within the needs that it can satisfy. Demand constitutes the Other as already
possessing the ‘privilege’ of satisfying needs, that it is to say, the power of depriving them of that alone by which they are
satisfied.”46 One outcome of framing demand as an affective and symbolic process tied to a set of
determinate rhetorical functions enjoins against the simple celebration of demands as
either exclusively liberatory, as unproblematic modes of resistance, as exhausting the political,
or as nodes for the production of political identity along the lines of equivalence . Alternatively, a
politics of desire requires that the place of the demand in a political toolbox ought to be
relativized : demands are useful as a precursor to articulating desire; they are important when moored
to a broader political strategy; but they are dangerous if seen as the summum bonum of political life. A
politics of desire thus functions simply as a negative constraint on the efficacy of a politics of
demand, and as a practice a politics of desire asks that political subjects constantly test their
demands against the measure of desire or against an explicitly owned set of political investments
that envision an alternative world. It is the presence of this alternative , explicitly owned as a desired
end state of the political, that might become the prerequisite for desire-based solidarities instead of
demand-driven affinities, and as such, a politics of desire recognizes the inevitability and
productivity of frustrated demand as part and parcel of antagonistic democratic struggle.
Links
 Link – Disaster Discourse
Repetition of disaster discourse means the events are de-traumatized
and props up an imperial narrative
Loos 5/3/11 (Maxwell E., Honors Thesis, International Studies Department at Macalester College, “Ground Zero: Tourism,
Terrorism, and Global Imagination”, http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1013&context=intlstudies_honors)//trepka
Allen Feldman explicitly analyzes 9/11 in terms of cinematic narrative, arguing that 9/11 generated a kind of
“ narrative numbness ” both during the actual event and in its wake. 90 Feldman speaks directly to the issue of
narrative interruption, writing, “Narratological numbness is not the inability to tell the story, but rather
the recourse to axiomatic story forms and emplotments that primarily restore our belief in our
ability to narrate.”91 He identifies the repetition of the images of the World Trade Center’s destruction as the first moment of
narrative numbness, in which “this repetition cinematically and incrementally trained the viewer’s
gaze by reinserting narratological time into the scene of temporal and spatial anarchy and
stasis.”92 At this point, the 9/11 terror attack had more or less disrupted and discontinued its audience’s ability to imagine a
narrative reality – both of a film and of a globe – and had to be re-trained to do so, even if briefly. Thus, 9/11 constituted a terroristic
“interruption of the thing-like functioning of society,” that had to be fixed through the reinscription of narrative fundamentals. 93
Feldman goes on to identify the dichotomy of good/evil, the Frontier-esque reversion to
patriarchal law, and the never-ending crusade by the pure as some of the overly-typical
narrative types that emerged as part of the post-9/11 94 narrative numbness .95 In
psychoanalytic terms, then, 9/11 was a traumatic event. To call 9/11 trauma seems obvious, but in
Lacanian psychoanalysis,96 trauma is the interruption of the Symbolic Order, or the experience
of the Real, that which defies inclusion into the Symbolic Order ; this is not to say that the traumatic Real is
some otherworldly thing that exists outside of language and representation that comes into the subject’s reality, but rather to say
that the traumatic Real is generated by the subject’s inability to inscribe an event into systems of
representation and language (or, perhaps, to understand it as an event).97 This interruption of the Symbolic
Order through the experience of something that defies inscription into it , then, interrupts the
subject’s ability to imagine a cohesive reality ; it is through the Symbolic, after all, that the subject imagines cohesive
realities. Film, or televisual media, functions in much the same way: the audience imagines a cohesive diegetic narrative, or reality,
through a set of structured, consistent, and predictable conventions. The sudden presentation of new conventions (like the
aforementioned cut to Human Centipede) acts like trauma the viewer’s ability to imagine a cohesive diegetic reality. On 9/11,
the traumatic nature of the image – that is, its resistance to inscription into a pre-existing Symbolic Order, and thus
reality – wreaked havoc on the ability of Americans to imagine cohesive reality, starting with the
temporary suspension of the ability to imagine a narrative from televisual media. This reestablishment of the function
of narrative is the most crucial process through which Ground Zero tourism mitigates the
trauma of 9/11 : by fitting the terroristic event into the conventions of narrative , the
timeline establishes that 9/11 can be narrated , or can be symbolically assimilated into a
cohesive reality. In psychoanalytic terms, the idea is to reinscribe the traumatic event into the
Symbolic Order. The omniscient narrator in the 9/11 Memorial Preview Site timeline is particularly instructive in this regard:
to narrate 9/11 as though it could have been fully understood as it was happening is, in effect, a means of placing the event under the
gaze of the big Other, which guarantees the ability of symbolic structures to represent reality. Thus, the timeline denies 9/11 its
traumatic aspect, which was that it defied narrative, interrupted the process of imagination, and did not properly fit into the
symbolic structures through which reality is constituted. This is not to say that, prior to visiting Ground Zero, the tourist experiences
9/11 as a lurking, repressed trauma, but rather to say that the explicit narration of the event makes sure to represent the event as
thoroughly integrated into a symbolic system through which reality is constituted; put another way, Ground Zero tourism
works to de-traumatize the event of 9/11 by presenting its images as part of a narrative
system. It may seem as though replay is actually the antithesis of freezing, that it actually unfreezes the event – after all, the
timelines explicitly give a temporal progression to the events of 9/11 – but in fact the opposite is true. In bounding the events of 9/11,
the timelines actually replay the event in a way that supplements the preservation of the moment. The timeline in the Tribute WTC
Visitor Center provides a good example: the timeline gallery in the museum is a hallway, and moments in the timeline are presented
on separate vertically-hanging banners that go down the center of the hall.168 The wall on the left of the visitor walking through has
missing posters on it – there are just a couple at the beginning of the hallway, but they multiply so that by the end of the hallway the
wall is covered with them – while on the right wall are various artifacts, including a piece of one of the planes and a dust-covered
teddy bear. This space, especially when jammed full of people, immerses the tourist in a 9/11 narrative-world – the banners have
quotes from people who both lived through and died in 9/11, as opposed to the omniscient narration of the other museum. The
timeline, though, covers only a couple of hours, beginning with 8:19 a.m. and ending at 10:35 a.m. on September 11. Thus, the
timeline does not un-freeze the frozen moment, but rather positions the tourist within the frozen moment, constantly replaying the
same moment as hundreds of tourists walk through each day. In this way, the immersive replay of the museum experience works in
tandem with the frozen moment, allowing 9/11 to be simultaneously preserved and narrated. A deeper historical analysis of Ground
Zero is also needed, not only to intervene in the ahistorical representation of 9/11, but also to build a greater understanding of how
Ground Zero has come to exist as it has and why. A historical study of Ground Zero would chart the way the site has developed since
9/11, keeping track of how the urban landscape has changed, what tourist sites or infrastructure have come and gone (with particular
attention to museums, exhibits, and street-merchants), and the contentious debate about what to do with the space. Sturken’s
chapter on the development of the memorial plans is an invaluable piece of a more complete historical understanding of Ground
Zero as a meaningful site.196 Ground Zero will continue to change, though, so work that continues to chart this change would be
valuable. A study is also needed of the production culture of Ground Zero; that is, what groups are behind the production of the
Ground Zero tourist sites, who are the people who make up these groups, and what stake do they have in the politics of representing
9/11? A detailed comparison of the sites produced by the Port Authority and the sites produced by the families of 9/11 victims, for
example, would be important to the understanding of why and how Ground Zero tourist sites appear the way they do. There is also
much room for comparative analysis of the tourism of trauma. There is likely much to be gleaned from the differences and
similarities between Ground Zero and the Holocaust Museum, or between Ground Zero and an Apartheid museum. This kind of
work could be interesting for what it reveals about the different ways in which trauma is dealt with and mitigated in different
cultures, and also potentially for what it might reveal about how different cultures deal with trauma in the same way. A comparative
analysis would also allow for a more definitive, generalized statement about the dynamics of creating a tourist site out of mass
violence and trauma. There is also room for a consideration of the colonial and postcolonial aspects of
tourism and, specifically, the tourism of violence and disaster. In comparing the representational strategies
between Ground Zero and an Apartheid museum in South Africa, for example, it would be worthwhile to consider whether the
Apartheid museum caters more to foreign tourists. This line of inquiry also could lead into a productive examination of the
conventions of comfort culture, and the extent to which these conventions travel and hybridize. So finally, why should we care about
the relationship between tourism, terrorism, and global imagination at Ground Zero? In addressing how kitsch objects prevent
certain types of engagement with 9/11, Sturken writes, “A teddy bear is not an innocent object.”197 The same goes for
Ground Zero tourism: far from being innocent, it ultimately helps to facilitate the acquiescence
of imperialism . When we are discussing global imagination, we are discussing nothing less than the production of reality
and its social, cultural and political-economic possibilities.Zizshould state clearly that terrorist attacks on 9/11 were the most horrific
violenceZizhave ever seen in my life, andZizhope to keep it that way. At the same time , 9/11 should also serve as a point
from which to investigate and evaluate the place that America occupies in the world, as both subject
to and constitutive of global conditions. Terrorism is disgusting and it is inhuman, but it is also by nature fraught with immense
possibility, even the possibility of peace. Zizek wonders whether, in the wake of 9/11, “America will finally
risk stepping through the fantasmatic screen that separates it from the Outside World, accepting
its arrival in the Real world, making the long-overdue move from ‘A thing like this
shouldn’t happen here! ’ to ‘ A think like this shouldn’t happen anywhere!’ ”198 At
Ground Zero, such a globe is nearly impossible to imagine.
 Link – Discourse Key
The aff’s discourse is especially problematic --- it’s a coping strategy
doomed to failure by ignoring broader surveillance relations
Lundberg 12 --- Professor and Communication Strategies Consultant (Christian, Lacan in Public,
Published by The University of Alabama Press, Project Muse)//trepka
As Lacan frames it, demanding subjects are either learning to reassert the centrality of their demand or coming to terms with the
impotence of the Other as a satisfier of demands: “But it is in the dialectic of the demand for love and the test of desire that
development is ordered. . . . [T]his test of the desire of the Other is decisive not in the sense that the subject learns by it whether or
not he has a phallus, but in the sense that he learns that the mother does not have it.”39 The point of this disposition is
to bring the subject to a point where they might “recognize and name” their own desire and, as a
result, become a political subject in the sense of being able to truly argue for something without being dependent on the
other as a support for or organizing principle for political identity. Thus, desire has both a general status and a specific status for
each subject. It is not just the mirror that produces the subject and its investments but the desire and sets of proxy objects that cover
over this original gap. As Easthope puts it: “Lacan is sure that everyone’s desire is somehow different and their own—lack is
nevertheless my lack. How can this be if each of us is just lost in language . . . passing through demand into desire, something from
the Real, from the individual’s being before language, is retained as a trace enough to determine thatZizdesire here and there, not
anywhere and everywhere. Lacan terms this objet petit a . . . petit a is different for everyone; and it can never be in substitutes for it
in whichZiztry to refind it.”40 Though individuated, this naming is not about discovering a latently held
but hidden interiority, rather it is about naming a practice of thinking the uniqueness of
individual subjects as a product of discourses that produce them. Thus, this is an account
of political subjectivization that is not solely oriented toward or determined by the locus of the
demand but that is also determined by the contingent sets of coping strategies that orient
a subject toward others and a political order and serve as the condition of possibility for
demands. As Lacan argues, this is the point where a subject becomes a kind of new presence or a new
political possibility: “That the subject should come to recognize and to name his desire; that is the efficacious action of
analysis. But it isn’t a question of recognizing something which would be entirely given. . . . In naming it, the subject creates, brings
forth, a new presence in the world.”41 Alternatively, subjects can stay fixated on the demand, but in doing so they forfeit their desire,
or as Fink argues, “an analysis . . . that . . . does not go far enough in constituting the subject as desire leaves him or her stranded at
the level of demand . . . unable to truly desire.”42
 Link – Discursive Resistance
Discursive resistance to surveillance does nothing to undermine our
affective investment(s) in control – Self-disclosure only obfuscates
the ways violence is operationalized
Andrejevic 6 “The Discipline of Watching: Detection, Risk, and Lateral Surveillance”. Mark, Mark Andrejevic
is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at The University of Iowa. 14 Dec 2006. Pgs. 392
– 395. PWoods.
The promise may turn out to be very different from the reality, as the celebration
of interactivity remains both
premature and largely unexamined. Although scattered enthusiastically and indiscriminately throughout popular and
academic descriptions of new media, the term is ill-defined and slippery. It has been used to describe everything from staying in
constant contact with friends, family and relatives to voting for a favorite American Idol. Its ubiquity is rivaled by its referential
flexibility. As one group of researchers noted, ‘‘Even the ‘experts’ are not yet certain exactly what the concept
means’’ (Downes & McMillan, 2000, p. 165). Somewhere in the mix, the positive associations of interactivity
as a form of two-way, symmetrical, and relatively transparent communication have been
assimilated to forms of interaction that amount to little more than strategies for asymmetrical,
nontransparent forms of monitoring and surveillance. Commercial and state-sponsored forms of monitoring
facilitated by new information and communication technologies , such as database programs, networked
devices, and search algorithms, are characterized by asymmetries that are rapidly becoming hallmarks of
the type of ‘‘interactivity’’ citizens and consumers encounter on a regular basis . That is to say,
information is gathered about citizens and consumers often without any information regarding what information is being gathered,
when, and for what purposes. Meyrowitz (1985) describes this process as a ‘‘nonreciprocal loss of privacy’’ in which ‘‘we lose the
ability to monitor those who monitor us’’ (p. 322). [Page 395] Such an approach envisions the potential of
networked interactivity to foster not democratic participation but the consolidation of centralized
command and control predicated on asymmetrical forms of observation and information gathering .
Tellingly, Wiener highlighted the possibility that a cybernetic model might be deployed not just as a technique of mechanical control,
but as one of information based social control. The use of cybernetic systems, he warned, might result in a society in which
entrenched economic and political powers managed the populace by tailoring messages in response to audience feedback. Rather
than speaking of interactivity in a sense that blurs the distinction between asymmetrical
information gathering and two-way, transparent information exchange, it might be more useful to
speak of a range of interactivities with varying consequences for power relations and issues of
democratization and centralized control. Meyrowitz (1985) observed that ‘‘if the new technologies have any ‘inherent
bias,’ it may be against ...a sharply hierarchical system’’ (p. 321). Pearce (1997) claimed, ‘‘No matter which way you look at it,
interactivity is inherently subversive’’ (p. 244). And Wriston (quoted in Barney, 2000, p. 19) predicts that ‘‘the force of
microelectronics will blow apart all monopolies, hierarchies, pyramids, and power grids of established industrial society.’’ All three
invoke a version of interactivity that implies reciprocity of information gathering and exchange. In practice, however, the
deployment of interactive technologies by both the commercial sector and the state remains, in many contexts,
largely asymmetrical or nonreciprocal, patterned more on a panoptic version of ‘‘interactivity’’
than on mutual transparency and accountability. News media, for example, have highlighted the asymmetry of state
monitoring in the post 9/11 era; during this time, the government has sought to expand technologically facilitated monitoring
programs while at the same time shielding its actions from public scrutiny. The news coverage can hardly be
considered a form of reciprocal monitoring insofar as one of its recurring themes is just how little
we know about the government’s use of new media technology to accumulate, store, and sort
information about citizens. Against this background of asymmetric, nontransparent forms of information gathering, the
revolutionary promise of interactivity to shatter hierarchy and centralized control enacts the return of
Foucault’s ‘‘repressive hypothesis.’’ Its 21stcentury, high-tech version portrays technologically facilitated forms of interactivity
as providing the promise of revolutionary liberation from forms of centralized, topdown control characteristic of industrial
capitalism. The incessant and multiplying forms of ‘‘talking back’’ incited by the interactive revolution
are presented as subversive, empowering assertions of individuality that challenge top-down
management and control. The marketers who encourage viewers and consumers to ‘‘vote’’ online, to create online profiles,
and to provide detailed information about their backgrounds, their consumption patterns, and their tastes and preferences, echo
Foucault’s (1994) formulation of the 19th-century incitement to self-disclosure: ‘‘Tell me your desires, [and] I’ll tell you who you are’’
(p. 128). Rather
than subversive challenges to governance and control, the forms of self-disclosure
(masquerading as self-expression) that migrate from the spaces of the confessional and examination
room into cyberspace facilitate the detailed specification of individual consumers as well as the
formulation of those tactics most likely to make them amenable to the ministration of marketers. Asymmetry lies at the heart of
panoptic power*in terms of both the monitoring process and the structured power relations that characterize panoptic institutions.
That is, the intricate arrangement of one-way monitoring technologies characteristic of the
Panopticon does not create the power relations that define the ability of authorities to exercise
control over the bodies arrayed within it. Rather it amplifies, extends, and automates this power :
‘‘The panoptic schema makes any apparatus of power more intense: it assures its economy (in material, in personnel, in time); it
assures its efficacy by its preventative character, its continuous functioning and its automatic mechanisms’’ (Foucault, 1995, p. 206).
The point is important in that it highlights the fact that a simple rearrangement of the panoptic mechanism does not necessarily
reconfigure the structured relations of power within which it functions (although it may render the exercise of power less efficient).
 Link – Drones
The videogame-like fantasy of drone use captivates the state and the public – only
critical analysis disrupts this illusion and mass violence against people feared as
terrorists
Zulaika, 13 – Professor and Director, Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, Reno (Joseba,
“Drones and fantasy in US counterterrorism,” Journal for Cultural Research, 5-6)//SY

“They count the copses and they’re not really sure who they are” (Quoted in Becker & Shane, p.
A11), an intelligence officer admitted to the New York Times reporters. Yet the president is “quite
comfortable with the use of force.” How does he know they are actual or potential terrorists? He knows
it essentially by an act of fantasy. Since you don’t really know for certain that they are terrorists, but
you know that there are out there people who commit acts of terrorism, you are free to assume that
their “pattern of life” may betray their terrorist intentions. Fantasy surrounding the figure of “the
terrorist” becomes a major component of any explanation why the president and the American
public can have such a cavalier attitude toward targeted killings of people about whom we even do
not know their names. A critical perspective on terrorism discourse confronts us at the outset with the
ontological ambivalence of what is the real of the thing itself. The figure of the Terrorist gives ground
to a reality the menace of which is felt to be greater than the one posed by the superpower Soviet Union
during the Cold War. The task of a critical approach is to problematize that real as necessarily
imbued in fantasy . This requires we deploy a valid theory by which fantasy is not equal to the not-
real but rather “constitutes a dimension of the real” (Butler, 1990, p. 108). This is a theory of fantasy
removed from the representational realism of the media whose reports on terrorism tend to be
oblivious of the “state of the exception” in which they are gathered and produced (censorship, one-
sided sources, information obtained under torture, and so on). In such realism “representation becomes
a moment of the reproduction and consolidation of the real” (Butler, p. 106). A positivist view of the
real stabilizes itself by the phantasmatic exclusion of all absence as unreal. Terrorism is that disavowed
phantasmatic exclusion, included in the system as exception, that solidifies and gives ground to the
politically real. Since this real is shaped by the phantom of terrorism constrained by the State of
Exception, the exceptional phantasmatic draws the boundaries of the real and “assumes the status of the
real, that is, when the two become compellingly conflated” (Butler, p. 107). Thus fantasy emerges with
the mask of the real. As Nader remarks, counterterrorism in many of its forms “appears as fantasy
requiring terror in the name of ending terror, when in reality the elimination of terror is the
apotheosis of terror” (2012, p. 113). Not surprisingly, the current drone war has been described as
“sheer fantasy, if not literally science fiction” (Sluka, 2011, p. 72). Indeed, as admitted by everyone
working in the industry, science fiction is the major inspiration behind the drone technology. “If you
do not read science fiction, you’re not qualified to talk about the future” (Quoted in Singer, 2009, p. 160),
said Arlan Andrews, a writer close to the White House and Department of Homeland Security.
Politicians easily become fascinated with technological novelties and spatial operations. The fantasy
plays into the seductive illusion of virtual war “as a surgical scalpel and not a bloodstained sword”,
wrote Ignatief, adding: “We need to stay away from such fables of self-righteous invulnerability”
(2000, pp. 214–215). Such “fables” are now the dominant culture, believed not only by the general
public but also the political class and the media elite. You will not read or hear in the mainstream media
reports indignant about the drone killings. What science fiction presents as pure fiction, robotics makes it
an aspect of reality. When the fiction turns out to be reality, a frenzy of excitement and the oft-
repeated sense of magic obtains. A frequent comparison of the remote controlled unmanned drones
is video game. In fact, military researchers are modeling the robot controllers “after the PlayStation
because that’s what these 18-, 19-year-old Marines have been playing with pretty much all of their lives”
(Heines quoted in Singer, p. 68). Making war a continuation of the kids’ video games creates an
experiential link between “play” and “war,” confusing the virtual and the real .

Legal curtailment of drones fails --- their ban turns drones into the
newest desireable transgression, making circumvention structurally
inevitable
Rothstein 11/23/12 (Adam, Freelance writer, “The Drone and the Gaze”, http://www.poszu.com/poszu/index.php/blog-
archive/drone-and-gaze/)//trepka
Like stepping out of our homes into a sky filled with satellites, an atmosphere seething with flying drones, a
city with buildings dripping with closed-circuit cameras. We could elude the lenses, shine an impeding glare into the
sensors, dazzle the algorithms. But for how long could we escape the constantly inscribed regime of
sight-recording that exists in our contemporary surveillance state? A map of CCTV cameras cannot be the
full surveilled territory. The cones of observation we avoid are limited to those we know of, and even our
tools of observation and avoidance now observe us back. We live in an age of Drone Ethnography, in which any
attempt at recording what is happening to us is overshadowed by another lens, watching a lens, watching a lens, watch us. The
opportunity for opting out of a visual culture elapsed long ago, when our eyes were evolving in the
membranes of a long lost taxonomic ancestor. We cannot ban drones anymore than we can dispel the gaze. If
the technological gaze is banned by legal means, it will only occur extra-legally. If human sight is
judged as immoral, it will only become a fetish. We are always already being recorded, and there is nothing we can
do about this. What matters is whether someone will persecute, rape, or kill us on the basis of that recording.

The military will continue to pursue drone development to make the fantasy of
perfection in robot warfare a reality
Zulaika, 13 – Professor and Director, Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, Reno (Joseba,
“Drones and fantasy in US counterterrorism,” Journal for Cultural Research, 10-11)//SY

What happens to the axis of time in the expectations of robotic technology? Robots will have to react in
such speed, we are told by an army colonel, that in the decision cycle, reduced from minutes to
microseconds, “As the loop gets shorter and shorter, there won’t be any time in it for humans” (Quoted in
Singer, p. 64). It is no longer the “perversion of temporality” in the waiting for terror, but the very
elimination of human time – the perfect fantasy by which humans are left aside in a war in which,
not only they will not die, but, by reducing time to the category of fiction, they will not have to make
the tough decisions and carry the burden of their consequences. Thus in robotic reality not only is the
decision cycle no longer going to be minutes but microseconds, but also it dabbles in futuristic
expectations that tend to reduce time to the category of fiction. What science fiction presents as pure
fiction, robotics makes it an aspect of reality. When the fiction turns out to be reality, a frenzy of
excitement and the oft-repeated sense of magic obtains. Drones provide the latest instance of Arthur
Clarke’s notion that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”
(Quoted in Singer, p. 165). Not surprisingly, the drone machines are treated as real soldiers and given
“battlefield promotions” and “Purple Hearts” medals (Singer, p. 338). Far from perceiving the
militarization of technology as leading to an impending catastrophe, the possibilities offered by new
fields such as lasers produce “immense excitement among soldiers, scientists, and sci-fi geeks alike …
to the point that one study called it the ‘Holy Grail’ of weapons” (Singer, p. 85). This is no longer a
Hollywood fantasy; it is something that is happening in the real world. The “Predator” is no longer an
animal metaphor but a real predator up in the sky. Not only will human time be eliminated from the loop
of increasingly rapid robotic responses, and the “human baggage” sidelined as to avoid faulty senses such
as human eyes, but there can be no place for human error in hitting the targets. One of the magical
words for robots firing missiles from drones piloted from via satellite communication from 70 to 500
miles away is “pinpointed.” The implication of such accuracy is that the missiles fired by the drones kill
only the bad guys. The precondition of targeted precision becomes imperative in a fight whose very
nature is best imagined as the hitting the needle in a haystack. Amazing as it may appear to common
sense, counterterrorists have come to actually believe that the best and cleanest way to take away
the needle in the haystack is by shooting a missile from 10,000 in the sky and guided from 70 to 500
miles away in Las Vegas. One of the “clairvoyant” prospectors of the bright robotic future and a major
consultant for the US military, “the Ultimate Thinking Machine” according to Forbes, is Ray Kurzweil.
His main prediction is that, “In just 20 years the boundary between fantasy and reality will be rent
asunder ” (Quoted in Singer, p. 96). One of his predictions is that, given the exponential nature of
progress, we are on track to experience “about 20,000 years of progress in the twenty-first century,
1000 times more than we did in the twentieth century” (Quoted in Singer, p. 102). In a couple of decades
we are about to hit “Singularity” – a kind of black hole in which things become so radically different that
the rules break down and we know nothing. Some people have mocked the notion of “Singularity” as
“The Rapture for Nerds.” When Kurzweil first shared his visionary prospect of a robotisized army of
the future, the military saw him as amusing and entertaining, but by 2008 his predictions were “very
much at the mainstream” of military thinking.
 Drones / Cyberterrorism
Fear of cyberterrorism and terrorist drone use drives a self-fulfilling prophecy that
actualize these threats
Zulaika, 13 – Professor and Director, Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, Reno (Joseba,
“Drones and fantasy in US counterterrorism,” Journal for Cultural Research, 8-9)//SY

It was false that there was Al Qaeda in Iraq before the invasion but then it became true after the
invasion. Anti-American radical Islamists could never afford to have antiaircraft missiles, until the
CIA provided Stinger missiles to Afghan rebels battling the Soviets in the middle 1980s. Similarly,
over forty countries are currently developing drone technology to be used as military robots, with the
likelihood that in a not far away future they might fall in the hands of terrorists. Such self-fulfilling
prophecy of counterterrorist drones being used by terrorists, we are told, “is not far away” (Caryl,
2011, p. 58). The same can be said of “cyberterrorism”, as the case of the cyber worm “Stuxnet”,
the malicious software developed by Americans and Israelis against Iran but spread to the Internet,
made it abundantly clear: while raising alarms against attacks from cyberterrorists, the entire world was
put on notice that Obama’s administration was doing just that; as a result, “Now that Stuxnet’s in the
wild, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist. You’ve got a blueprint of how to do it” (Ralph Langner
quoted in Sanger, 2012, p. 209). Obama is concerned that “any American acknowledgment that is is
making use of cyberweapons … would create a pretext for others countries, terrorists, or teenage
hackers to justify their own attacks”, therefore “Obama has not even acknowledged in public that the
capability exists” (Sanger, 2012, p. 265). As with the nuclear weapons, it is legitimate for us to possess
and even use them, but their desire to have them is terroristic.
 Link – Free Trade / Economy
Free trade and a free market economy don’t exist – pursuit of them,
even with government oversight, only sustains a neoliberal fantasy
that ensures economic inequality and violence
Dean, 8 – Professor, Political Theory, Hobart and William Smith Colleges (Jodi, “Enjoying
Neoliberalism,” Vol. 4, No. 1, 54-57,
http://culturalpolitics.dukejournals.org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/content/4/1/47.full.pdf+html)//S
Y

Neoliberal ideology relies on the fantasy of free trade. Everyone, ultimately, benefits in an
unfettered market because markets are the most effi cient ways of ensuring that everyone does
that for which they are best suited and gets what they want. Michael Lebowitz describes this
faith: The unfettered market, we are told, insures that everyone benefits from a free exchange (or it
would not occur) and that those trades chosen by rational individuals (from all pos sible
exchanges) will produce the best possible outcomes. Accordingly, it follows that interference with
the perfect market system by the state must produce disaster – a negative-sum result in which the
losses exceed the gains. So, the answer for all right-thinking people must be, remove those
interferences. (2004: 15–16) The fantasy of the free market promises that everyone will win. To
ensure that all will win, the market has to be liberated, freed from constraints, unleashed to
realize its and our full potential (cf. Shaik 2005). As free rational agents armed with full
information, people will make the right choices – but, again, only so long as nothing biases or
constrains these choices. Žižek’s account of the phantasmatic background of ideology brings to
the fore the analytic benefi ts in considering neoliberalism in terms of the fantasy of free trade. I
consider here four elements of his discussion. First, Žižek argues that the “external ideological
ritual is the true locus of the fantasy which sustains an ideological edifice” (1997: 6). Considering a
discourse or formation as an ideology, then, does not involve some kind of search for truth
hidden under the distorted beliefs of misguided masses. Rather it involves looking at actual
practices; these practices, what people actually do, are the location of ideological beliefs.
Neoliberal ideology focuses on practices of exchange. The ordinary exchanges of everyday
people – cleaned up and understood as rational decisions made under ideal conditions – are
trade. Part of the fantastic appeal of neoliberalism comes from the way individual exchanges
stand in for global fl ows (upward) of capital. Second, Žižek holds that fantasy answers the
question, “What am I to the Other?” (1997: 8). The typical answer in the United States is “free.”
To the Other, I am the one, we are the ones, who are free. After September 11, 2001, “because we
are free” answered the question “Why do they hate us?” Moreover, from the US perspective, the
Cold War was fought between freedom and total itarian ism. Neoliberalism’s emphasis on free
trade answers the question of who we, as Americans, are, and, increasingly, who “we” are in a
global sense: the global “we” is the we connected through markets, the “we” of what I describe
elsewhere as communicative capitalism (Dean 2002, 2005). Third, Žižek explains that fantasy
occludes an original deadlock (1997: 10). The fantasy of free trade covers over persistent
market failure, structural inequalities, the violence of privatization, and the
redistribution of wealth to the “have mores.” Free trade sustains at the level of fantasy
what it seeks to avoid at the level of reality – namely actually free trade among equal players, that
is equal participants with equal opportunities to establish the rules of the game, access
information, distribution, and fi nancial networks, etc. Paradoxically, free trade is invoked
as a mantra in order to foreclose possibilities for the actualization of free trade
and equality . This foreclosure appears in the slippage between ideas of competition and
winning. On the one hand neoliberal thought emphasizes the necessity of competition. As Susan
George points out, competition was Margaret Thatcher’s central value, and faith in competition
was the governing precept of her destruction of the British public sector. George quotes
Thatcher, “It is our job to glory in inequality and see that talents and abilities are given vent and
expression for the benefit of us all” (1999: 4). On the other hand even as neoliberalism
emphasizes competition, it holds onto the notion that everyone is a winner, a notion clearly at
odds with competition because in competition there are winners and losers. Thus Third World
countries are not told, “sorry, losers, that’s the breaks in a global economy.” Rather, they are
promised that everyone will win (cf. Derber 2002: 37–8). The Global Report on Human
Settlements notes: Conventional trade theories see increased trade and a liberalized trade regime
as purely beneficial; but, as in all chance, there are, in fact, winners and losers. Those
participating in the active, growing areas of the world economy or receiving (unreliable) trickle-
down effects benefit. Those who do not participate at best receive no benefits, but, in fact, are
usually losers, since capital tends to take flight from their countries or their industries to move to
more productive zones, reducing work opportunities and business returns as currencies and wages
fall or jobs disappear. (2003: 40) Similarly, in the United States, workers are advised not to
worry about the decline in manufacturing and rise of outsourcing. New jobs will be created. With
education, they can be retrained. Again, the neoliberal fantasy promises that no one will lose.
Finally, at the level of the local school, kids today are taught that everyone wins. Everyone gets
some kind of prize or ribbon just for showing up. In some US districts, schools no longer post
grades or rankings out of fear of hurting the self-esteem of those students near the bottom. Thus
the emphasis on testing part of George W. Bush’s education policy, No Child Left Behind, is not
accompanied by a corresponding ranking of students; instead, schools and teachers are ranked
and assessed – not the students, because everyone is a winner. Fourth, Žižek writes that “fantasy
constructs a scene in which the jouissance we are deprived of is concentrated in the other who stole
it from us” (1997: 32). Free trade stages this scene as a deferred promise of fulfilment. When we
meet in the market, our needs and desires will be met. This is the very definition of a perfect
market – it will meet everyone’s needs and desires. In a crude sense, financial, stock, bond, and
commodities markets are bets on this future, investments in the promised fulfilment. We could
also include here mortgages, loans, credit cards, that is all sorts of different financial
instruments that rely on a presumption of future satisfaction. Of course market exchanges do
not actually provide jouissance. Moreover when the market serves as a vehicle for jouissance, it is
mesmerizing, repulsive, excessive. I can explain this point more clearly by distinguishing between
free trade’s staging of the lack of enjoyment as a loss or theft and its figuring of the
corresponding excess of jouissance. According to the fantasy of free trade, everybody wins. If
someone loses, this simply indicates that trade was not free. Someone cheated; he didn’t play by
the rules. She had secret information, the benefits of insider knowledge or the advantages of an
unfair monopoly. Within the terms of the fantasy, the solution to this problem is oversight,
preferably by those familiar with the industry or practice in question. The government can make
sure that others are not out there stealing our enjoyment, the fruits of our labor, through their
dishonest and unfair dealings. There are risks, however. The government might get
overinvolved. It might overstep its boundaries and impede “free trade.” Differently put, the
notion of oversight continues to sustain enjoyment as stolen as it shifts the location of thievery
from the insider or cheat to the government itself – it might tax me too much; it might pay for
the medical expenses of all sorts of illegal immigrants while I could lose my health insurance at
any point; it might use my tax dollars to support tenured radicals (who look down their lazy,
secular noses at me and my hardworking, God-fearing way of life) while I can’t even afford my
kids’ tuition . . . The fantasy of free trade thus plays host to series of tensions and anxieties
associated with our failure to enjoy.7
 Link – Generic
If we really wanted to decrease surveillance, it would have happened
already – periodic revelations about the NSA have occurred
throughout its history, and to what effect? We sweep it back under the
rug or create short-lived legal changes because our collective
unconscious remains unchanged and sets the norm for surveillance
--- analyzing it is possible, but it has to come before effective legal
action
Aristodemou 2014 --- Senior Lecturer in Law (Maria, “Law, Psychoanalysis, Society: Taking the Unconscious
Seriously” https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=5M3pAwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=%22nsa%22+AND+
%22psychoanalysis%22+AND+%22desire
%22+&ots=lDnuDxQFMZ&sig=7H0c6GELtGQ6U53BZ8NtxhN7oh8#v=onepage&q=nsa&f=false)//trepka
Psychoanalysis throws into doubt the assumption of a division between the public realm of law and
state on the one hand and
the private realm of the individual on the other because for psychoanalysis, it is the
distinction between self and other, subject and neighbour, inside and outside, that is precisely blurred: the
most intimate part of ourselves is actually taken from the outside , from the other. Indeed, to
pursue Freud's own description of the uncanny as the horror of the all-too-familiar, we could say there is nothing more uncanny
than the experience of analysis itself. In analysis, what is most intimate to oneself appears as if for the first time to an unwilling and
hostile audience: the subject herself encounters the self she didn't know she harboured. No wonder psy- choanalysis is the ultimate
horror story, confronting the subject with her own limits, in effect, with her own relation to death. As we will see in pages to come,
Lacan coined a beautiful neologism for this intimate yet disavowed place, denoting the fact that it is excluded in the interior; it is a
term thatZizwill be returning to time and again, the 'extimate'. For psychoanalysis, attempts to understand and legislate for the
individual cannot take place without understanding how the individual and the social interrelate: unless we understand the
nature of the individual and her relation- ship to the social, our ability to reform the social,
including the legal, realm, will be sadly limited. It is in the human psyche and its
relationship to the Big Other, that we must look for the potential for change if
meaningful and lasting social and legal reforms are to be achieved. Conversely, our difficulty, or
inability to affect social structures even when we appear to try to, is due to the fact that those
structures are entrenched not only in the symbolic realm but in our own unconscious .
Politicians know this only too well and are quick to stoke and incite our fantasies , some more success-
fully than others. Whether the fantasy is of a nation, a religion, a common friend or a common
enemy, nothing will command more lasting support than the ability to reach the parts laws and
policies on their own cannot reach: our unconscious. As we will see in the course of this book, there is nothing
harder or more painful than letting go of our fantasies, the stories we weave and come to believe about ourselves and others. It is our
fantasies, after all, that constitute us as subjects so if any meaningful change is to take place it requires the
shat- tering dissolution not only of our laws and policies but of the unconscious beliefs
and fantasies that support them. How do we access those beliefs and fantasies? How do we put law on the couch,
listen to its monotonous ramblings and excavate its unconscious desires? To attempt to examine law and legal
discourse through the psychoanalytic lens is, of course, no easy task. How can one uncover the
unconscious workings of the rules and principles that make up the symbolic order in general
and of the legal system in particular ? As we know, it can take years of painstaking and expensive analysis before an
individual, kicking and screaming no doubt, can be said to come face to face with their idiosyncratic and invariably embarrass- ing
and shameful desires. How do we get law to lie on the couch, start talking to the analyst (and who, if anyone, could Law develop a
transference with), and then gradually move from empty to full speech, let alone pay the debt for its analysis? My wager is that these
questions are not only rhetorical but also meta- phorical. AsZizhave started describing, those
beliefs are already 'out
there', in our practices and products of our culture: like the activities of Jimmy Savile or the
NSA, they are open for us to see, if only we dared to . In the same way that the abuses by
public figures like Jimmy Savile had been an open secret at an organization like the BBC, we do
not need 'Law' to lie on the couch because the unconscious laws that influence and determine
our behaviour do not reside in some unexplored recesses of the mind but are displayed in all
their (dirty) glory in the practices and products of our culture . Cultural, no less than legal, texts proclaim
knowingly and unknowingly, consciously and unconsciously, the ineluctable rules and mores that make up the social order, whether
we are aware of them or not, like them or not, suffer them, tolerate them, or enjoy them. In the same way our myths and
cultural texts, to follow my own Law & Literature thesis from over a decade ago, are just as influential and
norm- making , if not more so, than so-called 'real' laws." Rather than hidden away beyond our reach,
the unconscious rules and principles that order our individual and collective lives, are
established and displayed by our cultural practices under the full lights of our social order.
Most of the time, of course, as in the Jimmy Savile example above, we prefer to stay blissfully unaware of
them; they are the 'known unknowns' , to use Slavoj Zizek’s poignant corrective to Donald Rumsfeld's
epistemological categories, that is, things our unconscious knows, but our conscious selves prefer to
ignore . They are the disavowed practices and beliefs that co-exist and underline the
official practices while remaining firmly swept under the carpet . Needless to say, Donald
Rumsfeld is not the only person suffering from a blindspot in their field of vision, and not only
when it comes to illegal wars; the 'known unknowns' are a blindspot for us all , hence the need for what
Holderlin called a 'third eye' to remind us of what we know but daren't openly acknowledge let alone pay the price for." This
'third eye' can be provided not only by the occasional Julian Assange or Edward Snowden , not even
only by an analyst, but as we will see, by our cultural products and practices. The focus of the book will be the
unconscious law inscribed in cultural no less than in legal texts and manifested in our society's cultural products and practices, in
our aesthetic as well as political choices and preferences. Poets, as both Freud and Lacan acknowledged, understood
societal norms and the unconscious processes supporting them long before psychoanalysts and
have always been adept at taking seemingly marginal phenomena to epitomize what is central
and inherent to society. Whether we are referring to well-known and best-selling cultural texts or less celebrated products ,
it is through the interstices of culture, through its loud as well as its less noisy manifestations, that the core of
the unconscious can be gauged : in the same way that, as Freud insisted, it is in our mistakes, our jokes,
our slips of the tongue or of the pen, that the truth of our desire may be gauged.

State action to address surveillance sector just draws people to

corporate surveillance – reform can’t overcome Americans’
compulsive desire for security
Smecker, 13 – BA, Philosophy and Psychology, University of Vermont and Writer, Peace and
Justice Center (Frank, “1984.0: The Rise of the big Other as Big Brother,” Truthout, 6/20,
http://www.truth-out.org/speakout/item/17111-19840-the-rise-of-the-big-other-as-big-
brother)//SY

Perhaps, then, the normalization of domestic spying is already underway. Virtually the entire
nation is under surveillance. Phone records, emails, documents, photographs, connection logs,
audio and video chats and more are being handed over without reluctance to the NSA, the data
scraped and archived. Why? So that this information can be accessed at any time, for reasons
not entirely clear. OK, ostensibly it's a safeguard against terrorism. But these days everybody and
their political representative appear to have their own respective fetishes for what qualifies as an
act of "terrorism"... and so the gamut of reasons behind this surveillance monstrosity, at least
those that have been disclosed to the public, ends up serving to maintain its ambiguous,
secretive impression. In any event, now that the cat's out of the bag, it seems most people aren't
too outraged over this domestic spying business - to wit: Verizon's stock is going up despite their
complicit role in all this (people are continuing to buy their products and services). And many of
those who do appear to be bothered nonetheless launch their invectives in the form of pithy cynical
quips posted from their Facebook and/or Twitter accounts - their incessant lamentation is, by these
lights, feeding the very source of their lamentation. The German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel coined
a term for such individuals - "Beautiful Soul": that specific "I-told-you-so!" individual who, by
incessantly complaining about this whole debacle, is actually contributing, in a way, to the
preservation of this despicable situation - for, first of all, the Big Culprit against which the
Beautiful Soul takes issue is none other than the external point of reference by which this
dissenting character acquires his or her "dissident" personality; and second of all, if you're using
Facebook to express your contempt for being spied on, at least try to be a little more consistent.
If you signed up for Facebook, you are, in some form or another, being watched. That's the point
of the damn thing: to be seen. Don't pretend like you don't enjoy it, even if your enjoyment appears
in the form of angst. In other words, people may be angry over being spied on, but not so much
with Verizon, not with Facebook, nor with Sprint. Not with any of the private companies
involved. Everybody seems upset primarily with The Government. Thus in the wake of being spied
on, Americans show resolute loyalty to the very companies that collude with the federal programs
doing the spying. It's as if the idea of boycotting these companies and their products and services,
is, for the vast majority of the US, more deranging than the fact that hundreds of millions of lives,
perhaps yours and mine even, are being tracked day in day out. The point I'm alluding to here is
this: a classic example of abuse of power is to present its victims with a series of false choices
whereby no matter which choice the victim makes, those in power win: do you want security or do
you want privacy? Do you really want to trust the government, or do you want to trust the private
sector that provides you with a false sense of security through things like smartphones, Internet
access, social media, and so on? One has to wonder then, if pooled distrust is being directed
toward Big Government, does this sentiment of suspicion merely act as a catalyst for
consolidating more power in the sphere of Big Business? If so, we end up with the following logical
absurdity: the more surveillance, the more "privacy." More correctly, that is to say: the more
security we want, the less privacy we'll have, and the stronger the private sector will become. And
that's why the more I think about this situation and its seemingly irrational, stupid-as-shit
absurdity (that, by dint of purchasing things like smartphones and dicking around on Facebook -
in the face of being spied on through these very things - people are thereby giving their
(unwitting) consent to being spied on by some sort of "Big Brother" agency), the more I realize
that there is something rather philosophical in nature going on here. Perhaps this situation has less
to do with some secretive "Big Brother" entity tracking peoples' everyday behavior. Rather, what
if this situation is exactly how it appears to be? What if this situation is essentially an ideological
problem - having everything to do with us, the body politic, and, our immensely complex relation to
the very "locus of power" that gives substance to the body politic? What if, and I don't intend to
sound cynical but rather skeptical here, this surveillance scandal is the logical, though odious,
result of America's desire for security ?

The surveillance state is too entrenched to solve with legal reforms –

debate about the unconscious effect of digital surveillance on the
public is necessary
Gray, 14 – Director of Policy, Open Policy Foundation and Doctoral Researcher, History of
Philosophy, Royal Holloway, University of London (Johnathan, “The Snowden Files: so much
more than state surveillance,” Open Democracy, 2/6,
https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/jonathan-gray/snowden-files-so-much-more-
than-state-surveillance)//SY

The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan complained that American interpreters of Freud had
missed the point of his shockingly radical decomposition of the human mind. By locating the
unconscious inside the mind, like an iceberg partially submerged underwater, Lacan argued that
they left the traditional conception of the conscious subject largely intact, albeit complemented by
a dark, unknown portion which they considered it the job of psychoanalysis to uncover. On the
contrary, Lacan argued that the unconscious is something that resides outside of us, in language, in
our relationships with others, beyond our reach and beyond our ken. The NSA documents leaked
by Snowden highlight the dizzying experiential gulf between on the one hand the seamless, multi-
coloured user interfaces with which we are so familiar, worlds of windows and folders, apps and
icons, loved ones and deadlines and distractions; and on the other hand the monumental physical
infrastructures of thousands of miles of intercontinental fibre optic cable, immense server farms,
satellites and tunnels that enable us to connect to each other, the corporate giants that own and
run them, and the geopolitical forces at play around them. Decades of mythology, marketing and
rhetoric around cyberspace and personal computing have led us to imagine and talk of our online
lives as autonomous, deterritorialised public and private spaces in which we can conduct our
business or leisure, unimpeded and free from watchful eyes. We know this not to be true: we
know, at least in the abstract, that our personal information is very often coveted by tech
corporations, sold to advertisers, and used to train the algorithms and improve the offerings of
commercial services. Our every click, pause and keystroke is grist in Silicon Valley’s lucrative mill.
Snowden’s “PowerPoints, training slides, management reports, [and] diagrams of data-mining
programs” give us a glimpse of a yet bigger picture: of how these transactions are bundled up, sold,
stolen and secretly haggled over by governments and corporations at an enormous scale. In a
project called UPSTREAM, the NSA intercepts an estimated 80 per cent of digital communications
going in, out and around the US using an extensive network of oceanic cable taps in the Atlantic
and Pacific oceans. It pays hundreds of millions a year for access to 81 per cent of international
phone calls coming in and out of the US. It cajoles, compels and partners with major tech
companies and infrastructure operators for access, front or back door, given or taken. GCHQ
allegedly reports a 7,000 per cent increase in the amount of information they have access to in
the past few years. This is not just a simple case of state overreach. This is the surveillance
industrial complex: the deep entanglement of entrenched public and private interests, woven
together by contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars, secret deals, legal immunities, power
games and revolving doors. Despite the loud protestations from Silicon Valley that “the balance
… has tipped too far in favor of the state and away from the rights of the individual”, this is just
as much about the nefarious secret activities of unaccountable corporations as it is about the
nefarious secret activities of unaccountable governments. As many have pointed out, the debate
which Snowden started should not just be about curbing the excessive and unaccountable
enthusiasms of the surveillance state but also access capitalism, corporate influence, undermining
global institutions and trust and new forms of information consumerism. While some have
recently condemned the way in which the debate has been framed as a cyberlibertarian
distraction, surely what is needed is a broadening and deepening of the debate, rather than
ignoring it or moving on. Perhaps we should take it as an opportunity to discuss not only how to
strike the right balance between security, privacy and liberty, but also about the composition,
functioning and regulation of the invisible world that gives life to the light from our screens, and
the effect that this world has on us and how we collectively think and operate .

The pervasiveness of state surveillance demands a psychoanalysis of

why people submit their data to be observed rather than single-issue
reforms
Burnham, 15 – Associate Professor, English, Philosophy, and Cultural studies, Simon Fraser
University (Clint, “Does the Internet Have an Unconscious?,” The Freudian Legacy Today, 168-
169, http://www.cnpc-rcpc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/10-Burnham-Does-the-Internet-
Have-an-Unconscious.pdf)//SY
I am not arguing that one should ignore the practices of state and corporate surveillance, although I
find Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s contention that privacy is a nineteenth century bourgeois liberal
fantasy compelling.10 But certainly, as revelation follows revelation of the data mining of one’s
personal information (the ideology of a subject ‘owning’ or ‘having rights to’ one’s information
must be questioned and historicized), one feels that there is a certain structural relentlessness on
the part of such apparatuses. Perhaps what we need is a psychoanalysis of those
apparatuses, of their perverse need to compile all of one’s data . Let us now turn to
Freud’s famous remark that the unconscious knows no contradiction. This is so because the
unconscious is the site of our desire, of our “wishful impulses,” which “exist side by side without
being influenced by one another, and are exempt from mutual contradiction” (186). I would
argue that this lack of contradiction is also what is so prevalent and annoying about social media
and online email web browsers. Consider how, when Facebook or Gmail is up on our computer
screen, we see our intimate thoughts surrounded by ads for belly fat or ESL or gay photography.
Facebook now asks me: “How are you doing, what’s happening, how’s it going, what’s going on,
how are you feeling, Clint?” Here the unconscious of the internet, via the shared characteristic of
a lack of contradiction, relates to how the algorithms work. On Facebook, ads are triggered by
your profile information (if you like cookery, you will get cookbook ads) and your likes (you are
what you like, as one online posting explains), whereas Google ads are triggered by your search
terms. In both cases, we find precisely what Freud discusses in terms of the contents of the
unconscious: wishful impulses, with the exception or caveat that we may not, in fact, like
cookbooks, even if we clicked on that link, or want cookbooks. Indeed we may have used that
search term because we wanted to buy one for our cousin for his or her birthday. Thus, when I
go to Amazon I am continually offered books I bought not for myself, but for my son or my
brother. This is my point: our subjectivity as worked out in the unconscious does not conform to
how we want others to see us (the imaginary: cookbooks versus cultural theory; YA novels versus
police procedurals). Instead it discloses the real of our desire, in my example actually to please my
brother or my son. In this sense, it’s a matter of desire (Lacan), and not taste (Bourdieu).

Policies decreasing surveillance are worthless transgressions ---

limiting the NSA because they restrict our freedom is a token action
that puts the locus of value in the Other
Andrejevic 2013 --- Associate Professor of Critical and Cultural Studies (Mark, “Infoglut: How Too Much
Information Is Changing the Way We Think and Know”, https://books.google.com/books?
id=b1MXhS71t40C&pg=PA137&lpg=PA137&dq=Mark+Andrejevic+psychoanalysis&source=bl&ots=u7EOqDowuO&sig=Yjh5iuA--
vWmFoMWS7eWyBOBxAw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=VcmOVYHaMYarsAHgzY6IBg&ved=0CD4Q6AEwBA#v=onepage&q&f=false)//trepka
The psychoanalytic relationship between desire and drive, as described by Jodi Dean (following the work of
Zizek and Lacan) is invoked by this infinite recession. Desire, according to her account, is about constant
pursuit and disillusion - the endless attempt to catch an ever elusive object. With each gesture of capture, the
obtained object is revealed not to be it - the true object of desire - and the chase begins anew. By
contrast, the logic of drive reflexivizes the process, conceding the impossibility of ever catching up with the infinitely
deferred object, although "conceding" isn't the right term - enjoying or "getting off on" this impossibility might be a better
way to put it: "Drive cir- culates, round and round, producing satisfaction even as it misses its aim ,
even as it emerges in the plastic network of the decline of symbolic efficiency. There is a self-satisfied gesture of the
"non-duped" in this reflexive recognition - a certain glee in "getting" what the dupes do not . But
there is also something altogether too facile about this recognition insofar as it imagines
in its reflexive wisdom that it has captured a bit of truth about truth - in this regard,
it is not quite reflexive enough. As Alenlta Zupancic puts it, "If we simply keep repeating that all our knowledge is
subjectively mediated and necessarily partial, we have said nothing of importance. Echoes of the perverse
enjoyment of the drive resonate in the right-wing embrace of what the comedian Stephen Colbert famously dubbed "truthiness" (a
"zeitgeisty" term, according to the New York Times): a cynical and ultimately conservative realism that concedes the demise of
symbolic efficiency while continuing to rely upon it. Consider the example of a vexed exchange about the details of Obama's health
care plan between CNN anchor Soledad O'Brien and Republican mouthpiece john Sununu during the 2012 US Presidential
campaign: O'Brien: I'm telling you what factcheck.com [sic] tells you, I'm telling you what the CBO says, I'm telling you what CNN’s
independent analysis says… There is independent analysis that details what this is about… Sununu: No there isn't! O'Brien: Yes there
is! Sununu: [shouting] No, there's Democratic analysis… there's Democratic analysis! The very attempt to appeal to a notion of
independent analysis or objective fact is aggressively (and somewhat gleefully) debunked. On its face, this dynamic might seem an
instance of the logic of desire: the ongoing attempt to capture an infinitely receding piece of the real - as if a more accurate, better
constructed analysis might reveal the true impact of policy in question. However, such a formulation doesn't capture Sununu's
position, which is not "you need better analysis," but the post-reality-based community assertion that "your analysis can never catch
up with my (affective) facts." The assertion is a self-undermining gesture for pundits and commentators
insofar as it highlights the futility of analysis altogether (at least insofar as its purported goal of clarification and
explication is concerned), and yet the endless loops of analysis proliferate on 24-hour cable
news, blogs, and Websites. To point out, as one systematic study Did, that a coin flip is more accurate than
the predictions of expert commen- tators and analysts is to miss the point: in a post-deferential
era, analysis is simply more "word clouds": "elements that reinforce the collapse of meaning and
argument and thus hinder argument and opposition.” The fact-checking cottage industry is a legacy of the
journalism of the 1980s and 1990s, which replaced an ostensibly outdated commitment to "objectivity" with the convention of
balance - a convention that was so badly abused by skilled public relations strategies and spokespeople that some news outlets felt
compelled to revive the notion of objectivity as a separate division, like the Tampa Bay Times’s, to which reporters could have
recourse as one more "source." This kind of sock puppetry along, with the occasional willingness of a mainstream media outlet to
identify a politician's blatant lie has been greeted in some circles as a welcome exercise in "shucking the old he- said-she-said
formulation and directly declaring that some claims are False. But the damage might run too deep for the
occasional invocation of a truth claim to heal. As the Atlantic put it in a hand-wringing piece on the fate of
political campaigning triggered by a misleading ad run by the Romney cam- paign: " But
what if it tums out that when
the press calls a lie a lie, nobody cares ? The bottom line, of course, is that the ad is
continuing to run . It is continuing to run because the Romney campaign's polling shows it to
be effective.

The aff’s controlled transgression upholds the surveillance state

Glassford, Professor, 2004 (John, “Representations of Surveillance”, http://www.angelo.edu/faculty/jglassford/my
%20publications%20encrypted/representations%20of%20surveillance.pdf)//trepka
The state already has the capacity to intercept private communications, either electronic or regular mail, it
can listen to conversations through the traditional wiretap or wireless communications, it can bug and listen to people calling out in
the night while asleep or dreaming, it can engage in sneak and peak surveillance of property undetected, it can examine all private
financial transactions and an individual’s credit history, it can monitor and collect a wealth of biological data on suspects,
including blood type, dental records, fingerprints, both standard and DNA, ear-lobe identification, and voice pattern recognition, it
can follow a person’s daily routine while remaining undetected. In fact it can close down the individual’s physical and mental scape
to the extent that it could leave them literally with no home to go to . The game is not to find out whether an
individual has the ability to commit an offense, thousands of citizens in the average urban setting now have the
capacity to commit acts of terror, the goal is to establish if they are “thinking” about committing an
offense. Some recent Hollywood movies, especially those released after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the attacks on the
World Trade Center have tried to engage with some of the issues associated with these events. Films such as The Pelican Brief,
directed by Alan J. Paluka, 1993, Enemy of the State, directed by Tony Scott, 1998, Minority Bourne Identity, directed by Doug
Liman, 2002. These films have had something to say about life after the political certainties of the Cold War and the World Trade
Center attacks, the growth of surveillance power, and especially the manipulation and control of human biology. In all of these films
the most consistently applied theme suggests that surveillance technology allows a state to clandestinely
operate within a state, and that rogue elements who control this surveillance technology will inevitably attempt to expand
their own power at the expense of concerned politicians and the American public alike. Thus the assassination of ecologically
friendly Supreme Court judges, inquisitive Senators, and foreign policy embarrassments of one kind or another, as well as the
unwarranted harassment of innocent members of the public are all de rigueur in most of these movies. Often it is the
sanctity of key American values which are under threat, values such as property or privacy; “that’s
my blender” says the captured, outraged lawyer character played by will Smith to a rogue NSA operative who stole it from his
kitchen during the course of a sneak and peak raid in Enemy of the State. Writing off habeas corpus is one thing, but stealing a man’s
blender is an affront to every decent American. The surveillance movie genre is inherently paradoxical . As well as
being good entertainment these movies are clearly intended to be a running commentary on the dangers posed by the state to
individual civil liberties, they are meant to be a wake up call to decent liberty-loving folks every where. Yet the entertainment
function is not irrelevant, since
these films have a need to thrill they are fundamentally structured by
what Lacan called jouissance, or the
sheer inertia created by the pleasure principle. Although these
movies are clearly alert to the possibilities of abuses of power by the new surveillance wonks, for the most part
these films are sentimental or sanguine and seldom dwell on the destructive details of spying or the ultimate ends of such human
behavior analysis and control. The rush of the action is seldom allowed to run into unknown cultural and political
terrain or to rebellion or transgression. Transgression, where it does occur, is often neutered. This
Hollywood strategy of ambiguous protest is nothing new, in his “Fantasy as a Political Category”, Slavoj Zizek’s Lacanian analysis of
fantasy demonstrated with regard to the 1970 Robert Altman film, M*A*S*H that acts of transgression need not
automatically qualify as acts of rebellion if such acts operate as a controlled release of
wholly legitimate anger and rage . Indeed in the case of the 4077 it helped to keep the
participants sane and the war effort going .

The social relations governing society and the way our personality is
constructed means we want to be watched, we desire surveillance ---
that affirmative reforming one program can’t change that
Humphreys 6 (Ashlee, Northwestern University, “The Consumer as Foucauldian “Object of Knowledge””, Social Science
Computer Review, Volume 24 Number 3, page 296-309, Sage)//trepka
The Cookie Surveillance on the Internet works in much the same way for tracking desire, but one should not overhastily assume that it controls
consumer desire in the same way as the gaze of the tower (individuation from the surveillance is much more productive for creating desire).
Surveillance does, however, play an important role in making the consumer an object of knowledge, in enabling individuation. Through cookies, files
placed on each computer that serve to track and document Internet activity (e.g., purchases, name, address, and other information),
surveillance is ever-present . The cookie used by Amazon.com, for example, is used to identify and greet the customer when she
or he visits the site, then to literally bombard she or he with products that she or he might be interested in: sidebars of book reviews, lists (made by
other, similar members) of CDs along a certain theme or genre, new releases from movie genres of the consumer’s previous choices. This is not,
however, a covert practice—it is one that is encouraged by visitors and advertised by Amazon: “Get instant personalized recommendations based on
your prior purchases the moment you log on” (Amazon.com, 2002a). Although consumers may not be aware of the extent or the machinations of this
technology, they are continually made aware of Amazon’s presence as a watcher by the personalized feedback that Amazon provides. The log-on serves
to instantly identify but also to instantly and continually track. Only, in this case, the
continuous gaze from the tower is often
welcomed because it is conflated with the gaze from other consumers. As evidence of this desire to be watched,
customers contribute lists, reviews, and guides to Amazon.com, often developing personalities
as a “top reviewer” or an expert on some domain of consumption. Integral to this practice is a process of rating others based on their
contributions. Thus, one driving factor for both the desire to gaze and the desire to be gazed at is

“ scopophilia ” and, more historically speaking, the rise of “image culture ,” as Fredric Jameson (1998) identifies it. Now
suddenly a hitherto baleful universal visibility that seemed to brook no utopian alternative is welcomed and reveled in for its own sake: this is the true
moment of image society, in which human subjects henceforth exposed (according to Paul Willis) to bombardments of up to a thousand images a day
(at the same time that their formerly private lives are thoroughly viewed and scrutinized, itemized, measured and enumerated, in data banks) begin to
live a very different relationship to space and time, to existential experience as well as cultural consumption. (pp. 110-111) Thus, image
culture
inspires in consumers not only the desire to watch but also to be watched (Kozinets et al., 2004). Some
compelling examples of this phenomenon include reality TV shows and the proliferation of personal,
voyeuristic, 24-hour web cameras. In the specific case of Amazon.com, consumers exercise their desire to be watched through
“Listmania!” a service offered by Amazon that allows consumers to display their preferences in a themed list to be looked at by other consumers and
(implicitly) by Amazon.com. Of this practice, Amazon says, “Go ahead and create a favorite item list now to help other customers discover products that
you enjoy. It’s free, democratic, and fun” (Amazon.com, 2004). Because consumers derive pleasure from being watched by other consumers, the gaze in
general is welcomed, whereas the gaze from marketers in particular is seldom noticed or differentiated. Surveillance is so pervasive that it may not
occur to consumers to care if they are being watched by marketers. They may assume, in many cases, that they always are being watched anyway.
However, paranoia,Zizwould argue, is unwarranted as a metaphor because consumers in this paradigm, as evidenced by the shoppers at Amazon.com,
want to be watched. We
have not a culture of paranoids, as in the Panopticon, but a culture of narcissists . This
narcissism, also noted by Kozinets et al. (2004), is one reasonZizargue that a refracted or prismatic
Panopticon is a more apt metaphor than the obverse Panopticon . The obverse of the Panopticon, for Foucault,
would be consumers looking back at marketers rather than the marketers looking at the consumers. The spectacle—consumers all fixing their gaze on
some image or another—is not the obverse of the Panopticon; consumers do not look back at the marketer, they look to the image or other consumers.
In the present case of the spectacle, the consumer not only is watched but is watched watching .
This model of consumers being
“watched watching” has three levels: marketers watching consumers, consumers gazing at an
image, consumers gazing at other consumers (cf. Kozinets et al., 2004) and—admittedly the perspective of this essay—the
consumer-researcher watching all of this watching. The refracted Panopticon is one of maximal scopophilia in which
everyone gazes: The marketers watch consumers who watch other consumers, a cycle that only terminates with a consumer’s gaze at an image, to the
degree that everything in this space is always already an image (Baudrillard, 1983; Derrida, 1978b). It is like two
mirrors held up to one another. The image moves back and forth regressively, an infinite dialectic. As Jameson notes, “image
society” created around consumption—and in fact almost indistinguishable from it (Firat & Venkatesh, 1995)—instills in
the consumer a desire to be watched, but also to be watched watching. The image has become so revered in
contemporary culture that some consumers not only feel compelled to gaze, they feel compelled to be gazed at. Here

we can see how being watched has amplified and altered consumer agency. Consumers not only
have the scopophilic desire to look at images but also the desire to be an image themselves . Thus,
the spectacle as theorized by Debord (1967/1983) and Baudrillard (1983) is intricately linked with surveillance by way of scopophilia. The
embracement of both surveillance and spectacle issue from the same source: image cultur e. To
theorize further as to the cause of image culture itself would necessarily, as Jameson argues, be linked with the historical condition and the dynamics of
global capital, a discussion that is beyond the scope of the present essay. In
image culture, the embeddedness of the gaze,
addressed earlier with regard to prisoners, recurs
only in more advanced form. The gaze is internalized by
controlling how consumers themselves see. An overly deterministic view might assert that consumers have so internalized the
gaze that there is no resistance to it, that there is a continual performance of preferences, and that they never truly originate from the consumer. This
view has the downside of neglecting human agency. If we subscribe to a more liberatory view, it could be argued that consumer preferences are co-
constituted by both consumers and marketers through dialectic interchange that meets the needs of both groups. Unlike the case of the prisoner in the
Panopticon, the
gaze is welcomed because it serves a different, more indirect, even playful function of
power than it did in the penal system. Here, surveillance is used, on the surface of it, to improve
consumer satisfaction . Cookies are used to remember consumer preferences and information to make the process shopping faster and more
pleasant. And what consumer (uncritically) would resist that? The practice of using cookies fulfills, to some degree, both the consumer and the
marketer goals. These goals are for both constituencies local or instrumental goals; they do not call into question the orientation of more global goals.
This kind of institutional rationality may thus benefit neither consumers nor companies on a larger, more global level (Weber, 1922/1968).

One-shot solutions to surveillance fails --- the modern subject jumps

into strangers’ pictures, posts endless updates of the burrito they ate
for breakfast on Facebook and Instagram, constantly desiring an
outside gaze by an important, governmental Other
Tziallas 2010 --- Ph.D. student, conducts surveillance research (Evangelos, “Torture porn and
surveillance culture”, http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc52.2010/evangelosTorturePorn/text.html)//trepka
Surveillance is everywhere , and its social ubiquity has led to it being a common element or mode of representation
in contemporary moving image culture. As Thomas Levin has argued, “By the 1990s…cinematic narration could be said, in many
cases, to have effectively become synonymous with surveillant enunciation as such.”[1][open endnotes in new window]
Surveillance has become a mode of visual production , as in reality television shows like Big Brother (US, 2001)
or films like Timecode (2000); it has become a narrative and thematic element, as in Caché (2005), Disturbia
(2007) The Borne Ultimatum (2007); and sometimes it serves as both a mode of production and narrative
theme, as in The Conversation (1974), Sliver (1993), The Truman Show (1998), or the British sitcom Peep Show. When
surveillance functions as both mode of production and major script element, as Levin puts it, “It is this ambiguity—between
surveillance as narrative subject, i.e. as thematic concern, and surveillance as the very condition or structure of narration itself—that
will become increasingly characteristic of the cinema of the 1990s.”[2] The prevalence of surveillance in contemporary media is now
so vast that, for the purpose of this paper,Zizwould like to focus on a small group of films that exemplify contemporary discourses on
surveillance in a specific way. This group of films is collectively known as “torture porn.” The label “torture porn” refers to a loose
association of feature fiction films featuring scenes of extreme violence and torture. David Edelstein coined the phrase in his 2006
New York Magazine article as he quickly surveyed a common trend of violent representations in popular cinema. The catchy term
became a trendy buzzword and now torture porn is considered a horror sub-genre in its own right.[3] AlthoughZizwill in part
investigate torture porn as a cinematic sub-genre, my goal is to demonstrate the centrality of surveillance in
these films as shaping narrative elements, modes of presentation, and iconographic motifs in ways that
convey deep anxieties about the alteration of “the gaze.” Surveillance in torture porn allegorizes
larger cultural and political trends in panoptic (the few watching the many) and synoptic (the many
watching the few) subjectivities. Surveillance metonymically encompasses looking and the complex
and ambivalent nature of looking and being looked at, and these elements of human social life are currently
undergoing radical transformation due to technological advancements spurring on a “culture of surveillance,” or “surveillance
culture.” As Nicholas Mirzoeff has noted, “Since the 1970s, one of the striking phenomena that have come to make visual culture
seem a vital topic has been the convergence of spectacle and surveillance.”[4] “Surveillance” and the larger category, “image,” are
merging together into surveillant images. If these two methods of representation have united, then this union requires us to
investigate how the act of looking follows this social and technological change and what the ramifications of this merged, or altered,
cultural gaze are. Looking is biological; gazing is cultural. As culture evolves, so too does the gaze.
Torture porn is a sub-genre invested not just in looking or visibility but in panoptic and synoptic watching and hyper-visibility,
which are rendering privacy and invisibility a thing of the past. The label “torture porn” combines reference to two of the most
intense bodily acts and visible bodily representations; “porn” (sex) and “torture” (violence). The label itself is symptomatic of the
extreme forms of visibility that torture porn engages with, bringing the body, but most importantly, visibility to the foreground.
These films are partially concerned with “torture” and “porn,” but their consistent underlying structure rests on the sub-textual
desires of looking embedded within “torture” and “porn.” Indeed “torture” and “porn” are actions and/or representations designed
for maximum visibility. “Torture” and “porn” come to represent two increasingly intertwined discourses: first, the
loss of privacy brought upon by, and commonplace attitude towards,
institutional/corporate/government surveillance (the culture of surveillance); and second, our
appropriation of surveillance as a form of entertainment (surveillance culture).Zizargue that torture porn is an
extreme reaction to the Bush administration’s post-9/11 surveillance protocols and policies. Entangled with various issues and
anxieties relating to the ubiquity of surveillance, we have now also culturally appropriated surveillance as a form of entertainment.
In his book The Culture of Surveillance Staples argues, “As a society, we have become obsessed with the gaze of
the videocam, not only because we perceive that it brings us ‘security’ but also because we are
fascinated by the visual representation of ourselves .”[5] The ever-looming presence of
potential surveillance, either via our own “videocams” or CCTV, makes us “ comfortable with,
and even drawn to, the idea of being preserved on tape .”[6] The converging of these
forms of surveillance suggests that a contemporary psychoanalytic approach to understanding
gazing (voyeurism, scopophilia, exhibitionism) requires a nuanced expansion and re-
conceptualization . Toronto writer Hal Niedzviecki investigates the effect of surveillance within pop culture phenomena
in his 2009 book The Peep Diaries. For Niedzviecki, “ Peep culture is reality TV, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr,
MySpace and Facebook. It’s blogs, chat rooms, amateur porn sites, virally spread digital
movies…cell phone photos—posted online—of your drunk friend making out with her ex-
boyfriend, and citizen surveillance .”[7] Peep culture then, is “a cultural movement steeped in
and made possible by technological change.” It implants the belief, “You need to know. You need to be known.”[8]
Why do onlookers jump around behind news reporters filming on location? Because they know they will be seen on TV. People
used to avoid walking into strangers’ pictures, now they often jump into the frame because
they know they will be uploaded onto Facebook or Myspace, or Flickr, increasing their visibility.
Niedzvicki’s book casts a wide net, weaving personal observation, experience and interviews into an exploration of contemporary
“surveillance culture.” Topics he investigates include the following: reality television, celebrity “news,” amateur porn, serial
YouTubers, camboys/camgirls, social networking, GPS obsession, government surveillance, spying technology, the urge to “confess
ourselves,” and the dissolution of community and identity. His thesis is that we have entered an age where
surveillance proper (military/security/institutional) has merged with and is appropriated
by cultural industries and individuals , resulting in new surveillance-inspired forms of representation and
entertainment. We have entered into an age defined by “wanting to know everything about everyone
and, in turn, wanting to make sure that everyone knows everything about [us ].”[9] In
short, people live for the surveillance gaze . Niedzvicki does not see this as a positive turn of events, as
surveillance remains a key tool of corporate and governmental power . People’s desire to rid themselves of
their privacy has dangerous consequences, and the underlying fear and anxiety about these consequences is what torture porn draws
upon and implicitly replicates.

Subjects in the media age abhor privacy --- modern narcissism

requires the surveillance gaze in the other in order to validate our
existence
Tziallas 2010 --- Ph.D. student, conducts surveillance research (Evangelos, “Torture porn and
surveillance culture”, http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc52.2010/evangelosTorturePorn/text.html)//trepka
Voyeurism was a hidden, somewhat shameful, secret gaze, while surveillance
is a flaunted gaze. The voyeuristic gaze
seeks others as a way to acknowledge the self, while the
surveillance gaze only seeks itself; it is a further
intensified narcissistic gaze. It is no longer voyeurism’s “I see you,” or exhibitionism’s “I want
you to see me,” but surveillance’s “I want you to see me seeing you,” and surveillance performers’
“I want you to see me seeing you see me.” Rather than seeking the human gaze of the other for mirrored
identification, we now seek the recorded gaze of the mechanical: we increasingly know
ourselves (and others) as images rather than people mediated by images. For Ursula Frohne, “This
desire to attain telepresence, to verify and validate one’s own existence…under the gaze of
the media society and thereby to anchor one’s cultural self-realization is characteristic of
contemporary media narcissism .”[79] Zizek echoes the same theme: “Today, anxiety seems to arise
from the prospect of not being exposed to the Other’s gaze all the time, so that the subject
needs the camera’s gaze as a kind of ontological guarantee of his/her being.”[80] Whether
looking or being looked at, the gaze invariably turns back to the self , something Paul Virilio now sees as a
merging of the human gaze and the technological surveillance gaze. For Virilio, we live with “Vision Machines,” within a system
where machines watch us, and where we watch them as they watch us, ad infinitum, mimicking the endless gaze of two mirrors side
by side reflecting each other’s reflectionreflection: an undecipherable world of mise-en-abyme. Surveillance culture
produces “a new readiness to give up one of the fundamental principles of civilization—that
of the legally protected private sphere and personal intimacy …”[81] and it is precisely this willingness to
sacrifice our private selves to the media that torture porn is critical of. Niedzviecki quotes Renton and Reuben’s belief that “reality
TV’s production techniques have aspects in common with torture” citing shows “like Fear Factor and Survivor and even The Real
Gilligan’s Island, that regularly subject their contestants to confinement, starvation and degrading activities.”[82] In this regard,
Saw II is the film most critical of surveillance culture. The entire film is constructed as a sinister version of Big Brother. Eight
strangers wake up to find themselves locked in a large house with poisonous gas slowly leaking through the vents. Their mission is to
find the code to the safe, a safe that contains the antidote. What the victims here are fighting for is “immunization,” or as in the
reality television show Survivor, “immunity.” As contestants in reality television get knocked off, victims in Saw II get killed off, and
as with most reality television shows, an implicit “award” for those who survive is additional visibility. In this instance, however, this
“award” is perverted as it only prolongs one’s torture. The longer you last, the more screen time you get, but the more screen time
you get, the more you suffer. A tape recording tells them to work together as a team, but each “contestant’s” greed takes over, leading
our desire to rid
to their demise. Saw II implicitly critiques reality television’s neo-conservatism and expresses disgust for
ourselves of our privacy . Not only are people dissolving themselves into images, not only are they watching people
being tortured, they are even letting themselves be tortured for this new social privilege. It is no surprise that
the cultural appropriation and use of surveillance has focused so intently on the “average person,” and that this visual power
of public looking, especially on the Internet, has been leveraged by individuals to expose
themselves. Surveillance culture is an attempt to salvage ourselves . As Hal Niedzviecki argues, when
people appropriate surveillance as a form of resistance, it does not mean they attempt to resist
the institution but rather to resist the eradication of themselves . The surveillance gaze then
is partly a gaze of lamentation. Perhaps then is why so many have churned out images of themselves
on the Internet performing intimate , obscene or criminal acts, such as eating feces, having orgies,
torturing others, attacking the homeless, or committing crimes; and perhaps this is why the public’s eyes are simultaneously
attracted to these very same images. As the world becomes more virtual and fragmented, yet integrated, it seems people need to
intensify the shock in order to feel something. Yet these grasps for attention only add to the seemingly
limitless fragments available for consumption. As the protagonists of a film like Menace II Society indicate (they
robbed a convenience store and stole the surveillance tape not to remove evidence of a crime but to play it repeatedly for friends as
entertainment),[83] it seems that a condition of modern subjectivity is people’s need of the other’s gaze to validate themselves,
regardless of what the gaze sees, whether it be mundane activities like washing the dishes or a crime. As the title of Sandra
Bernhard’s one woman act/film puts it, “Without You I’m Nothing” (1990), or as Ursula Frohne has argued, our “internalized
camera gaze[,] the all-seeing, seemingly omnipresent ‘eye of God’ is reincarnated in the presence
of the observer in today’s media culture.”[84]

Focus on macropolitical surveillance obscures individual complicity

in monitoring – your aff is super obsolete and you’re worse than 1984
- Also a link to affs that ignore voyeurism
Andrejevic 6 “The Discipline of Watching: Detection, Risk, and Lateral Surveillance”. Mark, Mark Andrejevic
is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at The University of Iowa. 14 Dec 2006. Pgs. 392
– 395. PWoods.
The peer-to-peer monitoring practices described above have been characterized as a displacement of ‘‘Big
Brother’’ by proliferating ‘‘little brothers’’ who engage in distributed forms of monitoring and
information gathering. Whitaker (1999), for example, invokes the model of a ‘‘participatory Panopticon’’ in a
double sense: it represents a form of consensual submission to surveillance in part because the watched are
also doing the watching. As Miller (1988) put it in a succinct reformulation of the Big Brother slogan for a reflexive era: ‘‘ Big
Brother is you, watching.’’ But even the model of a participatory Panopticon tends to focus attention on the targets of
surveillance* those who are subject to various forms of information gathering and the implications of peer-to-peer or commercial
monitoring for those targets. Whitaker argues that the decentralization of Big Brother amplifies Panoptic
control: ‘‘There is less need for a central command centre, a single focused Eye, when the same
effect can be achieved by multiple, dispersed, even competitive eyes that in their totality add up to a
system of surveillance more pervasive than that imagined by Orwell’’ (p. 140). Similar concerns regarding
the invasion of privacy or the inappropriate use of personal information, as well as forms of discrimination, exclusion, and
discipline, are raised by a persistent focus on the targets of Panoptic monitoring (e.g., Foucault, 1995; Gandy, 1993; Rosen, 2000).
However, in an era of distributed surveillance, the amplification of panoptic monitoring relies on the
internalized discipline not just of the watched, but also of the watchers . Absent the internalization of norms
of conduct and governing imperatives by the watchers, distributed surveillance would amount to little more than the pluralization of
control rather than a strategy for its centralization and amplification. The exposure of the watchers as objects of the
gaze is the participatory twist highlighted by Room Raiders’ portrayal of peer-to-peer monitoring
as spectacle. It is the moment, anticipated in Freud’s (1938, 1950) discussion of the scopic drive, wherein the role of the
voyeur is redoubled by that of the exhibitionist. The savvy spy, engaged in an ongoing process of
verification, is exposed as the object of what Lacan (1981) described as the imagined gaze in the field of the
Other*a gaze literalized by the omniscient reality TV cameras. Room Raiders offers a reflexive distillation of the role of
the savvy subject who, always on guard against the risks of deception, internalizes the norms and
imperatives of surveillance, screening, and sorting. The contrived scene of surveillance on the show
simultaneously exposes practices of investigatory voyeurism as forms of self-display. The drive to
make oneself seen as someone not fooled by facades aligns itself with the performance of the savvy
subject, who takes pride in the ability to discern the ‘‘real’’ (purely strategic and self-interested)
agendas and personalities underlying public discourses and symbolic mandates. The ‘‘room raid’’ is thus
both examination and exhibition. By going through the rooms with investigative tools, searching dresser drawers and hard drives,
the raider guards against potentially unpleasant surprises and performs for an imagined audience the
skills of detection and risk monitoring necessary for negotiating a world in which people are not
always who they say they are. Practices of mutual monitoring , seen in this light, rely not just on a climate of
generalized skepticism and wariness, but upon conceptions of risk that instantiate social imperatives of
productivity, hygiene, and security associated with the maximization of productive forces . The
discussion of Room Raiders is meant not as a comprehensive catalogue of the pathologies of lateral surveillance, but as a
suggestive example*a pattern to ‘‘think with,’’ as it were, when considering other security or self-help
campaigns that invoke the injunction to watch out for one another *whether for reasons of economy, efficiency,
or security. As a diagram of power, mutual monitoring supplements the model of the (‘‘swarming’’ of the)
Panoptic with the added discipline of watching one another in order to redouble the monitoring
gaze of the authorities.

The plan is a symptom of ambivalence about integration in the

symbolic economy: privacy laws allow us to avoid analyzing our
desire by making token gestures instead of confronting our
ambivalence over the desire to be watched
Meyers 14 Zach Meyers Master of Public and International Law candidate, University of Melbourne. “Applying
Psychoanalysis to Australian Privacy Law”. June, 2014. Pgs. 141- 143. PWoods.
A key problematic addressed by Lacan’s theory is that, despite concerns about data protection, individuals are
willing to trade their personal information for marginal, if any, gain . The argument put forward by legal
economists such as Richard Posner to respond to this conundrum is predictable: ‘ the fact that people surrender it for
rather small gains is a sign they don’t really, or most people don’t really, value it that much’ .91 Here
we perhaps need to distinguish between the exchange of information between individuals (which one might
imagine as governed primarily by a tort of privacy or notions of ‘intrusion on seclusion’) and the
provision of information to the Other (which is the province of data protection law). The voluntary exchange of
personal information between individuals in normal social interactions has nothing to do with the
value of the personal information. It is akin to what Žižek calls an ‘empty gesture’:92 the point of the
exchange is interaction itself (it is coupled with a mutual understanding that the information is not to be used
inappropriately, that its potential value will not be realised). The application and implementation of these social
rules is an example of the Other, but applied to relations between individuals – as Žižek notes, the ‘main
function of the symbolic order with its laws and obligations is to render our co-existence with others
minimally bearable: a Third has to step in between me and my neighbours so that our relations do
not explode in murderous violence’.93 In this sense, the surrender of personal information in social
contexts (as better reflected in torts of privacy) seems to reflect well Nissenbaum’s concept of breach of ‘contextual integrity’.
The free exchange of information in this context is not a sign that the information itself is not
valued – indeed, the social bonds of the ‘empty gesture’ are, paradoxically, better entrenched when
the information is more valued and the trust between individuals is therefore greater . But the same
rationale does not apply to the type of provision of information governed by Australian data protection laws, which is a unilateral,
deliberate exchange where the personal information is indeed valued for its own sake. In fact, its value to us is
determined precisely by the fact that it is perceived as being valued by an-Other, and that it is
therefore seen as an inherent part of individual identity, an object potentially capable of being
desired. The desire of individuals for privacy is therefore not a desire for the protection of specific
information – instead, it is a (vain) attempt to invest in that information, to be able to explain the
profound feeling of loss of autonomy that is entailed by entering the social order by reference to
having lost control of something. This creates contradictory behaviour: on the one hand, a desire to achieve
control over one’s self by claiming a right to privacy; and on the other, a desire for publicity
because a person cannot fully achieve a withdrawal into privacy without confronting self-
surveillance and the reality that autonomy can never be achieved. For Lacan, ‘the gaze must
function as an object around which the exhibitionistic and voyeuristic impulses that constitute the
scopic drive turn … producing not merely anxiety but also pleasure’.94 Data protection laws
therefore function as a necessary safety net to enable individuals to disclose their personal
information (if not to deliberately create a market for disclosure – an approach that perhaps explains the purely economic
rationale for earlier Australian reforms).95 Westin has acknowledged this phenomenon, noting that ‘each individual is continually
engaged in a personal adjustment process in which he balances the desire for privacy with the desire for disclosure and
communication of himself to others’.96 Psychoanalysts’ emphasis on competing drives also explains the social
phenomenon that many privacy scholars have noted: the fact that, at the same time as concerns
about privacy are escalating (particularly due to the rise of new technologies), individuals have never been more
willing to both provide and disseminate personal data and engage in exhibitionist activities .97 That is,
despite psychoanalysis’s skepticism about the concept of autonomy, psychoanalysis does accept that the fantasy of
autonomy remains important to human dignity. Importantly, it does so without disregarding the evident importance
most people have for the protection of their personal information, and the apparently contradictory willingness most people have to
disclose that information. As I have suggested in the sections above, privacy law creates a sense of control over one’s
privacy (and so enables a person to avoid confronting the reality of their lack of autonomy), even as it continually
reminds and creates anxiety about the enforced loss of privacy and the lack of autonomy that is
being avoided. In terms of fulfilling drives, personal information becomes useful for individuals
exactly because it can be traded, exchanged, disseminated and recollected (in other words, treated like the
reel in the fort-da game). To the extent that data protection laws reflect privacy concerns, it is because
they facilitate a marketplace and an economy for personal information. Psychoanalysis rejects the view that
the increasing trend of individuals voluntarily allowing the public access to their personal information (for example, on social media)
reflects a disregard for privacy; on the contrary, it suggests an increasing desire to engage in the practice of exercising control over
one’s personal information.98 Psychoanalysis therefore explains why many prominent privacy theorists such as Prosser and Godkin
have expressly referred to a person’s right to their personal information as being proprietary.
 Link – Heg
Descriptions of the US as inherently superior serves to create a global
imagination that perpetuates cultural whitewashing and oppression
Loos 5/3/11 (Maxwell E., Honors Thesis, International Studies Department at Macalester College, “Ground Zero: Tourism,
Terrorism, and Global Imagination”, http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1013&context=intlstudies_honors)//trepka
The second, and most important, comparison to make is between the process of global imagination and the concept of the Lacanian
imaginary. For Lacan, the imaginary, which works in tension with the symbolic order and the Real,
has to do with the perception of coherence and wholeness out of fragmentation . This is outlined most
clearly in the mirror stage of development, in which (roughly) a child encounters an image of itself in a mirror, and takes that image
reflected in the mirror as a whole self, an ideal ego. This is the first time that the child recognizes itself as a whole and bounded self,
as prior to the mirror stage, the child has experienced only a fragmented reality.10 Friedrich Kittler argues that film is the
penultimate medium of the imaginary, as it takes fragmented remnants of optical reality (film frames) and projects them to create a
whole, continuous, moving image.11 The mirror stage has also been used in film studies, most notably by Laura Mulvey, who argues
that pleasure in narrative cinema derives from a mirror stage identification with the (male) figures on the screen as ideal egos.12
Importantly, Lacan argues that the formation of the ideal ego as demonstrated in the mirror stage
provides the image of cohesive reality that allows for the infant to experience subjectivity and
enter into the symbolic order of reality and its representation through language.13 The idea of global
imagination resembles the Lacanian imaginary in several important ways: first , Lacan’s
contention that imagining a whole, ideal ego is required for the subject to enter the symbolic
order is not dissimilar to Steger’s formulation of how social articulations like political ideologies
require social imaginaries. The most important aspect of the Lacanian imaginary for understanding the process of global
imagination, though, is the idea of creating cohesion out of fragmentation. The globe, as a unit of social imaginary which
undergirds and allows certain social articulations, must be imagined as a cohesive thing. Lacan , in explicating the
mirror stage, remarks that the process of subject formation outlined in the mirror stage parallels the
way in which knowledge resembles paranoia ; that is, knowledge (and mirror stage subject-formation)
creates connections and cohesiveness where none actually exist .14 This is, more or less,
what global imagination does: it makes the globe from a reality that is fragmented, lacking the
structures of physical experience or community, into a cohesive whole, logical and bounded in its thing-
ness, observable and representable. It is also a means of producing knowledge about the globe. The iconic image of the globe, the
1968 Earthrise photograph taken from Apollo 8, appears to capture this wholeness, presenting the earth in two dimensions as a
spectral, closed sphere against the background of black, empty space. It indicates that the entirety of the globe can be seen, and that
it looks like a certain way. Certainly, this image of the earth parallels the reflected image of the child in the mirror in that it is
imagined as a whole, when prior to its representation it would have been a collection of unintelligible, fragmented reality.Zizhave
thus far ignored the issue of subject-formation in the mirror stage, but there is an important element of subjectivity and positioning
involved in the process of global imagination. The global imaginary is not, after all, the only social imaginary in existence; it is not
even the dominant one of our moment. Thus, in a situation where multiple social imaginaries undergird various social articulations
– some of them imagined communities, some of them imagined units – the process of imagining a globe, a unit uniquely able to
subsume all of these in its imagined form, must involve an element of organizing and positioning. This is most easily demonstrated
in relation to nations, still the dominant social imaginary: global imagination not only creates the world as a
cohesive globe, it also makes nations fit together as a part of that globe . More than that, though, it
positions nations in relation to one another and in relation to the globe , so that the
United States can articulate a sense of global responsibility in bombing Libya,15 while Qatar flies
jets over Libya as a regional actor, and Djibouti is not part of the conversation. 16 In other words,
nations are imagined as parts of the globe with specific attributes and roles to play in the logical functioning of that globe. Global
imagination, then, in addition to creating a cohesive globe, also does this job of positioning nations and other entities within the
globe. The primacy of the nation as a unit of social imaginary, though, complicates this process of positioning entities within the
imagined globe; for one, the process of imagining the globe does not actually take place from above the globe, as the photograph
from space might imply, but from within a social situation, particularly from within a nation. This means that there is a
“here/there” element to the process of global imagination ; at least in the American context, the globe, despite
being imagined as a closed and inclusive system-thing, is not “here,” it is part of “there,” not unlike the distinction
between Self and Other that undergirds the Lacanian subject’s integration into the Symbolic
Order.17 For evidence of this distinction, one need look no further than the structure of news
media: almost every major newspaper has separate sections or subsections for world news, indicating that all
of the other news, likely organized around local and national categories, is not world news. If it weren’t for some sort of here/there
distinction in global imagination, all news would be world news. This means, then, that the process of “making whole” in global
imagination does not erase difference and otherness; rather, global imagination takes experiences and images of difference and
otherness and arranges them symbolically to fit into a unit called the globe. It subsumes them into the globe, so that global
imagination is a process by which the subject can imagine that he/she does understand difference and otherness (“there”) as part of
a system-thing; a retail chain with a name like “Global Market” can sell the consumer commodities specifically engineered to dwell
on cultural difference and otherness, because they are part of a system called the globe. In this instance, the term “global”
can be seen as a means of managing cultural difference. Global imagination, at this point,
starts to resemble Edward Said’s Orientalism, insofar as global imagination is a process by which
cultural difference is appropriated into a system of knowledge, wherein something is made and
constructed. Said argued that Orientalism, both as an academic discipline and a Foucauldian discourse, produced knowledge of
the Orient that allowed it to serve as an Other to the Occident.18 There is a definite discursive element to global
imagination, particularly as knowledge is generated about specific parts of the imagined globe (i.e. Tahiti is tropical,
France is European, Iran is oppressive – all typically global unquestioned “facts,” circulated and
mediated to the American subject). Indeed, it is important to understand global imagination not just as the process of
imagining the globe as a unit, but as the process of imagining the globe as a unit with specific characteristics. This is in line with
Steger’s argument, in which differences in the specific characteristics of the imagined globe (and thus global imaginary) between
groups allow for the articulation of different globalisms.19 It does make sense, then, that while Justice Globalism and Jihadist
Globalism might be articulations of a global imaginary, they stem from different fundamental understandings of the shape, or
characteristics, of the globe. Put another way, they all stem from a global imaginary, but different specific knowledges of the globe.
 Link – Hysteria

The hysteria of their demand is politically counterproductive --- it creates distancing which both
sustains hegemonic logic and creates impossible demands for hysterical enjoyment
Lundberg 12 --- Professor and Communication Strategies Consultant (Christian, Lacan in Public,
Published by The University of Alabama Press, Project Muse)//trepka
Hysteria is a politically effective subject position in some ways, but it is politically constraining from the
perspective of organized political dissent. If not a unidirectional practice of resistance, hysteria is at best a politics of
interruption. Imagine a world where the state was the perfect and complete embodiment of a hegemonic order, without interruption
or remainder, and the discursive system was hermetically closed. Politics would be an impossibility: with no site for contest or
reappropriation, politics would simply be the automatic extension of structure. Hysteria is a site of interruption, in that hysteria
represents a challenge to our hypothetical system, refusing straightforward incorporation by its symbolic logic. But, stepping outside
this hypothetical non-polity, on balance, hysteria
is politically constrainin g because the form of the
demand , as a way of organizing the field of political enjoyment, requires that the system
continue to act in certain ways to sustain its logic. Though on the surface it is an act of
symbolic dissent, hysteria represents an affirmation of a hegemonic order and is therefore
a particularly fraught form of political subjectivization. The case of the hysteric produces an additional problem
in defining jouissance as equivalent with hegemony. One way of defining hysteria is to say that it is a form of enjoyment that is
defined by its very disorganization. As Gérard Wajcman frames it, the fundamental analytical problem in defining hysteria is
precisely that it is
a paradoxical refusal of organized enjoyment by a constant act of deferral. This
deferral functions by asserting a form of agency over the Other while simultaneously
demanding that the Other provide an organizing principle for hysterical
enjoyment , something the Other cannot provide. Hysteria never moves beyond the question or the riddle, as
Wajcman argues: the “hysteric . . . cannot be mastered by knowledge and therefore remains outside of history, even outside its own. .
. . [I]f hysteria is a set of statements about the hysteric, then the hysteric is what eludes those statements, escapes this knowledge. . . .
[T]he history of hysteria bears witness to something fundamental in the human condition—
being put under pressure to answer a question.”44 Thus, a difficulty for a relatively formal/ structural account of
hegemony as a substitute for jouissance without reduction: where is the place for a practice of enjoyment that by its nature eludes
naming in the order of knowledge? This account of hysteria provides a significant test case for the
equation between jouissance and hegemony, for the political promise and peril of demands and
ultimately for the efficacy of a hysterical politics . But the results of such a test can only be born out in the
realm of everyday politics.
 Link – I-Law
International cooperation is an impossibility haunted by the return of
the real – only an authentic encounter with the extimate can solve
Aristodemou 14 Maria, Senior Lecturer in Law and Assistant Dean for International Links
and Enterprise at Birkbeck College, University of London. “A Constant Craving for Fresh Brains
and a Taste for Decaffeinated Neighbours”. Eur J Int Law (2014) 25 (1): 35-5. PWoods.
As if such an attack on Kant’s dignity of the free will was not severe enough, Freud’s blow to Kantian ethics continues by suggesting
that what Kant calls the moral law, the inner voice of conscience which utters the categorical imperative, is nothing other than the
superego. Rather than issuing guidance and benign rebukes to the subject, Freud’s superego is a
sadistic agency whose origins hark back to the perverse God who commands Abraham to kill his
own son. This superego not only enjoins the subject to obey the moral law but also enjoys the subject’s failures to come up to its
exacting standards. Lacan takes this cue from Freud and pushes the point further: the core of Kantian
ethics, he suggests, as a demand for the impossible (‘You can because you must’) has a perverse
undercurrent, just as Sade’s perverse discourse can be construed to have an ethical undercurrent:
using the other as an instrument for my enjoyment implies, indeed demands, a correlative right in
the other to use me as an instrument for her enjoyment . So for Lacan the Marquis de Sade’s ‘will-to-jouissance’
conformed perfectly to Kant’s imperative of the universalization of the will: Sade’s will to use others as instruments for his
enjoyment recognized at the same time the right of others to use him as an instrument for their enjoyment. In short, a subject
can derive enjoyment from enunciating and imposing categorical imperatives, commands which
may well be universalizable, as Kant insisted, but are not necessarily for good ends . The ‘emptiness’ of
the moral law, the fact that it does not enunciate any notion of the Good other than doing one’s duty, can lead the subject to do
something not only for the sake of duty but only for the sake of duty. That is, one can conform to the formal structure of the
categorical imperative irrespective of the substantive content of that imperative, in other words, while pursuing diabolically evil
ends. A famous abuse of Kantian ethics was of course Eichmann’s appeal to Kant during his trial in
Jerusalem: Eichmann’s perversion, as Hannah Arendt and others have described, involved putting
himself in the position of an instrument of the Big Other’s – here the Führer’s – will. By making
himself the instrument of the Big Other’s will, a subject like Eichmann can use the notion of duty as an excuse to absolve himself
from exercising free will and for refusing to acknowledge that he did, in fact, have a choice. As Alenka Župancic puts it,
‘What is most dangerous is not an insignificant bureaucrat who thinks he is God but, rather, the
God who pretends to be an insignificant bureaucrat. One could even say that, for the subject, the most difficult
thing is to accept that, in a certain sense, she is “God”, that she has a choice.’58 The horror Eichmann’s case revealed, as Žižek notes,
is that in modernity evil is not just pure egotistical evil, that is, for simple selfish reasons, but radical evil: ‘[e]vil masked (appearing)
as universality’.59 Public international law’s retreat, therefore, behind rules, procedure, diplomacy, and
bureaucracy will not save us from having to make an ethical choice . The reason rules and self-
legislation are not adequate to protect us from radical evil is the same in the case of individuals as it
is for a group of individuals called states: public international law, no more than any law, cannot
escape the pathological . The symbolic, to put it in Lacanese, is not an impermeable barrier
against the Real . Kant was aware of this, showing not only the limits of pure reason and supplementing it with practical or
moral reason, but also revealing the excess in humanity; he appreciated, in his words, the ‘scandal of reason’, that ‘reason
contradicts itself ’.60 The capacity for the infinite of practical reason is also a capacity for the inhuman,
for radical evil . As we see later, this inhuman element, the undead as Žižek calls it, is the excessive
dimension of the human. While with the creation of the modern state this irrational excess is
supposed to have been left out, like a state within a state, to return to Freud’s metaphor, like the
repressed, it is always bound to return and shatter the patient’s equanimity . Humanity or a Race of Devils?
If formal law cannot be guaranteed to protect us from the pathological, what about the cult of
humanity, otherwise known as human rights? If divine law prompted and promoted faith in a
tradition of natural law, following the death of God the cult of humanity provided a tradition of
natural rights as human rights. Kant frequently cites Leviticus’ injunction to love one’s neighbour
as oneself as an instance of the categorical imperative, and continues the logic of universalization
and marriage between religion and reason. Psychoanalysts, however, are not convinced . For Freud in
his pessimistic late work, Civilization and Its Discontents, the injunction to love one’s neighbour is Christianity’s
ultimate delusion: ‘not merely is this stranger not worthy of my love’, he protests. ‘I must honestly
confess that he has more claim to my hostility and even my hatred.’ 61 Freud appreciated that solidarity within
the community is only ever achieved at the expense of those outside the group; in that sense, Jews, he presciently claimed, rendered
‘most useful services’ by being the target of hatred and thus promoting community spirit among Christians.62 The rise of
nationalism and fundamentalism in the last two decades suggests that tolerance and
multiculturalism have not worked . And that closer co-existence can breed, not more respect and
cooperation, but more intolerance and hostility . The message of the second half of the 20th
century, a time when human rights were enacted and sought to be enforced, is, unfortunately, not
as salient as we would like: the neighbour, it appears, is tolerated, respected, and celebrated only
when she is kept at a proper distance.63 When she comes too close, as the plight of refugees and
illegal immigrants betrays only too well, the rhetoric of toleration shows its limits . Freud and Lacan
shared this pessimistic analysis of the limits of human generosity and neighbourly love: altruism, as Lacan pointed out, does not cost
much, and indeed it protects, rather than detracts from, our egoism, since we only help those who are in our own image. It seems
that the other whom we do not recognize as being in our image is left to the wiles not of our humanity, but of a God that we profess
to have killed. For psychoanalysis the function of law is not to bring us close to the neighbour, but to
keep her at a proper distance: that is, the underlying focus of the law is not to enjoin us to ‘care’ for
our neighbour but to regulate the relationship between us so that the neighbour does not get too
close to us. For Freud in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego distributive justice works only because we deny ourselves
things so that others may be deprived of them as well.64 We could go further and say, like Žižek, that the
charade of political correctness and celebration of multi-culturalism arise not from love of one’s
neighbour but from fear of encountering real others; the fear of the inevitable violence such
encounters entail. Which leads to my conclusion. 9 The Extimate is the Neighbour If the extimate is the bit in
ourselves that we do not dare approach, the unassimilable core, or, as Lacan often described it, the
Thing, the un-decaffeinated neighbour exemplifies this radical core . ‘Freud’, Lacan understands, ‘recoils in
horror at the commandment to love one’s neighbor because of the evil that dwells in the neighbor and therefore also in oneself. And
what is it that we don’t dare go near to? Our jouissance – that which prevents us from crossing a frontier at
the limit of the Thing.’65 The alien, traumatic kernel, the unbearable Thing we do not dare
approach except from the safe distance of decaffeinated tolerance and multiculturalism, is the
neighbour. The neighbour who has not had the caffeine subtracted from her is the neighbour we do not dare approach and find it
harder to love. As Jacques Alain Miller discusses, the concept of the neighbour in Christianity seeks to abolish extimacy: as if such a
project were ever possible. ‘The Christian injunction’ Jacques Alain Miller says, is ‘nullify extimacy’. 66 Lawyers, and human
rights lawyers in particular, are used to addressing the symbolic register, the register where one
subject can superficially look like another. However, what law and the symbolic order generally
cannot get rid of is the extimate . Human rights discourse may try to reduce the disturbing and unassimilable core of the
other to what is common, to the universal, to what conforms to the norm. As Miller puts it, ‘ On the level of the signifier, on
the level of form, there is equality, substitutability, peace’. But what makes the other other, her
alterity, her difference, her particularity, is not on the level of the signifier, of the symbolic, but on
the level of the Real , of the extimate. At that level, the other is irreducibly different: at that level, as Miller says, ‘there is
war’.67 Miller suggests why none of the generous and universal discourses on the theme of ‘we are all fellow-beings’ have been
effective. Because racism, he continues, calls into play a hatred which goes precisely toward what
grounds the Other’s alterity, in other words its jouissance . If no decision, no will, no amount of reasoning is
sufficient to wipe out racism, it is because racism is founded on the point of extimacy of the Other. Racism is founded on
what one imagines about the Other’s jouissance; it is hatred of the particular way, of the Other’s
own way of experiencing jouissance. We may well think that racism exists because our Islamic
neighbor is too noisy when he has parties; nevertheless it is a fact that what is really at stake is that
he takes his jouissance in a way different from ours. The Other’s proximity exacerbates racism: as
soon as there is closeness, there is a confrontation of incompatible modes of jouissance . For it is
simple to love one’s neighbor when he is distant, but it is a different matter in proximity. Racist stories are always about the way in
which the Other obtains a plus-de-jouir: either he does not work enough or he works too much, or he is useless or a little too useful,
but whatever the case may be, he is always endowed with a part of jouissance that he does not deserve. Intolerance, in short, is
intolerance of the other’s enjoyment. We can now make sense of Kierkegaard’s dramatic claim, often repeated by Žižek, that the only
good neighbour is a dead neighbour.68 If the extimate is the neighbour’s disturbing jouissance then Kierkegaard is right that the
only good neighbour is a dead neighbour because a dead body can no longer enjoy. 10 Towards an Atheist Public International Law
To sum up, public international law, I have suggested, is an inadequate or porous limit because, like
all law, it does not take account of the extimate: it can neither guard against the extimate in the
other nor acknowledge the extimate in ourselves. Can we learn anything from Kris’s failure in the fresh brains case to
address this deadlock? As we recall, Kris wanted to show his patient that he was plagued by a desire to consume fresh brains because
he believed in the existence of someone who already possessed fresh brains: that is, someone who is Great, someone who knows
everything. As I discussed, this belief in someone who knows it all harks back not only to the ‘grandfather’ of the patient but to the
grandfather par excellence, the omniscient divinity. Public international law suffers from a similar symptom;
that there is someone out there greater than it, that it compares itself to and finds itself wanting . As I
have discussed, the entity which the subject directs her demands to, imagining that it has the capacity to answer and fulfil them is
not a subject but a place: the place where full knowledge and full enjoyment is not only possible but attainable. In other words, the
place once occupied by God. Learning from Kris’s mistake, the task for the analyst I suggest is not to tell the patient, ‘listen, don’t
worry, you are also great’, but instead to lead them to come to terms with the fact that the person they have been trying to please,
impress, and imitate is also not great; that the place she has been addressing her demands and beliefs to is an empty place. I call this
realization, the traversing of the fundamental fantasy of someone great, the atheist position: for the subject fully to assume the non-
existence of a Big Other who knows it all means that the subject must learn to know how not to know and to live without guarantees.
Like the man in search of fresh brains, like international law, like all of us, we must acknowledge not only that we do not know but
that the Other does not know either. That the answers are not to be found in other disciplines or in other people’s brains, but in our
own disavowed, repressed, and hidden extimate recesses. This, of course, is no easy task: it means facing up to
our own ugliness without the help of consoling fantasies, including the fantasy of a God, or a Big
Other, or ideologies including human rights or democracy. It means confronting our own excess jouissance, an
enjoyment that we find so threatening when we encounter it in the neighbour precisely because it is the unacknowledged evil that
also resides in ourselves. Moreover, we must confront this ‘radical evil’, to borrow Kant’s expression,
without the placebos and palliative softeners provided by fantasies of a benign humanity or a
benevolent Big Other. Like Kris’s patient, we need to recognize there is no grand père who knows it all, that when we come
face to face with the extimate we are alone; and that no law, international or domestic, can protect us. This is the foremost
ethical demand facing international law today and the challenge we must rise to: until we are ready
to confront our own extimate core, no individual or social transformation can take place Freud’s
response to Kant’s ‘Perpetual Peace’ can be found, I suggest, in his Civilization and Its Discontents .
Anticipating Lacan, who was, after all, Freudian first and foremost, Freud suggests here that what
eros and civilization can ultimately never eradicate, however hard they try, is the death drive or, in
our terms, the extimate: The inclination to aggression is an original, self-instinctual disposition in
man, and it constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization … man’s natural aggressive instinct,
the hostility of each against all and of all against each, opposes this program of civilization. The
aggressive instinct is the derivative and the main representative of the death instinct which we have
found alongside of Eros and which shares world-dominion with it. 69 For Freud the death drive,
whether it exists or not, nevertheless persists and insists. Like the undead, it is defiant, intransigent,
obstinate, unassimilable, unriddable, and above all, unlegislatable. Following Žižek’s term, we can
call it the ‘indivisible remainder’ that persists beyond and is oblivious to symbolic and imaginary
appeals, rules, and interventions.70 Public international law, like all of us, continues to refuse to
acknowledge the extimate: that there are things we cannot represent, not by law and not by
literature either. The extimate, nevertheless, which is closer to us than ourselves, continues to persist and insist . It is no
wonder therefore that Schopenhauer’s verdict on Kant was that, despite protesting to be exploring
and critiquing the nature of reason, he was, all along, courting religion: as he memorably suggested,
Kant was like the man at a masked ball trying to seduce a woman only to find when she removed
her mask that the masked lady was his wife all along. Kant, in other words, was at pains to seduce
reason but behind the mask of reason was always religion.71 To return to my beginning: to get to the extimate we
must experience anxiety. Unlike other affects that we can fool ourselves into thinking we feel, anxiety does not lie: it is the alarm bell
that announces to us that we are approaching the extimate. When we experience anxiety we know we are touching the untouchable,
unassimilable core. When and how does this happen? In the terms I have been using in this article, and which Lacan insisted on
when demolishing Kris’s attempt at treatment, this happens when the extimate is not safely hidden by law (the symbolic), or by
politics (the imaginary), or by affects or passions (that can be faked), but erupts in all its obscene and violent underside. I will
close with two examples of such recent explosions of the extimate, both causing anxiety and forcing
us to confront the extimate, the first in the neighbour, the second in ourselves. First, France’s
recent legislation banning the burka or niqab in public; when the other’s difference, her extimacy,
is all too apparent , the rhetoric of toleration, allowance, and acceptance comes abruptly to an
end . As Slavoj Žižek elaborates on this example, when the face which subjectivizes the neighbour and makes her look a little like us
is hidden from view, we are confronted with the horror of the neighbour as unbearable thing and the ‘tolerant’ west from France and
beyond can no longer pretend to tolerate her.72 French legislators, we could say, prefer their neighbour ‘decaffeinated’. My
second example is an instance when the extimate is shown not in the other, in the neighbour, but in
ourselves: the abuses at Abu Ghraib which, as we know, are not isolated instances of lone rangers
or ‘bad apples’ but all too endemic in the conduct of wars and indeed in the exercise of power
generally . As Žižek elaborates again, Abu Ghraib illustrates ‘the disavowed beliefs, suppositions, and
obscene practices that we pretend not to know about even though they form the background of our
public values’.73 In international just as in domestic law and institutions, the abuse of power forms
the obscene and hidden underside of all exercise of power . I have called this hidden and obscene core the
extimate, the gap in the subject as well as in the Other that God was so good at concealing. In the morning after the death of God,
fully assuming this gap at the centre of our subjectivity as well as of our neighbour, in all its ugliness, and without decaffeinating it, is
the highest and hardest ethical demand international law, and all of us, face. Until we do that, no amount of ‘fresh brains’ will be
sufficient to satiate our patient.
 Link – Internet Freedom
Legal reform cannot resolve the hypocrisy of the United States’
internet freedom agenda – addressing the complexities and
ideological underpinnings of surveillance are a prerequisite to solve
the aff
Mozorov, 13 – Visiting Scholar, Liberation Technology Program, Freeman Spogli Institute for
International Studies, Stanford University and Schwartz Fellow, New America Foundation
(Evgeny, “The Price of Hypocrisy,” Frankfurt General Newspaper, 7/24,
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/ueberwachung/information-consumerism-the-
price-of-hypocrisy-12292374.html?printPagedArticle=true#pageIndex_2)//SY

This is the real tragedy of America’s “Internet freedom agenda”: it’s going to be the dissidents in
China and Iran who will pay for the hypocrisy that drove it from the very beginning. America has
managed to advance its communications-related interests by claiming high moral ground and using
ambiguous terms like “Internet freedom” to hide many profound contradictions in its own
policies. On matters of “Internet freedom” – democracy promotion rebranded under a sexier name
– America enjoyed some legitimacy as it claimed that it didn’t engage in the kinds of surveillance
that it itself condemned in China or Iran. Likewise, on matters of cyberattacks, it could go after
China’s cyber-espionage or Iran’s cyber-attacks because it assured the world that it engaged in
neither. Both statements were demonstrably false but lack of specific evidence has allowed
America to buy some time and influence. These days are gone. Today, the rhetoric of “Internet
freedom agenda” looks as trustworthy as George Bush’s “freedom agenda” after Abu Ghraib.
Washington will have to rebuild its policies from scratch. But, instead of blaming Snowden,
Washington must thank him. He only exposed the shaky foundations of already unsustainable
policies. These policies, built around vaporous and ambiguous terms like “Internet freedom” and
“cyberwar” would have never survived the complexities of global politics anyway. All
objects and appliances turn “smart” and get connected What is to be done? Let’s start with
surveillance. So far, most European politicians have reached for the low-hanging fruit – law –
thinking that if only they can better regulate American companies – for example, by forcing them
to disclose how much data and when they share with NSA – this problem will go away. This is a
rather short-sighted, naïve view that reduces a gigantic philosophical problem – the future of
privacy – to seemingly manageable size of data retention directives. If only things were that
simple! Our current predicaments start at the level of ideology , not bad policies or their
poor implementation. This is not to oppose more regulation of technology companies – Europe
should have done this a decade ago instead of getting caught in the heady rhetoric of “cloud
computing” – but only to point out that the task ahead is far more intellectually demanding.
Assume, for a moment, that Europe forces all the laws it wants on US technology companies. It’s
a very unlikely hypothetical – not with their growing lobbying power in Brussels– but let’s forget
this for a moment. What will happen in five years, as all objects and appliances turn “smart” –
i.e. they suddenly have a cheap but sophisticated sensor built into them – and become
connected to each other and to the Internet? Many such objects are already commercially
available and many more will be soon: smart forks that monitor how fast we eat; smart
toothbrushes that monitor how often we brush our teeth; smart shoes that tell us when they are
about to get worn out; smart umbrellas that go online to check when it will rain and warn us to
take them with us on leaving the house. And then, of course, there’s that smartphone dangling in
your pocket and – soon – Google Glasses adoring your face.
 Link – Iran
Denying Iran the right to nuclear weapons is a racist, unnecessary
proposal founded in the construction of Iran as the “hostile Other”
who could launch a nuclear attack at any corner --- this framing risks
pre-emptive strikes which are actually bad
Nath 12 --- Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India (Sanghamitra, WHAT MILITARY DETERRENCE
CANNOT DO, CYBER DETERRENCE CAN DO TO IRAN: EXPLORING THE IMPLICATIONS OF MANIPULATIVE INCESSANT
USAGE OF THE TERM ‘PREEMPTIVE’, http://sosbilko.net/journal_IJSS/arhieves/2012_1/sanghamitra_nath.pdf)//trepka
2. A Problematic Paradigm: The Unspoken Truths An objective view of the conventional
deterrence paradigm discloses that it is value-loaded from the beginning . The deterrence
paradigm is conceptualised from the perspective of the defending state . To deter a state is
to already presume that a hostile state is planning to launch a military attack against another
state. Therefore, the deterrence paradigm recalls the Freudian psychoanalysis ---‘me’/ defending state
and ‘not me’/‘other’ state. The ‘me’ is purposively defined in opposition to the ‘other’. The
function of such a deliberate distinction between the ‘me’ and the ‘other’ in international
relations is to legitimise why one should and the ‘other’ should not have nuclear weapons.
Within this problematic framework of deterrence paradigm, Iran’s status is that of the hostile ‘other’
vis-a-vis the defending states of Israel and the United States (US). Iran’s nuclear program is viewed as an
offensive capacity build-up to harm them in the near future and therefore, it needs to be deterred (through
economic sanctions and maybe even air strikes at the sites of nuclear program). The fact that Israel and US
seek ‘to deter’ Iran from carrying on its nuclear program overshadows equally relevant facts like:  Nuclear Weapon States of Israel
and the US: Real Threat to Peace and Security Though the Iranian President Ahmadinejad announced, "We
do not need an atomic bomb” (BBC, 6 March 2012) and declared its present uranium enrichment program was meant
purely for peaceful purposes, the West (especially the US), Israel and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) refused
to accept the same. Their underlying rationale for this opposition is that the mere possession of
nuclear weapons by Iran will threaten international peace and security. If possession of
nuclear weapons itself threatened international peace and security, Israel and the US
should be the ‘hostile’ states. It is an open secret that Israel possesses nuclear weapons at the Negev Nuclear Research
Centre near the desert town of Dimona. (The Guardian, 23 May 2010) (Cohen 1998) As for US, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
(1968) permits the US to retain nuclear arsenals as well as recognizes it as a legitimate NWS. In contrast, Iran still does
not have the N-bomb. In the IAEA report (November 2011), it mentioned that “Under its Safeguards Agreement, Iran has
declared to the Agency fifteen nuclear facilities and nine locations outside facilities where nuclear material is customarily used
(LOFs)” and these facilities and sites were “nevertheless under Agency safeguards”. (IAEA, 24 February 2012:3) If Iran actually
pursued nuclear weaponisation program, it would have been detected by the watchful eyes of
IAEA. In the exceptional case of Parchin, Yukiya Amano, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said
that the IAEA and Tehran were near to signing an agreement wherein greater cooperation will be achieved for inspection of the
nuclear sites and that inspection of the Parchin military site had been included in this agreement. (BBC, 18 May 2012)
 Link – Life 1st
Prioritizing life deprives death of value – leads to more death and
makes life really boring
McGowan 13 Todd McGowan, smarter than you. “Enjoying what we don’t have: The political project of psychoanalysis”. 2013. Pgs. 223 -
227. PWoods.
Life versus Death The
contemporary geopolitical landscape is largely divided between those who privilege
life and those who privilege death. This struggle pits the advocates of modernization and global capitalism against the
fundamentalist alternative that seeks to resist the effects of modernization (if not moderniza- tion itself). The central idea of
psychoanalysis — the death drive — reveals a path out of this seemingly intractable opposition. The insistence on
the death drive marks a rejection of both the celebration of life and the apotheosis of death . The
death drive represents the bringing together of life and death in a way that confounds the
adherents of both sides. As early as 1996, Osama bin Laden himself put the struggle between modernity
and fundamentalism in the terms of life against death. In his fatwa of that year entitled "Declaration of War against
the Americans Occu- pying the Land of the Two Holy Places," he tells his American enemy, "These LMuslimJ
youths love death as you love life."l In his statement after the September 11 attacks, bin Laden again framed the conflict
in the same way, and commentators drew considerable attention to this formulation. Though Western leaders rejected almost the
entirety of bin Laden's politi- cal philosophy, they almost universally accepted the way of framing the opposition between global
capitalism and Islamic fundamentalism. In doing so, they follow a tradition that prevails within much contemporary thought and
even within psychoanalytic political philosophy. Erich Fromm, who tried to bring psychoanalysis and Marxism together in order to
form a new political program, saw within psychoanalysis an embrace of the love of life and a struggle against the love of death. He
called these phenomena "biophilia" and "necrophilia." As Fromm notes in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, " Love of life
or love of the dead is the fundamental alternative that confronts every human being. Necrophilia grows
as the development of biophilia is stunted. Man is biologically endowed with the capacity for biophilia, but
psychologically he has the potential for necrophilia as an alternative solution. "2 While we naturally
love life, the interruption of this love leads to a devotion to death and a consequent aggressive bent .
Later in Ille Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Fromm identifies Hitler as a particularly obstinate case of necrophilia, and he
would undoubtedly have done the same with bin Laden and the Islamic fundamentalists, had he lived to see them. The problem with
this opposition is the way that it constrains our thinking. On one level, recognizing an opposition
between those who love death and those who love life represents an accurate appraisal of the
contemporary political landscape, but it does not exhaust the political possibilities. If we look at
things like this as George W. Bush would have us do, either we are with the capitalist West or we are with
the terrorists. But psychoanalysis helps us to see the falsity of this opposition, to see that hidden
between the contrast of life and death is a third possibility — death in life, or the death drive. An
insistence on the death drive marks an option beyond what seems possible on the contemporary
political landscape. The implications of this other path will emerge through the following examination ofthe widespread
opposition of life and death. On the level of common sense, this opposition is not symmetrical. What thinking person
would not want to side with those who love life rather than death. 3 Everyone can readily understand
how one might love life, but the love of death is a counterintuitive phenomenon. It seems as if it
must be code language for some other desire, which is how Western leftists often view it.
Interpreting terrorist attacks as an ultimately life-affirming response to imperialism and
impoverishment, they implicitly reject the possibility of being in love with death. But this type of
interpretation can't explain why so many suicide bombers are middle-class , educated subjects and not the
most downtrodden victims of imperialist power.4 We must imagine that for subjects such as these there is an appeal in
death itself. Those who emphasize the importance of death at the expense of life do so because death is the source
of value . S lhe fact that life has an end, that we do not have an infinite amount of time to experience every
possibility, means that we must value some things above others. Death creates hierarchies of value,
and these hierarchies are not only vehicles for oppression but the pathways through which what we
do matters at all. Without the value that death provides, neither love nor ice cream nor friendship
nor anything that we enjoy would have any special worth whatsoever. Having an infinite amount of
time, we would have no incentive to opt for these experiences rather than other ones. We would be left unable to enjoy
what seems to make life most worth living. Even though enjoyment itself is an experience of the infinite, an
experi- ence of transcending the limits that regulate everyday activity, it nonetheless depends on the limits of finitude.
When one enjoys, one accesses the infinite as a finite subject, and it is this contrast that renders enjoyment enjoyable. Without
the limits of finitude, our experience of the infinite would become as tedious as our everyday lives (and in
fact would become our everyday experience). Finitude provides the punctuation through which the infinite emerges as such. The
struggle to assert the importance of death — the act of being in love with death, as bin Laden claims that the Muslim
a mode of avowing one's allegiance to the infinite enjoyment that death doesn't
youths are — is
extinguish but instead spawns. This is exactly why Martin Heidegger attacks what he sees as our modern
mauthentic relationship to death. In Being and Time Heidegger sees our individual death as an absolute limit that has the effect of
creating value for us. As he puts it, "With death, Dasein stands before itself in its ownmost potentiality-for-being. This is a possibility
in which the issue is nothing less than Dasein's Being-in-the-world "7 Without the anticipation of our own death, we flit through the
world and fail to take up fully an attitude of care, the attitude most appropriate for our mode of being, according to Heidegger.
Nothing really matters to those who have not recognized the approach of their own death. By depriving us of an authentic
relationship to death, an ideology that proclaims life as the only value creates a valueless world
where nothing matters to us. But of course the partisans of life are not actually eliminating death itself. They simply privilege life
over death and see the world in terms of life rather than death, which would seem to leave the value-creating power of death intact.
But this is not what happens. By privileging life and seeing death only in terms of life, we change the way
we experience the world. Without the mediation that death provides, the system of pure life
becomes a system utterly bereft of value. S We can see this in the two great systems of modernity— science and
capitalism. Both modern science and capitalism are systems structured around pure life. 9 Neither
recognizes any ontological limit but instead continually embarks on a project of constant change
and expansion. The scientific quest for knowledge about the world moves forward without regard for humanitarian or ethical
concerns, which is why ethicists incessantly try to reconcile scientific discoveries with morality after the fact. After sci- entists
develop the ability to clone, for instance, we realize what cloning portends for our sense of identity and attempt to police the
practice. After Oppenheimer helps to develop the atomic bomb, he addresses the world with pronouncements of its evil. But this
rearguard action has nothing to do with science as such. Oppenheimer the humanist is not Oppenheimer the scientist. I same
dynamic is visible with capitalism. As an economic system, it promotes constant evolution and change just as life itself does. Nothing
can remain the same within the capitalist world because the production ofvalue depends on the creation of the new commodity, and
Capitalism produces crises not
even the old commodities must be constantly given new forms or renewed in some way.
because it can't produce enough — crises of scarcity dominate the history of the noncapitalist
world, not the capitalist one — but because it produces too much. The crisis of capitalism is always a crisis
of overproduction. The capitalist economy suffocates from too much life, from excess, not from
scarcity or death. Both science and capital- ism move forward without any acknowledged limit, which is why they are
synonymous with modernity. 2 Modernity emerges with the bracketing of death's finitude and the belief that
there is no barrier to human possibility. The problem with the exclusive focus on life at the expense of death is
that it never finds enough life and thus remains perpetually dissatisfied . The limit of this project is,
paradoxically, its own infinitude . It evokes what Hegel calls the bad infinite — an infinite that is wrongly
conceived as having no relation at all to the finite. We succumb to the bad infinite when we pursue
an unattainable object and fail to see that the only possible satisfaction rests in the pursuit itself.
The bad infinite — the infinite of modernity— depends on a fundamental misrecognition. We continue on
this path only as long as we believe that we might attain the final piece of the puzzle, and yet this
piece is constitutively denied us by the structure of the system itself. We seek the commodity that would
finally bring us complete satisfaction, but dissatisfaction is built into the commodity structure , just
as obsoles- cence is built into the very fabric of our cars and computers. Like capital- ism, scientific inquiry cannot find a final
answer: beneath atomic theory we find string theory, and beneath string theory we find something else. In both cases, the system
prevents us from recognizing where our satisfac- tion lies; it diverts our focus away from our
activity and onto the goal that we pursue. In this way, modernity produces the dissatisfaction that
keeps it going. But it also produces another form of dissatisfaction that wants to arrest its forward movement. The further
the project of modernity moves in the direction of life, the more forcefully the specter of
fundamentalism will make its presence felt. The exclusive focus on life has the effect of producing eruptions of
death. As the life-affirming logic of science and capitalism structures all societ- ies to an increasing
extent, the space for the creation of value disappears. Modernity attempts to construct a symbolic
space where there is no place for death and the limit that death represents . As opposed to the closed world
of traditional society, modernity opens up an infinite universe. 14 But this infinite universe is established
through the repression of finitude. Explo- sions of fundamentalist violence represent the return of what modernity's
symbolic structure cannot accommodate. As Lacan puts it in his seminar on psychosis, "Mihatever is refused in the symbolic order,
in the sense of Verwerfung, reappears in the real." IS Fundamentalist violence is blowback not simply in response
to imperialist aggression, as the leftist common sense would have it. 'This violence marks the return of what
modernity necessarily forecloses.
 Link – Monopoly on Enjoyment
They imagine the Other has a monopoly on enjoyment --- reducing
surveillance is an empty act of rebellion to steal some of that
enjoyment while maintaining the locus of enjoyment in the Other
McGowan 2013 --- Associate Professor at the University of Vermont (Todd, Enjoying What We Don’t
Have, Project Muse)//trepka
As Slavoj Žižek points out in Tarrying with the Negative, “We always impute to the ‘other’ an excessive
enjoyment: he wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our way of life) and/or he has access to
some secret, perverse enjoyment . In short, what really bothers us about the ‘other’ is the
peculiar way he organizes his enjoyment, precisely the surplus, the ‘excess’ that pertains to this
way: the smell of ‘their’ food, ‘their’ noisy songs and dances, ‘their’ strange manners, ‘their’ att itude toward work.”32 This belief —
this paranoia about the other’s secret enjoyment — derives from the signifier’s inability to
manifest its transparency. In one sense, the signifier is transparent: the very possibility of psychoanalysis depends on the
fact that subjects speak their unconscious desire even (or especially) when they try hardest to hide it. The signifiers that subjects
choose reveal the truth of their unconscious desires. And yet, at the same time, the signifier does not avow its own transparency;
every signifier appears to be hiding something, a secret meaning, a private intention, to which only the subject itself has access.
Ludwig Wittgenstein spent the better part of his philosophical career attempting to disabuse fellow philosophers of the idea that the
signifier could hide anything. When we believe that signifiers hide a private meaning, we fall victim to
the deception of language as such. Hearing what someone says allows us to grasp all that there is to grasp. As
Wittgenstein puts it, “To say ‘He alone can know what he intends’ is nonsense.”33 In fact, he goes so far as to claim that the subject
can know the other’s intention even better than its own. He notes, “I can know what someone else is thinking, not whatZizam
thinking.”34 By recognizing the transparency of the signifier, we might fight against the paranoia that seems to accompany
subjectivity itself, and all of Wittgenstein’s thought participates in this combat. Even though Wittgenstein’s argument has
undoubtedly found adherents among many philosophers and laypersons, paranoia about the other’s hidden
enjoyment has not disappeared in the years since this argument first appeared. One could even safely
say that paranoia has grown more rampant. Is this simply the result of a failure to disseminate Wittgenstein’s
thought widely enough or of popular resistance to it? Or is it that paranoia is written into the structure of the
signifier itself? The hidden meaning that the subject perceives beneath the signifier is the result
of the signifier’s apparent opaqueness, and no amount of inveighing against hidden meaning
will stop subjects from believing in it. The belief that the other holds a secret enjoyment that the subject has sacrificed
renders the smooth functioning of collective life impossible. The force that allows human beings to come
together to form a society in common — language — is at once the force that prevents any society
from working out. The structure of the signifier itself militates against utopia . It produces
societies replete with subjects paranoid about, and full of envy for, the enjoying other. Though one might imagine a
society in which subjects enjoyed without bothering themselves about the other’s enjoyment,
such a vision fails to comprehend the nature of our enjoyment . We find our enjoyment
through that of the other rather than intrinsically within ourselves . Our envy of the
other’s enjoyment persists because this is the mode through which we ourselves enjoy. It is thus far
easier to give up the idea of one’s own private enjoyment for the sake of the social order than it is to give up the idea of the enjoying
other.
 Link – Panoptic Model
The Panoptic model of surveillance confuses material structures with
the underlying ontological field of the gaze - the aff can't solve
surveillance and our psychoanalytic critique is better
Crossley 93 Nick Crossley, Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10, United
Kingdom. Human Studies, Vol. 16, No. 4. “The Politics of the Gaze: Between Foucault and Merleau-Ponty”. Pgs. 408-
415. PWoods.
The effect of the look is described by Sartre in terms of alienation. To experience "the look" is to experience
oneself as no longer belonging to oneself but as belonging, as an object, in the project of the other.
This involves a change in our very structure. We are not normally objects of our own awareness , in
Sartre's view. We "do" and live our life and actions, rather than having them as objects of our thought. The look of the other tears us
away from this however. Through it we come to experience ourselves as objects of our own contemplation
and awareness. We are divided and estranged. Moreover, we are aware that our actions and
experiences have a meaning and a significance, in the project of the other, which we can neither
control (at least not completely) nor necessarily have access to. We experience our being as not belonging to
us therefore. We belong, in part, in the project of the other, as an object of his/her thought and
designs. We are possessed by the other. And we are thereby (again) estranged. Sartre finds a literary illustration and
elaboration of this effect in the novels of Kafka (1953, 1957). Kafka's novels describe and utilise this very notion of alienation. The
actions and experiences of Joseph K. in The Trial, and of the Land Surveyor in The Castle, Sartre notes, have meaning for those
protagonists, but the protagonists are also aware that they are objects in the eyes of others, and that their
actions have a different meaning and different significance for these anonymous surveyors, which
they themselves do not and cannot know. They experience their life and actions, therefore, as not
completely belonging to them. They feel estranged in relationship to their actions and experiences
because they do not understand or know the meaning of those actions and experiences as they exist
for the anonymous other. The effect of "the look" is achieved, for Merleau-Ponty, when this mutual
recognition is not realised; when we feel that we are individuated and objectified in the gaze of the
other, when we feel that our actions and expressions are "not taken up and understood, but
observed as if they were an insect's" (1962: 361). The look "takes the place of a possible
communication" (ibid.). One party to the encounter constitutes him or herself as "inaccessible" or
as an "inhuman gaze" (ibid.). They refuse to communicate, although, of course, "The refusal to communicate is still a form of
communication" (ibid.). Such refusal is a "style of conduct", it belongs to the world of the carnal-intersubjective, the intercorporeal,
not to a mythical inner world, and it is only in this way that it can communicate to the surveyed subject that
they are not being recognised as a subject but are being constituted as an object. It is only in this
way, in other words, that the surveyed subject can experience objectification, estrangement and
capture. Furthermore, the refusal to communicate, and the objectification of an other , according to
Merleau-Ponty involves the (surveying) subject retreating into their "thinking being " (ibid.): i.e., it involves
their involvement in the linguistic and more specifically reflective practices of their culture qua intersubjective interworld. The
necessary caveat to this point is that for Merleau-Ponty, as for Sartre and Foucault, there is no reason why "the look"
cannot be secured through an indices of human presence rather than through an actual other. For
Merleau-Ponty then, the look, despite the fact that it involves the experience of objectification, is intersubjectively situated. It is a
cultural practice, effected in the action of a surveyor and communicated (by virtue of its
visible/cultural form) to a surveyed. It is not an absence of intersubjectivity but a tension or knot
within the intersubjective fabric. Furthermore, in contrast to Sartre, Merleau-Ponty maintains that "the look" is
constituted within the particularity of a given situation. It is not an inevitable consequence of a given state of the human condition.
Foucault describes the Panopticon as a machine. He marvels (1979, 1981) at the manner in which it secures its effects independently
of human intention or will. In this paper, whilst not denying Foucault's claim, I have argued that there is a human
infrastructure to the Panopticon which Foucault does not and cannot account for. I have suggested
that we examine the human relations which make the Panopticon a Panopticon and not a pile of
bricks. And in particular I have called attention to the perceptual and intersubjective-intercorporeal character of these relations
and this infrastructure. Such notions are, to some extent at least, inconsistent with Foucault's philosophy .
Certainly his philosophy does not and cannot provide for an understanding of them. Furthermore, I have argued that Foucault's
philosophy cannot actually account for the "anxious awareness" which it refers to and depends upon.
In respect of these problems, I have suggested that the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty provides for a rethinking and recasting of our
understanding of Panopticism. I would also add to this that in facilitating a deepening and extension of our understanding of
Panopticism, Merleau-Ponty's philosophy provides for a deepening and extension f our understanding of the politics of the gaze
more generally.
 Link – Performance Aff
The 1ac presents a subversive performance that is a wishful fantasy. We briefly
snatch away a small part of the power structure, leaving most forms of oppression
intact. We produce enjoyment in the act of snatching, so that we come to love
oppression.
Zizek 97 (Slavoj, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis,
The Plague of Fantasies, p. 45-48) DJ
In short, the right-wing intellectual is a knave, a conformist who refers to the mere existence of the
given order as an argument for it, and mocks the Left on account of its `utopian' plans , which
necessarily lead to catastrophe; while the left-wing intellectual is a fool, a court jester who publicly displays
the lie of the existing order, but in a way which suspends the performative efficiency of his speech.
Today, after the fall of Socialism, the knave is a neoconservative advocate of the free market who cruelly rejects all forms of social solidarity as
counterproductive sentimentalism, while the
fool is a deconstructionist cultural critic who, by means of his ludic
procedures destined to `subvert' the existing order, actually serves as its supplement. `' What
psychoanalysis can do to help us to break this vicious cycle of fool-knave is to lay bare its
underlying libidinal economy - the libidinal profit, the 'surplus-enjoyment', which sustains each
of the two positions…{original upon request}… So: if the conservative knave is not unlike the gypsy, since he also, in his answer to a
concrete complaint (Why are things so horrible for us ... /gays, blacks, women/?'), sings his tragic song of eternal fate ('Why are things so bad for us
people, 0 why?') - that is, he also, as it were, changes the tonality of the question from concrete complaint to abstract acceptance of the enigma of Fate -
the satisfaction of the progressive fool, a `social critic', is of the same kind as that of the poor Russian peasant, the
typical hysterical satisfaction of snatching a little piece of jouissance away from the Master. If the
victim in the first joke were a fool, he would allow the monkey to wash his balls in the whisky yet another time, but would add some dirt or sticky stuff
to his glass beforehand, so that after the monkey's departure he would be able to claim triumphantly: 'I duped him! His balls are now even dirtier than
before!' It is easy to imagine a much more sublime version of the reversal performed by the gypsy musician - is not this same reversal at work in the
subjective position of castrati singers, for example? They are made to `cry :o Heaven': after suffering a horrible mutilation, they are not supposed .o
bemoan their worldly misfortune and pain, and to look for the culprits responsible for it, but instead to address their complaint to Heaven itself. In a
way, they must accomplish a kind of magic reversal and exchange all their worldly complaints for a complaint addressed to Divine Fate itself - this
reversal allows them to enjoy their terrestrial life to the fullest. This is (the singing) voice at its most elementary: the embodiment of 'surplus -
enjoyment' in the precise sense of the paradoxical `pleasure in pain'. That is to say: when Lacan uses the term plus-de jouir, one has to ask a naive but
crucial question: in what does this surplus consist? Is it merely a qualitative increase of ordinary pleasure? The ambiguity of the French term is decisive
here: it can mean `surplus of enjoyment' as well as `no more enjoyment' - the surplus of enjoyment over mere pleasure is generated by the presence of
the very opposite of pleasure, that is, pain. Pain generates surplus-enjoyment via the magic reversal-into-itself by means of which the very material
texture of our expression of pain (the crying voice) gives rise to enjoyment - and is not this what takes place towards the end of the joke about the
monkey washing his balls in my whisky, when the gypsy transforms my furious complaint into a selfsatisfying melody? What we find here is a neat
exemplification of the Lacanian formula of the fetishistic object (minus phi under small a): like the castrato's voice, the objet petit a - the surplus-
enjoyment - arises at the very place of castration. And does not the same go for love poetry and its ultimate topic: the lamentation of. the poet who has
lost his beloved (because she doesn't return his love, because she has died, because her parents do not approve of their union, and block his access to
her ...)? Poetry, the specific poetic jouissance, emerges when the very symbolic articulation of this Loss gives rise to a pleasure of its own.' Do we not
find the same elementary ideological gesture inscribed into Jewish identity? Jews `evacuate the Law of jouissance', they are `the people of the Book'
who stick to the rules and allow for no ecstatic experience of the Sacred; yet, at the same time, they do find an excessive enjoyment precisely in their
dealings with the Text of the Book: the `Talmudic' enjoyment of how to read it properly, how to interpret it so that we can none the less have it our own
way. Is not the tradition of lively debates and disputes which strike foreigners (Gentiles) as meaningless hairsplitting a neat example of how the very
renunciation of the Thing jouissance produces its own jouissance (in interpreting the text)? Maybe Kafka himself, as the Western `Protestant' Jew, was
shocked to discover this obscene aspect of the Jewish Law' - is not this jouis-sense in the Letter clearly discernible in the discussion between the priest
and K at the end of The Trial, after the parable on the door of the Law? What strikes one here is the `senseless' detailed hairsplitting which, in precise
contrast to the Western tradition of metaphorical-gnostic reading, undermines the obvious meaning not by endeavouring to discern beneath it layers of
`deeper' analogical meanings, but by insisting on a too-close, too-literal reading ('the man from the country was never ordered to come there in the first
place', etc.). Each of the two positions, that of fool and that of knave, is thus sustained by its own kind of
jouissance: the enjoyment of snatching back from the Master part of the jouissance he stole from us (in the case of the
fool); the enjoyment which directly pertains to the subject's pain (in the case of the knave). What psychoanalysis can do to help
the critique of ideology is precisely to clarify the status of this paradoxical jouissance as the
payment that the exploited, the servant, receives for serving the Master. This jouissance, of course, always
emerges within a certain phantasmic field; the crucial precondition for breaking the chains of servitude is thus
to `traverse the fantasy' which structures our jouissance in a way which keeps us attached to the
Master - makes us accept the framework of the social relationship of domination.
 Link – PRISM/NSA Programs
Post-plan, surveillance like PRISM will continue unabated because of
the narcissistic desire for the gaze of and recognition by the other
Kriss 13 (Sam, University of Sussex, MA Critical Theory, “Prism: the psychopathology of internet surveillance”,
https://samkriss.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/prism-the-psychopathology-of-internet-surveillance/)//trepka
Neurosis. Top-secret documents released recently by the Guardian and the Washington Post reveal
the existence of a far-reaching surveillance programme operated by the National Security
Agency (a part of the US military), codenamed PRISM. Under the programme, personal
communications from nine Internet services – including Facebook, Skype, and Google, but with
the notable exception of Twitter – can be accessed at any time by government security agents.
Not just public postings but also private emails and video calls; in a separate scandal it was
revealed that the NSA has been collecting the phone records of US citizens . What’s more shocking is that
these companies voluntarily signed up to the programme; they abused the trust of their users in handing over private data to
government spies. What we’re seeing is the development of a surveillance society far more insidious than any historical totalitarian
regime. You can still think and say whatever you want, but you’re always being watched; your right to privacy has disappeared
without you even noticing it. In some sinister concrete server complex there’s a digital file on you, containing everything you’ve said
and done. Government agencies listen in on your telephone calls, software built in to your iPhone records your exact location, web
cookies track your browsing habits. This is what radical openness means; it’s a laceration. The government-corporation complex is
with you at every moment, and should it decide that it doesn’t like what you’re thinking and saying, it has the power to murder you
on a whim. Psychosis. There’s something grimly humorous about the whole situation. One of the nine services that forms part of the
Prism system is YouTube; the unbidden image arises of a young, driven NSA staffer going in to work – his tie fastidiously knotted,
his shoes gleaming like an oil slick – to watch hundreds of videos of cats falling over in the defence of American security interests.
With every new maladroit kitten the aquiline focus of his eyes sharpens; the furrows on his forehead grow glacial in their cragginess.
Ashley’s going for cocktails with the girls, Matt’s watching the football, Tariq’s eaten too much Ardennes pâté, and the government
has to take note of it all in a desperate and doomed attempt to regulate our world. Except what if that’s the entire point? The
programme isn’t political, it’s sexual. It’s not surveillance, it’s scopophilia. You think the NSA is trudging through millions of hours
of Skype conversations just so they can catch out a couple of would-be terrorists? What do those initials really stand for, anyway?
Nudes Seekin’ Agency? Nasty Sex Appraisers? Our agent isn’t watching out for coded communications, he’s got something entirely
different in mind. A couple are talking into their webcams. She’s gone off to university, he stayed at home; they’re still together but
in her absence he’s been feeling kinda down. He wants to touch her, he wants to hold her, he wants to feel flesh against flesh, but he
can’t. As he talks a smile slithers across her face. “Oh, don’t,” she says. “Not now.” “Come on,” he says. “Please. I’m going crazy out
here.” They think they’re alone. “OK,” she says. She takes off her shirt. As her tits flop out our agent bellows in exultation. There are
hundreds of workstations in the big tile-carpeted room in Fort Meade, Maryland, and they all spout arcing parabolas of cum…
Schizophrenia. Internet surveillance is different from ordinary surveillance. The NSA isn’t putting bugs in your home
or following you down the street; you’re giving them everything they want . You’re putting
all this information out there of your own free will, and you can stop any time you want .
We all know that everything we post online is monitored, that every ‘like’ on Facebook is worth
£114 to advertisers and retailers, that Google knows far more about our shameful desires than
our sexual partners or our psychotherapists, that intelligence agencies routinely prowl through
our communications. And yet we still do it . Some people can’t eat their lunch without slapping an Instagram
filter on it, others feel the need to tweet the precise consistency of their morning shit. Planet Earth produces 25 petabytes of data
every day, a quantity of information several orders of magnitude larger than that contained in every book ever published – and most
of it is banality or gibberish. A web developer named Mike DiGiovanni commented of Google Glass: “I’ve taken more pictures today
thanZizhave the past 5 days thanks to this. Sure, they are mostly silly, but my timeline has now truly become a timeline of where I’ve
been.” As if this perverse behaviour is somehow to be encouraged. Why do we do this? Why can we no longer
handle unmediated reality? Why does it always have to be accompanied by a digital
representation? The fear of death must play into it. We mustn’t lose a moment to the decay of time, it has to be electronically
immortalised. But surely that can’t be all. Perhaps this is precisely what we were designed to do. It’s
engineered into the fabric of our being, it’s what we’re for. Our world is a distraction, it’s light
entertainment. The NSA existed long before our society. It existed before the first human being gazed at the stars and rearranged
them into shapes it could comprehend, it existed before the first gasping half-fish hauled itself out of the slime to feel the sun on its
back. The NSA is our demiurge, and we are its creatures. And as for what its agents look like when they take their masks off, perhaps
it’s better for us to never know. Melancholia. There’s something odd about all these interpretations: they’re
grotesque, but at the same time they tickle our narcissism – a narcissism which is, after all,
founded on the gaze. In a strange way it’s nice to think that you’re being watched , it’s nice to
think that whatever drivel you produce somehow merits the attention of big important
government agencies. It’s far more horrifying to think that nobody is watching you, because
nobody cares. The problem is that that’s the truth – that, as Lacan insisted, the Big Other
doesn’t exist. You’re being watched, but only by machines . Your data is thoroughly chewed up in the inhuman
mandibles of some great complex algorithm, and by the time it’s regurgitated for advertisers or spies you’re pretty much
unrecognisable. You’re not a person, you’re input and output; a blip with a few pathetic delusions of
sentience. And the narcissism of the surveilled is the most telling of those delusions . This is the
complaint of the privacy campaigners: the flying robots of death were bad, but this is really the last straw. As if someone snooping on
your emails was the worst thing that could ever happen to anyone. We don’t live in a society of surveillance; that’s
ultimately ephemeral.

Programs like PRISM are manifestations of Americans’ fantasies

about being watched – people’s willful participation in surveillance
means that legal reforms won’t deal with its problems
Smecker, 13 – BA, Philosophy and Psychology, University of Vermont and Writer, Peace and
Justice Center (Frank, “1984.0: The Rise of the big Other as Big Brother,” Truthout, 6/20,
http://www.truth-out.org/speakout/item/17111-19840-the-rise-of-the-big-other-as-big-
brother)//SY

In the old days, before the advent of post-Grecian democracy, when civil society was presided
over by a monarch, the monarch was, as director of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis
and Culture at SUNY Buffalo, Joan Copjec, puts it: someone everyone - or everyone who
counted - was encouraged to 'emulate,' [the king was] merely the retroactive effect of the general
will-of-the-people. The place of this leader [was] thus a point of convergence, a point where the
full sense of this unified will [was] located. [1] Obviously, these days there is no king. But as
French philosopher Claude Lefort explained, the locus of power that was once embodied by a
legitimate pretender - the monarch - has, upon the advent of modern democracy, become an
empty place... Now that the "throne is empty," so to speak, and modern democracy (an
"indetermination that was born from the loss of the substance of the body politic"[2]) has
usurped its place, modern power, to paraphrase Foucault, is wielded by no one in particular,
though we are all subject to it. In order to grasp what I'm getting at here, it's important to
familiarize oneself for the time being with two theoretical terms: the "big Other" and "gaze." The
latter often lends itself to a multitude of theoretical interpretations, each one replete with its
own definition and conceptualization of functioning. To preempt against too much confusion,
however, we'll focus on the gaze as discussed hereunder. To start, the twentieth century
psychoanalyst Badass, Jacques Lacan, gave an account of the gaze with the following story he
borrowed from Sartre: The gaze that I encounter [...] is not a seen gaze [not a set of eyes that I
see looking at me] but a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other [...] the sound of rustling
leaves heard while out hunting [...] a footstep heard in a corridor [The gaze exists] not at the
level of [a particular] other whose gaze surprises the subject looking through the keyhole. It is that
the other surprises him, the subject, as an entirely hidden gaze. [3] And then there is what
Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic, Slavoj Žižek, calls the "impossible gaze": that uncanny
perspective by means of which we are already present at the scene of our own absence. What this
means is that, any good ol' fantasy functions properly only by "removing" ourselves from the
fantasy we are having. Take as an example Disney's Wall-E, the story of a convivial little robot
that looks like an anthropomorphized Mars rover, that "falls in love" with Eva, a robot that
basically looks like an egg. Essentially, this is a fantasy of a post-human earth - though of course
dreamed up by someone (human) and, definitely watched by a whole bunch of (human) people.
Hence the perspective in which "I am present at the very scene of my own absence" - the human
viewer reduced to the "impossible" gaze - as if I'm not a part of the very "reality" I'm observing.
This is, in a nutshell, the definition of gaze. The big Other, on the other hand, is a bit more
involved. Its definition is inherently nuanced. To start off, what we'll call the Symbolic big Other
is something that is shared by everyone. It is none other than that which embodies the very
ideological essence of the socio-symbolic order of our lives; rules and etiquette - especially juridical
Law itself - customs and beliefs, everything you should or should not do, what you aspire
toward, and who or what you aspire to be, all of this and more, individually or in combination,
constitutes the Symbolic big Other. The subject's big Other (hereafter, the Imaginary big Other),
however, is a sort of private investment in the Symbolic big Other, a personal allegiance to the
ruling ideology which sustains the narratives, beliefs, and lived fantasies of the very culture in
which the subject is immersed. Each Imaginary big Other is distinct in its own unique way: my
Imaginary big Other may be, say, a patriotic bricolage (not really, but you get the point) - a
composite of things like, e.g., Uncle Sam, the American soldier trope, "God" and Tim Tebow. And
your Imaginary big Other may embody, say, just Emily Post, or maybe some vague ideological
package of some other normative principles. In any case, the Imaginary big Other, the subject's
big Other as such, designates a private virtualization of the socio-symbolic field in which he or
she is inscribed. Whether it exists in one's private notion of God, or one's notion of government,
or family, or "what's cool," or a combination of these things or whatever, the Imaginary big
Other refers directly to that distinctly personalized social standard by which each of us
respectively measures ourselves - 24/7/365 (yes, the big Other can make itself known even in
our dreams). Virtually everybody shares in the Symbolic big Other, for it's that very point from
which the general "will-of-the-people" is reflected back to the people, so that we can see ourselves
as we appear in this reflection - as a consistent social "whole." In other words, the big Other is
that which gives substance to the body politic. We are its subjects. And despite not really existing
- that, at the imaginative level of the individual, it's really none other than one's own internalization
of society's dos-and-don'ts - the big Other is nonetheless experienced as a sort of independent
phantasm which situates itself smack dab in the middle of any social interaction like some kind of
incorporeal incarnation of a necessary third-wheel that both instructs and scrutinizes our every
thought, utterance, and move. As such, the big Other ensures that the rules of society are being
followed, that we are conducting ourselves properly in society. Without the big Other the social
fabric begins to fray, presenting the veritable threat of losing the constitutive substance of
society itself, its governing laws, and its subjects. I suppose I should've been a little clearer
earlier on: when we combine the Symbolic big Other and gaze, the result is the Imaginary big
Other, the subject's big Other - that remote sense of being watched and evaluated by something
that's not really there. It's sort of like a cross between a Jiminy Cricket figure of conscience and
an iconic role-model of sorts, who, as such, seems to loom over your shoulder, telling you what
and what not to do simply by "looking" at you, normatively shaping and informing your every
thought and behavior. We all have a big Other. It is, to repeat an emphasis from earlier, that
standard by which we measure ourselves: our own private piece of the larger, public social space
we inhabit. To paraphrase Žižek, the gaze of the Symbolic big Other is my own view of myself,
which I see through eyes that are not authentically my own. Here, one should not fail to notice the
Symbolic big Other's striking resemblance to Bentham's "Panopticon," that omnipresent,
omniscient "God's-eye-view" intended to watch over us wherever we go. The likeness is
unmistakable, simply because Bentham's little wet dream embodies the big Other as such. The
essential point to take away from this is that one's sense of (political) "self" is inevitably bound
up with the localization of the panoptic gaze - that centralized point of omnipresent, omniscient
surveillance. Wherever we go, our image of self, as seen by the gaze of the big Other, always
functions for another. And further, in these times, do we not receive constant arousal,
enjoyment, from the act of watching our own image of self, controlling our own image of self,
tracking our own image of self? Though it's not: as if we were the Panopticon itself, but rather:
because we are the Panopticon itself. We bring the Panopticon, the gaze of the Symbolic big Other
as such, with us wherever we go. Social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.,
instantiate this. But what, precisely, does this even mean? Well, this is where things get both
revelatory and a bit complicated. The trouble with all this is that, to return to Copjec's analysis,
the Symbolic big Other is "a point of convergence of the general will-of-the-people." What this
means - and bear with me here, because this may turn confusing - is that the Symbolic big Other,
as such, signifies the very mode of appearance in which we appear to ourselves, for ourselves, as we
desire to appear as such. So it would follow that, if we appear to ourselves, for ourselves, as images
to be controlled, manipulated, tracked, watched, and so on, as we certainly do in today's digital
medium of social networking - which, by the way, we collectively, willfully and, pleasurably
participate in - then this zeitgeist of the modern majority will inevitably converge at a
centralized point: which is to say, the big Other, both its Symbolic and Imaginary incarnations,
will appear in the guise of "Big Brother." At the individual level, each of us embodies "Big
Brother": we are intrigued with the act of watching, tracking, manipulating, images of ourselves.
At the Symbolic level, the truth of this enjoyment expresses itself today in all of its
unsettling perversity: PRISM .

Their predictable calls to reform PRISM ignore the human relations

that create the desire to be surveilled --- locks in totalitarianism
O’Neill 14 --- focuses on Critical Theory Studies, Faculty Member of the Film and Digital Media
Department @ University of Wales Trinity Saint David (Timi, “Michel Foucault and the NSA Panopticon”,
https://www.academia.edu/9290473/Michel_Foucault_predicts_the_NSAs_cyber_Panopticon)//trepka
The NSA controversy The Prism program allows the NSA, the world's largest surveillance organisation, to
obtain
targeted communications without having to request them from the service providers and without
having to obtain individual court orders. 2 On the morning of 5th of June 2013, the world woke up to
the news that the US Federal Government had been collecting metadata from Verizon customers as part
of their on-going war against...someone and everyone. The resulting outcry sent the by now predictive
shockwaves around the world. How could the government of a ‘democracy championing’, freedom obsessed nation do
such a wicked thing? Within days, the name of the deep throat was released and from that moment Edward Snowden became a
poster child of government interference in our everyday lives. Obama’s response was to point to the needs of America to protect its
national security interests and in so doing conjure up the ghost of 9/11. This specter has haunted the American political landscape
with such force that it has perhaps changed the American mindset for generations to come – an almost forced jump in evolutionary
terms. The problem in this case, is that the ghost of 9/11 appears to be more akin to the ambivalent vision of Hamlet’s father ; ‘Be
thou a spirit of health or goblin damned,/Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,’ 3Zizsuggest this in the sense that the
original event has now become split in perceptions and of the subsequent events since 9/11 led to The Patriot Act and this is turn has
perhaps inevitably led to the NSA’s actions; Perhaps the most interesting remarks about the NSA controversy thus far came from
Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, one of the original authors of the USA PATRIOT [...] Sensenbrenner stated that particular
provision of the Act requires government lawyers to prove to the FISC that a request for specific business records is linked to an
“authorized investigation” and further stated that “targeting US citizens is prohibited” as part of the request. Sensenbrenner argued
that the NSA telephone metadata collection is a bridge too far and falls well outside the original intended scope of the Act: “[t]he
administration claims authority to sift through details of our private lives because the Patriot Act says that it
can.Zizdisagree.Zizauthored the Patriot Act, and this [NSA surveillance] is an abuse of that law.” 4 If the author has control over the
intention of his work then by his words US government agencies were acting outside the scope of the law. Being so, what are we to
make of this? Are we seeing a new approach to governance or in effect business as normal, but with a new strategy adapted to meet
new demands? Worryingly so, if we remind ourselves of the words of Michel Foucault; Then it gets really scary. Foucault describes
the observation of our private lives, as aided by new technology. Felluga notes the French philosopher’s emphasis on surveillance
within an emerging information society and a developing bureaucracy that “turns individuals into statistics and paperwork,”... Lest
we forget Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984) In seeing Foucault, alongside his compatriots of Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan and
Jacques Derrida as
one of the pioneers of post structuralism, it helps the reader to locate Foucaultian
ideas firmly and squarely at the heartbeat of this contemporary world we share . Although at times his
work on madness and punishment could be said to be more historical than political in nature, thatZizfeel would be to misread both
his methodological approach and closely philosophical conclusions that emanate from his work. His work on surveillance
and power (highly influenced by both Nietzsche’s genealogical approach and Bastille’s ideas on otherness) help us to see
‘ tried and tested’ mechanisms of power at play. His work on power and its analysis on political regimes can be
said to have an even greater relevancy today than in the years he was alive. In today’s age we seem at times to be stumbling toward a
dystopian reality; A
really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful
executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do
not have to be coerced , because they love their servitude 6.
 Link – Privacy
Privacy is based on an assumption of the autonomous, free self --- but
this free self is formed only in relation to surveillance and desires the
gaze --- makes surveillance inevitable
Meyers 6/16/14 --- Masters of Public and International Law candidate, University of
Melbourne (Zach, “Autonomy as a Fantasy”, Taylor and Francis Online)//trepka
The Rationale for Privacy Privacy and Autonomy Since at least the early twentieth century, and particularly in
the United States, a major justification for the development of privacy law has been the value of
autonomy over how one’s personal information is disclosed and disseminated . Certainly, Warren and
Brandeis’s seminal 1890 article on the right to privacy purportedly found privacy rights in the ‘inviolate personality’ and the
‘spiritual nature’ of humanity10 (leading many scholars to focus on dignity, rather than autonomy, as the foundation for privacy
law). In my view, though, the conception of privacy they reached better reflects the value of autonomy than any inherent, inalienable
aspect of human dignity.11 Warren and Brandeis were concerned only with ‘unauthorised’ dissemination of information. By this,
they clearly meant that consent was central to the concept of privacy – indeed, their explicit intention was to ensure that ‘the law
allows each person to decide the extent to which their thoughts and emotions are communicated’.12 Importantly, although Warren
and Brandeis agreed that some matters were of such sufficient public interest that they could not be legitimately kept private, this
proposition was put forward only in respect of those who had ‘assumed a position which makes their doings legitimate matters of
public investigation’. Conceptually, their article proceeded on the basis that a right to privacy merely followed the principle of
dominion over private property as a ‘right against the world’ (albeit in an ‘extended and unusual’ sense) – over which the individual
has control – rather than a means of regulating individual behaviour to preserve dignity. 13 Concepts of privacy that relate it to a
proprietary right, and that therefore focus on autonomy and control, have remained influential – hence William Prosser’s
description of privacy as the ‘composite of the interests in reputation, emotional tranquility and intangible property’14 and Fried’s
view of privacy as ‘the control we have over information about ourselves’.15 Reiman, too, has identified that privacy is ‘necessary to
the creation of selves out of human beings, since a self is at least in part a human being who regards his existence – his thoughts, his
body, his actions – as his own’.16 Reiman’s use of the language of property law to explain identity – ‘ownership’ over self, and an
individual’s ‘moral title to his existence’17 – is particularly evocative. Some scholars have complicated this picture by recognising
that autonomy is not necessarily ‘pre-existing’.18 These articulations of privacy suggest that individuals have an inherent ‘core’,
which stands in contrast to their social existence19 – that is, there is a distinction between ‘intimate information’ over which a
person has a right to privacy (a sphere of autonomy from external influences)20 and public aspects of identity over which there is no
such right.21 While scholars acknowledge the role of social discourses and ideologies on individual identity, such scholars see these
as an interference with the pre-existing individuality of each individual.22 Alan Westin, for example, has accordingly noted that ‘the
most serious threat to the individual’s autonomy is the possibility that someone may penetrate the inner zone and learn his ultimate
secrets, either by physical or psychological means’. 23 For Westin, as for most privacy scholars, privacy is therefore about ‘the claim
of individuals, groups or institutions to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is
communicated to others’.24 Critiques of Autonomy Recent scholarship has challenged the concept of the
autonomous individual. 25 This scholarship has come to acknowledge that no concept of privacy can achieve
autonomy, and that the concept of autonomy itself is a fantasy . The first wave of this scholarship
suggested that there is no ‘core self’ immune to dominant ideologies and social discourses ,26 and
that privacy may not only be desired but imposed as a means of exercising social dominance.27 The more fundamental challenge to
the connection between autonomy and privacy came from post-structuralist theorists such as Michel Foucault, who argued that
‘surveillance is permanent in its effects’, so that individuals are ‘caught up in a power situation of
which they are themselves the bearers’ .28 As this body of work developed, Foucault came to understand
identity as not only governed, but actually constituted, by dominant social ideologies. 29 A large body of work
following Foucault created a radical critique of autonomy – a critique that questioned not only whether autonomy could be
retrieved, but whether there was anything to retrieve at all – whether one’s identity (the very ability to seek to exclude others) was
always already colonised by the public sphere. This poses a fundamental challenge to the idea of a ‘core self’
and its relevance to privacy by suggesting that a person’s ability to identify as autonomous , as
capable of excluding others, is already a result of social relations . But if a person’s desires and identity
are not just influenced, but created, by social norms, then what is left of autonomy for privacy laws to protect other than a fantasy?
And how can the desire for privacy laws be explained if their ‘success’ brings us closer to acknowledging this fantasy for what it is?
Reconciling Privacy with the Decentred Self This is a fundamental question that should have caused a
significant rethink of the underlying purposes and justifications for privacy laws . But as Julie Cohen
notes, ‘privacy scholars have seemed both unable and unwilling to generate a different theory
of the self that privacy protects’,30 and most contemporary privacy theorists have not
responded fully to these critiques. A small number of contemporary privacy theorists have attempted to reconceptualise
privacy in a way that better reflects doubts over the ideal of autonomy. However, few have conducted the type of deconstruction of
privacy laws that post-structuralist critiques suggest is needed.

Laws to protect privacy are counterproductive --- identity is formed in

relation to the external gaze, which makes surveillance inevitable
Meyers 6/16/14 --- Masters of Public and International Law candidate, University of
Melbourne (Zach, “Autonomy as a Fantasy”, Taylor and Francis Online)//trepka
Psychoanalytic Approaches to Privacy It is at this point that, in my view, psychoanalytic theory – and
particularly the work of Jacques Lacan – can contribute. This is not to deny the role of social relations in developing privacy
norms, but it does recognise that, ultimately, the desire for privacy may be neither rational nor entirely
explained by social relations external to the individual. Instead,Zizsuggest that an appropriate
response to critiques of autonomy can be found by attempting to bridge the individual/social
divide. As Butler notes, ‘the psyche is precisely what exceeds the imprisoning effects of the discursive
demand to inhabit a coherent identity, to become a coherent subject’.39 By examining the
psyche, psychoanalytic theory can explain the desire for autonomy and the relevance of
privacy law to this desire in a way that is not necessarily wholly predetermined by social conditions.40 From Omnipotence to
Autonomy Psychoanalysts adopt a similar scepticism to the idea of autonomy to that expressed by many post-structuralists.
Freud41 paid significant attention to the lack of autonomy experienced during infancy and the
trauma realised by an infant when the child’s mother is temporarily absent .42 The infant’s
realisation that it is separate from the mother is understood by many psychoanalysts as being
traumatic.43 For Lacan, this trauma is one connected with omnipotence: in the first months of life, Lacan notes that the
infant incorporates feelings, needs and pleasures narcissistically, without recognising any clear
boundaries between them – without being able to articulate them as desires or demands, experiencing ‘raw’,
unstructured desire. In this state of primary narcissism, the infant’s mother provides it with what it needs and the infant
identifies as the only object of the mother’s desire. But at a certain point the infant realises both that the mother is not always ‘there’
and that the mother is not ‘there’ only for the infant: she has her own desires, and cannot fulfil all of the infant’s desires. Bruce Fink
describes the impact of this separation as there being: something about [the mother’s] desire which escapes the child, which is
beyond its control. A strict identity between the child’s desire and [the mother’s] cannot be maintained; her desire’s independence
from her child’s creates a rift between them, a gap … unfathomable to the child …44 The separation from its mother is
therefore a traumatic experience for the infant, because it shatters its narcissistic self-
understanding and forces it to recognise its lack of omnipotence . Although many dominant psychoanalytic
theorists never addressed privacy expressly, the attention so many psychoanalysts have given to the development of individual
identity by way of a traumatic separation from one’s mother has obvious implications for any theory of
privacy. It suggests that each individual’s first experience of privacy (at least in its traditional formulation of
being ‘left alone’) is something radically different to what most privacy scholars have assumed. As
infants, we neither start life alone nor seek to reserve any right to be ‘let alone’ . In the first instance,
being ‘let alone’ and experiencing privacy are imposed. It is this state of privation – and the need to come to terms with the loss of
omnipotence – that drives individuals towards a desire for autonomy, to be able to control this privation by being able to express
desires for and as one’s self. Privacy, then, creates the desire for autonomy, rather than autonomy creating the need
for privacy. The Myth of the ʻCore Selfʼ The disconnect between autonomy and privacy is reflected in Lacan’s work by the fact that an
infant’s autonomy is never developed or achieved ‘in privacy’, or by the infant ‘withdrawing from society’, in the way contemplated
by most privacy scholars who rely on the concept of a ‘core self’. While psychoanalysts differ in their views of how infants come to
terms with the realisation of their loss of omnipotence, 45 for Lacan an infant begins working through this trauma at the ‘mirror
stage’ of development – the time when the infant recognises an image of him or herself (that is, as a mental association with how the
child sees others).46 In the ‘mirror stage’, the infant, despite being ‘beset by disobedient limbs and unrelated urges’47 – a terrible
recognition of the loss of their omnipotence – acquires an ‘imaged and imagined, impression of … unity and oneness’, 48 an ‘ideal-
ego’. The infant creates an imaginary sense of mastery and autonomy associated with its separate identity – that is, the infant begins
to imagine that they are an ‘I’ capable of autonomy. 49 As Lacan notes, the development of the ego can be understood ‘as an
identification, in the full sense analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he
assumes an image’. 50 In other words, it
is only by misrecognising one’s self – by identifying one’s self
only as an object of another’s gaze – that one develops identity and comes to see one’s
self as capable of autonomy. This suggests an ambivalence towards the concerns of privacy theorists who have described
the sense of being objectified and under surveillance as deeply harmful. Floridi, for example, understands ‘a breach of one’s
informational privacy as a form of aggression against one’s personal identity’,51 and mainstream psychology has long perceived a
sense of privacy to be essential to a person’s mental health.52 Further, Lacan’s
work suggests a scepticism
towards claims that privacy protects an ‘authentic self’ – and particularly privacy as reflecting
human dignity or as standing ‘in stark opposition to the expansive forces of the modern market ,
which reduces everything that comes within its grasp to a common medium of exchange’.53 Instead, his work suggests
that, whatever the effects of self-surveillance, it is a necessary part of developing a social identity. For Lacan,
self-identity is only achieved relatively; the very image of an ‘autonomous self’ is in itself a perception achieved by the child
imagining itself as others see it, distancing itself from the reality of its ‘disobedient limbs’. Indeed, Lacan explains this dislocation
precisely in terms of a feeling of being under surveillance, of having no privacy: ‘the gazeZizencounter … is not a seen gaze, but a
gaze imagined by me’.54 The irony, then, is that the desire for autonomy, arriving as it does to manage the anxiety caused by
imposed privacy, functions only by reference to reference to others – which means its attainment, in a state of privacy, is always-
already foreclosed. We desire to see ourselves as enclosed subjects with the ‘core self’ relied upon by most privacy scholars, but the
very conception of self is recognised only through social and institutional discourse. Indeed, in Lacan’s work, the mirror stage ends
when the infant shifts from identifying with the image in the mirror to the image of others – ‘the time at which the specular turns
into the social’.55 This, of course, is a similar conclusion to those reached by other contemporary privacy scholars – Cohen, for
example, notes that ‘the subjectivity that results from the processes [we normally associate with privacy] is predominantly
intersubjective, informed by existing, socially situated conventions, practices, and ways of knowing’.56 It aligns well with the focus of
Nissenbaum’s and Austin’s work on social conventions. Lacan’s work offers more nuance: it sees the sense of self as social, but never
entirely socially determined, because there is still a sense of misrecognition when a person self-identifies as autonomous.
Importantly, Lacan
acknowledges that (self-)surveillance creates a feeling of loss as the infant
moves on from its primary narcissism, losing omnipotence and seeking autonomy, and as its
unstructured desires and experiences become subject to and mediated by social relations. Similarly, Jean Copjec, for example, has
described the experience of a ‘moment of extimacy in which we discover an “overpopulated” privacy, where some alien excess
adheres to us’.57 The ego itself is developed and constituted from social discourse at the end of the
mirror stage – but there remains a remainder that is ‘left over’, never fully represented in
discourse, and can only be felt as a feeling of loss to be regained .58 Judith Butler, for example, notes that this
sense of loss rifts the subject, marking a limit to what it can accommodate. Because the subject does not, cannot, reflect on that loss,
that loss marks the limit of reflexivity , that which exceeds (and conditions) its circuitry.
Understood as foreclosure, that loss inaugurates the subject and threatens it with dissolution. 59 It is here,Zizsuggest, that an
explanation of the desire for privacy can be found.

True privacy is impossible --- social relations that govern society

mean that people desire privacy repeatedly which means the aff will
never be enough
Meyers 6/16/14 --- Masters of Public and International Law candidate, University of
Melbourne (Zach, “Autonomy as a Fantasy”, Taylor and Francis Online)//trepka
Applying Psychoanalysis to Data protection laws If privacy is always-already lost, the reason why
it remains such a compelling legal issue is precisely the way it creates this threat of identity dissolution. For Freud (as for Lacan),
individuals have competing drives both to repress and to repeat trauma in a vain attempt to master and
overcome it.60 Similarly, for Lacan, the experience of losing omnipotence is both traumatic (because it is the infant’s first structured
experience of loss) and compelling (because the loss must be repeated to be mastered). The trauma of the infant’s separation from its
mother and the trauma of loss associated with the castration of entering into social discourse therefore results in attempts to
constantly repeat loss and to overcome it by ‘achieving’ autonomy. But the loss of omnipotence is no longer
recoverable because of the mother’s separation , and autonomy is always elusive because the infant’s ‘identity’ is
dependent on being able to express its desires and demands in ways that are recognised by others. Accordingly, individuals not only
repeat the act of being ‘let alone’, but desire to reclaim and reimagine the experience of loss as enabling of autonomy. Privacy
comes to be desired and repeated. This understanding of the role of trauma and repetition to privacy is illustrated by
Freud’s interpretation of a game he observed his grandson play during infancy as a way of dealing with the absence and return of his
mother. As Freud describes it: what he did was to hold the reel by the string and very skilfully throw it over the edge of his curtained
cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive ‘o-o-o-o’ [a sound Freud interprets as meaning fort, or
‘there’]. He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful ‘da’ [‘here’]. This, then was
the complete game – disappearance and return.61 Lacan and Freud both interpret the game as a compulsive repetition of loss, and
reflecting a drive to master the realisation that the individual is separate(d) from others. 62 But two particular aspects of
Lacan’s reinterpretation of the fort-da game have important consequences for information
privacy. First, for Lacan, the game demonstrates how the mirror stage results in the infant’s entry
into the structured social world (what Lacan terms the symbolic order) and the castration this entails. In doing so,
the individual’s self-identity becomes bounded, transformed and mediated through social
relations. For Lacan, the reel in the fort-da game therefore comes to stand in not for control over the mother (a desire for which
could be ‘expressed quite simply in a cry’),63 but for the infant’s more profound sense of disconnection from its own body.64 The
reel, then, is not ‘the mother reduced to a little ball by some magical game … it is a small part of the subject that detaches itself from
him while still remaining his, still retained’. 65 Accordingly, by throwing the reel over the side of the cot, the child is attempting to
establish autonomy, seeking to relate to and assert his influence beyond the cot, seeking an ‘answer to what the mother’s absence has
created on the frontier of his domain – the edge of his cradle – namely, a ditch, around which one can only play at jumping’.66 There
is necessarily a feeling of transgression associated with this game, with the infant pushing the boundaries of identity imposed upon
it.67 Second, Lacan considers the fort-da game to exemplify the child’s acquisition of language as
the key part of the castration needed to develop an ego, a sense of bounded self-identity :
This object [the reel], being immediately embodied in the symbolic pair of two elementary
exclamations [ie, fort and da], announced the subject’s diachronic integration of the dichotomy of
phonemes, whose synchronic structure the existing language offers up for him to assimilate; the child thus begins to become
engaged in the system of the concrete discourse of those around him by reproducing … the terms he receives from them.68 Lacan
describes the castration as being an accession to law (represented by the father): a law that
recognises the individual as bounded , as separate from the mother, and that requires the child to see
its own self as a bounded individual before it can articulate its own desires. Like the child shunning its disobedient limbs in
imagining they are an ego-ideal before the mirror, entry
into linguistic systems is an alienating process –
one which involves leaving behind an untamed ‘excess’ from the ‘wholeness’ of omnipotence ,
and taking up foreign linguistic systems ‘received’ from others.

The very existence of “personal information” to collect induces

anxiety, even if nobody collects it
Meyers 6/16/14 --- Masters of Public and International Law candidate, University of
Melbourne (Zach, “Autonomy as a Fantasy”, Taylor and Francis Online)//trepka
Indeed, this explains the value of collecting personal information. The very value of personal
information to marketers (and the very justification of marketers for doing so) disturbs our confidence in our
own autonomy. It suggests that, rather than being autonomous, our future behaviour is fully
predetermined by our entry into the social world. In this way, the information itself – along
with its disclosure – becomes anxiety-inducing . Rather than confront the information itself
directly, the preference is to suspend it between the fort and da, to perpetuate the dissemination
and recovery of the information without ever addressing its real content or import .
Indeed, Žižek would suggest that the forced confrontation with the content and importance of one’s own
personal information is particularly violent: ‘perhaps the forced actualization in social reality itself of the
phantasmatic kernel of my being is the worst, most humiliating kind of violence, a violence that undermines the very basis of my
identity (of my self-image)’.87
 —AT: Nissenbaum
Nissenbaum can’t explain why people desire privacy --- her
informational norms are vague nonsense
Meyers 6/16/14 --- Masters of Public and International Law candidate, University of
Melbourne (Zach, “Autonomy as a Fantasy”, Taylor and Francis Online)//trepka
The most comprehensive work in this area is by Helen Nissenbaum, who has constructed a theory of privacy
(largely focused on information flows, and so particularly relevant to the data protection strand of privacy) that does not rely on a
private/public dichotomy, and therefore acknowledges that there is no sphere in which an individual is fully ‘autonomous’. Instead,
Nissenbaum suggests that different public spheres carry their own norms about how information is used and disclosed – the
public/private dichotomy is not useful because ‘there are no arenas of life not governed by norms of information flow’.31 A breach of
privacy is therefore a breach of ‘contextual integrity’, a treatment of information that is seen as unacceptable in that particular
context. 32 Nissenbaum’s theory seems sympathetic to post-structuralist critiques, and seems to acknowledge that autonomy
therefore cannot be an appropriate conceptual foundation for privacy law. But thetheory seems limited in its ability
to describe why individuals desire privacy and how they negotiate within and create
‘ informational norms’ .33 One is left with the concept of an individual who ‘arrives’ in a social
context (like the pre-social autonomous individual of social contract theory) desiring privacy, in a way that is
unexplained other than as a desire to comply with social norms.
 —AT: Austin
Austin’s theory of privacy fails --- can’t explain the yearning for
privacy
Meyers 6/16/14 --- Masters of Public and International Law candidate, University of
Melbourne (Zach, “Autonomy as a Fantasy”, Taylor and Francis Online)//trepka
Lisa Austin’s work also engages with critiques of autonomy, but raises similar questions. Austin seeks to reconceptualise
privacy without autonomy at its core: suppose instead of the idea of an individual with an inner core transparent to
itself upon solitary introspection, we posited a self that is in fact formed through social interaction. The point of privacy would not be
to protect the conditions of social withdrawal in order to maintain the integrity of such a self – it would be to protect the conditions
of social interaction in order to provide the basis for identity formation in the first place. 34 Like Nissenbaum, Austin is
therefore critical of the dominance of consent in data protection laws ,35 and her work has a well-
developed theoretical foundation. 36 Austin takes seriously both the pervasiveness of power relationships
and their consequences for the ideal of autonomy – including that the very practising of autonomy is a social act,
meaningless in isolation. 37 Like Nissenbaum, however, Austin’s work does not address the desire
individuals have to protect their privacy. For example, Austin does not explain what it is about a
particular set of social conditions , a particular set of privacy principles, that enables
identity-formation. The suggestion seems to be that individuals have an inherent need for their privacy to be protected – a
single set of acceptable social conditions – as a prerequisite to identity formation. Again, one is left with an individual
who desires a certain set of privacy rights prior to identity formation – even though the
identity that desires these rights is already formed by them .
 Link – Race

Racism operates through a paradox of double logic operationalized by

the economy of pleasure – those subjected to racism are too similar
and successful, like the Jews, or too different, like blackness –
psychoanalysis provides a unique breaking point because it provides
both accurate diagnosis of the problem and a potentials for rethinking
the relations between ourselves, the other, and the other other
Young 2007 --- Silver Professor; Dean of Arts and Humanities (Robert J.C., “Torn Halves: Political
Conflict in Literary and Cultural Theory”, http://robertjcyoung.com/THChapter6.pdf)//trepka
For all that, however, Reich's Work in this area is important because he was the first to isolate what he called the characteristic
ambivalence of fascist ideology, and, crude as his analysis may in certain respects sound today, to stress the link between sexuality
and racism, a link that is constantly repressed or subject to social amnesia. What is important about Reich's work is his
demonstration that racism can't be separated from sexuality: positive or negative racist feelings share a structure of obsession with
the loved or hated object. This suggests that if it were asked where psychoanalysis itself comes closest to a symptomatic discussion of
racism, then it must be in the only concept that it takes from the racial arena, and that is fetishism. A term first used by
travelers with reference to the religious icons of Africa-the Africa that Freud also identifies as
the dark continent of female sexuality." The structure of fetishism, of simultaneous fixity and mobility,
operating together at once in a dialectic of attraction and repulsion , seems at least to get
at the constitutive ambivalence of racism , derived from what is in effect a surplus of
signification in the other- which explains why its other constant feature is paranoia , the
disease of overinterpretation. This recalls Freud's idea of the narcissism of minor differences. If the constitutive
factor of racism is that it finds a constant surplus of signification in the other, it can,
interestingly, work both by there being a difference, too much of a difference (in relation to
black people) but equally well through there being a danger of their being no difference (as
in anti- semitism, anti-Irish racism). There's no pleasing the racist: the bastards are either too
different or too similar. Such a logic is a kind of perverted mirroring of the liberal position
on cultural difference, that is, ethnic minorities are the same but different . This reversibility may suggest
that either liberalism is simply the other side of racism, or that the structure of racism doesn't have to be
dismantled but can rather be turned round. Either way, only psychoanalysis is placed to deal
with this perverse kind of paradoxical double logic -because this is the logic of
psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is uniquely placed to understand the operation of such structures: psychoanalysis itself
operates as a kind of illegitimate, unlegitimated form of thought that infiltrates the home territory of different disciplines, the other
that has been brought in to the same but which far from being assimilated remains inalienable and other to it: here psychoanalysis
itself reproduces the Very structure that is the object of racism-so that it appears as the apparently foreign body within that disturbs,
producing the uncanny effect of disquiet which characteristically purists within the discipline seek to expel outside. Compare the
insistent desire of psychologists and analytical philosophers to prove psychoanalysis wrong, to delegitimate yet again something that
after all already has no legitimacy, with the insistently repeated attempts to refute racism and racialism on logical or scientific
grounds. Psychoanalysis can locate, and even dislocate , the logics of racism precisely because,
like racism, it is a discourse whose object is its own raveled fantasy. If racism involves a
structure of sameness and difference, it also suggests a realignment of any simple model of 'the
Other'. There is an immediate problem about using the term 'the Other' dualistically in relation
to racism in a psychoanalytic context in so far as for psychoanalysis the Other is already a part of
the psyche , the unconscious that remains unacceptable and uncanny because it is other to the
ego and is not centred in a determinate self, amounting rather to the disturbing effect of the self
dislocated, as it Were, into the third person. Now if the symbolic structure of the social is that of the other, then
the social is already the other-whereas those who are the objects of racist antipathy are precisely
those who remain other to the social , in psychoanalytic terms, therefore, other to the other. At
this point the trauma becomes the inkling that the other's other could in fact be the same, the double of yourself. Forcing an uncanny
recognition of what should have remained hidden, racism
articulates desire and disavowal . Neither subject nor
object, the structure of racism takes the form not of simple negation, but of 'denegation'
(Verneinung), that is negation simultaneously accompanied by disavowal . This is the paradoxical form of
What Kristeva calls the 'abject', a state of simultaneous revulsion and desire: There looms, within abjection, one of those violent,
dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope
of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It
beseeches, worries, and fas cinates desir e, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced.
Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. A certainty protects it from the shameful - a certainty of which it is
proud holds on to it. But simultaneously, just the same, that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere as
tempting as it is condemned. 31 These two incompatible but inescapable poles of attraction and repulsion
enforce a blockage that produces its own narrative logic of repetition : the point about the
racial stereotype is indeed that it is always a stereotype, the other is thus paradoxically
always the same. The threatening heterogeneity is always reduced, while the desire that the other conjures up is
displaced into the (dis)pleasure of repetition , a repetition that energizes and ensures the
perpetuation and continuity of the cultural and ideological forms of racism through the ages -a
parasite that lives on the exercise of power.

Power reappropriates affect, reinforcing racism in the process –

conversely, psychoanalysis of the unconscious provides a break from
the micro-economy of desire that structures race relations in the
status quo
Hook 2007 (Derek, Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research in London, “Foucault, Psychology and the Analytics of Power”,
http://sociology.sunimc.net/htmledit/uploadfile/system/20100915/20100915203936818.pdf)//trepka
The model of racism thatZizam speculatively advancing – that is, racism as affective technology
of subjectivity and
self would thus need to assume that there are kinds of routings, channellings of affect that take on
regularized forms, and which are amenable to the exploitation of various political and discursive
systems, which are themselves thus reinforced in the process . It seems to me that Foucauldian
approaches to governmentality, and the associated scrutiny of human technologies have for too long neglected the question of
affect.Zizam sympathetic, for reasons outlined in Chapter 4, with the argument that the ostensibly psychological notion of ‘affect’
appears incompatible with a Foucauldian frame;3 this certainly is the case if one takes this concept to bring with it the presumption
of an essential interior that exists beyond the jurisdiction of power. Then again,Zizdo not subscribe to the view that affect should be
located exclusively within the bounded parameters of individual interiority, nor doZizbelieve that this concept necessarily entails the
trappings of the epistemology of humanism.Zizshare thus Rose’s (1996b) suspiciousness towards any theory that commits us to a
reliance on the belief of a human nature.Zizappreciate also the pertinence of the Deleuzian concept of the fold as Rose employs it
inasmuch as it ‘suggests a way in which we might think of human being without postulating [an] interiority’ (p. 142). The theme
of fold, the idea that what is ‘inside’ is merely an infolding of an exterio r, is a useful illustrative figure, one
of considerable importance to the overall argument thatZizam advancing, certainly inasmuch as it helps us avoid ‘binding
ourselves to a particular version of the law of this interiority whose history we are seeking to
disturb’ (p. 142). Nevertheless, those utilizable elements of the human subject, those ‘instrumentalities’
of the human subject that might guardedly be referred to as ‘psychological’ or ‘psychic’ , the very
elements that Rose’s analysis would eschew – ‘Is it possible that one might write a genealogy of the subjectification without a
metapsychology?Zizthink it is’ (p. 142) – remain, it seems to me,
crucial dimensions in the conduction of
power.4 It seems to me that if we are willing to accept that affect is indeed a human capacity – which, to
press the point home, is neither simply localizable within the parameters of the individual psychological subject, nor the point from
which a series of psychologistic or liberal– humanist presumptions necessarily flow – if we are willing to
accept this, then we must accept that affect can be utilized, ‘ resourced’ by types of power
which generate and produce it, even as they conduct and extend and its forces. Perhaps in this respect
we should follow the model set by Foucault in his genealogical prioritization of the body. The objective here, asZizhave
already noted, is not to substantialize a transhistorical entity, but rather to examine the forces of the body as
anchoring points of power’s corporeal implementation. The same may be true of affect – affect approached thus
as a set of forces that act as anchoring points for power’s psychological implementation – an idea which brings with it two
interesting suggestions. The first of which is that we need to treat psychoanalysis as an ally of
Foucauldian analytics – albeit an uncomfortable or unexpected ally – one which provides a sophisticated
vocabulary with which we may grasp the micro-functioning of a political
instrumentation of affect. The second suggestion is that such an initiative is critically
sustainable only on condition that, simultaneously, we concern ourselves with writing the genealogy
of affect, a genealogy within which the conceptual language of psychoanalysis will presumably
play a large although by no means singular role.
 Link – Terrorism
Paranoid threat construction of terrorism acts as a self-fulfilling
prophecy, exacerbating the actual impacts of terrorism and driving
the United States to the extent of nuclear war
Zulaika, 12 – Professor and Director, Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, Reno
(Joseba, “Mythologies of Terror: Fantasy and Self-Fulfilling Prophecy in U.S. Counterterrorism,”
Kroeber Anthropological Society, Vol. 102, No. 1, 10-13,
http://kas.berkeley.edu/documents/Issue_102-103/2_Zulaika.pdf)//SY

A central dimension of terrorism, and one that is crucial to show its self-fulfilling quality, has to
do with threats and their perception and the reactions they provoke. A threat plays with the sign as
representing a future event, while we never know whether the issuer actually means it or not, or
whether he might change his opinion in the future. The Unabomber brought the traffic in
California airports to a halt by simply sending a letter to a newspaper with the threat of bringing
down an airliner, while he sent another letter to another newspaper admitting that the threat
was a “prank.” The actual reality of the threat might be nothing but play -- a zero that can yet have
deadly serious consequences. Counterterrorism is a prime example of what Merton labeled “the
Thomas theorem:” “If men define situations as they are real in their consequences” (Merton
1968:475). Once the situation is defined as one of inevitable terrorism and endless waiting, what
could happen weighs as much as what is actually the case; once a threat, whose intention or
possibility is unknown to us, is taken seriously, its reality requires that we must act on it.
Terrorism is the catalyst for confusing various semantic levels of linguistic, ritual and military
actions. Anthropologists have examined phenomena such as divination, which manipulates the
axis of time in a cultural context of magic and witchcraft. They have compared pre-modern
mystical notions of causation and temporality to our own modern standards of rationality. The
central premise of counterterrorism thinking is the oft-repeated formula that “it is not if, but
when.” Hypotheticals are premised with the conditional if— “if A, then B.” What characterizes
basic counterterrorist knowledge about the next impending attack is that it will happen. In a mind-
set that parallels Azande witchcraft, the counterterrorist axiom of “not if” rules out mere
hypotheses.2 The revelations are thus “unfulfilled hypotheticals” that will become real with time.
Counterterrorist projections are the equivalent to oracular certainties—the horror will happen
no matter what. This leads in pragmatic terms to the fatalistic attitude of disregarding actual
knowledge and not taking responsibility for actual decisions—what does it really matter what we
decide since it is going to happen anyway and whatever happens is out of our hands? What
matters, therefore, is that we sort of divine what the course of action will be. The practical aspect
of this temporality of waiting, in which the certainty of the impending evil is beyond any
hypothetical (“not if”), is that we need to act preemptively now against events that are to happen
in the future. The rationale behind nuclear deterrence was that developing armaments now, ready
to strike at the push of a button, guaranteed that they would not be used in the future. Many
commentators saw in such logic the quintessence of technological madness. But that was not
enough. Since future nuclear attacks by terrorists are only a matter of time, we must wage war
now preemptively even in a nuclear context , thus breaking the historic assumption that
nuclear arsenals were for deterrence, not for actual usage. Thus the formula of “not if, but
when” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy . The counterterrorist thinking makes it an
imperative that the war must start now— against Saddam Hussein, against al-Qaeda, against
Iran, against all potential terrorists. This is how the American public, including the liberal media,
accepted the rationale to go to war against Iraq. What happens to the axis of time in the
expectations of robotic technology? Robots will have to react in such speed, we are told, that in
the decision cycle, reduced from minutes to microseconds, “As the loop gets shorter and shorter,
there won’t be any time in it for humans,” according to an army colonel (Singer 2009:64). It is
no longer the “perversion of temporality” in the waiting for terror, but the very elimination of
human time—the perfect fantasy by which humans are left aside in a war in which, not only will
they not die, but, by reducing time to the category of fiction, they will not have to make the tough
decisions and carry the burden of their consequences. The fact that robotic technologies created to
combat terrorism reinforce such self-generating quality to a frightening degree can be illustrated
with the best-known case of terrorism before 9/11: the Pan Am flight 103 downed over
Lockerbie, Scotland in December 1988, killing the 270 passengers aboard. What the public
ignores is that this was preceded in July of 1988 by the downing of an Iranian airliner in the
Persian Gulf by the U.S.S. Vincennes with 290 people on board, and this was the result of the
cruiser being equipped with an Aegis radar system that registered the civilian plain as “Assumed
Enemy.” The Iranian jet was on a consistent course and broadcasting a civilian radar and radio
signal, but the automated Aegis had been designed for dealing with Soviet bombers and thus it
appeared on its computer screen to be an Iranian F-14 fighter. The hard data were telling the
crew that the plane wasn’t a fighter, but the computer was telling them it was. And who could
challenge the robotic knowledge of Aegis? And because the Vincennes was a Robo-cruiser, the
crew had the authority to fire without seeking further permission from the authorities. In short,
“the computer was trusted even more than any human captain’s independent judgment on whether
to shoot or not” (Singer 2009:125). Five months after the tragedy provoked by the Vincennes
came the terrorist attack on the Pan Am 103, and prominent experts saw a case of revenge or
“blood feuding” (TT 11). A classic case of counterterrorism’s self-generating logic. What are the
practical results of the drone campaign? The number of terrorist attacks in Pakistan has gone up
sharply in a wave of anti-Americanism, for Pakistanis “overwhelmingly believe that most of those
who die in the attacks are civilians” (Caryl 2007:56). One concrete instance of such a link was
provided by Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American known for the failed bomb in Times Square
in May 2010, who declared in his trial that “I’m avenging the attack” of “drones [that] kill
women, children... everybody... I am part of the answer” (Hari 2010). Add to this the stark fact
that the CIA drone strikes set a precedent for the nearly 50 other nations, including Pakistan
and Iran, that already possess the same unmanned technology. Counterterrorists know all of
this. Yet why is it that these very drones, that help increase terrorist insurgency “exponentially,”
are still “the only game in town”? In short, counterterrorism knows that its tactics operate clearly
along the path of a self-fulfilling feedback, and yet there is nothing else better to do. Such an
impasse— if we do nothing, terrorism will flourish; if we do something it will flourish even more—
shows dramatically the current crisis in counterterrorist knowledge. There is at the domestic level
another dimension of how counterterrorism needs terrorists, much like a hunter
needs the beastly prey , and which can be gathered from Trevor Aaronson, working here in
Berkeley, in his article “The Informants” (2011): “Informants report to their handlers on people
who have, say, made statements sympathizing with terrorists. Those names are then cross-
referenced with existing intelligence data, such as immigration and criminal records. FBI agents
may then assign an undercover operative to approach the target by posing as a radical.
Sometimes the operative will propose a plot, provide explosives, even lead the target in a fake
oath to al-Qaeda. Once enough incriminating information has been gathered, there’s an arrest—
and a press conference announcing another foiled plot.” The Washington Metro bombing plot,
the New York subway plot, the plot to blow up the Sears Tower, the one to bomb a Portland
Christmas tree lighting, and dozens more across the nation were organized and led by the FBI.
Mother Jones, having examined the prosecutions of 508 defendants in terrorism-related cases,
found that all the high-profile terrorism plots of the last decade, with the exception of three,3
were FBI stings (Aaronson 2011:30-43). The FBI consumes now most of its budget (3.3 billion) on
counterterrorism, not on organized crime (2.2 billion). It has 15,000 spies, many of them with the
task of infiltrating Muslim communities, paid as much as $100,000 in some cases. As one
defense lawyer put it, “They’re creating crimes to solve crimes so they can claim a victory in the
war on terror” (Aaronson 2011:33). Attorney Eric Holder argued in a speech that sting operations
have “proven to be an essential law enforcement tool in uncovering and preventing potential terror
attacks” (Aaronson 2011:33). But what this view doesn’t take into account is the extent to which
the sting operation is actually creating terrorism. There is no better case to prove this than the
case of the blind Sheikh, which several writers consider to be a crucial event leading to 9/11.
What cannot be answered is of course how many of the FBI’s targeted “terrorists” would have
never become one were it not for an informant. In the case of the blind Sheik, the evidence
points to the fact that, if not for the sting operation based on a paid informant notorious for
lying to everyone, according to the New York Times, his fatwa would not have taken place, a key
event in the making of 9/11. The final result of such counterterrorist culture is that regular crimes
are now frequently viewed by law enforcement and intelligence agencies with the suspicion that
they are possibly linked to terrorism.4 What greater success could al-Qaeda have in the end than it
be considered by the U.S. security as a bigger threat than the Soviet superpower during the Cold
War, deserving in counterreaction so far several trillion dollars?

Counterterrorist surveillance is ineffective not because of any specific

program but because of the misguided fantasies of terrorist threats
Zulaika, 12 – Professor and Director, Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, Reno
(Joseba, “Mythologies of Terror: Fantasy and Self-Fulfilling Prophecy in U.S. Counterterrorism,”
Kroeber Anthropological Society, Vol. 102, No. 1, 7-8,
http://kas.berkeley.edu/documents/Issue_102-103/2_Zulaika.pdf)//SY

What concerns us most here is a crisis of knowledge in terrorism studies. Right from their
inception, a sign of this crisis has been the difficulties of, not only defining the term itself, but
the very interpretive frameworks of the events covered by the concept. A critical analysis must
inquire into the genealogy of this discourse and world-view, beginning with the very naming of
the phenomenon; it must examine its conceptual premises and policies, question its politics and
ethics. It is the placement of the terrorists in a context of taboo, the willful ignorance of their
political subjectivities, the role of fantasy in the entire phenomenon —these are aspects
that need investigation to find out the extend of the crisis of knowledge in the entire field. One has
to begin such study by examining what counts as a standard of evidence and as valuable
information in such context of taboo, what type of experience should be respected, what sort of
associative logic links together various kinds of events. Forty percent of the U.S. military budget
is secret (Johnson 2007:209), as are the budgets of the intelligence agencies. The number of
classified documents has tripled since 2001 to 23 million. Priest and Arkin provide evidence that
no one in government knows how much is spent in counterterrorism nor is in charge of managing
its exponential growth nor is responsible for the overall effort. Yet the critical question is: does
secrecy help or make a country more vulnerable in the current culture of instant electronic
information? The National Security Agency “now ingests 1.7 billion pieces of intercepted
communications every twenty-four hours” (Priest and Arkin 2011:77). After 9/11 government
agencies published some 50,000 intelligence reports. The usefulness of the report depends on
the quality of the analysts, and these are among the lowest paid employees, young people
making $40,000 to $60,000, two-thirds of whom at the CIA have less than five years of
experience, and are typically ignorant of the languages or the cultures of the countries they are
working on. The intelligence veterans have migrated to the lucrative private sector. As director of
intelligence at U.S. Central Command, John M. Custer III grew so angry at the lack of useful
information coming from the gigantic National Counterterrorism Center that in 2007 he visited
its director and told him “that after four and a half years, this organization had never provided
one shred of information that helped me prosecute three wars!” (Priest and Arkin 2011:84-85).
Priest and Arkin’s conclusion is that nobody is in charge of Counterterrorism in Top Secret
America. Which explains, for example, that in the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the
Nigerian known as the “underwear bomber,” who tried to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253
over Detroit in Christmas of 2009, not only was information from the British intelligence
connecting him to Anwar al-Awlaki, but his own father had contacted the CIA officers at the U.S.
Embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, alerting them of the danger posed by his son’s “extremely religious
views.” And yet his name was not added to the No Fly List nor was his U.S. visa revoked. This was
déjà vu of the knowledge had by fifty to sixty officers for a period of over a year that two of the
future 9/11 plotters were in this country and nothing was being done about it. Which brings us to
the relevant issue of the extent to which counterterrorism has become terrorism’s best ally. It is a
fact recognized by the 9/11 Commission Report that the plotters could have been found and the
attacks prevented. What are the premises and blind spots in counterterrorism that not only
allowed 9/11, but might have contributed to making the problem much worse? And isn’t the drone
war just another flight into counterterrorist fantasy and one more chapter in self-fulfilling
prophecy? What is the meaning of “information” in such terrorist scenarios of states of exception
and in the presence of a community of believers whose basic structure separates those who
“know” the secret information and the rest of us who are to be kept in the dark? Secrecy means
that no critical judgment can be exercised, much like in mystical societies where knowledge
belongs only to the sacred specialist. Intelligence becomes ancillary information when belief
drives knowledge . Once the decision has been made that the enemy is a Hitler-like monster, the
ordinary standards of factual evidence are supplemented with untested premises grounded on
moral and political principles. The main role of information is no longer procuring factual
evidence but helping uncover the secret intentions of the evildoer.

The affirmative’s counter-terror mindset embodies “violent

innocence” – this results in the projection of aggression onto the
Other and lash-out – they create more terrorists motivated by “violent
innocence” than they attempt to destroy
Hollander 14 – Currently a research psychoanalyst, educated at the Psychoanalytic Center of California, Former
Professor of History at California State University, Dominguez Hills (Nancy Caro Hollander, 4/8/2014, Routledge, Uprooted
Minds: Surviving the Politics of Terror in the Americas, ISBN: 978-0881634914 // SM)
An important component of the traumatic significance of 9/11 was our experience of ourselves as targets of an arbitrary and
unfathomably aggressive act. Why did we become the innocent victims of such a monstrous assault? As an ostensibly
puzzled President Bush put it, “But why do they hate us? We are so good.“ This stance represents
what Christopher Bollas (I992) posits as “violent or radical innocence,” a psychic defense by
which the denial of one's own aggression is projected onto the other , who is then
experienced as the source of one's innocent victimhood. This defense simplifies
consciousness and inhibits the capacity for symbolization, promoting paranoid
schizoid splitting and projective mechanisms that characterized the states of mind
of both leaders and citizens in this country . Shortly after 9/11, Hedda had an experience that illustrates
this phenomenon. She called together a group of her colleagues to discuss their responses to the attacks on the Twin Towers and the
Pentagon. “Of course, early on, the question of ‘why do they hate us’ came up,” she told me, with more than a little irritation, “and I
thought, okay, I know a little about this, so I tried to explain something about this country's role in the world. I got resistance to this
line of thinking, so l tried suggesting that we think together about how people are looking to Bush as a father figure who in fantasy
we need to rely on to keep us safe. But that kind of minimal psychoanalytic thinking was not what they were interested in. They
wanted to talk about revenge, how we could get even with the terrorists. They were afraid it might happen again, and no one but me
was afraid of what we might do, what Bush might carry out in a kind of self-righteous vindication that would wind up being even
more destructive. I felt isolated in my concerns, which were much more about our government than about the terrorists.” As Hedda
feared, this theme of violent innocence was manifested in the Bush administration's adoption of an
attitude of righteous entitlement to aggressive retaliatory tactics that risked an ever-expanding war
whose product would be the manufacture of thousands of new terrorists who also
experience violent innocence in their conviction that the United States is a mortal
enemy they must destroy. The recourse to violent innocence as a strategy to deal with the
destabilizing effects of the terrorist attacks was framed by aspects of hegemonic ideology that have
informed this country's relationship to the rest of the world for centuries. Most U.S. citizens
understand foreign policy through the government's ideological lens as it is monotonously
transmitted and reiterated through the corporate-owned media and the host of other institutions through
which circulate, as Gramsci showed, hegemonic notions and practices that are felt to be the shared
common sense of the social order. Citizens were thus receptive to their government's self-
representation of violent innocence based on the denial of U.S. expansionist policies that long predated 9/11. While we
were in fact victims of hateful violence, the immediate conclusion of our innocent victimization
and the assumption that the terrorists were motivated by envy —of our goodness, our
freedoms, our material achievements— inhibited citizens‘ capacity to think about how
U.S. policies in the Middle East and Asia may have been an important source of
terrorist hatred , about which we might be able to do something constructive. In this regard, a poster
carried by participants in antiwar marches ironically asked a significant question regarding a motive for the invasion of Iraq. It read:
‘How did our oil get under their sand?!‘ The grandiosity in the attitude satirized in the poster has a long tradition in this country‘s
estimation of its superior institutions and values that are the foundation of U.S. foreign policy. Many citizens endorsed,
however unknowingly, the ideological assumptions underlying the war on terror and its aggressive
foreign and domestic policies. They identified with and thus gave consensual support to hegemonic
depictions of this country's invasion and occupation of Iraq as a force for democracy, liberty, and
justice. War was the culturally acceptable response to the terrorist attacks because the government
could rely on a historical reservoir of racism and neocolonial sentiments that has driven U.S.
foreign policy

Discursive threat construction about terrorism manipulates

Americans to fear the undefined terrorist Other and causes them to
support the national security state that carries out dehumanization
and violence
LaMothe, 11 – Professor, Pastoral Care and Counseling, Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of
Theology (Ryan, “Obsession for National Security and the Rise of the National Security State-
Industry: A Pastoral-Psychological Analysis,” Pastoral Psychology, Vol. 61, No. 6, February, 34-
35)//SY

Since 9/11, the ideas of national security and the war on terror are deeply embedded in the minds
of most Americans. President Bush and administration officials, with remarkable consistency
and coordination, coined terms such as the axis of evil (North Korea, Iran, and Iraq), preventive
war, the war on terror, and the smoking gun of a mushroom cloud to channel and harness the
anxiety and fear of the American public toward supporting two wars, torture, the
Guantanamo prison, secret prisons abroad, and the Patriot Act. What is interesting and deeply
problematic about the proliferation of the term “war on terror” is the absence of a defined enemy
to be defeated, which gives rise to a perpetual war (Bacevich 2010; Chomsky 2010; Vidal 2002).
Where before the Soviet Union provided a clear circumscribed enemy, now any person, group,
or country can fall under the amorphous banner of terrorist. Terrorism and terrorists are terms
that provide an unprecedented emotional plasticity in political discourse. Indeed, terrorists are the
best kind of enemy if one is seeking to keep the idea of national security alive and malleable in the
psyche of the American public. The idea of national security and attending metaphors have served
to motivate leaders and citizens alike to support massive military and intelligence spending, as well
as an aggressive foreign policy that has had very concrete and frequently devastating consequences,
along with accidental beneficial results. Following WWII the result of the employment of the
phrase “national security” led to an incredible expansion of government entities, ushering in the
“age of the National Security State” (Bacevich 2010, p.35). 34 Pastoral Psychol (2012) 61:31–46
Concern for national security, in other words, led to a number of government agencies and
military branches that focused primarily on combating the prevalence of external and internal
threats and, in particular, Communist threats. Allen Dulles of the new spy organization, CIA, Air
Force general Curtis Lemay at the Strategic Air Command (SAC), J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI,
Robert McNamara the Secretary of Defense, General Westmoreland and many other leaders all
played various roles in heightening anxiety about the threat of Communism to the survival not
only of the U.S. but Western democracies as well. Clearly, the Soviet Union was involved in
making nuclear warheads and delivery systems, but, as Bacevich (2010, 2011) noted, many of
the claims made by U.S. political, military, and intelligence leaders were greatly exaggerated,
often deliberately, to pursue personal, national (e.g., economic and political expansion and
control), agency (e.g., more funding), and military goals. A consequence of the emergence of the
National Security State was the rise of what President Eisenhower called the military-industrial
complex. In his Farewell Address, Eisenhower said, Our military organization today bears little
relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of
World War II or Korea. Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no
armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make
swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we
have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to
this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment.
We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence,
whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.2 Certainly, Eisenhower did not
use the term “complex” as a double entendre. The military-industrial complex is complex because
of the deep and entangling ties between the military, corporations, and the state. It is also a
complex in the sense of the social psyche supporting these entanglements. That is, the psychological
complex was the growing obsession with national security. Despite Eisenhower’s warning, the
military-industrial complex has mushroomed, with an impressive surge after 9/11. The growth of
the military-industrial complex was broader than simply arming the U.S. U.S. companies played
and play a leading role in the manufacture and sale of weapons throughout the world that are
sometimes used by U.S. supported dictators (e.g., Somoza in Nicaragua; Rhee in South Korea;
Armas and Fuentes in Guatemala) or used by allies to suppress or remove native groups (e.g.,
Israel occupation of Palestinian lands; Iraq during the Iraq-Iran war). What is important to
grasp here is that the rise of the national security state and the military-industrial complex, which
signified a marriage of the state to private, non-democratic economic institutions, occurred
largely by consistently employing the idea and the seemingly ineluctable logic of national security to
heighten anxiety and fear among U.S citizens. Heightened fear and anxiety motivated (and
continues to motivate) citizens to support massive military spending and aggressive foreign policy
goals and actions.

Manipulation of Americans’ anxieties about survival causes them to

support global interventions to eradicate the undefined terrorist
Other
Weber, 2 – Paul de Man Chair, European Graduate School and Avalon Professor of Humanities,
Northwestern University (Samuel, “War, Terrorism, and Spectacle, or: On Towers and Caves,”
Grey Room, No. 7, Spring, 19-22, http://www.jstor.org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/stable/pdf/1262582.pdf?
acceptTC=true)//SY

Baudrillard's assertion makes sense, I would argue, only insofar as it is understood to articulate
the position of spectators, a position that is not the same in Paris as it is in New York but that
nevertheless shares certain general characteristics which Debord was one of the first to discern.
Debord emphasized that spectacle perpetrated the separation and isolation of individuals in a
commodity society while at the same time concealing that isolation. The televisual view of the
world propagated by the nightly news in every country with which I am familiar (a very limited
number, to be sure: mainly North America and Western Europe) heightens what Debord
described but never explicitly named: ambivalence, which results when anxieties related to the
limitations of physical (and social) existence, involving frailty, vulnerability, and-ultimately-
mortality, are provisionally suppressed through images that position the spectator as an
invulnerable and all-seeing survivor-surviving all the catastrophes that constitute the bulk of the
nightly news (at least in the United States; the situation of European television strikes me as
different but, unfortunately, moving in the same direction at varying speeds). The situation of
this spectator is akin to that of the child, described by Lacan as the Mirror Stage, characterized by
an Imaginary identification with an image of wholeness. The internal contradiction of such
identification is that it institutes an image of unity only by occupying two places at once: the
desired place of wholeness and the feared place of disunity. In the images of catastrophe that
dominate broadcast media "news," the disunity is projected into the image itself, while the desired
unity is reserved for the spectator off-scene (and for the media itself as global network).9 To
support such identification and the binary opposition upon which its success depends, images
must appear to be clearly localizable, self-contained, and meaningful at the same time that they
englobe destruction, mutilation, and implosion. They must comprehend and contain the
catastrophes that thereby appear to be intelligible in and of themselves, without requiring the
spectator to look elsewhere. The spectator thus can sustain the illusion of occupying a position that
allows one to "endure" indefinitely. This is the moral of the story, whether it is called "Enduring
Freedom" or "Infinite Justice." The War against Terrorism is thus conducted in the
name of "enduring freedom," as the freedom to remain the same, to keep one's place
indefinitely. This is also the message of "infinite justice": to remain in[de]finitely the same is to
pursue the enemy relentlessly, without end, until he is cornered in his innermost redoubts and
destroyed. The trajectory that leads from the Twin Towers to the caves of Tora Bora and beyond,
marks the will to power as a will to endure. This is the not-so-hidden religious subtext of the
ostensibly secular War against Terrorism, a war that is above all a defense and an affirmation of
"globalization" as the right to determine the earth as being both all-encompassing and self-
contained. To rule the planet, one must survive. But to survive, one must rule. Western television
(and often print) media appeal to their viewers by promising them the continued rule of such
survival. "Stay with us: we'll be right back after the break." Stay with us-and survive the break;
leave us and perish. The spectacle of the Twin Towers imploding-a phallic fate if ever there was
one-and of a portion of the Pentagon in ruins, broadcast in real time, has had two effects. On the
one hand, it heightened the anxiety of the "break" to which consumption appeals. Consumer
confidence was shattered, at least temporarily, and after a period of mourning the official
discourse had to urge all citizens not, as one might have expected, to "get back to work," but to
start spending again. The promise of immortality through consumption had lost much of its
appeal, for the time being at least. But since just such traumatic breaks are at the origin of the
compulsion to consume, the basic structure and process was not fundamentally altered. That is, as
long as the putative cause of anxiety can be located in an image, confined to a site, a stage-or,
rather, to multiple sites and stages, but in sequence, one following the other. This is the goal of the
military response to "terrorism": it must be named (Al Qaeda), given a face (Osama bin Laden),
and then, above all, located (Afghanistan, Tora Bora, Sudan, Somalia, and so on) in order then to
be depicted, if possible, and destroyed. The names and faces may change. But presumably not the
need that "terror" be named and given a face. On the other hand, when terrorism is defined as
"international," it becomes more difficult to locate, situate, personify, and identify; or, rather, it
can only be situated sequentially, one site after the other, not all at once. From this point on the
War against Terrorism becomes a scenario that unfolds, step by step and intrinsically without end,
in its effort to bring the global enemy to "infinite justice." Almost from the beginning of this war,
the Bush administration asserted that the enemy was "international" in character, limited
neither to one person, however important, nor to one state, however nefarious. Thus, the War
against Terrorism, unlike the cold war, cannot be defined primarily as a war against a single state,
the Soviet Union, or against that state's international emanation, "The Communist Conspiracy."
It is not even a war against a single terrorist organization, however decentralized, such as Al
Qaeda. "International Terrorism" englobes all the "rogue" states that for years have been
designated by the U.S. State Department as aiding and abetting terrorism: Iraq, North Korea,
Iran, Sudan, Syria, and so on. What characterizes this policy is its continuing effort to tie
terrorist networks to nation-states. It locates cause, condition, and ramifications in the
pathological behavior of individual "rogue" states, whose roguishness consists in their refusal to
follow the norms of international behavior as laid down by the United States government.10 To
conclude: the spectacle, at least as staged by the mainstream broadcast media, seeks
simultaneously to assuage and exacerbate anxieties of all sorts by providing images to which they
can be attached, ostensibly comprehended, and, above all, removed. Schematically, the fear of
death is encouraged to focus upon the vulnerability of the other, which, as enemy, is the other to
be liquidated or subjugated. The viewer is encouraged to "move forward" and simultaneously to
forget the past; encouraged to identify with the ostensibly invulnerable perspective of the
pilotless airborne camera that registers as blips the earthbound destruction tens of thousand of
feet below. Such a position seems to assure the triumph of the spectator over the mortality of
earthbound life. The trails of the B-52s in the stratosphere high above the earth announce the
demise of the Caves and the Ressurrection of the Towers.

Analyzing the United States’ post-9/11 rhetoric is key to understand

our relationship to the war on terror and deconstructing and stop
ceding political will to the state’s militarism
Biesecker, 7 – (Barbara, “No Time for Mourning: The Rhetorical Production of the
Melancholic Citizen-Subject in the War on Terror,” Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 40, No. 1, 150-
152, http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/25655263.pdf)//SY

Zizek's definition in this essay of the melancholic's so-called lost object as "nothing but the
positivization of a void or lack, a purely anamorphic entity that does not exist in itself is, of
course, his theory of subjectivation and ideology writ small: always already at the core of
subjectivity lies a constitutive void, the self is therefore fundamentally compensatory and
ultimately delusional, and ideology is the symbolic space of self-enunciation at once inaugurated
and governed by lack and always already lacking?a melancholic economy's spectral and
structural effect. Contrary to what others have proscribed, the way out of the ideological enclosure
is not to confront what we experience as reality but, instead, "to traverse the phantasy" that shores
it up so as to come face to shadowy face with the fundamental lack, split, or antagonism around
which our putative reality has been structured. In the words of Richard Boothby, whom Zizek
himself approving cites, the task is "to be more profoundly claimed by the phantasy than ever, in
the sense of being brought into an ever more intimate relation with the real core of the phantasy
that transcends imaging" (2002, 18). In Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Zizek once again sets
into motion the logic of "going through the fantasy"?"not its symbolic interpretation but the
experience of the fact that the fantasy-object [or symptom], by its fascinating presence, is merely
filling out a lack, a void in the Other" (1989,133)?in order to pronounce not only a sweeping
diagnosis of Americans', indeed the West's, cathected relation to the terrorist attacks on the Twin
Towers and Pentagon but also of the ever more bloody Israeli-Palestinian ideological deadlock.
Here, I quote him twice, at some length: Who is really alive today? What if we are "really alive"
only if we commit 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 ... suicide bomber on the point of blow ing him- or herself (and others)
up is, in an emphatic sense, "more alive" than the American soldier engaged in a war in front of a
computer screen against an enemy hundreds of miles away, or a New York yuppie jogging along
the Hudson river in order to keep his body in shape? Or, in psychoanalytic terms, what if a
hysteric is truly alive in his or her permanent excessive questioning of his or 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 or her compulsive rituals to prevent the "thing" from happening?this "thing" being the
excess of life itself? (2002, 88-89) And: The problem with Ariel Sharon is not that he is
overreacting, but that he is not do ing enough, that he is not addressing the real problem?far
from being a ruthless military executioner, Sharon is the model of a leader pursuing a confused
politics of disoriented oscillation. The excessive Israeli military is ultimately an expression of
impotence. (2002, 128) To allow the "thing" to happen and to recognize that Sharon, his hench
men, and their military machine, like the emperor, have no clothes: In these and numerous
other instances, Zizek points out the way in which the Real as the limit point of all subject-
formation and eluding all ideological fabrication "returns as the same through diverse
historicizations/symbolizations" (1989, 50). I cautiously accept Zizek's theorization of
subjectivation, indeed of hegemony, as an always already failed compensatory and ideological effect
and, hence, as "melancholic" through and through. Doing so, however, raises a host of difficult
questions for me, not the least of which is the following: If the contingent and interminable
process of collective subjectivation is set into motion and kept on the move by the irreducible
gap between symbolization and the Real (for Zizek, the "fixed" coordinates of all historicization),
to what are we to attribute the modulation or particularization of its forms? On my view, the short
answer to that question is rhetoric?herein understood as a technology of (re)subjectivation whose
constitutive but conjunctural effects contribute to the consolidation and stabilization of particular
epistemological and political regimes.5 The much longer version of the answer comes in the pages
to follow, pages that?as I hinted nearly at the start?tender a reading of post-9/11 patriotism as the
material upshot of a carefully crafted and meticulously managed melancholic rhetoric whose
distinct features are: one, the discursive transfiguration of a historical and political catastrophe into
the harbinger of an epochal Act "to come" and, hence, the ubiquitous deployment of the future
anterior; two, the "perfecting"?in the Burkean sense?of the aesthetics of disappear ance that
structured Americans' perception of Gulf War One into the aesthetics of dematerialization that
continues to structure our relationship to the ongoing "war on terror"; and, three, a visual ecology
of repetition. The specific aim and accomplishment of this melancholic rhetoric, I suggest, is the
formation of a public "political will" that, with considerable irony, cedes the power of the
citizenry to the remilitarized state for the sake of protecting what will have been lost:
namely, the democratic way of life.
 Link –Transgression
Transgression requires law—we should recognize that it can only
occur in the presence of law establishing the possibility of sacred
moments that push subjects beyond the limit of utility. We only break
the law because it’s there—the aff’s push for decreasing legal
surveillance undercuts their strategy by blunting the desire for
privcacy and rendering it tame
HEGARTY 2000 (Paul, Dept of French, University College, Cork, Bataille: Core Cultural
Theorist)
Transgression is ordinarily seen as the breaking of (a) law, or, the breaking of taboo. It is usually
some form of extreme situation or behaviour. To transgress is to step outside the norm, and
such stepping out requires punishment in order that the law holds. Transgression cannot, then,
be separated from law, or notions of law - it is not in the act, but the illegality of an act that
transgression lies. As Bataille writes, ‘evil is not transgression, it is transgression condemned’
(Eroticism, 127; OCX, 127), and this condemnation is the process whereby evil comes into
existence. Similarly, if there were no transgressions, we would not need law - so law/taboo and
transgression are bound up from the start, such that the origin of the distinction becomes
unclear. But transgres- sion is not simply doomed to fall within the boundaries of law, as it ‘does
not negate the taboo, but surpasses and completes it’ (63; 63, trans. mod.). Transgression is
both more and less than the break- ing of a taboo or law - more because it goes beyond simple
crime, less because it does not conclusively break or break with law/taboo.
In earlier societies the realm of taboo was clear - what was sacred was known and organized, and
the transgression, in the form of the festival and/or sacrifice constituted the site of sanc- tioned
transgression, but according to Foucault, modern society lives near to transgression; as it lives
in the death of God. We now have ‘profanation without an object’, and, he asks, ‘profanation in a
world which no longer recognizes any positive meaning in the sacred - is this not more or less
what we may call transgression?’ (Foucault, ‘Preface to Transgression’, 30). In fact, we are close
to an originary state, with the possibility of transgression (as with Bataille’s view of sacrifice)
opening on to something ultimate: ‘the death of God does not restore us to a limited and
positivistic world, but to a world exposed by the experience of its limits, made and unmade by
that excess which transgresses it’ (32). At one level, the world seems to have transgressed - we
are all transgressors now. At another level, we are being shown that our existence is made up of,
and by, transgression. As Bataille has it, ‘organized transgression, together with prohibition,
forms a unity which defines social life’ (Eroticism, 65; OC X, 68, trans. mod.). At this stage it
becomes less than clear whether transgression is really ‘outside’ of any- thing. Foucault writes
that the line (law, taboo) that transgression crosses is always already crossed - i.e. the law is
broken before it exists, and through its existence, whilst transgression is caught within law:
Transgression, then, is not, finally, as black is to white, the prohibited to the permitted, the
outside to the inside, the outcast to the sheltered space of the domicile. (...) Transgression does
not oppose anything to anything, does not make anything slide in the play of derision, does not
seek to disturb the solidity of foundations I... ] it is the measure beyond measure of the distance
that opens at the heart of the limit, and traces the flashing line that brings it into being. (‘Preface
to Transgression’, 35 trans. mod.)
Foucault completes the thought of Bataille on this point, through a reading I would agree with,
but that Bataille does not necessarily completely intend. There is plenty of evidence which
suggests that transgression is a ‘good thing’ and, above all, that it is a choice. Bataille writes that
‘eroticism, like cruelty, is premeditated. Cruelty and eroticism are conscious intentions in a
mind taken with the resolution to trespass into a forbidden field of behaviour’ (Eroticism, 79-
80; OC X, 82 trans. mod.). Perhaps the way to unite the more voluntaristic version with the
more ontological one is to say that they feed into each other so that the will to transgress is only
a ‘will’ inspired by the existence of law, but once under way, transgression will be recalled as
individuals lose themselves in sovereign moments.
 Link – USfg Focus
Demands on the other obscures our own desires and creates the state
as the only institution capable of doling out enjoyment --- they can
never escape the framing of the USfg as the central agent
Lundberg 12 --- Professor and Communication Strategies Consultant (Christian, Lacan in Public,
Published by The University of Alabama Press, Project Muse)//trepka
A politics defined by and exhausted in demands is by definition a hysterical politics . The hysteric
is defined by incessant demands on the other at the expense of ever articulating a desire
that is theirs . In the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan argues that the hysteric’s demand that the Other
produce an object is the support of an aversion toward one’s desire: “the behavior of the
hysteric, for example, has as its aim to recreate a state centered on the object , insofar as this
object . . . is . . . the support of an aversion.” 43 This economy of aversion explains the ambivalent relationship
between hysterics and their de mands. On one hand, the hysteric asserts their agency, even authority, over the Other. Yet, what
appears as unfettered agency from the perspective of a discourse of authority is also
simultaneously a surrender of desire by enjoying the act of figuring the other as the
one with the exclusive capability to satisfy the demand. Thus, “as hysterics you demand a new
master: you will get it!” At the register of manifest content, demands are claims for action and seemingly
powerful, but at the level of the rhetorical form of the demand or in the register of
enjoyment, demand is a kind of surrender. As a relation of address the hysterical demand is more a demand for
recognition and love from an ostensibly repressive order than a claim for change. The limitation of the students’ call on Lacan does
not lie in the end they sought but in the fact that the hysterical address never quite breaks free from its
framing of the master. The fundamental problem of democracy is not articulating resistance over and
against hegemony but rather the practices of enjoyment that sustain an addiction to mastery and a
deferral of desire.
Impact
 Impact – Conservatism
Their knowledge production makes them what they critique – without
enjoyment, people quit the movement – the alt is a prereq to the aff
McGowan 13 Todd McGowan, Assoc. Prof. of Film and Television Studies at U. of Vermont. “Enjoying What
We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. Pgs. 172 - 175. PWoods.
The rule of the expert has such a degree of hegemony today that it is difficult to think of any films,
novels, and other artworks that attempt to contest it or expose the expert’s enjoyment without ultimately
partaking of it. On the other hand, the works that allow audiences to enjoy along with the expert multiply throughout the
culture. Television shows such as c s i: Crime Scene Investigations and House M.D. display this dynamic in its most open form: the
shows present a problem that appears utterly unsolvable to the viewer, and then they reveal the expert’s genius at finding a solution.
Expert knowledge — a knowledge not accessible to the ordinary subject—has all the answers and
thus becomes the undisputable locus of authority. The popularity of these shows derives from their
ability to allow audiences to share in the expert’s enjoyment, an enjoyment that typically is the site
of trauma for the subject. Contact with expert authority has a traumatic effect on the subject
because of the proximity of the expert. While the old master remained at a distance, the expert is
always in the subject’s face, like Dr. Buddy Rydell in Anger Management, never allowing the subject room to
breathe. As Anger Management shows, this proximity has the effect of stimulating the subject. Under the
rule of the expert, subjects experience what Eric Santner calls “a sustained traumatization induced by
exposure to, as it were, fathers who [know] too much about living human beings. ”10 Exposure to this type
of authority, to “this excess of knowledge,” produces “an intensification of the body [that] is first and foremost a sexualization”11
Instead of emancipating the subject, knowledge traumatizes and plays the central role in the
subjection of the subject to the order of social regulation. For emancipatory politics, the
transformation of knowledge from a vehicle of liberation to an instrument of power has had
devastating effects. Emancipatory politics has traditionally relied on knowledge in order to
facilitate political change, and even today one of the primary operations of emancipatory politics is
getting information out to citizens. In the minds of most people engaged in the project of
emancipation, the fundamental task has been establishing class consciousness among the members
of the working class. Class consciousness, according to this way of thinking, is the basis for
substantive political change. As Georg Lukács puts it in History and Class Consciousness, “The fate of a class depends on its
ability to elucidate and solve the problems with which history confronts it.”12 Political change depends, for someone like Lukács, on
the knowledge that makes decisive action possible. As long as authority remains in the position of the traditional master, knowledge
can have a revolutionary function. Historically, the primary problem for emancipatory politics involved access to education, which is
why a key component of the communist program that Marx and Engels outline in The Communist Manifesto is universal access to
public education. There are those on the side of emancipation who continue to insist that knowledge will
be the source for political change. According to this position, people side with conservative policies
against their own self-interest because they lack the proper information. They are the victims of
propaganda, and emancipatory politics must respond by providing the missing knowledge. If not
for big media’s control over knowledge, the thinking goes, subjects would cease to act against their
self-interest and would begin to oppose contemporary capitalism in an active way. For those who adopt this position,
political activity consists in acts of informing, raising consciousness, and bringing issues to light.
But today the failures of consciousness-raising are evident everywhere. Such failures are the subject of
Thomas Frank’s acclaimed analysis, What's the Matter with Kansas? Frank highlights the
proclivity of people in areas of the United States like Kansas to act politically in ways that sabotage
their economic interests. He notes: “People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all
about.”13 The Right’s current success in the United States and around the world is not the sign that more people have become
convinced that right-wing policies will benefit them. Instead, conservatism permits people a way of organizing their enjoyment in a
way that today s emancipatory politics does not. Emancipatory politics may offer a truer vision of the world,
but the Right offers a superior way of enjoying. Traditionally, the primary advantage that
emancipatory politics had in political struggle was its challenge to authority. When one took up the
cause of emancipation, one took a stand against an entrenched regime of power and experienced
enjoyment in this defiance. One can still see this form of enjoyment evinced in the revolutions of the Arab Spring in 2011.
Though emancipatory activity always entailed a certain risk (even of death, to which the fate of innumerable
revolutionaries attests), it nonetheless brought with it an enjoyment not found in everyday obedience and
symbolic identity. In short, there was historically a strong libidinal component to emancipatory
militancy that the risk it carried amplified rather than diminished. The liberating power of emancipatory
activity is present in almost every political film. We see activists falling in love as they jointly embark on an emancipatory project or
romance burgeoning as a fight for justice intensifies. Conservatism has not traditionally provided much
enjoyment of this type, but it has had its own appeal. It took the side of authority and stability.
Whereas emancipatory politics could offer the enjoyment that comes from defiance of authority,
conservatism could offer the enjoyment that comes from identification with it. This is the
enjoyment that one feels when hearing one’s national anthem or saluting the flag. It resides in the fabric
of the nation’s military uniform that makes the fingers touching it tingle. This eroticism is not that of emancipatory politics — and it
is perhaps not as powerful — but it is nonetheless a form of eroticism . It produces a libidinal charge. The struggle
between conservatism and emancipatory politics has historically been a struggle between two
competing modes of organizing enjoyment with neither side having a monopoly. Despite the
traditional emphasis that the forces of emancipation placed on knowledge, even in the past the
struggle between emancipatory politics and conservatism centered on enjoyment rather than
knowledge. In the political arena, knowledge is important only insofar as it relates to the way that subjects mobilize their
enjoyment. If subjects see through ideological manipulation and have the proper knowledge, this does
not necessarily inaugurate a political change. The knowledge that something is bad for us — a
president or a Twinkie — does not lessen the enjoyment that we receive from it. It is not that we
have the ability to enjoy while disavowing our knowledge but more that the knowledge works to
serve our enjoyment. The enjoyment of a Twinkie does not derive from the physiological effect of
sugar on the human metabolism but from the knowledge of the damage this substance does to the
body. Knowing the harm that accompanies something actually facilitates our enjoyment of it, especially when we are capable of
disavowing this knowledge. Enjoyment is distinct from bodily pleasures (which the Twinkie undoubtedly also provides); it depends
on some degree of sacrifice that allows the subject to suffer its enjoyment. Sacrifice is essential to our capacity for enjoying ourselves.

Life sucks, they pretend it doesn’t have to – That’s bad

McGowan 4 Todd McGowan, the realest. “THE END OF DISSATISFACTION?”. 2004. Pgs. 17-22. PWoods.
Though this prehistorical enjoyment did not exist, the idea of it nonetheless continues to have a power
over the subjects of the social order. Having given up a part of themselves —albeit a part that did not exist
until they gave it up— these subjects, insofar as they remain within the social order, are incomplete or lacking. Bound
by this lack, they imagine or fantasize an object that exists in the gap left by their sacrifice . This object
is what Lacan calls the objet petit a. The objet a constitutes the subject as desiring; it provides the lure that acts as an engine for
the desire of the subject and also directs that desire in its circuit . In fact, Lacan notes repeatedly that “the petit a
is the cause of the subject.”11 It causes the subject to emerge as a desiring subject, as the subject of desire.
Desire is, in this sense, part of what one gets in exchange for the sacrifice of one’s enjoyment. While
this may seem, on the surface, to be a bargain for the subject (considering that she or he never had the enjoyment she or he gave up
in the first place), desire is inevitably a poor substitute for enjoyment. Enjoyment satisfies the subject,
but when a subject desires, she or he perpetually lacks her objet a and hence remains perpetually
dissatisfied.12 Desire lays down a path that has no exit and leaves the subject, despite her/his
constant longing for something more, a prisoner of the social order that desire itself is a reaction
against. The only end of desire is more desire. We desire because we don’t find the sacrifice of our
enjoyment entirely satisfying, but desire, unfortunately, does nothing to overcome that
dissatisfaction. In fact, desire is sustained dissatisfaction.13 This state of sustained dissatisfaction is the normal state for
subjects within a society of prohibition. Prohibition produces dissatisfied, desiring subjects, subjects who remain securely within the
confines of the social order. Desire is consonant with the social order because of its reliance on absence rather than presence.
When I desire an object, its absence is often helpful in building up my desire: the longer the desired
object remains away, the stronger the hold of desire over me . All of our clichés about desire—like “absence
makes the heart grow fonder”—affirm this fundamental truth of desire. By the same token, when the object becomes a
constant presence, my desire tends to wane. And if I gain too much proximity to the object of
desire, the object suddenly disappears or loses its desirability. This aspect of desire is correlative to
the functioning of the social order, which is itself a symbolic entity. It allows subjects to relate to
each other through the mediation of a symbolic order, which means through absence rather than
presence. The symbolic order is, as Lacan puts it, the absence of things, and this absence is crucial for the possibility of mediation,
because it serves to eliminate rivalry. If one subject doesn’t have a thing, at least another doesn’t have it
either, which provides some degree of consolation for lost enjoyment.14 This is why prohibition is
so important for holding society together: if I see that no one else is able to enjoy, I feel as if we are
partners in loss rather than rivals in enjoyment. The symbolic order is the basis for any social order because it
provides a layer of mediation connecting subjects together. Within it, no one has direct access to enjoyment. As Lacan puts it,
“jouissance is prohibited to whomever speaks, as such—or, to put it differently, it can only be said between the lines by whomever is
a subject of the Law, since the Law is founded on that very prohibition.”15 This shared sacrifice of enjoyment—
embodied in the incest prohibition—establishes the basis of the social bond. Because subjects
experience themselves as lacking, as not fully enjoying themselves, they look to the Other for what
they are missing, for the piece that would allow for complete enjoyment. It is subjects’ inability to enjoy
completely—to have an experience of total enjoyment—that directs them to the Other, that creates a desire for what the social order
seems to have hidden within its recesses. In contrast, the enjoying subject does not look to the Other for what it
lacks, but rather sustains an attitude of indifference toward the Other. As a result, enjoyment as
such is not conducive to social relations and the functioning of the symbolic order. The symbolic
order thrives on the deprivation of the subjects belonging to it: it creates a bond of lack. In this way,
prohibition works to create coherence within society. The prohibition of enjoyment holds the social order together through the
shared dissatisfaction it produces. This sense of shared dissatisfaction is the salient feature of the society of prohibition, and it
represents a direct point of contrast with the society of commanded enjoyment. Because prohibition denies the subject the ultimate
enjoyment, it inevitably produces dissatisfaction and potential rebellion. The imaginary is the repository for that
potential rebellion insofar as it provides an illusory enjoyment in the midst of its prohibition by the
social order. One can imagine an enjoyment that the social order prohibits, and as a result, society’s confines do not seem
absolute, even for those committed to remaining within those confines.16 For example, the spouse devoted to the ideal of
marital fidelity can imagine the steamy affair that she/he would never accede to in reality. This
imagined affair—this event enacted on the imaginary level— allows the subject to enjoy
transgressing a prohibition without actually doing so. The imaginary thus plays a crucial supplementary role in the
society of prohibition, offering an imaginary enjoyment for those who suffer from the prohibition of enjoyment in the Real. Because
of our ability to imagine an enjoyment that the symbolic order prohibits, the imaginary offers us a separate register of
experience, distinct from the symbolic order. In Lacan’s triadic division of experience, the symbolic order
constitutes our social reality, the imaginary provides an avenue for the illusory transgression of that
reality, and the Real marks the point at which the symbolic order fails—the gap that always haunts
it. Though the imaginary assists prohibition by providing a safe outlet for enjoyment, it also
represents a danger to the society of prohibition. The imaginary thus has an ambiguous status within the society of
prohibition, and we must examine both its role in supplementing the power of prohibition and the threat that it poses. But within
the society of prohibition the imaginary is also a site of potential disruption. Subjects immersed in the imaginary
remain within the confines of the symbolic order, but they do not recognize these confines. As a
result, despite this inscription of the imaginary within the symbolic, our experience within the
imaginary seems as if it occurs before or outside of the intervention of the symbol. This is why our first
experiences, though the symbolic order provides the context for them, are imaginary ones.20 Prior to the act of grasping
their integration into the world of the symbol and thus their “humanization,” subjects constitute
themselves on the level of the imaginary, and on this level, they are able to enjoy—which is to say,
they are able to see themselves as whole, not as lacking. In the mirror stage, the prototypical
imaginary experience, the child looks in the mirror and sees her/his body as a coherent whole over
which she/he has mastery. Though this sense of wholeness and mastery is illusory or imaginary, it
nonetheless obscures the child’s lack and hence disguises subjection to the symbolic order. In the
imaginary, the subject seems isolated and independent of the symbolic order—self-sufficient. It is
for this reason that imaginary experience represents a danger to the social order even though it is
integral to it and remains firmly within it: subjects lodged in the imaginary believe themselves to be
independent and fail to see their symbolic bond with other subjects. Thus, they see other subjects
purely as rivals, rather than as partners in sacrifice. The lack of distance in the imaginary further exacerbates this sense of
rivalry. Images, unlike symbolic structures, seem directly present to us. As Richard Boothby notes, The difference between the
imaginary and symbolic functions aligns itself with a distinction between the perceptual and nonperceptual. Unlike the imaginary,
which distinguishes figure and ground within a perceptual field, the symbolic is always conditioned by its relation to a network of
signifiers that is not and in fact cannot be made an object of perception.We perceive speech and writing but not the symbol system
that makes them possible.21 We can readily grasp the image in a way that we are constitutively unable to grasp the symbolic
function. As a result, enjoyment permeates the imaginary realm because here there is no distance between the subject and the
image. This lack of distance—or lack of mediation that the symbol would provide— means that from
the perspective of the imaginary, every relationship is necessarily a violent relationship, a life and
death struggle for enjoyment: in the imaginary, there is no possibility for compromise or sharing
because of the nature of imaginary enjoyment itself. Here, enjoyment has an either/or quality to it:
either I am enjoying or you are—not both of us and not “first I’ll enjoy a little and then you can.” It
is in such either/or terms that Lacan always describes life in the imaginary order. Here, without language, one cannot come to any
agreement or compromise. On the level of the imaginary, in other words, there is no such thing as peaceful
coexistence, no possibility for a pact governing the rationing of enjoyment. In Seminar I, Lacan argues that
“Each time the subject apprehends himself as form and as ego [i.e., on an imaginary level . . .], his desire is projected outside. From
whence arises the impossibility of all human co-existence.”22 This dimension of the imaginary—the hostility that it produces toward
the Other—proves a barrier to the functioning of the society of prohibition.

They kill their own politics – forced enjoyment is how power

replicates itself
McGowan 4 Todd McGowan, the realest. “THE END OF DISSATISFACTION?”. 2004. Pgs. 23 - 29. PWoods.
Has Bloom responded authentically to the turn from prohibition to enjoyment? Does Bloom demonstrate the truth of Fredric
Jameson’s claim that reactionaries are often able to recognize accurately the contradictions of their historical moment, even though
they can’t discover a viable solution to them (because they look for solutions only nostalgically in the past, as Bloom, for one,
certainly does)? My contention here is that what Bloom misses about this situation—and what should be emphasized in the critique
of the society of enjoyment—is that though the social order today demands enjoyment instead of a sacrifice
of enjoyment, this in no way allows subjects within the social order to enjoy themselves, anymore
than they were ever able to. The transformation at work here, in one sense, does not exist. It is merely a transformation in
the way subjects experience the social order, a phenomenological transformation; it occasions no substantive change in the
relationship between society and enjoyment. Society remains, despite the fears of Bloom and Quayle, free of the enjoyment that
would precipitate its dissolution. Contemporary American society has become a society of enjoyment only
in the sense that enjoyment, rather than prohibition, is its governing commandment. Despite this
transformation from demand for renunciation to the demand for enjoyment—a change impelled by
the increasing predominance of the superego over the Law—enjoyment has not burgeoned. In fact,
enjoyment is now just as elusive as ever. The existence of the superegoic command “Enjoy!” merely
produces a sense of obligation to enjoy oneself; it does not produce enjoyment . And insofar as it creates this
sense of obligation, the imperative to enjoy makes enjoyment that much more difficult. As Zizek points out in
For They Know Not What They Do, “superego marks a point at which permitted enjoyment, freedom-to-enjoy, is reversed into
obligation to enjoy—which, one must add, is the most effective way to block access to enjoyment.”52 When subjects feel
enjoined to have a certain experience, even the experience of enjoyment, this inevitably creates a
psychic barrier to achieving that experience. Just as telling oneself “I must fall asleep right away” is
the surest way not to be able to sleep, feeling that one must enjoy makes enjoyment next to
impossible. Consequently, the unavoidable effect of the command to enjoy is the barring of enjoyment in a heretofore unequalled
way. The imperative to enjoy produces the same problem for the subject that imperatives in general produce: they have the effect of
creating an impossible situation for the subject. The more that the subject complies with an imperative— even
the imperative to enjoy—the more poignantly she/he feels her/his failure to comply fully. This is
why the most moral subjects often proclaim their great immorality. Their attempt to heed the
moral imperative leads to an endless cycle of moral failure . As Lacan points out, “whoever attempts to submit to
the moral law sees the demands of his superego grow increasingly meticulous and increasingly cruel.”53 With the imperative to
enjoy, this dynamic becomes even stronger. The subject who attempts to obey the command to enjoy cannot
help but notice all the ways that she/he is not fully enjoying because contemporary society so
highlights the endless possibilities for enjoyment. This sense of not fully enjoying themselves leads
contemporary subjects to move so quickly—from commodity to commodity, from internet site to
internet site, from channel to channel. Each new thing seems to hold the elusive enjoyment that
would fulfill the imperative, and yet each new thing disappoints the subject in its turn, perpetually
revealing the impossibility of complying with the command to enjoy. The example of Kant is instructive
because Kantian morality doesn’t foreclose the possibility of enjoyment, even though it indicates that enjoyment cannot be
legislated. What Kant shows is that subjects can only obtain enjoyment or happiness indirectly. In aiming for
morality, according to Kant, we can gain enjoyment as a side benefit of our moral activity. This is the indirect path through which we
can access enjoyment. The very nature of enjoyment demands that we approach it in this way—through
aiming elsewhere. It is precisely this indirection that the society of commanded enjoyment does not
allow us. The imperative to enjoy establishes a direct route to enjoyment and thereby,
paradoxically, renders it inaccessible. Despite the explicit absence of the Law of the Father demanding sacrifice and
obedience to its dictates, we are not witnessing an explosion of radical behavior, a mass breaking free
from the confines of the social order. The Law of the Father continues to predominate even as the
authority of patriarchal fathers evanesces. This complacency with the social order, however, is not
experienced as complacency, but as defiance. Our complacency—our conformism—feels as if it is
radical activity: today, we think we are challenging authority at precisely the moment we are most
wholly following its dictates. This is why political conservatives increasingly see themselves—and
paint their conservatism—as rebellious. For them, conservatism represents a willingness to defy the
ruling structure of contemporary society. FOX News represents its conservativism as an
“alternative” to the dominant ideology. And even someone like Rush Limbaugh can imagine himself (like the Leftist of
old) “telling truth to power.” Most of its practitioners today define conservatism as a radical program—thus the “Republican
Revolution” of 1994— despite how this contradicts the very definition of the term “conservative.” Whereas within the
society of prohibition it is relatively easy to distinguish between conformity and defiance, this
becomes increasingly difficult within a society structured around the command to enjoy. This is
because, in a society of enjoyment, we no longer experience the explicit prohibition from the social
order, which lets us know that the symbolic order is structuring and determining our behavior . We
don’t experience the symbolic law in its prohibitory form, and so we imagine that, when we act, we are acting without reference to
the symbolic law, that it does not shape our actions. Our failure to experience the impinging of the symbolic law, however, doesn’t
mean that it does not exist.
 Impact – Injustice
Their impossible demand to lift surveillance leaves our relationship
to the symbolic order unchallenged --- that structurally ensures
injustice
McGowan 2013 --- Associate Professor at the University of Vermont (Todd, Enjoying What We Don’t
Have, Project Muse)//trepka
Perhaps the most important political problem of the last century concerns lifting repression . Even
more than the obstacle of religious belief, repression represents a rigid barrier that has often been the focus of emancipatory politics.
But as the history especially of the last half of the twentieth century has shown, lifting repression
doesn’t necessarily lead to political liberation. It can even, as the main thesis of the Frankfurt School has it,
become the vehicle for further decreasing the freedom of the subject in the face of
ideological control. As societies eliminate varieties of repression, some fundamental deadlock remains recalcitrant and stands
as a political stumbling block.1 If the political project of lifting repression inevitably goes awry, then this confronts the project of
emancipation with the question of what it can do. This is where the intervention of psychoanalytic thought makes itself felt.
Psychoanalysis has historically functioned as a tool for the struggle against repression, but if the attempt to fight
repression inevitably fails or even backfires, the engagement of psychoanalytic thought with politics
today requires a new attitude . The key to the political project of psychoanalysis lies in the
unexpected twist that it gives to the fight against repression. According to this project, one must reenvision
the deadlock that limits the political project of lifting repression. Rather than seeing the deadlock that projects for
emancipation encounter as purely a stumbling block to be negotiated, one might embrace the deadlock
as itself a political position . A properly psychoanalytic politics would transform it from an obstacle into a point of
identification. By identifying with the symbolic deadlock that impedes liberation, one can transform the cause of past political
failures into a source of success. But the cost of this transformation is a redefinition of success as clarifying and embracing a limit
rather than transcending it. The ultimate contribution of psychoanalytic thought to politics is its ability to provide a basis for an
emancipatory politics of the limit.2 The fundamental symbolic deadlock — the root of the disorder that plagues every
signifying system — involves the binary signifier, or the signifier of the feminine. The absence of this signifier prevents the
operations of the social order from running smoothly (and, as the previous chapter showed, prompts the belief in God). Nothing
necessitates, of course, that the missing signifier had to be the signifier of femininity, as it is in patriarchal society: one can envisage
a different structure with a different binary signifier, but we cannot conceive of a successfully completed signifying structure or a
structure without a missing binary signifier.3 There will always be a missing signifier, though it won’t always be the signifier of the
feminine.4 The subtraction of this signifier marks the founding moment of the social order as such and thus is impossible for us to
experience. It is, instead, a condition for the possibility of experience. One can’t restore this missing signifier
through analysis or political activity. It marks a point of impossibility within the social structure,
and thus it poses a political question for psychoanalysis. Most psychoanalytic thinkers envision a politics that merely respects and
sustains the gap marked by the missing signifier. As one prominent Lacanian theorist notes, “The aim of psychoanalysis is best
described as negative: it ought not to deteriorate into a system which presents itself as an answer to the lack of a signifier.”5 The
problem with this purely negative psychoanalytic politics lies in its failure to appreciate the ontological status of the gap and to come
to terms with the pervasive desire to fill it. The appeal of codes, cryptograms, crossword puzzles, and so on derives from the absence
of the binary signifier. Even though most people tend to think of them as merely private amusements, these are fundamentally
political activities because they concern the gap within the signifying order. In working these word puzzles, one seeks the missing
signifier that would complete the system of signification itself, but finishing the puzzle provides only a momentary completion,
opening up to another puzzle and another and another. The infinite nature of the word puzzle attests to the
impossibility of overcoming the problem of the missing signifier once and for all. There will always
be another puzzle because whatever signifier one uncovers, whatever binary signifier one finds, will always be a piece of knowledge
rather than the binary signifier. For us, knowledge replaces the missing signifier and functions in its
stead, but it remains by definition incomplet e.6 There will always be more to know, whereas the recovery of
the binary signifier would provide a definitive ending. More sophisticated codes, such as the genetic code or the Bible code, attract
lifetimes of devotion because they promise the definitive ending that no mere cryptogram or crossword puzzle can provide.
Obviously, there is a world of difference between those committed to cracking the genetic code and those trying to solve the Bible
code. The former are seeking a definitive scientific discovery, while the latter are searching for an explanation that transcends
scientific inquiry. Nonetheless, there is an essential symmetry to these quests, which is why the idea of cracking the Bible code
manages to attract genuine mathematicians and scientists. Both projects aim at a conclusion that would put to rest the trouble that
the missing signifier stirs up, and this animates them with a political charge. On the one hand, the absence of the binary
signifier has a structural relationship to all injustice : it produces the imbalance that
manifests itself in class society, racial difference, and male domination. But on the other hand, the
absence of this signifier allows us to enter into the regime of language and escape relations of pure force. It results in an
insurmountable injustice at the same time as it introduces the very possibility of conceiving justice. In Specters of Marx, Jacques
Derrida articulates this dual character of the absent binary signifier when he says: “ To be ‘out of joint,’ whether it be
present being or present time, can do harm and do evil, it is no doubt the very possibility of evil.
But without the opening of this possibility, there remains, perhaps, beyond good and evil, only
the necessity of the worst.”7 The missing binary signifier leaves the subject and the social order out of joint, as Derrida puts
it (following Shakespeare), but without this disjointedness there exists only simple domination by force — “the necessity of the
worst” — and no possibility for just interventions against pure force. In other words, without an absent signifier,
there would be no politics, but the political act cannot simply involve the attempt to sustain its
absence, since this absence produces injustice and evil. The fundamental political question concerns what
relationship we should try to take up relative to the missing binary signifier, a signifier whose inaccessibility constitutes us as
subjects. There are four possible attitudes toward the binary signifier: the first three (the fundamentalist, the positivist, and the
hermeneutic) function ideologically to deliver us from the trauma attached to this signifier’s absence, while the fourth (the
psychoanalytic) is founded on an encounter with the trauma. Most often, one encounters these attitudes in amalgamated forms that
obscure how each functions. The great merit of The Da Vinci Code lies in its ability to lay out clearly the three ideological attitudes
and thus to suggest negatively the contours of the fourth.

The gaze of surveillance excludes and overpowers the observed,

foreclosing any possibility of response or opposition
Koskela 3 – Senior Lecturer, Department of Geography, University of Helsinki (FI) (Hille, Vol 1, No 3 (2003): Foucault and
Panopticism Revisited, “‘Cam Era’ — the contemporary urban Panopticon”, http://www.surveillance-and-
society.org/articles1(3)/camera.pdf // SM)
The gaze of a surveillance camera is ‘calculated to exclude’ (c.f. Munt, 1995). A camera
represents total one-way-ness of the gaze by making it impossible to look back. One may see the cameras
but an eye-contact with it is impossible. There is no ‘mutual’ gaze. It would feel ridiculous to try to flirt with a surveillance
camera. Its objects are constantly seen but with no possibility to ‘respond’ or ‘oppose’
the gaze. It has been pointed out that ‘the all-seeing’ power has roots in mythology and religion: ‘[t]he
overpowering and ubiquitous eye of God can be considered as prototype of this hegemonic vision’
(Schmidt-Burkhardt, 2002: 18). The nature of the potential overseer is ‘God-like’, someone who is there,
and simultaneously, is not: ‘[h]is presence, which is also an absence, is in his gaze alone’ (Whitaker,
1999: 34). One can only be the observed, but not the observer.
 Impact – Neolib
Protection of corporate data from the state assumes that the desire
for privacy from the state is legitimate in all forms --- that reinforces
neoliberalism
Meyers 6/16/14 --- Masters of Public and International Law candidate, University of
Melbourne (Zach, “Autonomy as a Fantasy”, Taylor and Francis Online)//trepka
The Lacanian Other is therefore not identifiable as such, but represents the ‘symbolic order’ itself: the
inscrutable regulatory structures through which we communicate, recognise others, and that
allow us to identify ourselves as individuals . The concept of the Other appears a useful concept to help explain the
mechanical, systematic collection and use of personal information in ways that form our identity and our way of interacting with
others – and the law that regulates this behaviour. We are not capable of identifying desire in this ‘Other’: the
collection and regulation of data is bureaucratic, divorced from normal social interactions and
desires.73 The Other is the system that imbues personal information with value, that sees it as capable of being disclosed,
disseminated and traded. From the perspective of the subject, the concept of the Other seems to have a
dual role in data protection law – reflecting both the over-arching regulatory structure for data
protection and the ‘regulated entities’ that seek personal information . In terms of the regulatory structure,
the Other reflects the nature of law itself as a system that does not itself have desire, but
purports to support the desires of individuals. Indeed, Lacan suggests if there is a single question offered by the
Other to the individual, it is ‘what do you want?’ 74 – so that apparently desires that arise ‘autonomously’, such as the desire for
privacy, invariably strengthen the symbolic systems they appear to resist. Žižek, for example, describes how capitalist systems speak
to individuals by encouraging and driving their desire for privacy, drawing on Lacan to describe how: when we try to preserve the
authentic intimate sphere of privacy against the onslaught of ‘alienated’ public exchange, it is privacy itself that gets lost.
Withdrawal into privacy means today adopting formulas of private authenticity
propagated by the contemporary cultural industry. 75 In terms of the regulated entities,
the concept of the Other reflects the select type of entities that Australian data protection law
intends to ‘control’. It is typically only federal government agencies and large enterprises that
are regulated by the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth).76 Yet, importantly, the Act protects the inscrutable nature of
these entities. At the Act’s centre is a strange silence: its emphasis on regulating the way in which personal
information is used, without ever casting judgement on why regulated entities seek personal
information and the business models which require it (in other words, why it is desired –
which is always assumed to be a legitimate desire). Indeed, the very first National Privacy Principle reveals this
gap by providing that ‘an organisation must not collect personal information unless it is necessary for one or more of its functions or
activities’.77 There is no over-arching rule in the Act to determine whether the functions or activities that an organisation decides to
undertake are themselves desirable, even if those activities require large-scale and intrusive collection of personal information. The
Australian Law Reform Commission (‘ALRC’) has refused to recommend further rules to address this absence, noting only that: It
is implied that the activities and functions pursuant to which agencies and organisations collect
personal information must be lawful. It also is implied that collection pursuant to those
functions must be lawful.78 Of course, in few cases is the ‘lawfulness’ of collection of personal
information by commercial organisations regulated outside the Act (which is precisely where one would
expect its lawfulness to be regulated). Further, the principle actually facilitates the inscrutable
nature of data collection , by enabling the collector to claim that it has no desire for
information; it may argue that personal information is only collected because it is ‘ necessary’
to do so. The reason why the collection is necessary is deferred, to be addressed (if at all) in some other law. The fact that,
for a private organisation, the ‘necessity’ is precisely the result of the organisation’s own
commercial decisions and voluntary activities somehow eludes the scope of the Act. If
‘desire’ is at all relevant to data collection, then, it is only the desire of the data subject to its own
personal information. Like in the fort-da game, the Other merely sets up a framework for the subject to
 negotiate and reflect its own desires . The Act sets up a regime that centres (with few exceptions) on the
volunteering of personal information by individuals themselves, providing that, where reasonable and practicable, ‘an organisation
must collect personal information about an individual only from that individual’.79 The assumption in this principle appears to be
that collection should (where reasonable and practicable) be with the consent of the data subject – that is, the data subject
must want to allow the information to be collected. The focus on the desire of the data subject
then creates an ‘ economy’ of personal information . The Act creates a regime whereby the release of an
individual’s personal information to an organisation is described implicitly as being (except in limited circumstances) the result
of their own desire . The Act then provides avenues for the individual to seek to recover control
of that personal information through rules restricting the use or disclosure of the information ,80
and being entitled to demand access to the information.81 Although the Act does not provide for the full ‘recovery’ of the
information – it only provides for the destruction of personal information by the data collector ‘if it is no longer needed for any
purpose for which the information may be used or disclosed’82 – the economy of personal information the Act creates nevertheless
has strong resemblance to the fort-da game. The Act purports to – and does – regulate the inscrutable ‘Other’, setting out conditions
for the disclosure and recovery of personal information. However, the economy of desire the Act creates (because the Act and the
regulated data collectors are after all part of the bureaucratic institutional structure – that is, part of the Other) is predominantly a
desire of the subject of that personal information.
 Impact – Scapegoating
The impact is endless war --- the refusal to use psychoanalysis means
we ignore the collective unconscious of the public and the leaders
which allows manipulation of values to justify irrational invasions ---
our internal anxieties about failing to solve <advantage> are projected
onto the other, creating them as an enemy to be exterminated and
legitimating nuclear conflict
Jacobsen 2013 --- University of Chicago (Kurt, “Why Freud matters: Psychoanalysis and international relations
revisited”, International Relations, SagePub)//trepka
Psyche, self-interest, and warfare Updating Thucydides, ‘what made war inevitable was the presence of WMD in Iraq and the fear this caused in the
United States’. There is ample room here for interpretive work.91 What is at stake is not only a possible shift in relative capabilities but also what a
Psycho-
powerful actor was inclined to see in the other’s actions as portending. Freud, after the outbreak of war, remarked in a proto-realist way:
analysis has inferred from dreams and parapraxes of healthy people as well as from the symptoms of neurotics, that the
primitive, savage and evil impulses of mankind have not vanished in any of its individual
members, but persists, although in a repressed state, in the unconscious [and] It has further taught us that
our intellect is ... a plaything and tool of our instincts and affects . If you will observe what is
happening in this war – the cruelties and injustices for which the most civilized nations are
responsible, the different way in which they judge their own lies and wrong-doings and those of their enemies and the general lack of insight
which prevails – you will have to admit that psycho-analysis has been right in both these theses .92 World
WarZizspurred Freud’s death instinct hypothesis, of an aggressive, destructive drive independent of sexuality.93 Waltz likely approves Freud’s point
that ‘war
cannot be abolished so long as the conditions of existence among nations are so different
and their mutual repulsion so violent, there are bound to be wars’ but, more utopianly, Freud noted, ‘war
will only be prevented with certainty if mankind unites in setting up a central authority to which the right of giving judgment upon all conflicts of
interest shall be handed over’. Freud declined to attribute war to instincts running amok; he espied room for improvement in realizing one’s
‘enlightened’ self-interest. How did war tally with self-interest – whether from the vantage point of individual or state – anyway? Historians and social
scientists rarely examine the ‘psychological status of self-interest or to trace its actual incidence in human life’, Gay charges:94 The ‘cold calculations
that shape actions are less interesting (and often in the long run less important) than the passions that produced the calculations in the first place’. So,
psychoanalytic researchers study how ‘individuals
and groups internalize [socially induced] deceptions and
take them to be their own ideas’ (strongly akin to the Marxist notion of false consciousness). He contends: Much like a neurotic
symptom, self-interest is a compromise formation: and much like the ego, an interest must cope with three generally hostile forces: the outside world
(the depository of competing interests) the superego (which pours out distressing reminders that others too have valid claims and that one’s own claims
are at best suspect) and the id (which incessantly generates wishes.) That is why the ideas of a self-interest wholly
rational , clearly perceived and consistently pursued, is largely an abstraction .95 So, the serrated
boundary line between material interest and intrusive psyche really runs thin in most cases, and therefore is open to psychoanalytic forays. Fornari

highlighted a vital aspect of the legitimation of war as it being based on the group defending
itself against acute internal anxieties (and) ‘in this manner we arrive at the paradox that the
most important security function is not defend ourselves from an external enemy but to find
one’.96 The mechanism here is projective identification: ‘IfZiz project aggression on to the other, he or she is
likely to become –in reality – the mirror or embodiment of the aggressionZizam trying to
displace into him or her’.97 If this is old news, it is because psychoanalysis earlier unveiled it.98 Winnicott and Fromm contended that
people more often go to war because they are afraid of freedom, and its uncertainties, than in
order to extend freedom to others, as Bush claimed. Fromm found no ‘cruelty and viciousness which has not been rationalized
individually or [presented] as being motivated by good intentions’.99 This process gets especially complex when leaders display a deft ability to believe
psychoanalysis
whatever is expedient, and in this ruse, intra-psychic mechanisms and external motives mingle. As Brooks and Woloch put it,
fosters ‘an attitude of suspicion toward human behaviour and ostensible motives , a semiotic postulate
that in all actors [there are] messages to be read, a genealogical undermining of claims to unalloyed virtue, disinterestedness and civilization’.100
What would such beholders make of the Vietnam War, or the ‘war on terror’? Two, three, many Vietnam
syndromes The Vietnam War is not usually regarded as ripe stuff for couch analysis.101 Psychoanalysts shied away, instead taking on related issues
such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).102 However, at
least one analytical account probed ‘narcissistic
personality disorders’ in L.B.J. and Richard Nixon – a disorder that seems a job requirement.103
The question why these leaders, and L.B.J.’s ‘best and the brightest’ advisers, went awry in Southeast Asia remains intriguing and inadequately
understood. Free world leadership, institutional inertia, anti-communist ideology, bureaucratic politics, leaders’ personal reputations, the military–
industrial complex, and misplaced optimism in counterinsurgency techniques are all among the factors driving the United States into the ‘big muddy’.
Cognitive psychology has scoured this subject. ‘From a cognitivist point of view, all causal inferences and policy lessons are the product of mental
constructions of what would, could, or might have happened had a different set of antecedent conditions held or policies been tried’, explain Goldgeier
and Tetlock.104 ‘There is, in principle, an infinite number of possible background factors that one could enter as antecedents in one’s counterfactual
constructions of alternative worlds’. So ‘observers must rely on draconian simplifying rules that reduce the number of scenarios to be entertained to a
humanly manageable number’. The price exacted by reliance on ‘draconian simplifying assumptions’ can be very high. Parsimony has a lot to answer
for. Policymakers, according to this tack, became mesmerized by ‘analogies’ in the form of falling dominoes or Munich-like appeasement. These
analogies matter because ‘policy makers routinely turn to the past for guidance’.105 Such ‘schematic processing’ made it ‘difficult for policymakers to
appreciate the local forces at work in Vietnam’. So, policy inertia chugged on. In this regard too, Elster, who scolds psychoanalysis for concocting
‘meaning where none exists’, cannot account for why people adopt ‘“cold” mechanisms, these cognitive logics so rigid and naïve that they systemically
lead people into error’ – errors that can be ‘individually farcical and collectively tragic’.106 Perhaps, contrary to Elster, one is entitled to probe ‘inside’
in order to understand underlying reasons? The supreme problem for Khong is a ‘breakdown of consensus’ because a ‘consensus’ is deemed a good
thing even though it ushered the United States into Vietnam. Perhaps policymakers were ensnared in an axiomatic tangle of their own making, but it is
clear from the Pentagon Papers that this was a system for which they had a strong ‘elective affinity’ inasmuch as particular analogies were chosen as the
most likely ones that the public would swallow.107 The Pentagon Papers show that McGeorge Bundy invoked domino theory, but only after he ‘rejected
even the subtle argument, offered by some long-time Asian experts, that the uniqueness of the Vietnamese case, particularly its extraordinary lack of
political structure, invalidated any generalization of our experience there to the rest of Asia’.108 If ‘domino theorists’ did not know that the theory was
disputed, it was not because they were unaware. Hans Morgenthau in debates with Bundy poured scorn on domino theory.109 Cabinet naysayer George
Ball, citing Japan, ridiculed domino theory at high-level meetings.110 There was ‘no shortage of Southeast Asian specialists in the foreign affairs and
intelligence wars of the US government’, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst states, but the ‘consumers did not want what they were
producing’.111 This ample latitude of choice undermines the cognitivist case that policymakers had
become hapless prisoners of analogical reasonin g. Morton Halperin noted that Defense Secretary Clark Clifford on a trip to
South Asia ‘discovered to his amazement that none of the countries in the region shared our view about the
dominos’.112 A cognitive psychology account, if anything, is likely to furnish convenient if inadvertent ‘cover’ for policies pursued for other
reasons. (And irrational reasons are reasons too.) Khong’s argument seems true in the same manner as is Viennese satirist Karl Krauss’ acid sally that
‘diplomats lie to journalists and then believe those lies when they see them in print’. Another stellar example is the Military Assistance Command
Vietnam’s (MACV) underestimate (by several hundred thousand) of insurgents available to the National Liberation Front in the run-up to the Tet
Offensive when US officials were boasting of progress in pacification.113 This underestimation was doubtless deliberate; the only question was the
motive. A motive far stronger than ‘simplifying and filtering operations of human cognitive processing’ was at work when deciding who counts as an
enemy guerrilla at a time when authorities were under severe pressure to deliver good news.114 An abiding flaw in the cognitive psychologists’ ‘trust-
building approach’ is that when policymakers ‘ignored or misinterpreted evidence of the other’s desire for an accord’ (regarding arms control, an
economic treaty, or a peace agreement), the motive need not be ‘guiding beliefs’ at all but rather the decision makers’ calculations that they could
succeed on their own terms anyway. Only if that familiar possibility is found wanting can unconscious processes credibly come into consideration as
significant factors.115 Puzzling over L.B.J.’s escalation in Vietnam over 1964–1965, Kaiser sees the inadvisable series of decisions as a matter of
‘personality and choice’, goaded by a ‘GI generation’ of advisors who experienced nothing but success in all earlier endeavors.116 Yet, the Rural Affairs
Office in Vietnam reported in 1963 that the pacification campaign was ‘a will-o-the wisp’ – a failure.117 Senator Mike Mansfield and others counseled
L.B.J. to avoid a catastrophic commitment to shore up a flimsy South Vietnam regime.118 L.B.J.
and close aides had many well-
documented reasons to be wary about the sinuous course of events . Former defense secretary, Robert McNamara
later stirred a furor with a mea culpa book on Vietnam, but his claim that he didn’t know until long afterward that the Vietnamese liberation movement
was nationalist is, to say the least, extremely dubious.119 ‘McNamara now says we didn’t know anything about Vietnam and what was really happening
was not understood’, complained a State Department analyst, ‘That’s a lot of garbage. We would come out with papers showing that things were going
very badly indeed’.120 Dissent
contradicting official optimism was assiduously ignored. This response
constitutes denial in both the everyday and psychoanalytic senses of the word, and it runs up
and down bureaucratic organizational ladders. Hence, a social worker in 1969 reported that co-workers treated
reports of the My Lai atrocity as ‘obviously delusional’ .121 They found it impossible to believe Americans committed war
crimes. Psychoanalytic relevance again is triggered by excessiveness, as in an encounter between L.B.J. and Moyers on 1 July 1965.122 Moyers was
troubled by the President’s ‘paranoia’, and had been contacted by high officials who were ‘deeply concerned’ too. One day the ‘President would be in
severe depression’ and ‘twenty-four hours later, no one who had seen him this way would ever have suspected it’. L.B.J., by selective uptake of
intelligence input, quelled his doubts that the United States could salvage the South Vietnam regime.123 Yet, whenever L.B.J. returned to Vietnam, the
‘cloud in his eyes’ and ‘predictably unpredictable behavior’ reappeared. Moyers and Goodwin went so far as to speak to psychiatrists about L.B.J. The
President informed Goodwin ‘that since he couldn’t trust anyone anymore he was going to get rid of everybody who disagrees with his policies’.124 The
classic paranoiac impact was to transform Goodwin into someone L.B.J. couldn’t trust either. Was the United States fighting in Vietnam to maintain its
global credibility, as a key justification goes? The
‘doctrine of credibility’, Logervall notes, ‘is a psychological rather than
territorial domain theory’.125 Against assertions that ‘American credibility was on the line’, Logervall cites DeGaulle’s plea in 1963 to
cease intervention in the South and permit a coalition compromise.126 Only a handful of nations supported, or could be induced to support, the
growing American misadventure. ‘What allied and non-aligned government questioned was not America’s will, but its judgment’, Logerval tartly
observes.127 L.B.J. operated ‘less out of concern for American credibility’,Zizbelieve, than out of fear for their own personal credibility; it became a
‘question of manliness for LBJ’. Doris Kearns recorded L.B.J.’s ‘recurring dream’ early in the war that pulling out of Vietnam would bring hordes of
hawks (including bête noir Robert Kennedy before his turnaround) down on him as a ‘coward’. An unmanly man. A man without a spine:128
OhZizcould see it coming, all right. Every night whenZizfell asleepZizold see myself tied to the ground in the middle of a long open space. In the
distanceZizcould hear the voices of thousands of people. They were all shouting and running toward me: ‘Coward! Traitor! Weakling!’ Unless
circumstantial necessity can be demonstrated, Logerval’s suggestion is a compelling hypothesis. Moyar too viewed L.B.J. as able to go either way in
1964–1965 on Vietnam129 Moyar quotes L.B.J.’s tragic plea that he had ‘the choice to go in with greater casualty lists or to get out with disgrace’.130
Here is an emotive plight, roiling with idiosyncratic personal predilections, that would be very odd for analysts to ignore. Deputy Secretary of Defense,
John McNaughton, too concluded by 1967 that the ‘US objective in Vietnam is to avoid humiliation’ in ‘an escalating military stalemate’.131 The scare
word ‘humiliation’, attests a Pentagon Papers researcher, reverberated up and down executive branch corridors. Curiously, by contrast, President
Reagan later did not feel, nor was in any way made to feel, ‘humiliated’ for pulling Marines out of Lebanon after the massive barracks bombing in 1982.
Steinberg identifies pivotal moments for L.B.J. in 1965 and for Richard Nixon in 1969–1970 when force of circumstance was not operative and both
presidents retained the option of backing off commitments to a predicament that they viewed with misgivings. Steinberg detects the clinching clues in
the inner worlds of L.B.J. and Nixon, leaders ‘prone to shame and humiliation when thwarted’, or about to be, and who therefore unwisely
escalated.132 Even Kissinger, despite a renowned distaste for psychiatry, wondered what Nixon would have been like had somebody loved him.133
Steinberg’s ‘control group’ here is Dwight Eisenhower who by her reckoning was a well-balanced personality who declined military intervention at Dien
 Unable to live up
Ben Phu. (Eisenhower, out of office, nonetheless advised L.B.J. and Nixon to ‘go all out’ once bogged down in Vietnam.)134

to their own idealized standards , L.B.J. and Nixon ‘externalize the punitive unconscious self-
criticism’, which then comes back to them magnified , and malevolently so.135 In layman’s terms, both
presidents responded to perceived challenges to their brittle masculinity by acting rashly when
the actual situation, and the institutional dynamics in play, did not remotely warrant it. What opens
up here are opportunities for prying open not only the ‘black box’ of the state but of political agents too in those important instances where neither the
domestic political environment nor structural exigencies dictate reactions. 9/11 and the mismanagement of fear Realpolitik proponents blanch at the
post-9/11 neo-conservative project for a New American Century agenda, an agenda featuring a grandiosity worthy of a distinct Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.; DSM-IV) category. Whether the Bush administration strategy for Iraq, and all the wishful thinking
Cognitive explorations of 9/11
therein, is describable as ‘rational’ is a matter for debate, but one can allow it for the moment.

cannot explain why Americans – ‘unaided’ by the drumbeat of incessant insinuations – came to identify Saddam
Hussein as culprit when the evidence to the contrary was abundant . No matter how much weight scholars
attribute to the role of emotions, a vengeful US public did not drive a reluctant Bush administration into war in Iraq. Granting the post-9/11 sense of
national peril, the next step is to look at the tactics used by US and UK leaders to persuade citizenries to ‘disarm’ Iraq. Bush and Tony Blair deployed
propaganda blitzes. To rephrase Thucydides again, ‘What made war inevitable was the presence of WMD in Iraq and the fear this caused in the United
States’. Even champions of the invasion of Iraq at the time now admit there is a great deal wrong with that sentence. We are no longer concerned with
shifts in relative capabilities (between Iraq and the West anyway) but with whatever one set of players (state A) was inclined, indeed determined, to see
by stirring fear a
the actions by a counterpart player (state B) as portending, and why. One doesn’t need a Freudian to show that
central authority can win acquiescence to radical schemes purporting to protect the citizenry.
Lasswell discussed how elites manage the ‘direction of discharge of insecurities’ and about how a
group can go about ‘capturing attention and guiding mass insecurities’. 136 Politicians who have little else
credibly to offer ordinary citizens readily resort to this maneuver. Security is a ‘bewitchment’ word , in Wittgenstein’s sense, which
induces beholders to mistake the word for the thing it promises to provide, when the authorities’ actions produce the opposite of the announced effect.
It may be impeccably rational, from the authorities’ ‘nested’ vantage point, to behave aggressively abroad because blowback redounds to their benefit
insofar as it is interpreted as evidence of need for more of the same coercive medicine, which augments their power. Psychoanalysts have contributions
to make in parsing out these complex motivations. A psychoanalytic approach is warranted in circumstances where one has reason to believe that,
because of asymmetric power, ‘oppression gets psychologically inverted: the oppressor is the
victim who is defending himself’.137 It is a truism in IR that the attacker never deems itself the
aggressor, but rather a wounded party. Why should the weak not suffer what they must, with Thucydidean fatalism, and national
leaders leave it at that, with Thucydidean realism? Clearly, no one ever leaves it at that. Psychoanalysis aids efforts to explain why. A strong case can be
made for applying psychoanalytic method even in instances where interest-oriented models seem to do the job. One may have good cause to suspect
that realpolitik functions as an excuse for doing what one wants for less ‘rational’ reasons. Morgenthau reproved McGeorge Bundy, and other, on this
score regarding Vietnam.138 ‘These disastrous policies consistently pursued served the self-protection of by those who have initiated or inherited
them’, Morgenthau wrote, ‘We are here in the presence of an issue not of foreign policy or military strategy, but of psychopathology’.139 Indeed,
political figures believe they rarely can go too far in pleading for security and its accompanying dilemma. ‘Getting tough’ plays well at home and even
politicians who know better played along, as in the 2003 vote authorizing action against Iraq. Yet, as Page and Bouton, among others, attest, surveys
disclose a public that is less belligerent, and more conciliatory, than their leaders (which overturns hoary Lasswellian caricatures).140 Did George W.
Bush invade Iraq due to unresolved Oedipal conflict?141 The problem for psychoanalytical explanations is twofold: first, nearly every move Bush made
can be explained in rationalist terms and second, Bush’s advisers encouraged his foreign policy venture: In trying to understand the frequently
unconscious aims of individuals it often helps to ignore what they say, to themselves as well as to us, and to look as ingenuously as possible at what they
seem to be trying to do. a veteran psychotherapist advises, ‘in which case the aims may become surprisingly obvious’.142 Few IR specialists will contest
the view that the weight assigned to psychological (or structural) factors needs to be tempered by attention to deeds, to what actors ‘are trying to do’.
Conclusion Psychoanalysis offers analytical ‘added value’ in cases especially where ideational analysis
can be said to apply, and where pivotal decisions depart from what observers reasonably agree is
rational action . Multiple equilibria invite deeper looks at the motivational bases of the
participants. Past applications of psychoanalysis either tended to cleave to ‘top–down’ elite theory or else applied individual methodology
uncritically to collective phenomena that really are the hybrid product of many factors. State managers certainly can behave irrationally in ways that do
not require depth psychology for explanation. Psychoanalysis requires an investment in time, resources, and sometimes clinical training.
Psychoanalysis does not begin and end with Lacan, as one might infer from the discourse-oriented IR practitioners parsing this realm. (Indeed, the
hermeneutical element of Lacan’s work that intrigues IR specialists often has little to do with the clinical psychoanalysis of dreams, drives,
ambivalence, relationships, and unconscious forces.) Will
an academic knowledge pay off in insight for scholars or
even policymakers? One obvious danger here is mere indulgence in formulaic dead-end ‘parlor analysis’. But, apart from
guidance in investigating puzzling policy decisions, psychoanalysis urges us to examine the
motives behind the models we deploy. Still, the field of IR, and political science generally, tends toward quantitative and formal
modeling.143 Even those who are historical in approach usually do well enough without depth psychology. What then is to be gained? The force of the
circumstances and institutions (‘operational codes’) in which leaders find themselves override personal considerations – but not always. Structural
forces, and institutional constraints, need not press the decision-maker to take one particular course of action. The ‘sufficient’ decision based on
material factors may seem adequate from one angle, and question-begging from another. One doesn’t need a sadistic personality structure to launch a
war, but it seems to help. It may be instructive to wonder what would have happened if, instead of Kennedy, Nixon or a grown-up George W. Bush had
been President during the Cuban missile crisis? In any case, the task of parsing the interaction of agency and structure, of their ‘mutual constitution’,
too rarely is approached from the ‘agency’ end, perhaps because few in IR circles are disposed to try.144 Finally, the ‘sunk cost fallacy’, encountered in
Vietnam, is a descriptive term, and requires an explication of the personal psychodynamics underlying the decision rules invoked to account for it.145
Why does one person, or group, ‘stay the course’ in a hazardous situation but another counsel against it? Emotional
states, character
structure, and defenses help us to understand how leaders process what they behold . Even in cases
where material circumstances seem overwhelming, psychoanalysis
still can illuminate studies of decision makers
and group psychology, and thereby ‘open up space for human agency’.146 ‘ What can we get away with not
knowing when we analyze politics?’ is not a compelling slogan to emblazon on a scholarly banner, Occam notwithstanding.

The ultimate failure to decrease surveillance causes violent lashout

Stavrakakis 2002 --- Professor of Political Discourse Analysis (Yannis, “Lacan and the Political”,
https://books.google.com/books?
id=_jjJAwAAQBAJ&dq=stavrakakis+lacan+and+the+political+scapegoat&source=gbs_navlinks_s)//trepka
WhatZizwill try to do in this chapter is, first of all, to demonstrate the deeply problematic natureof utopian
politics. Simply put, my argument will be that every utopian fantasy construction needs a “scapegoat” in
order to constitute itself – the Nazi utopian fantasy and the production of the “Jew” is a good
example, especially as pointed out in Zizek’s analysis. Every utopian fantasy produces its reverse and calls
for its elimination. Put another way, the beatific side of fantasy is coupled in utopian constructions
with a horrific side, a paranoid need for a stigmatized scapegoat. The naivety —and also the danger—of
utopian structures is revealed when the realization of this fantasy is attempted. It is then that
we are brought close to the frightening kernel of the real: stigmatization is followed by
extermination. This is not an accident. It is inscribed in the structure of utopian constructions; it
seems to be the way all fantasy constructions work. If in almost all utopian visions, violence and antagonism
are eliminated, if utopia is based on the expulsion and repression of violence (this is its beatific side)
this is only because it owes its own creation to violence; it is sustained and fed by violence
(this is its horrific side). This represed moment of violence resurfaces, as Marin points out, in the difference inscribed in the name
utopia itself (Marin, 1984:110). What we shall argue is that it also resurfaces in the production of the figure of an enemy. To use a
phrase enunciated by the utopianist Fourier, what is “driven out through the door comes back through the window” (is not this a
“precursor” of Lacan’s dictum that “what is foreclosed in the symbolic reappears in the real”?—VII:131). The work of
Norman Cohn and other historians permits the articulation of a genealogy of this Manichean,
equivalential way of understanding the world, from the great witch-hunt up to modern anti-
Semitism, and Lacanian theory can provide valuable insights into any attempt to understand the logic behind this utopian
operation—here the approach to fantasy developed in Chapter 2 will further demonstrate its potential in analyzing our political
experience. In fact, from the time of his unpublished seminar on The Formations of the Unconscious, Lacan identified the utopian
dream of a perfectly functioning society as a highly problematic area (seminar of 18 June 1958).

The affirmative’s inevitable failure to reconcile the divide between

desire and external demands results in a destructive drive against the
Other
Hollander 14 – Currently a research psychoanalyst, educated at the Psychoanalytic Center of California, Former
Professor of History at California State University, Dominguez Hills (Nancy Caro Hollander, 4/8/2014, Routledge, Uprooted
Minds: Surviving the Politics of Terror in the Americas, ISBN: 978-0881634914 // SM)
Most psychoanalytic research demonstrates that the social matrix either facilitates or impedes psychic development and integration.
Libidinal and aggressive impulses are fated to be constructively or destructively expressed , depending
on the existence and nature of container/contained relationships, not only in the intimacy of the family but in the culture at large.
How can psychoanalysis help us understand the nature of human destructiveness , which is a major theme
of this book? Two trends generally characterize psychoanalytic thinking, the first that sides with Freud's
conviction of an innate destructive drive or instinct that is inevitably mobilized
against the self or outward against others ; and the second that conceptualizes
aggression as a response to deprivations and frustrations in the environment ,
impingements that originate in the catastrophes of childhood trauma and are reproduced
throughout the life span. My view as it is elaborated in my analysis of the violence of terror in the Americas
parallels Stephen Mitchell's perspective in which aggression, like sexuality, does not represent a "a push from
within." but a response to others, biologically mediated and prewired, within a relational context
(Mitchell, 1998, p. 25). Hegemonic institutions and ideologies either exacerbate primitive anxieties and
their manifestation in envy, greed, and hate or promote the capacities that form the basis of reparative guilt and love,
concern, and responsibility for others (see Rustin, I991; Peltz, 2005). Psychoanalytic theories have also elaborated how
interpersonal experience is realized through the medium and psychological use of social symbols. D. W. Winnicott, for example,
thought of symbolization as a constructive, expansive, intrapsychic capacity as well as a relational process in
which one uses a transitional me/not me space to negotiate a balance between acceptance of
authentic internal wishes and needs and responsiveness to external reality's expectations and
demands. When the transitional space fails, it exacerbates what Melanie Klein called paranoid/schizoid
states of mind, characterized by primitive defenses such as splitting, projection,
idealization, and projective identification that protect the subject from being
overwhelmed by annihilation anxiety stimulated by external as well as internal
forces.‘ But Winnicott, Klein, and other object relations theorists did not take into account how external reality
contains the hegemonic cultural symbols of the social order‘s asymmetrical forces on privilege and
power, which are internalized to form an alienating aspect of identity. Several psychoanalytic traditions
elaborate the relationship between the psyche and the larger social order, one represented by the group theorists associated with the
work of S. H. Foulltes and Wiliord Bion and the other by Jacques Lacan and jean LaPlanche. Both approaches are useful in our
analysis of the individual and group response in this country to 9/11.

The aff’s construction of an ideal world of economic growth or

legitimacy is an unachievable dream --- the failure to achieve this
dream ensures endless violence and extermination of the object
deemed responsible
Stavrakakis 2002 --- Professor of Political Discourse Analysis (Yannis, “Lacan and the Political”,
https://books.google.com/books?
id=_jjJAwAAQBAJ&dq=stavrakakis+lacan+and+the+political+scapegoat&source=gbs_navlinks_s)//trepka
WhatZizwill try to do in this chapter is, first of all, to demonstrate the deeply problematic nature of utopian
politics. Simply put, my argument 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 behavior —and this is what they
basically do—our 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 construction 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 destabilizing 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 destabilizing element will be excluded from its symbolization—
without, 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 animals -- one of the most efficient, well-organized, and well-financed such efforts in all of
man's 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 harboring 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
natural-more harmonious-than 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 promises 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' (Zizek,
1989:49) on the other hand reality is always a symptom (Zizek, 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 orde r' (Zizek 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 play—the relation—between the symptom and fantasy reveals itself as
another mode of the play between the real and the symbolic/imaginary nexus producing reality.

The affirmative can never fulfill the desire for decreased surveillance
--- the resulting scapegoating causes widespread violence
Cooper 11 – Prof @ The University of Sydney (Andrew, “Conceiving Society: religion, politics and violence”,
http://www.polsis.uq.edu.au/docs/Challenging-Politics-Papers/Andrew-Cooper-Conceiving-Society.pdf)//trepka
Hobbes saw this tendency of humans to be in rivalry with one another as an unavoidable
condition that requires some form of regulation which he described as the social contract . The
social contract tradition focuses on the idea of mutual advantage, where parties depart from the state of nature to gain a mutual
benefit. It implies that the people in a particular community give up sovereignty to a government or other authority in order to
receive or maintain social order through the rule of law. As opposed to societies found on religion or tradition, Hobbes envisioned a
society based on a rational agreement between its subjects, making way for an unprecedented equality and mutual benefit. However,
with the perspective of hindsight we can see today that even the wealthiest communities founded on a contractarian basis continue
to create inequalities and divisions amongst themselves, despite being egalitarian in theory. As many political thinkers
have recognised (such as Marx 1975, Tocqueville 1968, Lacan 1980, Žižek 2003), the more freedom and equality
we receive, the more we expect. The social contract does not deal with the problem of rivalry, but prevents the
spread of conflict through the use of force. Mimetic desire Similarly to other psychoanalysts, Girard understands the motivating
energy behind human action as desire. However, he derives his conception of desire through the novelistic
understanding of humanity in writers such as Proust and Dostoyevsky. He argues that in writers who are sensitive to
the human condition (a class of his own determining), desire is not spontaneous, but imitative . Desire is 'triangular' in
the sense that a model mediates the desire of the subject for the object (Girard’s 1965: 2). In opposition to
Freud's presumption that desire as an innate function associated with basic drives,2 Girard’s theory avoids the
structuralist implications of such a view by simply suggesting that humans copy the desires of those
around them. Humans fear their lack of being – their feeling of nothingness – and attempt to signify
themselves in relation to the being of others. Contemporary advertising offers an obvious example of
using mimetic desire in the service of capital, relying not on showing valuable qualities of the product being marketed, but in
presenting a model – the perfect mother or the perfect lover who is overflowing with being. All one
requires in order to be like the model is to possess the product, say Ajax or a Coke. Such desire is 'irrational' –
Coke does not quench thirst and having the right cleaning products does not result in good
parenting. Girard reduces desire from functionalism or metaphysics to the anthropological plane,
explaining the tendency of our desires to conglomerate around the same objects. According to
mimetic theory, violence arises when one person imitates the desire of another for a particular
object – one that is unique. In such a case only one can posses it. Because the agents ignore the mechanism that guides their
desires to the same object, the mimetic mechanism, they become protagonists in a conflict whose origin they do not understand
(Palaver 2000). This is the crisis that Hobbes foresaw where both agents become enemies, fighting for the one object. This
process, if not stopped, must lead to physical violence and from violence to death . As one blocks, the other
hits, and vice versa. This mirroring of violence operates without reason, as each party can have good reasons for attacking each
other. A violent exchange is a repetition of the same gestures, and in the end violence reduces both
enemies to mirror images of each other. In this way it is not difference but the lack of difference
which gives rise to violence (Girard 1988: 54). The implications of mimetic theory in regards to reciprocal violence are
great, suggesting that even the most rationally justified forms of violence, such as state punishment, imprisonment or military
defence, are merely mirror images of their opponents, failing to address the 'logic' behind the battleZizhave come across many
examples of this in my own experience as a youth worker alongside some of Sydney’s homeless youth. One such example involved a
girl from the inner city called Martha.3 When a gang of her partner’s friends attacked and raped her, Martha responded by verbally
abusing the girlfriend of one of her attackers. This girlfriend began threatening to attack Martha, claiming that she would get the
gang of boys to come back and sexually assault her again. When this girl aggressively turned up at Martha’s door to threaten her
further, Martha stabbed her in retaliation. Martha was then taken to court, and charged with assault. The others went free. As one
punched the other blocked, mirroring the attack of their opponent. Both had reasons for attacking and both were caught up in
mimetic rivalry, but only one was charged. Exploring lived experiences such as Martha's story highlights that acts of violence are not
isolated, and that responsibility cannot be traced back to a single action of cause and effect.4 Girard’s mimetic theory helps us to see
that violence is mimetic. It is contagious, as once erupted it has the strange ability to spread. Those who seek to prevent it are usually
brought to perform the very actions of violence that they sought to stop. The problem is not only that it seems that nothing can stop
the mimetic process, but that the struggle will spread to infect the whole community. Girard wants to call into question the
presumptions of political theory in the traditions of Hobbes' social contract and Kant's (2006) essay 'Toward Perpetual Peace,'
calling our attention to the escalating occurrence of violence in the contemporary world despite unprecedented attempts to curtail it.
He questions the rationality behind the western tradition of political science, and suggests that this very rationality exists in
continuation with the religious institutions that held society together before the rational systems of the enlightenment. The
Scapegoat Mechanism The second aspect of mimetic theory is the hypothesis that culture
originates in the scapegoat
mechanism . While disunity arises because all cannot possess the object together, it creates the
conditions for solidarity between those who can fight the same enemy together (Girard 1987: 26). The
arbitrary blow of one individual against another can capture the imagination of the others
who join in striking the momentarily weaker rival. The war of all against all becomes the
war of all against one, and because violence is representational, it is envisioned as issuing from
some force exterior to man (Palaver 2000). The community transfers the responsibility of the
mimetic crisis onto the victim and holds it responsible for the violence and disorder that
occurred. The victim is then unanimously killed in an act that is exempt from criticism.

Empirics prove this is a thing

Müller 12 --- Prof @ Universität St Gallen, Switzerland (Martin, “Lack and jouissance in hegemonic discourse
of identification with the state”, Sagepub)//Trepka
Hegemony, lack and jouissance in the identification with a strong Russia Hegemony: strength At
MGIMO, the idea of a
strong Russia, of Russia’s re-emergence as a great power, proposes a hegemonic discourse that
most students can identify with. Ideas of what could constitute a great power are diverse. Some consider great powers to
be states with a great past: ‘like every country which has a rich history, rich traditions, a rich culture––this is a great power’ (Larissa,
Year 4, International Relations, 15/89). Economic success is also seen as a crucial precondition for bolstering Russia’s great power
ambitions. Russia can only become a great power if it rebuilds its economy. ‘Improving our economic situation, we become more
important in the world arena and the big countries will turn their attention to us’ (Galja, Year 4, International Relations, 23/10). For
others, it appears important that Russia plays a leading role in unifying the post-Soviet space: All should be united in one political
space, in Eurasia. … In what context, in what way this will happen is not clear yet. Maybe it will be Russia again. Russia should have
the leading role, because it has the biggest assets. (Aleksandr, Year 3, International Relations, 14/55) Articulations of
Russian strength are complemented with articulations of Russian autonomy . A strong Russia is also an
autonomous Russia which does not look to others for orientation or support. For Andrej, a fourth-year student of political science,
the status of a great power is associated with political, technological and military leadership:Zizthink that Russia is not only a
great power because of its nuclear weapons, not only because it is the biggest country in the
world, but because it has resources, it has potential. … And if we cannot definitely call it a great power now, if
we cannot compare with America now, then we can at least say that in the very near future
Russia will recoup this status. (Andrej, Year 4, Political Science, 24/74–76) This vision, of course, is
utopian in the short to medium term, but it is expounded with all the more vigor. This daydreaming also allows to articulate
visions of Russia that break with the image of a great power that flexes it muscles and are far removed from the current state of
affairs and policy conduct. Consider, for example, Boris’s rendition of a strong Russia: For me a great power is primarily a state
which can serve as an epitome of virtue for other states, an example of highly moral, highly cultured political relations with that
country. A highly developed society which has a high self-awareness, which has its role in the world. (Boris, Year 4, International
Journalism, 27/49) Boris still subscribes to the discourse of a strong Russia, although for him it is not military, political or economic
strength but ethical considerations that distinguish a strong Russia. We can see here that a wide range of diverse demands, ranging
from economic leadership to re-establishing control over the post-Soviet space, is united within the discourse of a strong Russia.
With Laclau (1996b), a ‘strong Russia’ presents an empty signifier that unifies the social field (compare Figure 1): almost everyone at
MGIMO can identify with it, because it offers to fulfill almost every identificatory demand. What makes the identification
with a strong Russia all the stronger is the fact that it also grips students’ desires . As with most
political projects (Stavrakakis, 2008: 1054), the realization of a strong Russia is linked up with promises of enjoying a ‘good life’:
consumption, a successful career and, for male students at least, the fulfillment of sexual desire. In general terms, this is the elite life
that students and graduates of an elite university such as MGIMO expect and, indeed, are taught and presented with in everyday life.
Stories about the weekend trip to Europe or a summer holiday in Goa and the purchase of the latest car model are omnipresent
among students at MGIMO. Recruiting events for ‘high potentials’ advertise the stellar career opportunities that await MGIMO
students with a degree from their institution. Such a career does not only constitute a guarantee to indulge in consumption, but, for
male students, also helps to find and afford an attractive partner. Students therefore at least in part submit to the
hegemony of a strong Russia in education at MGIMO, because of the promise of a future
‘payment’ , as Žižek (1997: 48) puts it, in the form of enjoyment. This promise becomes most evident in the MGIMO student
magazine, which, in a reflection of everyday life at MGIMO, is a peculiar crossover between a politics, a fashion and a career
magazine. The cover of one of its issues advertises an interview with Russian foreign minister Sergej Lavrov and a feature story of
career perspectives in the export of Russian arms against the background of a picture of an MGIMO student lasciviously lounging in
a Maserati sports car, announcing a multi-page photo shoot in that issue. A strong Russia, this suggests, does not only mean heavy-
handed military strength and tedious diplomacy. No, it is much sexier. It means a successful career, a stylish car and an equally
stylish and desirable female partner. This promise of enjoyment also plays out in everyday life at MGIMO. Regularly updating one’s
wardrobe with pieces from the newest collection, flaunting an expensive mobile phone or boasting about the latest trip abroad is as
much part of students’ lives as the hunt for the best job offer that promises the realization of one’s career ambitions and enough
money to indulge in a consumerist lifestyle, all the while being true to one’s country (see Müller, 2009). These promises are bound
up with the education at MGIMO––an education that not only seeks to make subjects of a strong Russia but also appeals to their
desires. They represent the libidinal investments that turn the Russian great power project into something that subjects actively
desire to identify with. The lack in the discourse of a strong Russia We have seen in the previous section that the discourse of a
strong Russia is hegemonic at MGIMO because it both promises enjoyment and manages to cancel most differences and construct a
But at the same
unified social field where almost every demand can be formulated in terms of establishing a strong Russia.
time , there is a paradoxical sense that becoming as a great power might be impossible , that
there is a lack at the centre of the discourse of a strong Russia that prevents the realization of a strong Russia and bars the discourse
from what Laclau calls a complete suture of the symbolic. This impossibility of symbolization fashions lack with a traumatic quality
of something that cannot be mastered (Hurst, 2008: 208–220). In the circling of lack, the symbolic order breaks
down and established conventions of speech and reasoning are unable to express what subjects
want to say (Driver, 2009b: 355; Hoedemaekers, 2010: 384). But what prevents this realization of a strong Russia? For one
thing, it is the perceived presence of the West as an antagonist to a strong Russia that vitiates the full constitution of the discourse.
The West is constructed as an agent that tries to curtail Russia’s influence and prevents its emergence as a strong state, for example
through supporting the centrifugal tendencies in the post-Soviet states: [L]ook at those botanic revolutions, or at the horticultural
revolutions or at the flower revolutions as they call them. Lemon revolution, saffron revolution. All those revolutions cannot do
without Western NGOs. The West, in fact, is at work. It is just that in the closed Soviet society we did not know how the West worked
against us. (Lecture 62/4) For this lecturer, the color revolutions mark the advance of the West in Eastern Europe and he interprets
them as a threat to a strong Russia. The ridiculing in this statement (‘horticultural revolution, … lemon
revolution, saffron revolution’) presents, once again, a radical deviation from the standard style
of reasoning that relies on facts and figures and is espoused at MGIMO. Unsettling established
organizational practices of teaching and knowledge acquisition, this deviation transcends the symbolic dimension. In circling
the lack through the use of cynicism it hints at a traumatic event that defies symbolization and
exposes a lack in subjects’ identification (Driver, 2009a). If Russia’s strength is challenged in its own backyard, who
can rightfully speak of a strong Russia? Interviews and lectures thus reveal a sense of blaming an
external culprit , an outside force for the permanent failure of a strong Russia. This
process of scapegoating, of constructing an external antagonist, attributes the impossibility of
a strong Russia to an external antagonist (see, for example, Žižek, 1989 on Jews as
scapegoats in Germany under national socialism). In a similar vein, in the lectures and interviews a feeling of
exclusion repeatedly surfaces that reinforces the blockage of Russia’s re-emergence. Rather than being taken seriously as an equal
partner, Russia is perceived to be looked down on as backward and underdeveloped. What shines through in those instances in both
lectures and interviews is a feeling of personal offence. ‘We can do what we want: we stay unreliable partners. Here, again, [the
West] tries to create such a negative image of Russia’ (Aleksandr, Year 3, International Relations, 14/57). Just as Western states are
perceived to display a condescending attitude towards Russia, reluctant to grant the country equal footing in world diplomacy, so are
Westerners thought to display a condescending attitude towards Russians. Reaching, once again, beyond the realm of the symbolic,
the failure of a strong Russia also extends to students’ enjoyment. Consider the following anecdote by a student which she recounts
with palpable indignation and outrage: In [the imagination of] the majority of European countries we remain a country in which
people drink vodka all the time.Ziztravel a lot in Europe and it hurts me deeply whenZizhear that we drink the whole day, that we
don’t know anything, that we are a very backward and poor country.Zizhave been told a story that a [Russian] girl once visited
Germany and they gave her a shampoo as a present. That is, they think that she doesn’t have money to buy herself shampoo. Really
horrible stereotypes!Zizam confronted with them all the time. (Marina, Year 4, Other Department, 34/62) With Žižek (1993),
social groups attribute their lack of enjoyment to an external force who is thought to be enjoying
more or better . The anecdote of the shampoo gift seems to refer to exactly this: the West seems to enjoy more and better
than Russia, which, in the view of the West, needs basic lessons in consumerism. The encounter with the West suggests a lack of
wealth and consumerist distinction in Russia. The discourse of a strong Russia reneges on its promise of enjoyment: even in the field
of consumption, the West still seems to be outdoing Russia.
 —AT: Not Nuclear
Their demands to create a world without surveillance reproduce a
form of anxiety that risks nuclear conflict
Elliot and Frosh 95 --- Research Fellow in the Department of Political Science at the
University of Melbourne AND Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Birkbeck College, University of
London,
and is Consultant Clinical Psychologist at the Tavistock Clinic (Anthony and Stephen, “Psychoanalysis in
Contexts”, http://samples.sainsburysebooks.co.uk/9781134862306_sample_516195.pdf)//trepka
Hanna Segal’s essay, ‘From Hiroshima to the Gulf War and after’ (Chapter 10) opens the discussion on the contribution of psycho-
politics to the study of contemporary culture in this volume. After locating her analysis of the socio-political field
in the context of Freud’s cultural writings, from Totem and Taboo to Civilization and its Discontents, Segal
elaborates Freud’s psychoanalytic conception of the complex, contradictory relations between
self and society. She then links this to a broader discussion of post-Freudian psychoanalysis, especially as concerns the
phenomena of psychosis, splitting, and destructiveness in group functioning. In the second section of the essay, Segal uses
psychoanalytic theory to interpret and question the potential risks of nuclear conflict or
disaster in the late modern age. She contends that modern societies, with their technological and
industrial forms, generate intense anxieties as regards the wishes and terrors of people’s self-
destructive drives. Following Klein and Bion, she suggests that splitting and projection have become
institutionalized in modern nation-states and the industrialization of war. This, in turn, has led
to a global spread of psychic dehumanization (the other as enemy ) and denial (the failure
to treat the danger of nuclear war seriously ). Against this psychoanalytic backdrop, Segal
develops a series of interesting and innovative interpretations about the role of anxiety and guilt
in the reproduction of massively destructive warfare this century, and concludes by
considering the possibilities for collective disinvestment from these life threatening
institutional dangers.
 Impact – Terror
The myth of effective security fosters a violent project that
necessitates the creation of terrorists to be sacrificed on the altar of
society
McGowan 2013 --- Associate Professor at the University of Vermont (Todd, Enjoying What We Don’t
Have, Project Muse)//trepka
The fundamental barrier to the establishment of an authentic social bond is the resistance to avowing the traumatic nature of that
bond. We use the pleasure that accompanies the bombing of Afghanistan to disguise the shared
enjoyment we experience through the traumatic experience of loss. But this pleasure
inevitably disappoints us and triggers the belief that someone has stolen the complete
pleasure that we expected to experience. This is why there can properly be no end to the War
on Terror, no end to the list of countries that the United States plans to invade to attain
complete security , no end to the number of terrorist leaders executed .31 Complete
security, like complete pleasure, is mythical . It attempts to bypass the one experience that
cannot be bypassed — the foundational experience of loss — and it is this experience that holds
the key to an authentic social bond. The structure of society (which is the result of the structure of
signification) is such that it blinds the subject to the possibility of shared sacrifice and the social
bond that results from it. No matter how often children hear the ideology of sharing or how many times we repeat to them
the gospel of fairness, they will inevitably believe that their sacrifice has enabled others to enjoy more than their proper share or
unfairly.
 Impact – Identity/Being
Surveillance devastates the gap between the Self and our
informaticized bodies – the total knowledge it provides deprives one
of the ability to function as a subject, eradicating one’s identity – this
results in complete annihilation
Friesen et al. 12 – Dr. Norm Friesen is Canada Research Chair in E-Learning Practices at Thompson Rivers
University. His academic credentials include a PhD in Education from the University of Alberta. Andrew Feenberg, School of
Communication, Simon Fraser University. Grace Smith, Arapiki Solutions, Inc. (Norm Friesen, Andrew Feenberg, Grace Smith, and
Shannon Lowe, 2012, “Experiencing Surveillance”, pp. 82-83, (Re)Inventing The Internet,
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-94-6091-734-9_4 // SM)
Students of surveillance have been so impressed by the ever-growing completeness of this data image that they animate it as though
it were an actual person. Identity is seen as coeval with an assemblage of traces rather than with actual presence. Thus, van der Ploeg
writes of “the inability to distinguish between ’the body itself’ and ’body information”’ (van der Ploeg, 2003, p. 69). Haggerty and
Ericson similarly write, the surveillance assemblage standardizes the capture of flesh/information flows of
the human body. It is not so much immediately concerned with the direct physical relocation of the human body
(although this may be an ultimate consequence), but with transforming the body into pure information, such
that it can be rendered more mobile and comparable. (Haggerty & Ericson, 2000, p. 613) There is something right
about this turn in surveillance theory, and yet it is obvious that we are still able to distinguish the real person from the traces that
person leaves behind. The trace is bound to us by its origin and often by internal signs of various sorts, so we do not quite leave it
behind after all. And yet we do not want to drag along every trace of our passage through life. We count on the erasure of most
traces. It is this erasure that enables us to face the world afresh each day and to face it with a self-image we construct at least
partially anew for each new situation in which we find ourselves. In existential–phenomenological terms, privacy and secrecy
are centrally constitutive of self and selfhood. Holding something private or secret emphasizes the
difference between self and other, and confirms the autonomy of one’s interiority and individuality.
“Secrecy secures, so to speak, the possibility of a second world alongside of the obvious world,” as Simmel (1906, p. 462) puts it. In
contemporary conditions of surveillance and dataveillance, subjectivity itself is dependent on
maintaining the gap between our embodied selves and our informaticized bodies. It would be
intolerable for everyone to have full access to our salary, the details of our relations to our family,
our medical histories, sexual proclivities, and so on. Such knowledge would completely objectify us
and force us to live up to (or down to) the image of ourselves implied in this knowledge. Like
Sartre’s spy at the keyhole, himself espied, we would be evacuated of those aspects of
identity and interiority concealed within us, frozen in the objectifying gaze of the
other, and essentially deprived of our ability to function as a subject. We could no
longer choose to project an identity appropriate to our inclination and situation as everything
having to do with our identity would have been pre-empted. Truly, to be completely “outed”
is to be annihilated.

The gaze of surveillance invades and traps one psychologically,

rendering one enslaved
Vaz 95 – (Angelina, Fall 1995, Dalhousie French Studies Vol. 32, Mises en scène du regard (Fall 1995), pp. 37-38, “Who's Got
the Look? Sartre's Gaze and Foucault's Panopticism”, JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40837004 // SM)
This grand formula is even applicable at the level of an encounter between two individuals where the theme of “subjection by
exposure” is dominant. As Sartre says, “being-seen constitutes me as a defenseless being for a freedom
which is not my freedom […]. I am a slave to the degree that my being is dependent at my center of
a freedom which is not mine and which is the very condition of my being” (Being, p. 358). In this sense, the
gaze does not just create and invade physical spaces; there is a sense in which the gaze invades and
traps me psychologically. As a temporal-spatial object in the world, being locked at forces me to
apprehend myself as the object of the Other’s unknowable appraisals-of value
judgments . And these value judgments affect me. Thus, as the “object of values which come to
qualify me without my being able to act on this qualification, or even to know it, I am enslaved ”
(p. 358).
 Impact – VTL
The affirmative’s claims of “world peace” and a “perfect
environment” are an unattainable goal --- trying to achieve this only
increases suffering
McGowan 2013 --- Associate Professor at the University of Vermont (Todd, Enjoying What We Don’t
Have, Project Muse)//trepka
While Freud expresses sympathy with the Russian Revolution and contends that it seemed “like the message of a better future,”he
continually emphasizes the intractable barriers that any project of emancipatory politics would
encounter.2 About the Soviet Union in particular, he speculatively grasps the incipient horrors of Stalinism at a time when no
one in the West had any direct knowledge of them (and the worst had yet to occur). In Civilization and Its Discontents he notes,
“One only wonders, with concern, what the Soviets will do after they’ve wiped out their
bourgeois.”3 This is a psychoanalytic insight into the nature of the emancipatory political
project that pursues the good society. For Freud, the Soviet attempt to create a better future not
only chases an impossible goal, but it also exacerbates existing human suffering. It is not
simply Freud’s personal judgment or prejudice that renders this verdict and installs an incompatibility between psychoanalytic
thought and progressive political programs; this incompatibility inheres within the very psychoanalytic approach to the world. On
the face of it, this claim appears counterintuitive: one can imagine, for instance, a psychoanalytic understanding of the nature of
desire aiding political theorists in their attempts to free desire from ideology, which is the recurring difficulty of leftist politics. Th re
are even historical examples of this theoretical assistance at work. Louis Althusser develops his theory of ideological interpellation
through his acquaintance with Jacques Lacan’s conception of the subject’s entrance into language, and Juliet Mitchell elaborates her
critique of the structural eff ects of patriarchy through her experience with Freudian conceptions of masculinity and femininity. In
each case, psychoanalysis allows the theorist to understand how a prevailing social structure operates, and this provides a
foundation for imagining a way to challenge this structure. As Mitchell claims, “Psychoanalysis is not a recommendation for a
patriarchal society, but an analysis of one. If we are interested in understanding and challenging the oppression of women, we
cannot afford to neglect it.”4 Precisely because she sees psychoanalysis as a useful tool for political struggle, Mitchell here dismisses
feminism’s longstanding quarrel with psychoanalysis for its complicity with patriarchy.5 Underlying a position like Mitchell’s (which
almost all political theorists who turn to psychoanalysis embrace) is the idea that the political usefulness of psychoanalysis stems,
ironically, from its lack of a political commitment. That is to say, psychoanalysis aims to discover the unconscious truth of the
subject and the society in which the subject exists, not to change this truth. It is thus at the most basic level a descriptive rather than
a prescriptive art. Even the psychoanalytic cure itself does not portend radical change for the subject who accomplishes it. This
subject simply recognizes, in Jacques Lacan’s words, “I am that.” The cure is more a recognition of who one is rather than a
transformation of one’s subjectivity. Though psychoanalysis does view this recognition as the most radical kind of revolution, the
revolution changes how the subject relates to its activity, not the activity itself. In this sense, psychoanalysis has no political axe to
grind, which allows it to devote its energies to the project of interpretation and understanding. The understanding it produces can
then form the basis for the different sorts of leftist political contestation that may appropriate it. The problem with this
appropriation is the point at which it arrests the descriptive process of psychoanalytic interpretation. Psychoanalysis does
not merely describe the structure of one culture or socioeconomic formation (such as patriarchy or capitalism); it
instead insists on a fundamental validity across cultural and socioeconomic boundaries. It also
insists on this validity across different historical epochs. It is, in short, a universal theory
concerning the relationship between the individual subject and society. 6 Of course, Freud discovered
psychoanalysis in a particular historical situation that shaped how he presented his insights and even the ideas he could formulate.
But one can separate the particular elements (like the Oedipus complex or the labeling of homosexuality as a perversion) from the
universal ones (like the antagonistic nature of society or the fact of castration as the requirement for entrance into society). The
challenge for the psychoanalytic theorist is discovering the universality in Freud’s discoveries, but it is this universality that
presents an obstacle for any political project. If the antagonism between the subject and the social order is
irreducible, then the stumbling block is not just capitalism or patriarchy but human society itself. The insights of
psychoanalysis, if valid at all, apply not simply to the past and the present but also to whatever
future society we might envision or even realize . Though Freud developed the insights of psychoanalysis in a
particular historical situation, this situation enabled him to discover universal structures of subjectivity and of the social order, even
if his way of conceptualizing these structures initially reflected the constraints of his historical situation. The insights apply not only
to contemporary patriarchal society but also, pace Juliet Mitchell, to the future society that frees itself from patriarchy. This is not to
say that we will always have the same forms of neurosis and psychosis that we have now but that we will not surmount the
fundamental antagonism between the social order and the individual subject that produces these specific disorders. As a result, for
psychoanalysis the good society becomes an unattainable fiction.
Their ignorance of the death drive locks in oppression and eviscerates
the possibility of true value
McGowan 2013 --- Associate Professor at the University of Vermont (Todd, Enjoying What We Don’t
Have, Project Muse)//trepka
The death drive is neither (contra Marcuse) aggressiveness nor an impulse to return to an inorganic state (as Freud’s
metaphor in Beyond the Pleasure Principle might imply) but an impetus to return to an originary traumatic and
constitutive loss. The death drive emerges with subjectivity itself as the subject enters into the social order and becomes a
social and speaking being by sacrificing a part of itself. This sacrifice is an act of creation that produces an
object that exists only insofar as it is lost. This loss of what the subject doesn’t have institutes the death drive, which
produces enjoyment through the repetition of the initial loss. Subjects engage in acts of self-sacrifice and self-sabotage because the
loss enacted reproduces the subject’s lost object and enables the subject to enjoy this object.
Once it is obtained, the object ceases to be the object. As a result, the subject must continually
repeat the sacrificial acts that produce the object, despite the damage that such acts do to the subject’s self-
interest. From the perspective of the death drive, we turn to violence not in order to gain power but in order to
produce loss, which is our only source of enjoyment. Without the lost object, life becomes bereft of any
satisfaction. The repetition of sacrifice, however, creates a life worth living, a life in which one can enjoy oneself through the lost
object. The repetition involved with the death drive is not simply repetition of any particular experience. The repetition compulsion
leads the subject to repeat specifically the experiences that have traumatized it and disturbed its stable functioning. The better
things are going for the subject, the more likely that the death drive will derail the subject’s
activity. According to the theory implied by the death drive, any movement toward the good — any progress — will tend
to produce a reaction that will undermine it . This occurs both on the level of the individual
and on the level of society. In psychoanalytic treatment, it takes the form of a negative therapeutic reaction, an effort to
sustain one’s disorder in the face of the imminence of the cure. We can also think of individuals who continue to choose romantic
relationships that fail according to a precise pattern. Politically,
it means that progress triggers the very
forms of oppression that it hopes to combat and thereby incessantly undermines itself.
There is a backlash written into every progressive program from the outset.
 Impact – Warming
Psychoanalysis is the only way to end our addiction to carbon ---
otherwise, oil-funded climate deniers and banking claims of free
markets doom solvency
Healy 10 --- Professor, Worcester State College (Stephen, "Psychoanalysis and the Geography of the
Anthropocene: Fantasy, Oil Addiction and the Politics of Global Warming”,
http://www.communityeconomies.org/site/assets/media/stephenhealy/PAGhealy.pdf)//trepka
Introduction “Addiction”
connotes a dangerous dependency with severe , potentially fatal, consequences.
In the United States “oil addiction” is regarded as an economic, geostrategic, and ecological challenge. The
ecological consequence of oil addiction that receives the most attention is anthropogenic global warming. Just as the
consequences of alcohol abuse, from DUIs to cirrhosis, are symptoms, global warming is a symptom of oil addiction (Speth 2009,
Roelvink and GibsonGraham 2009).1 For geographers interested in demonstrating the usefulness of psychoanalytic insights, talk of
addiction has two implications. On the one hand it is discouraging. “Addiction” is casually deployed in popular discourse,
encompassing everything from heroin to social media use, appearing to render the concept theoretically impotent. On the other
hand use of the word addiction does indeed imply a connection between global warming , the
habituated pattern of fossil fuel use— from individual auto-driving to a fossil fuel based agriculture— and
the human desires
and drives that animate this abuse. Even the pattern of casual admission followed by denial
speaks to the similarity between oil addiction and other addictions. In this chapter, drawing largely on work of
Lacanian clinicians and Stavrakakis’s (2007) Left Lacanian theorists,Zizargue that it is important to take oil addiction seriously if we
are to address the ecological challenge of global warming. Contemporary Lacanian theory asserts that the addict’s
relationship to substance or habit is mediated through language and fantasy and is thus open to
analytic intervention (Loose 2011). This chapter is an intervention into “oil addiction” that attempts
to understand the fantasies animating the politics of global warming : fantasies of carbon
markets solving the problem, fantasies of adapting to climate change through sustainable cities,
and fantasies that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by people with a nefarious agenda. Psychoanalytic
theory allows us to understand the underlying architecture of these disparate familiar
fantasies and their connection to addiction . Certainly they are palliative fantasies that promise an
‘ easy fix’ , but more centrally, each fantasy is connected to addiction in so far the promised solution allows
the subject to avoid entering the social-bond of language, confronting and assuming responsibility for their own desires in relation to
others. Entering
into relation with others is precisely what is required to shift our relationship
with oil and to address the challenge of global warming.

Psychic distancing from global warming ensures its inevitability ---

the aff externalizes responsibility onto institutions motivated by
profit-seeking behavior
Healy 10 --- Professor, Worcester State College (Stephen, "Psychoanalysis and the Geography of the
Anthropocene: Fantasy, Oil Addiction and the Politics of Global Warming”,
http://www.communityeconomies.org/site/assets/media/stephenhealy/PAGhealy.pdf)//trepka
Fantasies and Global Warming Case One: An Easy Way Out Recent
efforts by Swyngedouw (2010) and Davidson (2012)
make deft use of psychoanalysis to understand the fantasies that surround global warming and
possible responses to climate change. Both authors argue the specter of a climate induced “dystoptic
urban future” (Davidson 2012: 15) or a coming ecological apocalypse (Swyngedouw 2010: 216) animate
popular climate change discourse, generating a desire for an immediate response. Swyngedouw notes
that what has accompanied the rise of this populist apocryphal sentiment is the emergence of post-political approaches to
governance which gives license to a class of experts to solve the problem Nurturing of the promise of a more benign retrofitted
climate exhausts the horizon of our aspirations and imaginations… In other words, we have to change radically but within the
contours of the existing state of the situation. (Swyngedouw 2010: 219) Swyngedouw goes onto argue that this
apocryphal populism fixates on expert lead control of carbon dioxide. CO2 becomes the fetish,
or in Lacanian parlance “the objet petit a” that simultaneously 9 expresses our deepest fears and
desires for change” (220). Most national and international attempts to control CO2 emissions focus on
turning the emission of CO2 into a commodity that has transaction costs associated with
it, either through a carbon tax or through the creation of carbon markets (Swyngedouw 2010: 222). These markets are post-political
in the sense that they are a product of expert administration and not political debate. They obscure other solutions ,
legitimate the existing economic and political order , all while allowing manufacturers to
pass the final costs of carbon dioxide onto consumers . Writing in a similar vein Davidson (2012) notes that
this sense of emergency legitimates new “sustainable” approaches to urban planning. Sustainable cities are a topic of discussion
amongst planning experts legitimated and impelled forward by a sense of crisis. Visions of the sustainable city are responsible for
“mediating the relationship between climate change science and public policy” (Davidson 2012: 15). In developing his argument
throughout the paper Davidson points out it is easy to see these plans, particularly in an age of municipal austerity, taking the form
of a gentrified response to climate change: some places will get nice landscaping while others will be
subjected to the next Katrina. In his view they are a kind of “acting out” an adaptive response for
some communities to climate change while preserving, intact the larger set of practices that give
rise to ecological challenges in the first place. These would include the continued pursuit of
economic growth without necessary reductions in carbon emissions, carbon neutral scheme
standing alongside coal-fired power stations, extensive suburban expansion with policies
advocating reduced auto-transit. (Davidson 2012: 14-15) As with Swyngedouw’s analysis of carbon
market fetishism the sustainable city has now become the ideal of expert-led urban planning and yet idealizing one thing and
doing another requires another twist in the fantasy of the sustainable city—cynical investment .
According to Davidson, it is really the psychic distance cynicism creates that allows fantasy
to function effectively. On the one hand fantasy creates a space for acting out a utopian,
gentrified “sustainable city” while 10 on the other hand leaving intact the usual processes that
contribute to urban and economic development, and fossil fuel consumption, as usual. All that is
required, Davidson argues, is that someone believes in sustainability sincerely for the planner to act-out sustainably, keeping at bay
the traumatizing recognition of the impotence of these half measures.

The alternative’s overidentification is the ultimate political act --- it’s a

precondition for addressing warming
Healy 10 --- Professor, Worcester State College (Stephen, "Psychoanalysis and the Geography of the
Anthropocene: Fantasy, Oil Addiction and the Politics of Global Warming”,
http://www.communityeconomies.org/site/assets/media/stephenhealy/PAGhealy.pdf)//trepka
What then does psychoanalysis offer in the way of an intervention in relation to addiction? For
Loose (2011) the process is complicated by how addicts tend to relate to enjoyment and the ego ideal
—they want to enjoy life too much and they expect to be able to do it perfectly. In this sense addicts are
the perfect subjects of the society of enjoyment. Freud famously observed that the point of analysis was to allow for the patient to
experience ordinary unhappiness in love and work. For the addict this is always a step down. According to Loose, Lacan’s attempt at
a general understanding of how patients can assume responsibility for their own desire in the context of a society of enjoyment has
particular implications for the treatment of addicts. We cannot return to a society of prohibition: just saying “no” doesn’t work. It is
equally unacceptable to abandon the addict to the tyrannical rule of enjoyment. According to Loose, Lacan’s answer
lay in recognizing that the nomination of desire can represent the subject symbolically, it can
consolidate their imaginary identity, or it can position them in relation to the real—to the limits
of symbolization. It was his conclusion that exposing the addict to the void of the real, “real
nomination ” would help the addict to attenuate their belief in an idealized enjoyment,
traversing the fantasy that structures addiction and, in so doing, enter into relation with others and
the social bond that implies. What might ‘real nomination’ look like for the oil addict , in a
practical and political sense ? The Transition Town movement, inspired by the popular writings of Robert Hopkins
(2008), seeks to create locally resilient post-carbon eco-municipalities that can continue to function socially and 15 economically.
Accepting both anthropogenic climate change and peak oil as reality the more than 300 transition towns seek to enroll citizens in a
democratic and participatory approach to surviving the end of the oil-age. Fittingly, Hopkins offers a guide for composing citizen
groups capable of researching and implementing an Energy Action Descent Plan in twelve steps. Similarly, solidarity economy
movements have sprung upon around the world seeking to build economies based on principles of mutual aid rather than
competition, democratic social inclusion, and non-capitalist economic development. These movements seek to build ecologically
resilient communities while injecting social-justice into collective considerations of ecological challenges. In the United States both
these social movements are in their incipient stages and yet their response to climate change seems quite a bit different than the
fetishism described by Swyngedouw or the “acting out” critiqued by Davidson. Solidarity NYC’s recent policy statement pointed out
how super-storm Sandy underscored the need to considered economic justice in responses to ecological challenges. Their position is
that NYC needs to minister to the social and economic vulnerabilities that attend climate change now, and in making this point
many solidarity economy practitioners mobilized a cooperative civil response to the effects of Sandy well-ahead of any municipal
initiatives (Solidarity NYC: 2013). Both of these movements reject ‘easy solutions’ in favor of the ordinary unhappiness that attends
a political process of building more ecologically and economically resilient communities. Rather than avoid social bond through
fantasies of quick fixes, geographic cures or denial, they have entered into the social bond by figuring out what to do when the
answers are not obvious. What the formation of this social bond seems to imply is a collective reworking of our relationship with the
society of enjoyment, one in which subjects may be in a position to be accepting of social, ecological and personal limits on
individual enjoyment. Indeed, following Roelvink and Zolkos (forthcoming) we might see these movements as
engaged in the 16 ‘embrace’ of climate change, a kind of hitting bottom in our relation to oil
addiction as a precondition for moving beyond it.
Alternative
 Alt - Overconformity
The alternative is a strategy of overconformity to the surveillance
state – rather than trying to change or transgress the law, we must
enthusiastically open ourselves to the gaze of the state to disrupt the
panoptic regime of surveillance
Krips, 10 – Andrew W. Mellon All-Claremont Chair of Humanities and Professor, Cultural
Studies, Claremont Graduate University (Henry, “The Politics of the Gaze: Foucault, Lacan and
Žižek,” Culture Unbound, Vol. 2, 98-99,
http://www.cultureunbound.ep.liu.se/v2/a06/cu10v2a6.pdf)//SY

It is clear that the film theoretic account of Foucault that Copjec uses, misrepresents Foucault’s
concept of the panoptic gaze, and that this misrepresentation, in turn, is responsible for her
insistence upon a gap between the Foucauldian and Lacanian concepts of the gaze. By correctly
representing Foucault, I have closed this gap. A fortiori I have changed the exclusively
conservative political valence that, in virtue of its function as a disciplinary tool that supports
the status quo, has come to be associated with the panopticon. In particular, I allow that, like the
Lacanian gaze, and depending on context, the Foucauldian gaze may have either disruptive,
Dionysian effects or conservative, Apollonian effects.5 Foucault’s “practices of freedom” are one
way of thinking the possibility of disruptive effects. Rather than pursuing this line of thought at
an abstract level, however, I turn finally to Slavoj Žižek’s work, in particular his concept of
overconformity, in order to show that, by reconceiving the panoptic gaze along the lines that I
have suggested, new political possibilities arise for opposing modern regimes of surveillance.
Central to Žižek’s account of the modern state is the concept of “an obscene underside of the law ”,
namely widespread practices – petty tax evasion, speeding, walking on the grass, etc – which,
although strictly speaking illicit, are unofficially tolerated. This network of practices is sustained
thanks to what Žižek calls an “ideological phantasy” that keeps them an “open secret” – everyone
knows about and participates in them in private, but no one mentions them, let alone publicly
flaunts participating in them. Such practices constitute points of failure of the law in so far as
they fall in an indeterminate zone in relation to legal categories: on the one hand, in so far as
they are tolerated they are not straightforwardly illegal, but, on the other hand, neither are they
legal; and as such, constitute a fundamental illegality at the heart of the legal system. Žižek’s point
is that, rather than undermining the law, the obscene underside of the law sustains it – the law is
tol-erated because of the little secret pleasures that people derive from its obscene underside. In
Lacanian terms, we may say that the obscene underside of the law is the set of necessary but
repressed points of failure of the legal system – in short, it is the symptom of the legal system. In
particular, in the context of a legal state apparatus that is held in place by a panoptic system of
surveillance, the obscene underside of the law is a liminal zone of high anxiety that, like the
Emperor’s body under his new clothes, is obscenely visible to each of his subjects in the privacy of
their own visual field, yet must be shrouded in a cloak of invisibility in the public realm. This is the
site of the gaze. How are we to oppose such a system, which seemingly coexists with, indeed
depends upon its own systematic transgression? According to Žižek, not by acts of resistance, since
the system is readily able to accommodate, indeed depends upon such acts.6 Instead, Žižek
suggests opposition through acts of overconformity, which, rather than protesting let alone
breaking the law, insist upon it to the letter, even when ideological “common sense” suggests
otherwise. In particular, this means a refusal to turn a “blind eye” from manifestations of law’s
obscene underside. As Žižek puts it: “Sometimes, at least – the truly subversive thing is not to
disregard the explicit letter of Law on behalf of the underlying fantasies, but to stick to this letter
against the fantasy which sustains it….Is not an exemplary case of such subversion-through-
identification provided by Jaroslav Hǎ sek’s The Good Soldier Schweik, the novel whose hero
wreaks total havoc by simply executing the orders of his superiors in an overzealous and all-too-
literal way (Žižek 1997: 30, 22, 31). What constitutes such strategies of overconformity in the
context of a modern panoptic regime of surveillance? Answer: openly/publicly sticking to the
letter of the law by refusing the cloak of invisibility that shrouds the law’s points of failure; in other
words, by refusing to indulge what Žižek calls “the ideological fantasy ”, orchestrating a direct
encounter with the objet a qua gaze. To put it in Žižek’s terms, it is a matter of “actively
endorsing the passive confrontation with the objet a, bypassing the intermediate role of the screen
of fantasy” (Žižek 1997: 31). To be specific, it is matter of not merely saying but also acting out
publicly what everyone knows in private but dares not say: not merely announcing in public that
the Emperor is naked, but arresting him for indecent exposure. By Lacanianizing Foucault, as I
have done here, we are able to understand the logic behind such heterodox strategies for
opposing modern regimes of surveillance.

Submitting to surveillance as a form of exhibitionism serves as a form

of resistance against structures of power
Koskela, 4 – Senior Lecturer, Department of Geography, University of Helsinki (Hille,
“Webcams, TV Shows and Mobile phones: Empowering Exhibitionism,” Surveillance and
Society, Vol. 2, 2/3, 207-208, http://queens.scholarsportal.info/ojs/index.php/surveillance-
and-society/article/viewFile/3374/3337)//SY

While, as argued, in the televisualisation of human lives individuals increasingly ‘disappear’, the
home webcams can be interpreted as a form of ‘bringing back’ the subject. In contrast of being
targets of the ever-increasing surveillance, people seek to play an active role in the endless
production of visual representations. Their shows include a “notion of self-ownership” (Mann,
2002: 533). They seek to be subjects rather than objects. In other words, it can be claimed that
what they actually do is reclaim the copyright of their own lives. The logic is simple: if practically
anyone else can circulate one’s images, why not do it oneself. The choice to present ones private
life publicly can be understood as a form of exhibitionism. In most cultures it is considered
‘normal’ that you do obscuring gestures in order to protect your private life. You close the
curtains when it’s dark outside and light inside. You don’t appear publicly if naked or in
underwear. You don’t allow anyone to see your sex life, unless you want to make pornography.
In this respect it is a radical act to install a camera that shows your private life to an unknown
audience. This, however, raises a question how we understand exhibitionism? If installing a
home webcam is exhibitionism, is it automatically a form of sexual perversion? Or is it possible to
understand exhibitionism as a positive term? Could we reclaim the term, redefine it and de-
sexualise it? Could it be cultural critique? Or perhaps an emancipatory action? One of the first,
most famous and also most examined (however, recently abolished) cameras has been the
JenniCAM by Jennifer Ringley. In 1996 she installed a camera in her college dormitory room
continuing her ordinary daily life under the gazes of the global audience in the Internet. While
inviting the gaze of the world into her private space, she conducted her everyday tasks, did her
aerobic exercises, celebrated her birthdays – and also, occasionally, had sex. This ostensibly
minor change in the conventional code of what can and what cannot be shown hit deeply in the
collective cultural understanding of looking and being looked at. As Jimroglou argues in her
article analysing the JenniCAM (2001: 286) it “reveals cultural tensions surrounding
epistemological conceptions of vision, gender, and identity and raises questions for future
conversations regarding the role of technology in the representation and construction of
gendered subjects”. Jenni created a paradoxical stage, playing with conventional moral codes, in
which she “stabilizes and yet disrupts the process of subject formation by repeating yet resisting
cultural norms” (Jimroglou, 2001: 291). After keeping up the camera for a while Jenni received
threats – more precisely, was demanded to ‘pose’ at particular time for one of her net-admirers
(see Burgin, 2002). In one sense her ‘show’ was a way of creating a subject capable of resisting
the traditional readings of female embodiment, however, at the same time it “would seem to
offer the perfect heterosexual male fantasy” (Jimroglou, 2001: 287). The harassment she faced
was a form of cyberstalking (Adam, 2001). She closed the camera for a while, but then
eventually put it back again. When she was asked why she chose to reinstall the camera she replied
“I felt lonely without the camera” (quoted in Burgin, 2002: 230). I find this statement striking. It
places the camera into a position of a companion, or perhaps a pet. Or perhaps a part of Jenni
herself? The camera can be interpreted as a component in an integration of body and technology,
an object embedded in a ‘cyborg subjectivity’ (Haraway, 1997) where the corporeal and the
mechanic fuse into each other forming an entirety. The life of Jennifer Ringley has been analysed in
a psychoanalytical context, the image being seen as a window, a mirror, a fetish, a cinema etc. (e.g.
Jimroglou, 2001; Burgin, 2002; Zizek, 2002). My aim here is not to provide another
psychoanalytical explanation. Rather, I use her as an example of what is happening in the field
of vision. She is a particular case, indeed, but she is a pioneer rather than an exception. Since the
mid 1990s home webcams have become more and more popular and spread all around the
world. I shall apply to this phenomenon some of the concepts that are well known in the video
surveillance discussion: power, control, and agency. Regime of order / regime of shame Jenni’s
story made me think about something that could be called ‘empowering exhibitionism’. With the
cameras Jenni and others like her discuss with two fundamental regimes through which power
operates. I shall call these the regime of order and the regime of shame. These can be understood
as two common ways of thinking how visibility and transparency connote with power and control.
By the regime of order, I mean the ways in which society regulates individuals. Gathering
knowledge is seen as a form of maintaining control, a look equates with a “judgmental gaze”
(Burgin, 2002: 235). Everyday life is regulated, not only potential criminal acts. The regime of
order was perhaps most clearly seen taking place in the former socialist countries but it also has
its role in the capitalist world. A telling example of this is what Presdee (2000) has called the
‘criminalisation of culture’. By the regime of shame I mean individuals’ internalisation of control,
in the Foucauldian sense. The idea of having or doing something that cannot be shown. The
basic ‘need’ for privacy. The regime of shame keeps people meek and obedient as efficiently as any
control coming from outside. Rejecting it, is unacceptable and immodest. Further, these controls
coming from outside and from inside are most effective when functioning together: the
combination of fear and shame ensures submissiveness. Indeed, home webcams challenge these
both. By revealing their private intimate lives individuals refuse to take part in these two
regimes. If this is exhibitionism that succeeds in overcoming these two, then exhibitionism can
truly work as a form of empowerment. The liberation from shame and from the ‘need’ to hide leads
to empowerment. Conceptually, when you show ‘everything’ you become ‘free’: no one can
‘capture’ you any more, since there is nothing left to capture. These voluntary shows have
something to do with power, but it is difficult to grasp what exactly. Home webcams seem to be
opening up radically new subjectivities, which are yet to be understood (cf. Featherstone and
Burrows, 1995). What Jimroglou (2001: 289) argues in interpreting JenniCAM is that it
“challenges traditional definitions of the subject and poses a unique way to conceive of
subjectivity and the agency and power that is implied therein”. It is difficult to place home
webcams into the ordinary conceptualisation of power. While a subject and an object are ‘fused’,
as happens when the ‘object’ of a camera simultaneously “oversees her own viewing” and, hence,
is “refuting and resisting the traditional representations of objectification” (Jimroglou, 2001:
292), the essence of power seems to fade away. The differentiation between dominating power
and resisting power might be helpful here. Sharp and others (2000: 2) define dominating power
as “[...] that power which attempts to control and coerce others, impose its will upon others, or
manipulate the consent of others”. In contrast they define resisting power as “[...] that power
which attempts to set up situations, groupings or actions which resist the impositions of
dominating power” that “can involve very small, subtle and some might say trivial moments [...]”
(Sharp et al., 2000: 3). This latter definition applies quite well to the lives lived with home
webcams. Home webcams perhaps do not fit into the oldfashioned understanding of resistance,
but resistance, indeed, may take new unexpected forms, being pluralised rather than homogenous,
concealed rather than exposed. Webcams aiming at increasing visibility rather than hiding from
surveillance, can be interpreted as a form of confrontation, surveillance turned into spectacle – a
form of resistance.

The alt is overidentification – unconditional submission to the

demands of the surveillance state allows overt subversion of the
system – has empirically worked to counter surveillance
Parker 7 – Parker is a practising psychoanalyst, an analyst member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, works
with the Research Institute for Health and Social Change at Manchester Metropolitan University and is involved in editing over a
dozen academic journals. (Ian, 2007, ‘The truth about over-identification’, in P. Bowman and R. Stamp (eds), pp. 4-5, London:
Continuum. [ISBN: 978-0-8264-9061-2], http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?
q=cache:XmVnkwDqOHkJ:www.discourseunit.com/papers/parker_papers/2007%2520B%26S%2520Book
%2520Overidentification.doc+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us // SM)
Overidentification: A resistant subversive practice The ‘work of culture’ is viewed quite differently by Lacan, of course, and the ego is not hailed as the triumphal centre of the
subject, so let us turn to the second way of conceptualising overidentification. This second way revels in overidentification and is a resistant
subversive practice; it is directed against rational and irrational faces of authority, the reasonable
calls for order and the obscene supplement of the law. Overidentification now operates as a
strategy for making the conditions of possibility for the rule of the master visible
in such a way as to make that rule impossible . The concept of overidentification in this radical form
originates from the punk movement in Ljubljana in the early 1980s , in a politically-charged punk
scene that faced a peculiar combination of repression and tolerance in the last years of the Tito regime. The
combination of surveillance that aimed to identify and isolate active dissidents , and indulgence that

attempted to suffocate and recuperate the rest of the population, was but a particularly intense version of form s of ideological control in

the rest of Europe. Art activists knew this, which is why the strategy of overidentification was ratcheted up a step when Slovenia broke from Yugoslavia in 1991 and was

proclaimed as being at last a free and autonomous capitalist country. The opposition to Tito-Stalinism in Slovenia began with punk, and a first step to a

strategy of resistance organised around overidentification was the formation of Neue Slowenische
Kunst (NSK) in 1984. Different components of NSK – the design group New Collectivism, the fine artist members of Irwin, and the band Laibach, for example –
targeted the symbolic infrastructure of the regime, ridiculing and undermining it,
but in such a way that it was difficult for the authorities to explicitly condemn or
suppress it. This political conceptual art practice is where Žižek is coming from, and it is crucial to take this into account if we want to grasp what he has been
attempting to do with Lacanian theory to read Hegel played out on a stage populated with Marxist categories, theory that was forged in and against a disintegrating regime that
Overidentification here takes the system at its word and takes the bizarre
itself claimed allegiance to Marxism.

contradictory demands of the authorities more seriously than the system takes itself, so seriously
that it cannot bear that knowing participation but cannot refuse it. This is not merely a parody of totalitarianism but
functions as if it were an obsessive identification with it, playing out exactly what a system of power
demands of its supporters in its overt messages but what that system also needs to distance itself
from, as part of its ameliorative attempts to buffer itself from criticism and to contain the criticism
it must permit. For example, the New Collectivism design group submitted a poster for Yugoslavia’s ‘Youth Day’ in 1987, the year when it was Slovenia’s turn to come
up with the main publicity for an event that also marked Tito’s birthday. The panel of judges dutifully praised the design – a muscular figure leaning forward holding a torch out
into the foreground – as embodying the spirit of Yugoslav socialist youth. It transpired that the original design was from 1936 German national socialist propaganda. The
resulting scandal raised questions about symbolic formations operating through the ideological state apparatuses, and that ‘Youth Day’ turned out to be the last.
The affirmative is a futile effort to hide from the gaze of surveillance –
the alternative is to embrace and understand visibility as a means of
resistance
Koskela 3 – Senior Lecturer, Department of Geography, University of Helsinki (FI) (Hille, Vol 1, No 3 (2003): Foucault and
Panopticism Revisited, “‘Cam Era’ — the contemporary urban Panopticon”, http://www.surveillance-and-
society.org/articles1(3)/camera.pdf // SM)
Control is
Urban space will always remain less knowable and, thus, less controllable than the restricted panoptic space.
never completely hegemonic. There is always an element of resistance. Surveillance
can be turned to ‘counter-surveillance’, to a weapon for those who are oppressed. As Surveillance
Camera Players – a theatre group from New York presenting for surveillance cameras – show, it is possible to ‘play’
with surveillance cameras; to make opposing and critical comments (Surveillance Camera Players, 2000).
Webcams aiming at increasing visibility rather than hiding from the gazes can also be interpreted as
a form of resistance. Lyon (2001) has pointed out, there is not much an individual could do to resist the
multiple forms of surveillance. However, resistance may also take a form of ‘a choreographed
demonstration of cooperation’ (Faith, 1994: 39). It is not homogenous but pluralized. What we are facing
right now is ‘the cam era’ – an era of endless representations. Arguably, we have arrived at the point where ‘we
live in a society that prefers the sign to the thing, the image to the fact’ (Weibel, 2002: 219). There is
no way to escape it; we will just have to try to understand it. Eventually, it may be so that
the multiplied representations work as a more effective form of resistance than
the efforts to avoid the gaze(s).

Increasing visibility effectively resists the controlling gaze of

surveillance – this prevents surveillance from being interpreted as a
threat
Koskela 3 – Senior Lecturer, Department of Geography, University of Helsinki (FI) (Hille, Vol 1, No 3 (2003): Foucault and
Panopticism Revisited, “‘Cam Era’ — the contemporary urban Panopticon”, http://www.surveillance-and-
society.org/articles1(3)/camera.pdf // SM)
However, reciprocally there may be fascination in being seen, as the amount of ‘webcams’ showing public
as well as private daily lives demonstrate (see for example Burgin, 2002). While being under surveillance may generally be
involuntary, it is also the case that ‘many people are seeking to increase their visibility’ (Groombridge, 2002: 43). Just

as the new forms of control are widespread, so are the forms of antipode and
resistance created . No longer is panoptic surveillance , necessarily, interpreted as a threat
but rather ‘as a chance to display oneself under the gaze of the camera’ (Ernst, 2002: 461).
Visual representations are often connected with sexuality. Pictures circulated in the Internet range
from young women turning the real-life images into pornography (by charging the viewers of their
home pages) to gay communities building a (global) collective identity by presenting their lives in
the net. The same point is valid in the ‘reality shows’ in TV, such as Big Brother (e.g. Weibel, 2002). ‘The
algebra of surveillance structures the reveries of voyeurism, exhibitionism and narcism’ (Tabor,
2001:125).
 Alt – Overconformity (Drone-Specific)
Embracing rather than curtailing drone surveillance dispels the violent fantasies of
US counterterrorism
Zulaika, 13 – Professor and Director, Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, Reno (Joseba,
“Drones and fantasy in US counterterrorism,” Journal for Cultural Research, 7-8)//SY ***gender-
modified

The latest development in this technological aestheticization are the drones. Ten thousand feet
above in the sky, they are a further step in the sensorial distancing from the targeted enemy. The
enemy is no longer a real body even for the warrior attackers but now a mere image. The eye perceives
not the fatal consequences but the precision of the goal, the geometry of the operation, the beautiful
execution in reaching and destroying the target. Aesthetics is needed to shut up perception into what the
framers of the event want perceived. The drone industry has evolved in close association with science
fiction in secretive places such as “Area 51” in the Nevada dessert close to Las Vegas. In case, we are
not sure about the aestheticization of this industry, Area 51 has been the setting for more than sixty
movies, TV shows, and video games (Singer, p. 138). There is a Science Fiction Channel with a TV series
about Eureka, the town set by the Pentagon for scientists to work and live in. The popularity of science
fiction, despite its admittedly “nerd” quality, is undeniable. Roughly ten percent of all books belong
currently to science fiction and fantasy, without counting major authors who write “techno-thrillers.” In
the film industry, Star Wars was the blockbuster that began the genre; of the top ten most watched movies
six are science fiction; among the most popular TV shows, many have been science fiction (Singer, pp.
150–169). What Benjamin demanded from art was to undo the corporeal alienation of the senses, “to
restore the instinctual power of the human bodily senses for the sake of humanity’s self-preservation, and
to do this, not by avoiding the new technologies, but by passing through them” (Buck-Morss, p. 5).
Restoring the human bodily senses is what counterterrorism’s strategy of tabooing avoids at all
costs: the Terrorist should not be seen or heard, and any attempt at “understanding” his [or her]
alleged political or moral claims is highly suspect as equivalent to “justifying” them and already
giving in to his [or her] pretenses. Projecting oneself into terrorist subjectivity is tantamount to
making an apology for the monster. Being an ethnographer of terrorists becomes anathema since
no communicative link, let alone bodily contact, with them is permissible; the ethnographer’s first
premise of participant observation is that you must be in the presence of the bodies, faces, interactions,
primary institutional settings of the people you write about. Truman Capote would never be allowed to
interact with terrorists the way he did with multiple murderers (Zulaika, 2009, pp. 37–59).
Counterterrorism, in short, has created a new industry of thousands of government organizations
and private companies (Priest & Arkin, 2011), with the mission of studying and catching subjects whom
they are never supposed to meet, see, or talk to – in short, do not mess with your fantasy relationship
with the tabooed Terrorist by actually having a real bodily contact with the feared/desired Monster.
What Benjamin required from art was similarly the full restoration of the body senses against the
aesthetic alteration we observe in fascistic manipulation of the human sensorium by showing us the
beauty of war while hiding from our perception the resulting bodily horrors. And for this there is no
better way than “passing through” those very technologies. The best way to counteract the aesthetic
beautification of “Shock and Awe” over Iraq, the new kind of voyeurism afforded by wars fought
afar with vastly superior technologies and without risks for those watching it on TV, would have
been for the TV cameras to show the thousands of charred bodies on the ground. Fascistic
aesthetization consisted for Benjamin in such artistic manipulation. Following Benjamin’s advice, we
should perhaps postulate the use of robotics to restore the senses fully. To begin with, an initial
consequence of the allegedly all-seeing surveillance vision of the drones would be to dispel the
deceitful secrecy surrounding counterterrorism . Could they free us from such false pretenses as
Saddam Hussein having WMDs? Could they perhaps help us uncover plots such as the one previous
to 9/11? Where counterterrorism has gone stray is in its inability to rightly interpret terrorist threats
and its ignorance of terrorist subjectivities. There would be no greater antidote to counterterrorist
fantasies than full electronic knowledge of the actual weapons, movements, and organizational
links of the terrorists. Robots, their salesmen tell us, have an “undervalued advantage” that derives
precisely from the fact that “they don’t carry all our wonderful ‘human baggage’” (Singer, p. 65). Drones
do not have hangovers or heartbreaks; in particular they do not commit suicide. If anything, what you can
say about terrorists is that, in their inhumanity, they carry far too much “human baggage” – they carry all
the blindness of a man in love, the follies of a fanatic, the madness of a suicide. From Robespierre to
bin Laden, you could argue that humanity itself is at the root of all terrorism thinking and action.
Too frequently, the only exit terrorists can find to get rid of the burden of their human bodies –
plagued by unsolvable impasses, by the paradoxes of politics and ethics, by love and hatred – is by
killing others and themselves.
 Alt – Embrace Death Drive
Embrace the death drive
McGowan 13 Todd McGowan, Assoc. Prof. of Film and Television Studies at U. of Vermont. “Enjoying What
We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. Pgs. 19 – 22, 283-286. PWoods.
If we accept the contradictory conclusion that some idea of progress inheres in every system of
thought and that the psychoanalytic concept of the death drive shows the impossibility of progress,
this leaves psychoanalytic thought — and especially a psychoanalytic political project — on difficult ground. It
might explain the seemingly absolute pessimism of the later Freud, Freud after 1920, who appears to have abandoned his belief in
the efficaciousness of the psychoanalytic cure. One of his final essays, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” written in 1937 (just
two years before his death), lays bare Freud’s doubts concerning our ability to break from the power of repetition. Here, Freud
conceives of subjects’ refusal to abandon castration anxiety and penis envy as emblematic of the intractability of repetition. He
notes: “At no other point in one’s analytic work does one suffer more from an oppressive feeling that all one’s repeated efforts have
been in vain, and from a suspicion that one has been ‘preaching to the winds,’ than when one is trying to persuade a woman to
abandon her wish for a penis on the ground of its being unrealizable or when one is seeking to convince a man that a passive attitude
to men does not always signify castration and that it is indispensable in many relationships in life.”31 That is, the repetition
that centers around traumatic loss acts as a barrier that we cannot progress beyond. In light of this
barrier, the formulation of a psychoanalytically informed political project demands that we dissociate
politics from progress as it is usually conceived . We cannot escape progress, and yet the traditional
conception of progress always runs aground. This paradox must become the foundation of any
authentic psychoanalytic politics. It demands that rather than trying to progress toward
overcoming the barrier that separates us from the good society, we begin to view identification with
the barrier as the paradoxical aim of progress. The barrier to the good society — the social
symptom — is at once the obstacle over which we continually stumble and the source of our
enjoyment.32 The typical politics of the good aims at a future not inhibited by a limit that constrains
the present. This future can take the form of a truly representative democracy, a socialist utopia, a
society with a fair distribution of power and wealth, or even a fascist order that would expel those
who embody the limit. But the good remains out of reach despite the various efforts to reach it. The
limit separating us from the good society is the very thing that constitutes the good society as such .
Overcoming the limit shatters the idea of the good in the act of achieving it. In place of this pursuit,
a psychoanalytic politics insists on identification with the limit rather than attempting to move
beyond or eliminate it. If there is a conception of progress in this type of politics, it is progress toward the obstacle
that bars us from the good rather than toward the good itself . Identification with the limit involves
an embrace of the repetition of the drive because it is the obstacle or limit that is the point to which
the drive returns. No one can be the perfect subject of the drive because the drive is what
undermines all perfection. But it is nonetheless possible to change one’s experience within it. The
fundamental wager of psychoanalysis — a wager that renders the idea of a psychoanalytic political project thinkable — is that
repetition undergoes a radical transformation when one adopts a different attitude toward it . We
may be condemned to repeat, but we aren’t condemned to repeat the same position relative to our
repetition. By embracing repetition through identification with the obstacle to progress rather than
trying to achieve the good by overcoming this obstacle, the subject or the social order changes its very
nature. Instead of being the burden that one seeks to escape, repetition becomes the essence of one’s
being and the mode through which one attains satisfaction. Conceiving politics in terms of the
embrace of repetition rather than the construction of a good society takes the movement that
derails traditional political projects and reverses its valence. This idea of politics lacks the
hopefulness that Marxism, for instance, can provide for overcoming antagonism and loss. With it, we
lose not just a utopian ideal but the idea of an alternative future altogether — the idea of a future no longer
beset by intransigent limits — and this idea undoubtedly mobilizes much political energy.33 What we gain, however,
is a political form that addresses the way that subjects structure their enjoyment . It
is by abandoning the terrain of the good and adopting the death drive as its guiding principle that
emancipatory politics can pose a genuine alternative to the dominance of global capitalism rather
than incidentally creating new avenues for its expansion and development. The death drive is the
revolutionary contribution that psychoanalysis makes to political thought. But since it is a concept relatively
foreign to political thought, I will turn to various examples from history, literature, and film in order to concretize what Freud means
by the death drive and illustrate just what a politics of the death drive might look like. The chapters that follow trace the implications
of the death drive for thinking about the subject as a political entity and for conceiving the political structure of society. Part 1
focuses on the individual subject, beginning with an explanation of how the death drive shapes this subjectivity. The various
chapters in part 1 trace the implications of the death drive for understanding how the subject enjoys, how the drive relates to social
class, how the drive impacts the subject as an ethical being, and how the subject becomes politicized. The discussion of the impact of
the death drive on the individual subject serves as a foundation for articulating its impact on society, which part 2 of the book
addresses, beginning with the impact of the death drive on the constitution of society. Part 2 then examines how the conception of
the death drive helps in navigating a path through today’s major political problems: the inefficacity of consciousness raising, the
seductive power of fantasy, the growing danger of biological reductionism and fundamentalism, the lure of religious belief, and the
failure of attempts to lift repression. The two parts of the book do not attempt to sketch a political goal to be attained for the subject
or for society but instead to recognize the structures that already exist and silently inform both. The wager of what follows is that
the revelation of the death drive and its reach into the subject and the social order can be the
foundation for reconceiving freedom. The recognition of the death drive as foundational for
subjectivity is what occurs with the psychoanalytic cure . Through this cure, the subject abandons the
belief in the possibility of finding a solution to the problem of subjectivity. The loss for which one
seeks restitution becomes a constitutive loss — and becomes visible as the key to one’s enjoyment
rather than a barrier to it. A political project derived from psychoanalytic thought would work to
broaden this cure by bringing it outside the clinic and enacting on society itself . The point is not, of course,
that everyone would undergo psychoanalysis but that psychoanalytic theory would function as a political theory.
Politically, the importance of psychoanalysis is theoretical rather than practical. Politically, it doesn’t matter whether
people undergo psychoanalytic therapy or not. This theory would inaugurate political change by insisting not on the
possibility of healing and thereby attaining the ultimate pleasure but on the indissoluble link between our enjoyment and loss. We
become free to enjoy only when we have recognized the intractable nature of loss. Though
psychoanalytic thought insists on our freedom to enjoy, it understands freedom in a
counterintuitive way. It is through the death drive that the subject attains its freedom. The loss that
founds this drive frees the subject from its dependence on its social environment, and the repetition
of the initial loss sustains this freedom. By embracing the inescapability of traumatic loss, one
embraces one’s freedom, and any political project genuinely concerned with freedom must orient
itself around loss. Rather than looking to the possibility of overcoming loss, our political projects
must work to remain faithful to it and enhance our contact with it. Only in this way does politics
have the opportunity to carve out a space for the freedom to enjoy rather than restricting it under
the banner of the good. [CONTINUES ON PAGE 283}There is no path leading from the death drive to utopia. The death
drive undermines every attempt to construct a utopia; it is the enemy of the good society . It is thus not
surprising that political thought from Plato onward has largely ignored this psychic force of repetition and negation. But this does
not mean that psychoanalytic thought concerning the death drive has only a negative value for political theorizing. It is possible
to conceive of a positive politics of the death drive . The previous chapters have attempted to lay out the political
implications of the death drive, and, on this basis, we can sketch what a society founded on a recognition of the
death drive might look like. Such a recognition would not involve a radical transformation of society: in one sense, it would
leave everything as it is. In contemporary social arrangements, the death drive subverts progress with
repetition and leads to the widespread sacrifice of self-interest for the enjoyment of the sacrifice
itself. This structure is impervious to change and to all attempts at amelioration. But in another
sense, the recognition of the death drive would change everything. Recognizing the centrality of the
death drive would not eliminate the proclivity to sacrifice for the sake of enjoyment, but it would
change our relationship to this sacrifice. Rather than being done for the sake of an ultimate
enjoyment to be achieved in the future, it would be done for its own sake. The fundamental
problem with the effort to escape the death drive and pursue the good is that it leaves us unable to
locate where our enjoyment lies. By positing a future where we will attain the ultimate enjoyment
(either through the purchase of the perfect commodity or through a transcendent romantic union or through the attainment of some
heavenly paradise), we replace the partial enjoyment of the death drive with the image of a complete
enjoyment to come. There is no question of fully enjoying our submission to the death drive. We
will always remain alienated from our mode of enjoying. As Adrian Johnston rightly points out, “Transgressively
overcoming’ the impediments of the drives doesn’t enable one to simply enjoy enjoyment.”1 But we can transform our
relationship to the impediments that block the full realization of our drive. We can see the
impediments as the internal product of the death drive rather than as an external limit. The
enjoyment that the death drive produces also achieves its infinitude through self-limitation. It
revolves around a lost object that exists only insofar as it is lost, and it relates to this object as the
vehicle for the infinite unfurling of its movement. The lost object operates as the self-limitation of
the death drive through which the drive produces an infinite enjoyment. Rather than acting as a mark of the
drive’s finitude, the limitation that the lost object introduces provides access to infinity. A society founded on a
recognition of the death drive would be one that viewed its limitations as the source of its infinite
enjoyment rather than an obstacle to that enjoyment. To take the clearest and most traumatic example in recent
history, the recognition of the death drive in 1930s Germany would have conceived the figure of the Jew not as the barrier to the
ultimate enjoyment that must therefore be eliminated but as the internal limit through which German society attained its
enjoyment. As numerous theorists have said, the appeal of Nazism lay in its ability to mobilize the enjoyment of the average German
through pointing out a threat to that enjoyment. The average German under Nazism could enjoy the figure of the Jew as it appeared
in the form of an obstacle, but it is possible to recognize the obstacle not as an external limit but as an internal one. In this way, the
figure of the Jew would become merely a figure for the average German rather than a position embodied by actual Jews. Closer to
home, one would recognize the terrorist as a figure representing the internal limit of global capitalist
society. Far from serving as an obstacle to the ultimate enjoyment in that society, the terrorist
provides a barrier where none otherwise exists and thereby serves as the vehicle through which
capitalist society attains its enjoyment. The absence of explicit limitations within contemporary
global capitalism necessitates such a figure: if terrorists did not exist, global capitalist society would
have to invent them. But recognizing the terrorist as the internal limit of global capitalist society
would mean the end of terrorism. This recognition would transform the global landscape and
deprive would-be terrorists of the libidinal space within which to act. Though some people may
continue to blow up buildings, they would cease to be terrorists in the way that we now understand
the term. A self-limiting society would still have real battles to fight. There would remain a need for
this society to defend itself against external threats and against the cruelty of the natural universe.
Perhaps it would require nuclear weapons in space to defend against comets or meteors that would
threaten to wipe out human life on the planet. But it would cease positing the ultimate enjoyment in
vanquishing an external threat or surpassing a natural limit. The external limit would no longer
stand in for a repressed internal one. Such a society would instead enjoy its own internal limitations
and merely address external limits as they came up. Psychoanalytic theory never preaches, and it cannot help us to
construct a better society. But it can help us to subtract the illusion of the good from our own society. By depriving us of this illusion,
it has the ability to transform our thinking about politics. With the assistance of psychoanalytic thought, we might reconceive politics
in a direction completely opposed to that articulated by Aristotle, to which I alluded in the introduction. In the Politics, Aristotle
asserts: “Every state is a community of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some good; for everyone
always acts in order to obtain that which they think good. But, if all communities aim at some good, the state or political community,
which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest
good.”3 Though later political thinkers have obviously departed from Aristotle concerning the question of the content of the good
society, few have thought of politics in terms opposed to the good. This is what psychoanalytic thought introduces. If we act on
the basis of enjoyment rather than the good, this does not mean that we can simply construct a
society that privileges enjoyment in an overt way. An open society with no restrictions on sexual
activity, drug use, food consumption, or play in general would not be a more enjoyable one than
our own. That is the sure path to impoverishing our ability to enjoy, as the aftermath of the 1960s has made
painfully clear. One must arrive at enjoyment indirectly. A society centered around the death drive
would not be a better society, nor would it entail less suffering. Rather than continually sacrificing
for the sake of the good, we would sacrifice the good for the sake of enjoyment. A society centered
around the death drive would allow us to recognize that we enjoy the lost object only insofar as it
remains lost.
Their refusal to embrace the movement of the drive results in all
forms of violence
RHIZOMATICK 2012 (I am a Belgian philosophy student from Leuven university, “A POLITICS OF THE DEATH
DRIVE,” Sep 22, http://rhizomatick.wordpress.com/2012/09/22/a-politics-of-the-death-drive/)
Suffering has in this context a double meaning: on the one hand there is the suffering of the trauma,
but on the other hand there is the suffering of repression . One could even draw a link with
Benjamin’s distinction between law-enforcing violence and divine violence. The death drive is the
negation of this latter kind of suffering but repeats the first. It is this first characteristic, its defiance
of repressive suffering, that makes Adorno say that every view of utopia in the present age
resembles death (Beckett is his example). Utopian thinking wants to free the non-identical, that which
doesn’t conform to our contexts of meaning, from identification and repression. It is in this sense that we
can speak of a politics of the death drive. According to Adorno, the death drive is even an inescapable
political fate. Our contexts of meaning dialectically turn into their opposite and become the
violence of a “second nature” (i.e. a culture that we are so used to that we feel it as if it was our nature).
The trauma of nature is repeated in the genocides of the 20th century, the oppression in the
culture industry, etc. Freud knew that very well when he said that the ego tries to protect itself from
the death drive ( and also from the force of nature) not only by repressing it, but also by deflecting
its violence unto others. The agression of the fascist, the racist or the speciesist is the deflected
agression of the death drive against the ego. For the fascist actually envies the image of the Jew as the
non-person of a lower nature. The fascist himself wants to become a piece of nature.
 Alt – Politics of Desire
Debate is structured by an agential fantasy --- the plan is a worthless
academic offering that is answered and alleviated by judges only to
restart the cycle --- the aff and WTO Protestors share a common
refusal to surpass politics of direct demand--- the alternative is not a
new demand but rather a no to the affirmative which lets us break
apart the fantasy and allow political subjectivity that can name and
claim what it wants without calling on an insensible symbolic other
Lundberg 12 --- Professor and Communication Strategies Consultant (Christian, Lacan in Public,
Published by The University of Alabama Press, Project Muse)//trepka
On Resistance: The Dangers of Enjoying One’s Demands The demands of student
revolutionaries and antiglobalization protestors provide a set of opportunities for interrogating
hysteria as a political practice. For the antiglobalization protestors cited earlier, demands to be added
to a list of dangerous globophobes uncannily condense a dynamic inherent to all demands for
recognition. But the demands of the Mexico Solidarity Network and the Seattle Independent Media
project demand more than recognition: they also demand danger as a specific mode of representation .
“Danger” functions as a sign of something more than inclusion, a way of reaffirming the
protestors’ imaginary agency over processes of globalization . If danger represents an assertion of
agency, and the assertion of agency is proportional to the deferral of desire to the master upon whom the demand is placed, then
demands to be recognized as dangerous are doubly hysterical. Such demands are also demands for a certain kind
of love, namely, the state might extend its love by recognizing the dangerousness of the one who makes the
demand. At the level the demand’s rhetorical function, dangerousness is metonymically connected with the
idea that average citizens can effect change in the prevailing order, or that they
might be recognized as agents who, in the instance of the list of globalophobic leaders, can
command the Mexican state to reaffirm their agency by recognizing their dangerousness . The
rhetorical structure of danger implies the continuing existence of the state or governing
apparatus’s interests, and these interests become a nodal point at which the hysterical demand is
discharged. This structure generates enjoyment of the existence of oppressive state policies as a
point for the articulation of identity. The addiction to the state and the demands for the state’s
love is also bound up with a fundamental dependency on the oppression of the state:
otherwise the identity would collapse. Such demands constitute a reaffirmation of a hysterical
subject position: they reaffirm not only the subject’s marginality in the global system but the
danger that protestors present to the global system. There are three practical implications for
this formation. First, for the hysteric the simple discharge of the demand is both the beginning
and satisfaction of the political project. Although there is always a nascent political potential in performance, in this
case the performance of demand comes to fully eclipse the desires that animate content of the demand. Second, demand
allows institutions that stand in for the global order to dictate the direction of politics . This is
not to say that engaging such institutions is a bad thing; rather, it is to say that when antagonistic engagement with certain
institutions is read as the end point of politics, the field of political options is relatively constrained. Demands to be
recognized as dangerous by the Mexican government or as a powerful antiglobalization
force by the WTO often function at the cost of addressing how practices of globalization
are reaffirmed at the level of consumption , of identity , and so on or in thinking through
alternative political strategies for engaging globalization that do not hinge on the state and the
state’s actions. Paradoxically, the third danger is that an addiction to the refusal of demands creates a paralyzing disposition
toward institutional politics. Grossberg has identified a tendency in left politics to retreat from the “politics of policy and public
debate.”45 Although Grossberg identifies the problem as a specific coordination of “theory” and its relation to left politics, perhaps a
hysterical commitment to marginality informs the impulse in some sectors to eschew engagements with institutions and
institutional debate. An addiction to the state’s refusal often makes the perfect the enemy of the good,
implying a stifling commitment to political purity as a pretext for sustaining a structure of
enjoyment dependent on refusal, dependent on a kind of paternal “no.” Instead of seeing
institutions and policy making as one part of the political field that might be pressured for
contingent or relative goods, a hysterical politics is in the incredibly difficult position of taking
an addressee (such as the state) that it assumes represents the totality of the political field;
simultaneously it understands its addressee as constitutively and necessarily only a locus of
prohibition . These paradoxes become nearly insufferable when one makes an analytical
cut between the content of a demand and its rhetorical functionality . At the level of the
content of the demand, the state or institutions that represent globalization are figured as
illegitimate, as morally and politically compromised because of their misdeeds . Here there is an
assertion of agency, but because the assertion of agency is simultaneously a deferral of
desire, the identity produced in the hysterical demand is not only intimately tied to but is
ultimately dependent on the continuing existence of the state, hegemonic order, or
institution. At the level of affective investment, the state or institution is automatically figured as
the legitimate authority over its domain. As Lacan puts it: “demand in itself . . . is demand of a presence or of an
absence . . . pregnant with that Other to be situated within the needs that it can satisfy. Demand constitutes the Other as already
possessing the ‘privilege’ of satisfying needs, that it is to say, the power of depriving them of that alone by which they are
satisfied.”46 One outcome of framing demand as an affective and symbolic process tied to a set of
determinate rhetorical functions enjoins against the simple celebration of demands as
either exclusively liberatory, as unproblematic modes of resistance, as exhausting the political,
or as nodes for the production of political identity along the lines of equivalence . Alternatively, a
politics of desire requires that the place of the demand in a political toolbox ought to be
relativized : demands are useful as a precursor to articulating desire; they are important when moored
to a broader political strategy; but they are dangerous if seen as the summum bonum of political life. A
politics of desire thus functions simply as a negative constraint on the efficacy of a politics of
demand, and as a practice a politics of desire asks that political subjects constantly test their
demands against the measure of desire or against an explicitly owned set of political investments
that envision an alternative world. It is the presence of this alternative , explicitly owned as a desired
end state of the political, that might become the prerequisite for desire-based solidarities instead of
demand-driven affinities, and as such, a politics of desire recognizes the inevitability and
productivity of frustrated demand as part and parcel of antagonistic democratic struggle.

The pursuit of success through external means justifies imperialism

and conflict because the anticipated pleasure is never enough ---
enjoying the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake shatters the re-
enactment of constitutive loss
McGowan 2013 --- Associate Professor at the University of Vermont (Todd, Enjoying What We Don’t
Have, Project Muse)//trepka
From Enjoyment to Pleasure Nowhere
is the retreat from enjoyment to pleasure more evident than in
the American response to the attacks of September 11, 2001. The attacks immediately
reinvigorated the social bond for a majority of Americans. The loss that they occasioned brought
subjects back to the shared sacrifice that defines their membership in American
society . Even as they were horrified by the image of the towers burning and then falling, most Americans, in the strict
psychoanalytic sense of the term, enjoyed the attacks insofar as the attacks allowed them to experience once again their social bond
with great intensity. This is a bond that one suffers, just as one suffers from a terrorist attack. Even though it followed from an
attack, this bond was not one formed through the male logic of friend/enemy, which is why the headline in Le Monde on September
12, 2001, could proclaim, “Nous sommes tous Américains.” 27 The bond formed around the September 11 attacks
was not initially a bond of exclusivity with a clear outside and inside. Any subject willing to
accede to the experience of loss could become a part of American society at that moment. The not-all of
the social bond occurs through the experience of loss, but the recognition of this type of bond is unbearable. One enjoys it without
deriving any pleasure from it. It is, in fact, painful. Not only is it painful, but it also entails complete humiliation. The society
experiences the shame of being a victim and enduring trauma — the shame of enjoyment itself.
In order to disguise this shameful enjoyment, the United States quickly turned to an assertion
of power that would carry with it the promise of a restored wholeness — the recovery of
an imaginary perfect security. The attack on Afghanistan brought pleasure to most members of
American society. This pleasure had the function of rendering the enjoyment that emerged
through traumatic loss bearable, but it could not fulfill its inherent promise. Enjoyment satisfi es,
and pleasure always disappoints. Th e disappointing nature of the attack on Afghanistan paved the way to
the subsequent attack on Iraq in a further attempt to find an actual pleasure equal to
what we anticipated. In terms of American society, these foreign wars serve as alibis for the enjoyment of
the traumatic attacks themselves. Because we seek respite from the loss that binds us, we flee from the social bond
despite our purported desire for it. The authentic social bond exists only in the shared experience of loss — that is, only according to
the female logic of not-having. But the attack on Iraq also illustrates the inescapability of the enjoyment attached to loss. The Iraq
War clearly follows from the male logic of having and aims at producing the pleasure resulting from possession: the United
States would conquer a recalcitrant dictator and obtain a firm ally in a globally significant region. This is
both the stated justification for the war and the explanation offered by critics who see it as an exercise in
American imperialism . For both the perpetuators of the war and its critics, the war concerns having, despite the
different inflections they give this idea. But the result of the war is the failure of having and the renewed experience of loss. The
pursuit of the pleasure involved in having returns American society to the traumatic loss involved in the September 11 attacks. Of
course, no one fights wars with the express intention of losing them, but every war brings with it sacrifice and loss,
which is ultimately the substance of the social bond and the source of our ability to enjoy that
bond. The pursuit of the pleasure of having leads to the loss that inevitably accompanies this
pursuit. Imperial powers do not att empt to stretch their military and economic reach to the point that it breaks because of an
inescapable will to power or a biological urge for infi nite expansion. Th e conquering drive of empires has its roots in the search for
what no amount of imperial possession can provide — the enjoyment of the experience of loss. Empires conquer increasing
quantities of territory in order to discover a territory that they can’t conquer. In this same way, the Afghanistan War disappointed
the American leadership because it didn’t provide even the possibility for loss. Donald Rumsfeld’s lament that the
country didn’t have any targets to bomb points in this direction. Iraq, in contrast, promised a
possible defeat, and if it hadn’t, Syria or Iran would surely have come within the sights of the
Bush administration. Whatever the proffered justification or hidden motivation ,
powerful societies ultimately go to war in order to reenact a constitutive loss and
facilitate the enjoyment that this loss entails.28 This is the case not just with war but with
any positive project that a social order takes up. Building a monument like the Eiffel Tower provided French society
with a possession that allows for collective identification. But the work involved with the building involved a great sacrifice in time
and in money. When we think of the Eiffel Tower, we rarely think of the sacrifice required for its construction; instead, we think of
the sense of identity that it offers. It provides a positive point of identif cation for France itself as a nation, and French subjects can
find pleasure through this identification. Nonetheless, the enjoyment of the Eiffel Tower, in contrast to the pleasure that it offers,
stems from the sacrifice required to construct it. Every finished societal product — such as victory in Iraq, the beauty of the Eiff el
Tower, smooth roads on which to drive — promises pleasure, but this pleasure primarily supplies an alibi for the enjoyment that the
sacrifices on the way to the product produce. These sacrifices allow us to experience the social bond by
repeating the act of sacrifice through which each subject became a member of the social order. It
is not so much that the pursuit of pleasure backfires (though it does) but that it is never done
simply for its own sake. We embark on social projects not in spite of what they will cost us
but because of what they will cost us.29
Enjoying the process of desire in itself solves --- avoids enemy
construction and shifts the organization of desire from the plan to
desire itself
McGowan 2013 --- Associate Professor at the University of Vermont (Todd, Enjoying What We Don’t
Have, Project Muse)//trepka
There is no path leading from the death drive to utopia. The death drive undermines every attempt to construct
a utopia; it is the enemy of the good society. It is thus not surprising that political thought from Plato onward has largely ignored
this psychic force of repetition and negation. But this does not mean that psychoanalytic thought concerning the death drive has only
a negative value for political theorizing. It is possible to conceive of a positive politics of the death drive. The
we can sketch
previous chapters have attempted to lay out the political implications of the death drive, and, on this basis,
what a society founded on a recognition of the death drive might look like . Such a recognition would not
involve a radical transformation of society: in one sense, it would leave everything as it is. In contemporary social
arrangements, the death drive subverts progress with repetition and leads to the widespread
sacrifice of self-interest for the enjoyment of the sacrifice itself. This structure is impervious to change and to
all attempts at amelioration. But in another sense, the recognition of the death drive would change everything.
Recognizing the centrality of the death drive would not eliminate the proclivity to sacrifice for
the sake of enjoyment, but it would change our relationship to this sacrifice. Rather than being
done for the sake of an ultimate enjoyment to be achieved in the future, it would be done for
its own sake. The fundamental problem with the effort to escape the death drive and pursue the good is that it leaves us
unable to locate where our enjoyment lies. By positing a future where we will attain the ultimate enjoyment (either through the
purchase of the perfect commodity or through a transcendent romantic union or through the attainment of some heavenly paradise),
we replace the partial enjoyment of the death drive with the image of a complete enjoyment to come. There is no question of fully
enjoying our submission to the death drive. We will always remain alienated from our mode of enjoying. As Adrian Johnston rightly
points out, “Transgressively ‘overcoming’ the impediments of the drives doesn’t enable one to simply enjoy enjoyment.”1 But we
can transform our relationship to the impediments that block the full realization of our drive. We
can see the impediments as the internal product of the death drive rather than as an external limit. The enjoyment that the
death drive provides, in contrast to the form of enjoyment proffered by capitalism, religion, and utopian
politics, is at once infinite and limited. This oxymoronic form of enjoyment operates in the way that the concept does
in Hegel’s Logic. The concept attains its infinitude not through endless progress toward a point that
always remains beyond and out of reach but through including the beyond as a beyond
within itself. As Hegel puts it, “The universality of the concept is the achieved beyond, whereas that bad infinity remains
afflicted with a beyond which is unattainable but remains a mere progression to infinity.”2 That is to say, the concept
transforms an external limit into an internal one and thereby becomes both infinite and limited .
The infinitude of the concept is nothing but the concept’s own self-limitation. The enjoyment
that the death drive produces also achieves its infinitude through self-limitation. It revolves around a
lost object that exists only insofar as it is lost, and it relates to this object as the vehicle for the infinite unfurling of its movement.
The lost object operates as the self-limitation of the death drive through which the drive
produces an infinite enjoyment. Rather than acting as a mark of the drive’s finitude, the limitation that the lost object
introduces provides access to infinity. A society founded on a recognition of the death drive would be one that
view ed its limitations as the source of its infinite enjoyment rather than an obstacle to
that enjoyment. To take the clearest and most traumatic example in recent history, the recognition of the death
drive in 1930s Germany would have conceived the figure of the Jew not as the barrier to the
ultimate enjoyment that must therefore be eliminated but as the internal limi t through
which German society attained its enjoyment. As numerous theorists have said, the appeal of Nazism lay
in its ability to mobilize the enjoyment of the average German through pointing out a threat
to that enjoyment. The average German under Nazism could enjoy the figure of the Jew as it
appeared in the form of an obstacle, but it is possible to recognize the obstacle not as an external
limit but as an internal one. In this way, the figure of the Jew would become merely a figure for
the average German rather than a position embodied by actual Jews. Closer to home, one
would recognize the terrorist as a figure representing the internal limit of global capitalist
society. Far from serving as an obstacle to the ultimate enjoyment in that society, the terrorist provides a barrier
where none otherwise exists and thereby serves as the vehicle through which capitalist society
attains its enjoyment . The absence of explicit limitations within contemporary global capitalism necessitates such a
figure: if terrorists did not exist, global capitalist society would have to invent them. But
recognizing the terrorist as the internal limit of global capitalist society would mean the end
of terrorism. This recognition would transform the global landscape and deprive would-be
terrorists of the libidinal space within which to act. Though some people may continue to blow up buildings,
they would cease to be terrorists in the way that we now understand the term. A self-limiting society would still have real
batt les to fight. There would remain a need for this society to defend itself against external threats and against the cruelty of the
natural universe. Perhaps it would require nuclear weapons in space to defend against comets or meteors that would threaten to
wipe out human life on the planet. But it would cease positing the ultimate enjoyment in vanquishing an
external threat or surpassing a natural limit. The external limit would no longer stand in
for a repressed internal one. Such a society would instead enjoy its own internal
limitations and merely address external limits as they came up. Psychoanalytic theory never
preaches, and it cannot help us to construct a better society. But it can help us to subtract the illusion of the
good from our own society. By depriving us of this illusion, it has the ability to transform our
thinking about politics. With the assistance of psychoanalytic thought, we might reconceive politics in a direction
completely opposed to that articulated by Aristotle, to whichZizalluded in the introduction. In the Politics, Aristotle asserts: “Every
state is a community of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some good; for everyone always acts in order
to obtain that which they think good. But, if all communities aim at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest
of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good.”3 Though later
political thinkers have obviously departed from Aristotle concerning the question of the content of the good society, few have
thought of politics in terms opposed to the good. This is what psychoanalytic thought introduces. If we act on the basis of
enjoyment rather than the good , this does not mean that we can simply construct a society
that privileges enjoyment in an overt way. An open society with no restrictions on sexual activity, drug use, food
consumption, or play in general would not be a more enjoyable one than our own. That is the sure path to impoverishing our ability
to enjoy, as the aftermath of the 1960s has made painfully clear. One must arrive at enjoyment indirectly . A society
centered around the death drive would not be a better society, nor would it entail less suffering. Rather than continually
sacrificing for the sake of the good, we would sacrifice the good for the sake of enjoyment. A
society centered around the death drive would allow us to recognize that we enjoy the lost
object only insofar as it remains lost.
 Alt – Collective Resistance
Coordinated and concerted efforts at awareness and resistance can
undermine the surveillance regime
Friesen et al. 12 – Dr. Norm Friesen is Canada Research Chair in E-Learning Practices at Thompson Rivers
University. His academic credentials include a PhD in Education from the University of Alberta. Andrew Feenberg, School of
Communication, Simon Fraser University. Grace Smith, Arapiki Solutions, Inc. (Norm Friesen, Andrew Feenberg, Grace Smith, and
Shannon Lowe, 2012, “Experiencing Surveillance”, pp. 82-83, (Re)Inventing The Internet,
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-94-6091-734-9_4 // SM)
Yar calls for a recognition of “the centrality of the consciousness of the subject” (2003, p. 261), and such a recognition, he argues,
“opens the question of panoptic power to precisely the phenomenological question of intentionality, what the subject does or does
not attend to in his relation to the world he encounters” (Yar, 2003, p. 261; emphasis in original). Our discussion has shown that
our world includes the limitations imposed by the “traceability” of the observed, objective, and
extended body, but also that these limitations are themselves qualified by their interpretable and
manipulable character. This holds out a certain promise in the face of the proliferating powers of
surveillance and dataveillance. Various stratagems of resistance are still possible. As Yar describes,
these can range from the concerted efforts of groups such as the CCTV players to the strategies of
those living (to a greater or lesser extent) “off the grid,” as well as to those constructing and
manipulating identities as hackers and thieves. Finally, as the events in Seattle in 1999 (and in other times
and places since) show, the sheer, mobile, physical mass of political protests still poses a
challenge to authority that is not easily controlled . As these examples suggest, it is not the self
and the body in isolation that present the greatest potential for resistance, but rather the aggregate
effect of combined corporeal presence, working together in coordinated action. To return to our earlier
example, Internet social activists such as those who use Facebook to organise activism, hacktivism or slacktivism, are
vulnerable to being ‘shut off’ since they do not own the means of production of their
communication (the country-registered Internet itself). This vulnerability, as well as other limitations in communication
‘freedom’, such as the ability of a government to also concoct profiles for the purposes of entrapment, was evident in the Arab
Spring (2011) and according to many is an omnipresent condition for citizens of China (Zhang and Fleming, 2005). However, as the
bank machine description indicated, i t is through tacitly coordinated action in the spaces of awareness of the self and other which
Michel Foucault called the “microphysics of power” rather than in his broader characterisation of dominant eras through
genealogies that significant aspects of surveillance and the “enforcement” of social norms take place (Foucault, 1980, 1996; see also
Paras, 2006). It follows that it is also in
this collective space, and through different structures of collective
awareness and action, that surveillance and the control it represents can be
undermined and resisted.
 Alt – Race Framing
We should view whiteness a technology of affect – only the
alternative’s intervention in the affective economy can undermine the
ways racialized violence is operationalized
Hook 5 Derek, professor of social psychology at LSE. “Affecting whiteness : racism as technology of affect”.
International journal of critical psychology, 16. Pgs. 74-99. PWoods.
It benefits us now to turn to the work of Sara Ahmed. Doing so allows us to reiterate certain of the above arguments from the unique
conceptual perspective she brings to these issues. Her notion of affective economies , to which I am much indebted,
suggests that we avoid viewing emotion as a private matter , as individual belonging or psychological
disposition, or, indeed, as something that simply ‘comes from within’ and then moves ‘outward towards
others’. By contrast, we need to appreciate how emotions ‘create the very effect of the surfaces or boundaries of
bodies and worlds’ (in press, p. 1) and do so by means of certain sticky associations, or bindings. ‘Bindings’ of this
sort – of love, and just as powerfully, of hate - manage crucial ideological alignments: of certain subjects with preferential
rights, of imagined nation with land, and so on. Positive alignments of this sort have a role to play – a role which is dynamically
related to and counterbalanced by negative attachments to particular others – in bringing imagined subjects together ‘through the
capitalization of the signifier “white”’ (p. 2). Although I am tempted to inject an element of discontinuity here – this signifier to my
mind is perhaps better approached as a tacit or sliding signifier, the silent denominator or force- field of investments I have
mentioned above – I agree wholeheartedly with Ahmed’s analysis: ‘ The ordinary white subject’ she suggests, ‘is a
fantasy that comes into being through the mobilization of hate, as a passionate attachment tied
closely to love’ (p. 3). Moreover:¶ It is the love of White, or those that are recognizable as White, which
supposedly explains this shared “communal” visceral response of hate. Together we hate [and love]
and this hate [and love] is what makes us together (p. 2).¶ Ahmed’s argument points us in the
direction of the affective consolidation of particular types of political subjects – subjects of
whiteness, or of Englishness, although other types can clearly be imagined - agentic subjects who are animated with
particular modes of nostalgia, longing and aversion. Although the rhetoric of hate does appear frequently in the
examples Ahmed draws on, the force of the register of love should also be emphasised (as I have done above). One cannot but be
struck by ‘ethical’ quality of much of this language, the degree to which so much of its central thrust requires various loving
attachments, be they those of heritage, belonging or historical oneness, as indeed is exemplified in Blunkett's commentary. This is
unsurprising: it is difficult to imagine a more effective discursive warrant than that of love to do the job of exclusion. The upshot of
this is that the full spectrum of positive emotions can be put to the work of hate, and frequently is, particularly so
within strategies of liberal democratic governmentality , where one cannot express, indeed conduct hate in any other
terms.¶ Not only do certain circulations
of affect bond subjects, creating forceful associations, attachments ,
we might say, without origins (attachments, that is, which feel as if they predate the assumption of any conscious
political agency). Such an order of affect is also able to do its work via a slippery signifier that never
needs be explicitly rendered in and of itself. This is not to make a routine distinction between connotative and denotative
routes of signification, rather it is to assert the fact of the affective substantiation of certain communities, which are, certainly,
imagined communities, but affective communities no less. What I have been building towards thus far is an argument about how the
strategic conduction of affect can function as an oblique mode of ontological production. This is a mode of production, a
means of constituting subjects that is capable of effecting passionate attachments – and equally
powerful divisions – that often speak louder than words and that typically feel as if they predate the
immediate history of either subject or community . My point, to be clear, is that ‘whiteness’ may be attained
not merely through overtly discursive or representational means . One is reminded here, in respect of the
discursive constitution of ‘whiteness’, of Homi Bhabha’s (1994) cautioning that the colonial stereotype must not be
understood merely as representational effect, but also, via psychic processes of identification, as
mode of subjectification. ‘Whiteness’, indeed, is not a formation of discourse alone - certainly not in
the sense of explicit textual or predicative forms - ‘ whiteness’ comes to feel robust, ‘substantial’
also on the basis of circulations and investments of affect, movements that are not always
directly codifiable . This line of discussion touches on a slightly different question, one that I consider to be a crucial factor in
the analysis of racism, and one, alas, that I cannot do justice to here (although I have broached it elsewhere (Hook, in press)). This is
the question of ‘extra- discursive’ modes of subject constitution and how they come to be operationalised as
insidious technological means for conducting and entrenching racist patterns of affect. Such
technologies are indeed pernicious certainly inasmuch as such patternings, routings and conductions of affect (such as
that of ‘whiteness’) often feel as if they exist authentically, individually, in a state prior to the intervention of social and
symbolic meaning – after all, as may be argued, the dynamics of affect do often seem to exist in preverbal forms – despite the fact
that they are of course clearly amenable to the exploitation of various political and discursive systems. In
order to emphasise my point about the seemingly ‘prediscursive’ force of the bonds of ‘whiteness’,
it helps to point to a crude – and most certainly provisional - distinction between ‘emotion’ and ‘affect’:
emotion might be understood as more directly discursive, more immediately aligned to signification
(socially legible, codifiable, something which may be ‘put into words’). Affect, by contrast, may be
understood as less secure in its connection to representation, less fixed to a set of physical or
discursive codes, less immanently knowable. If this is the case – and I should emphasise the difficulties and political
dangers in attempting to draw too hastily such a dividing line between the discursive and the ‘prediscursive’ (or between ‘discursive
consciousness’ and ‘practical consciousness’, in Giddens’ (1984) terms) – then we must be prepared to grapple with
‘whiteness’ in its most seemingly ‘pre- discursive’ forms of attachment and belonging, in those affective
modes which despite seeming ‘pre-ideological’ are of course, at the same time, potent resources of ideological
sentiment and experience.¶ This is the point I wish to end with: simply to insist that ‘whiteness’ as a
constellation of values and investments – ‘a relational interplay of attractions and aversions’ (Jay, 1984, p. 14), to draw
on Adorno’s notion of the force-field - must be approached as in part a function of affective modes of
constitution and affirmation. It is true perhaps that the most recalcitrant and indeed sublime aspects of ‘whiteness’ are best
approached in just such a way, as formations of affect, whether such formations take on the regularised forms of
fantasy, or of anxiety, or even of fetishism (see Hook, 2005). Unless we are able to grapple with the
vicissitudes of such modes of affective formation, and indeed, with how these modes come to be
operationalised as technological elements of broader procedures of governmental logic, we fail to
appreciate the tenacity and slipperiness of ‘whiteness’ in this (post)Empire era.
 Alt Solves Terrorism
Disrupting Americans’ constructed fear of terrorists and desire to pursue them is
the only way to stop committing paranoid violence – the alternative is a prerequisite
to solving terrorism
Zulaika, 13 – Professor and Director, Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, Reno (Joseba,
“Drones and fantasy in US counterterrorism,” Journal for Cultural Research, 14-15)//SY

But fantasy not only cements reality; in its semantic excess, and as illustrated by Dylan’s bitter song (after
the biblical allegory and following trenchant commentaries such as Sø’sren Kierkegaard), creative fantasy
at the service of art and thought has also the potential to interrogate and contest the claims of the real.
“Man, you must be puttin’ me on.” Fantasy provides the frame and the setting for the individual who
is caught in the narrative of images. This implies that the very identity of the subject of fantasy is put
into question by the multiple identifications available in a fantasy setting; the mastery the subject claims
over the fantasy is already undone by the fantasy’s own power of fragmentation. The “utter ambiguity
that surrounds the notion of fantasy” makes it accountable, on the one hand, for “its beatific side, in
its stabilizing dimension, the dream of a state without disturbances”, whereas, on the other hand, “in its
destabilizing dimension … [in] all that ‘irritates’ me about the Other” (Zizek, 2012, p. 685) creates
hell. Totalitarianism’s lesson is “the co-dependence of these two aspects of the notion of fantasy”:
the Nazi’s dream of harmonious community producing the ghost of the paranoid Jewish plot;
Stalin’s “new Socialist man” compulsively producing new enemies. At the closing of the cold war, the
symbolic fiction of a “new world order” under American hegemony gave rise to the spectral
apparition of “the terrorist” as the ever-present apocalyptic threat in a nuclear era. Fantasy 1
requires fantasy 2. We are abiding here by the Lacanian thesis about fantasy, namely, that in the
opposition between dream and reality, fantasy is on the side of reality – fantasy is the support that gives
consistency to we call reality (Zizek, 1989, p. 44). This does not translate into assumptions such as
that reality is an illusion or life a dream. In the fantasy-scene the desire is not simply “satisfied” but
constituted – “through fantasy, we learn ‘how to desire’” (Zizek, 1989, p. 118). How does a given object
or person become the object of our desire, How does it begin to contain some X, some unknown
quality, something which is ‘in it more than it’ and makes it worthy of our desire? by entering the
framework of fantasy, by being included in a fantasy-scene which gives consistency to the subject’s
desire. (Zizek, 1989, p. 119) And what is the tabooed figure of “the terrorist” but an individual
possessing such “unknown quality” that is “in it more than it”, an X that provokes intense fear and
desire? It begins to contain such unknown apocalyptic power by accessing the framework of fantasy. The
terrorist followers are themselves the first ones to enter the fantasy framework by which their heroes
become superhuman beings. I have heard from former ETA activists who, upon being released from
prison, women would approach them and be surprised as to how “small” and “normal” they were – their
actual presence did not correspond to their fantasies. Counterterrorists’ views of the feared terrorists
they are hunting day and night, but whom they are unlikely to ever meet, seem no less immersed in
fantasy; one might even guess that they are likely to prefer not to interact with the terrorists in part
because they are more comfortable with the fantasy of the almost omnipotent enemies than
actually knowing the pathetic reality of cave-dwelling people riding on mules such was bin Laden at
the height of his influence – a fantasy that will sustain their desire to fight them to death as well as
keep their budgets. For Lacanians “the fantasy is conceived as a construction allowing the subject to
come to terms with [the] traumatic kernel” (Zizek, 1989, p. 133). Current American politics provides
much evidence of the flight from the traumatic real into the realm of fantasy. It was the Defense
Secretary Robert Gates who, smarted by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, made the comment that any
future defense secretary who would advise the president to send the American army into the
Middle East “should have his head examined.” Those who advised George W. Bush to go to Iraq had
followed the thinking by which, as a presidential aide put it, “ We’re an empire now, and when we
act, we create our own reality ,” while scorning journalists for being mere commentators of an already
fabricated “reality-based community” (Rich, 2006, p. 4). At the core of this “reality” is the war on terror
– which allows for an alternate reality sustained by the unknown yet intensely fantasized figure of
the Terrorist. The ultimate goal of the Lacanian psychoanalyst is to awaken the subject from the
spell of fantasy . The final moment of the analysis is defined as “going through the fantasy”: not its
symbolic interpretation but the experience of the fact that the fantasy-object, by its fascinating
presence, is merely filling out a lack, a void in the Other. There is nothing “behind” the fantasy; the
fantasy is a construction whose function is to hide this void, this “nothing” – that is, the lack in the
Other. (Zizek, 1989, p. 133) The question is therefore how to traverse the fantasy. Traversing the
fantasy surrounding the terrorist does not mean confronting the reality as it is; what it implies is
rather accepting the inconsistencies inherent to the figure itself. Thus, how to gain a minimal
distance from this fantasmatic frame, how to unhook desire and enjoyment from the pursuit of the
hunted terrorists, becomes a critical political problem .
Framework
 Framework – Toplevel
Predictable dialogue is an impossibility – The 1NC’s encounter with
negativity is critical to relevant discussion
Berlant and Edelman 14 Lauren and Lee, Prof of English @ U Chicago and Prof of English @ Tufts U. “Sex, or the
Unbearable”. 2014. Pgs. ix-xii. PWoods.
Reimagining forms of relation entails imagining new genres of experience. These chapters try to extend the generic contours of theoretical

by making exchange, dialogic give- and- take, a genuine form of encounter

writing . By that we mean that throughout this book we try to

Resistance, misconstruction,
attend not only to what we can readily agree upon but also to what remains opaque or unpersuasive about the other’s ideas, what threatens to block or stymie us.

frustration, anxiety, becoming defensive, feeling misunderstood: we see these as central to our
engagement and to our ways of confronting the challenge of negativity and encounter
with each other . Far from construing

indispensable to our efforts to think relationality.

such responses as failures in the coherence or economy of our dialogues, we consider them An academic culture in the United States

Structurally
still dominated by the privilege of the monograph only rarely affords occasions for critics to converse with each other in print. That may reflect conversation’s low place in the hierarchy of literary genres.

determined by interruption, shifts in perspective, metonymic displacements, and the giving up of

control, conversation complicates the prestige of autonomy and the fiction of authorial sovereignty
by introducing the unpredictability of moving in relation to another. One never can know in
advance to what one’s interlocutor will respond or what turns the conversation may take through
the associations of a single word. We are aware that what we’re saying here sounds a lot like what we say about sex—and that, of course, is the point. As the book proceeds, the structural resonances among sex,

This discussion starts, as all discussions do, in the middle of many

politics, and theory become ever more insistently the focus of our analysis.

idioms and vernaculars and at the point where many genealogies converge. Entering a conversation
always means entering it with an idiolect that has to adjust to someone else’s, difficult as that may
be. As a consequence, our own conversation includes and exceeds us at once; references taken for
granted by one person are foreign to another; historical contexts or philosophical grounds are
never fully shared alignments of context or reference take shape
(nor could they be, given the infinite expansion of knowledge that would require);

simultaneously as gaps, missed encounters, and blockages. So the process of clarification on which
we embark must operate immanently from within the conversation rather than by appealing to an
objectivized understanding of a set of issues that the conversation unproblematically presupposes.
Each of us offers a set of terms that start to look different when the other uses them, and each of us develops ways of testing out, querying, and accounting for the other’s conceptualizations. This process might make any reader, including the writers themselves,

But conversation, like

desire some dictionary or reference point to stabilize the conversation or long for an accompanying seminar to fill in the gaps and provide us with background knowledge to make the going smoother.

relationality, proceeds in the absence of such a reference point or undisputed ground, often, in fact,
producing the fiction of that ground only retroactively. The question of assumed knowledge can
also manifest itself as a question of address. Any given reader may feel that the conversation is
taking place elsewhere, failing to address her or him, or that it shifts its address unpredictably from
inclusion to exclusion. Being in relation invariably involves the animation of distance and closeness;
in that sense even direct address can be felt as indirect and acknowledgment can seem like
misrecognition. Both of us had that experience in the course of these conversations, and it would be surprising if our readers did not have it too. But the process of negotiating those shifts, of finding one’s bearings, is at the center of the
ongoing project of relationality we explore in this text. To sustain the critical dialogue we put fidelity to our ideas and their consequences above the performance of our friendship, on the one hand, or the scoring of points, on the other. (Whether or not we succeed, of

Though friendship serves as the ground from which these dialogues arise, it doesn’t
course, is not for us to say.)

prompt us to deny our differences or obscure our intellectual or political commitments. At the same
time, those commitments themselves are what these dialogues put to the test. In the course of these conversations we both experienced

The
clarification, surprise, and, most important, transformation; there were moments, that is, when the contours of our own understandings noticeably shifted and something of the other’s language or intellectual imperatives affected our own.

differences in our political and theoretical investments did not, of course, disappear, but something
else, new ways of inhabiting those investments, appeared For all the insistence of such as well.

differences, though, we acknowledge at the outset that we came to these dialogues with similar
intellectual backgrounds and theoretical allegiances. Some might see that as a limitation, a failure
of the dialogue to allow for an encounter with the disturbances of multiple kinds of difference. But
even in the narrowcast of an encounter with the similar we recognize no putative sameness of self,
no sovereignty, no coherence, and no identity that doesn’t reveal its own radical differences. To be sure, many

any encounter (with the

other encounters than this one both could and should take place—and encounters with other sorts of difference than those that develop here. But one of the points this book hopes to make is that

world, with another, or even with oneself) discloses a nest of differences that carry what Barbara Johnson so memorably called
“the surprise of otherness think together about the social, political, and
” (1987, 16). One of our goals, as we’ve already mentioned, is to

theoretical consequences of “negativity.” Negativity points to many kinds of relation in what

follows, from the unbearable, often unknowable, psychic conflicts that constitute the subject to the
social forms of negation that also, but differently, produce subjectivity. Generally negativity
signifies a resistance to or undoing of the stabilizing frameworks of coherence imposed on thought
and lived experience. In its disturbance of such totalizations, negativity enacts the dissent without
which politics disappears. Negativity, in this sense, is inseparable from the struggles of
subordinated persons to resist the social conditions of their devaluation. However, by challenging
the coherence of the categories through which the subordinated produce their claims for
legitimation, negativity can also become an obstacle to their organized resistance to things as they
are.This double valence of negativity accounts for its centrality to a set of debates that have occupied queer theory for some time—and that occupy our debate with each other here.
 Framework – AT: Fairness
The demand for fairness is grounded in envy --- this ensures even a
perfectly equal society is fraught with suspicions and resulting
violence
McGowan 2013 --- Associate Professor at the University of Vermont (Todd, Enjoying What We Don’t
Have, Project Muse)//trepka
This is why equality doesn’t solve the problem of the social antagonism . Rather than eliminating the
envy of the other’s enjoyment, a sense of justice exacerbates it . The demand for equality and
justice has its origins in envy of the other’s enjoyment . According to Joan Copjec, “Envy is not simply an
impediment, but the very condition of our notion of justice .”35 Because the idea of equality and justice
is rooted in envy, each member of society has constant suspicions about the others and their
commitment to forgoing pleasure for the sake of the social order as a whole. Suspicions
continually emerge , revealing that the social antagonism remains in force in such a way that makes
eruptions of violence inevitable.
 Framework – AT: Legal Education
Status quo legal education is just like the plan, a repeated, hysterical
demand expressed in a language that can never fully encompass
desire --- legal discourse subconsciously reinforces the structures of
oppression because of a refusal to recognize the relevance of
psychoanalysis
ARRIGO 98 --- Institute of Psychology, Law and Public Policy (BRUCE A., “REASON AND DESIRE IN
LEGAL EDUCATION: A PSYCHOANALYTIC-SEMIOTIC CRITIQUE”, International Journal for the Semiotics of Law VoI.XI no.31
[1998], Springer Link)//trepka
Critical commentary on the nature of law and legal education is rather commonplace. Significant contributions developed during the
Legal Realist eraZizand its successor the Critical Legal Studies (CLS) movement 2 exposed the layered dimensions of subjectivity,
hierarchy and politics, governing both legal practice and legal discourse. Most recently, the legacy of the CLS agenda and its acerbic
critique of legal education, reasoning, and decision making has found growing legitimacy in the writings of several structural and
post-structural commentators. The criticisms found in "second wave" feminist sociolegal studies 3 and the divergent intellectual
trends encompassing the field of legal semiotics 4 are notable here. Collectively,
these works reflect the " classist ,
racist , sexist , and domineering arrangements " privileged in legal thought re-valorized
and institutionalized through the training of the neophyte law student. 5 This juridical
instruction is both a form of epistemological indoctrination and political socialization
which, asZizintend to argue, is unnecessarily circumspect , incomplete , and oppressive . Missing
from these critical reviews to date is any attempt to account for the intrapsychic and
intersubjective processes at work which primordially shape and give meaning to legal
discourse, 6 resulting in the encoded articulation of its unique logic in the instructional milieu . In
other words, despite advances by Legal Realists and CLS scholars identifying the value-laden and non-neutral dimensions of law-
talk, scant attention has thus far been directed toward an explication of those unconscious or pre-
thematized forces which define the linguistic coordinates of the law fundamentally
communicated to the novice student through his/her experience of legal education. 7 This essay will
consider what psycho-semiotic processes are at work informing the construction of (juridical)
discourse and knowledge constitutive of that reality known as legal education. Put another way, the aim here is to focus
primarily on the linguistic coordinates themselves governing the student's method of
indoctrination and socialization in the juridical sphere. One under-examined source for this
semiotic investigation both germane to the topic and rich in insight includes the
contributions of Jacques Lacan and selected ideas contained in his complex psychoanalytic
theory . 8 Although Lacan never addressed the question of legal education or the construction of jurisprudence per se, a
growing body of work continues to demonstrate the utility of Lacanian thought when exploring
questions in law 9 and criminology. 1° While there are many differences among these studies, several recurring themes of
import relevant to the dynamics of legal language and cognition are discernible: (1) the argot of lawspeak structures
juridical thought in ways that are not neutral ; (2) legal discourse signifies multiple and, at times,
contradictory meanings ; however, it is reduced to one anchored representation of reality (i.e.,
uni-accentuated desire) consistent with its own internal system of signs; and (3) because legal discourse privileges a
specialized grammar (i.e., its own system of signs), it functions to semiotically cleanse or
invalidate all other discursive codes, regarding them as outside the signifying sphere of the
juridicolinguistic communicative market. 11 As a collective, these principles, assume the form of linguistic (and
therefore social) oppression as manifested in an instructional milieu. In order to investigate the psycho-semiotic method of
indoctrination and socialization for the law student, two pivotal features of Lacan's psychoanalytic topography will be studied: (1)
the intrapsychic and intersubjective dimensions by which (juridical) discourse is conceived of as such and is expressed as articulated
pedagogical desire; and (2) the discursive structure through which conventional (legal) thought finds embodiment as the only
legitimated manifestation ofjouissance (Lacan's jouis-sens, j'ouis sens); that is, an enjoyment in sense or "I hear sense" in the law
school classroom. The combinatory effect of these two Lacanian formulae quashes students' juridical plenitude (sense of
completeness) such that they unconsciously experience jouissance as JO or as a lack ~as route) in their being,
as Lacan designates, as opposed to J~. The former is accessible to woman who are not-all, and by implication, others who are
disenfranchised (i.e., taw students). The latter is the upper limits of jouissance in a phallocentric Symbolic Order accessible to those
who assume the male discursive subject position. The first concept entails a cursory review of the three overlapping and
interdependent paired axes which functionally structure language resulting in semiotic production. These paired tropes include the:
(a) paradigmatic-syntagmatic semiotic axis; (b) condensation-displacement semiotic axis; (c) metaphoric-metonymic semiotic axis.
The second notion calls into question Lacan's Four Discourses, particularly the form which
desire embodies in the discourse of the master versus the discourse of the hysteric . In the
concluding section of the essay, speculation on the future of legal education and the development of a replacement instructional
discourse will be considered. Intraphychic and Intersubjective Semiotic Production In order to conduct a critique of the
"what happened" (the storytelling) within the instructional setting of a law school classroom,
several summary statements regarding the discursive features of Lacan's schema on discourse construction are warranted. 12 In
the Lacanian topography, the construction of reality emanates from the identification of
phenomenal images found among the floating sea of signifiers inhabiting the primary process
region (i.e., the unconscious or "Other"). These pre-thematized images or forms are saturated
with the Other's accented metaphorical-metonymical signifying practices and receive temporary
coherence, fleeting psychical clarity, in the act of naming (/e donner-horn). This "naming," at the most
conscious level, occurs at the paradigmatidsyntagmatic level of speech production. Thus, following a release of initial, excitatory
energy; energy in which one's visde de conscience is directed toward some pre-thematized sensory data, a view of reality (Lacan's
notion of desire or d~sir) is articulated. 13 Here, desire is a reference to the combinatory effects of subjectivity and discourse (self
and language) giving rise to a specialized grammar and circumscribed knowledge. 14 Within the juridic instructional milieu, the
legal method (and its attendant features including, boundary definition; defining relevance; and case analysis) provides a
narrowly established spatio-temporal frame of reference for semiosis and the articulation of
one's singularly felt juridical desire (i.e., the subject'spas toute or lack in being). Indeed, the method's
commitment to and esteem for the more positivistic and formatistic dimensions of
lawspeak, assumes a reductionistic appreciation for law-finding and legal reasoning. The
argot of the juridico-linguistic communicative market described here embodies a uniquely encoded form ofjouissance. This line of
inquiry has been the basis for several postmodern gender critiques of the law, 15 its method, 16 and (crimino)legal education. 17
Collectively, these positions demonstrate how the law is phallocratically-conceived, subtending feminine (or
alternative) ways of knowing . Accordingly, by generalizing this example, implicated in the (psycho-semiotic)
grammar of juridical education is a limited accentuation of discourse consistent with uni-accentuated (malespeak) desire, dismissing
or repressing the notion that students are situated within diverse, competitive, and, often, paradoxical semantic domains with their
overlapping and interdependent effects. Following this provisional reading of Lacanian psychoanalytic semiotics to date, it is
possible to assess the manner in which the three semiotic axes functionally structure discourse in the ossified legalistic paradigm as
conveyed to the neophyte law student vis-a-vis the instructional milieu. The position taken is that the presentation and
review of case material unfold much like the construction of any story . 18 Thus, much like any
narrative, the educational aim is to encourage the audience (students) to recognize, indeed
embrace, certain truth claims (i.e., the "official story") about the law. 19 The linguistic
parameters of this story are always and already pre-arranged). Moreover, at the level of intrapsychic and
intersubjective semiotic production, participants (primarily professors) must address a number of interrelated questions. By
integrating the previous analysis we can identify several lines of inquiry that are non-reflexively considered. Paradigm. What
legalistic jargon (words) speak(s) through me to support the thesis of today's lecture (i.e., the legal principles] under review? Put
another way, in the context of that discourse which presents itself to me, what case references canZizcite, what issues of law
canZizmention, what court opinions/rulings canZizquote, that buttress the lecture's stated thesis? Syntagm. What lines of analyses
announce themselves to me making possible the construction of an argument in support of the lecture's thesis, simultaneously
eliciting desired student responses and moving the discussion in the direction of clarifying the legal principle under consideration?
Further, if students disagree with the lecture's thesis, what additional lines of thought (combination of words) speak through me
enabling me to neutralize their positions and redirect their foci back to the lecture's original thesis? Metaphor. What pre-uttered
images appear before me which, when spoken, unwittingly situate students into the story wherein they adopt the case analysis and
regard its logic as compelling and true (i.e., a convincing narrative)? Metonymy. What lines of though announce themselves to me
directing students to an element of the lecture deductively linking the component to the larger legal principle? For example: in a
class on Legal Ethics the broader issue may be the meaning of zealous client advocacy in the context of ex parte communications. A
constitutive element addressing this theme includes the conditions under which there is a duty to inform opposing counsel of said
communication. The stated example assumes a metonymical function in that the whole (zealous representation) is understood
through the function of one of its illustrative parts (duty to inform). Law, Legal Education, and Lacan's Discursive Structuring
Mechanisms The interdependent and interactive effects of Lacanian semiosis are illustrative of the
psycho-semiotic journey through which discourse finds embodiment as articulated desire . A
constitutive feature of Lacanian intrapsychic and intersubjective semiosis is an explanation of how only certain expressions of desire
(i.e., Foucauldian discursive formations) receive legitimation. For our purposes, then, the question is how does the argot of law-talk
function as the only form of desire legitimated in the juridical instructional sphere? Recent studies exploring Lacanian
psychoanalytics have done much in the way of illuminating the discursive schematizations
which functionally structure language and thought. 2o These investigations provide accessible and useful
commentary on what Lacan himself identified in his 1969-1970 seminar as the idea of the Four Discourses 21. Studies in the
sociology of law 22 and in criminology/criminal justice 23 have applied the operation of the four discourses to selected topics within
these respective disciplines. In the section that follows,Zizexamine the psycho-semiotic process, indeed the dynamic conflict,
governing the operation of two of these formations; namely, the discourse of the master 24 versus the discourse of the hysteric.25 26
A. Legal Education and the Master Versus the Hysteric Discourses The construction of any Lacanian
discourse is produced by a quarter turn in the basic structure. The discursive arrangement of the discourse of the master is depicted
as follows: S1 .......... --)$2 $<-- .......... a In legal instruction there are master signifiers ("due process",
"wrongfulness", "diminished capacity", "interest balancing", "intent", "duty of care", "products
liability", etc.), assuming the position of agent and arousing certain effects in the receiver
of the coded message (i.e., the law student). Recall the upper left hand position is the location of the sender of the
message. These master signifiers while embodying the logic of legal discourse, symbolize an
imaginary and fragmented construction of desire. The stated signifiers are imbued with ideological content and
flied in with specialized meanings, representing a circumscribed knowledge consistent with the system-maintaining iterations of the
juridical educational apparatus. In the classroom setting, a story presented (e.g., case law), unfolds constructed as a coherent
narrative based upon a believable (plausible) sequence of eventsP The educator, situating him/herself and being inserted within the
preconfigured coordinates of the legal sphere, relies upon the elements of the narrative (its actors, settings, motivations, injuries,
etc.) and weaves together a logical chain of circumstances so that a "series of ideas is built up in the perception and
consciousness...of the spectator (student), [resulting in] a whole image." 28 This composite image, however, is typically derived from
contradictory, inconsistent and incomplete information. After all, there are at least two parties in the dispute presenting with
incompatible interests. The ambiguity is intensified particularly where the claims of both disputants seem plausible. In such
instances, the professor communicating meaning from within the coordinates of law-talk, creates an imaginary space, to be filled in
by students, where legitimation of the master signifiers are imbued with juridical desire. This is the manifestation ofjouissance
consistent with the unconscious force of law. 29 The selection of particular pieces of information constituting the facts, the
sequencing of these elements, and the semantic domain used to communicate both will foster a metonymical system of expression
constitutive of lawspeak. This (juridical) knowledge, passed on from teacher to student, represents a certain product. The absent
material in the product (i.e., other or more bits of information, alternative readings of the facts, different sequences for both),
although seeking affirmation in the law, is dedared non-juridical. This data represents that left-out knowledge or a, denied
symbolization in the master signifiers-- signifier/signified anchorings affirming truths which are themselves provisional, positional,
fragmented but which are, nonetheless, constitutive of the law. 3o The discursive schematization for the discourse
of the hysteric 31 is represented as follows : $ ......... ---> S1 a ~---- ......... $2 In this formation the split or
juridic subject (i.e., the novice student as $) is in the dominant position and endeavours to
communicate through the juridical instructional milieu his/her being and desire .
The student, however, in order to communicate meaning, in order to participate in "good" legal
reasoning, must invoke those master signifiers symbolizing the coordinates of lawspeak.
Here desire and being refer to the intra and interpsychic dynamics forming one's longings,
frustrations, aspirations, alienations, despairs, repressions, ambitions: in short, one's existential
constitution. Notwithstanding, the subject, as de-centered , is in search of meaning consistent
with his/her desire and search for plenitude. The other (here the unwitting instructor or even the insurgent
professor), relying upon the juridico-linguistic communicative market, attempts to incorporate, to embody, the divided (student)
subject's jouissance in the instructional process. Temporarily, the inductee's lack or whole in being (manque d~tre) is filled. In
this instance, the professor acknowledges the student's inability to express his/her desire
within the coordinates of law-talk.
Framework Links to Social Science
 Toplevel
Their framework argument is worse than our K—it’s not just unfalsifiable but fails
every standard of social theory
MUTZ 2008 (Diana, Department of Political Science and Annenberg School, University of
Pennsylvania, “Is Deliberative Democracy a Falsifiable Theory?” Annual Review of Political Science Vol.
11: 521-538)
Falsifiability is probably the single most intransigent issue in getting normative theory and
empirical research to speak to one another in the realm of deliberative theory. Several problems
conspire to make deliberative theory elusive in this respect. For some theorists, deliberation is
simply defined as intrinsically good. Obviously, such a claim renders empirical research
irrelevant (see, e.g., Stokes 1998). But even without the assumption of intrinsic goodness, more
complex problems hinder the interaction between empirical studies and political theory.
It is difficult to envision an empirical test that might produce evidence construed by theorists and
empiricists alike as disconfirming the claims of deliberative theory. This is because deliberation falls
short on many of the standards deemed essential to good social science theory , at least as the
theory is currently construed. Beyond the general issue of falsifiability, deliberative theory falls
short of meeting three requirements for productive social theory that are enumerated in
virtually any textbook:
1. clearly defined concepts;
2. specification of logical relationships among concepts within the theory;
3. consistency between hypotheses and evidence accumulated to date.
It is, of course, unfair to criticize a normative theory for lacking the characteristics required of productive
social science theory. But criticism is not my main purpose. Instead, I want to take seriously the
admonition that the two subfields should talk to one another. To make a dialogue possible, this normative
theory must be translated into the terminology of empirical social science and must then be subjected to
the standards of theory testing within the social science tradition. It is crucial to address these three
problems in order to accumulate useful empirical evidence on the potential of deliberative democracy.
Social scientists generally define “theory” as a set of interrelated statements intended to explain and/or
make predictions about some aspect of social life. Toward those ends, a good theory is supposed to have
well-defined constructs of general theoretical interest. It is supposed to describe logical associations
among these constructs (which are most often causal associations), and it should allow for connections
between the theoretical constructs and observable entities. When theories cannot meet these three
criteria, they are generally unproductive in advancing our understanding of the phenomenon of
interest.2
What happens when empirical researchers attempt to translate deliberative theory into these
terms? First, as Thompson points out, they discover a great deal of conceptual ambiguity as to what
should qualify as deliberation. Moreover, the definitions offered by theorists frequently conflate
causes (criteria defining deliberation) and effects (its beneficial consequences). Second, the tests
of deliberative theory offered to date typically do not develop well-specified explanations for the
relationships between deliberation and its many proposed benefits. Third, deliberative theory is
inconsistent with much of what is already known about political discourse in group contexts.
Many, though not all, of the hypotheses that flow from the deliberative framework are not well-
grounded in either previous theory or empirical evidence.

Their framework arguments fail every social scientific test

MUTZ 2008 (Diana, Department of Political Science and Annenberg School, University of
Pennsylvania, “Is Deliberative Democracy a Falsifiable Theory?” Annual Review of Political Science Vol.
11: 521-538)
Although it may seem desirable to let a thousand flowers bloom in this regard, if we cannot agree on
what the independent variable is, we cannot hope to systematically evaluate its impact .
Interestingly, the number of conceptions of deliberation is surpassed perhaps only by the number of
versions of social capital, another concept that has intrigued both theorists and empiricists. Perhaps a
certain amount of conceptual ambiguity is inherent in extremely rich concepts. Whatever the cause, the
lack of agreement about what constitutes deliberation makes it extremely difficult for empirical
researchers to address the claims of normative theory. How can one safely assert that
deliberation has occurred when there are no necessary and sufficient conditions routinely
applied to this concept? For those who study political discourse as it occurs in real-world
contexts, how can one decide if the type of discourse that transpired qualifies?
For theorists, this lack of agreement and uneven stipulation of definitions is less troubling. But for those
who want to know whether deliberation produces its promised benefits before they sink millions
of dollars of foundation money into encouraging more of it, the uncertainty is problematic
indeed. Thompson's (2008) review of what should and should not qualify according to normative theory
illustrates a desire not to exclude, but in so doing renders deliberation a far less useful concept for
empirical research than it might be. For example, Thompson suggests that ordinary political
discussion should be distinguished from the decision-oriented talk that constitutes deliberation.
But this argument is seemingly contradicted by the subsequent suggestion that “maintaining this
distinction should not be taken to imply that other forms of discussion are somehow less worthy of a place
in deliberative democracy, but we can more clearly retain the connection to the central aim of deliberative
theory if we treat those other activities as part of a larger deliberative process, rather than instances of
deliberation per se.” Likewise, Thompson suggests that although like-minded discussion does not
qualify as deliberation, “[T]hat is not to say that discussion among like-minded people cannot
contribute to deliberative democracy.”
Empirical researchers attempting to test deliberative theory can be forgiven for wanting to bang
their collective heads against a wall in reaction to definitions of this kind. What does it
mean to say that something is not part of deliberation but is part of the larger deliberative
process? And if one theorist's version of normative theory includes the requirement of consensus
decision-making whereas another's does not, then how do social scientists design studies that
address the implications of deliberative theory?
It is commonly claimed that empirical studies do not fully embrace deliberative theory, and of course this
statement is entirely correct. No study could include all criteria invoked by all theorists collectively, and to
do so would violate even other theorists’ conceptualizations of deliberation. Thus, the conversation
between theorists and empiricists is next to impossible if one aims to produce research that can
be used to decide whether to pursue deliberation at all, or whether such practices need
refinement in order to work beneficially. The common problem faced by empirical researchers is
that when benefits are not found from a given conceptualization of deliberation in a particular
study, the null findings are as easily attributed to the operationalization of deliberation as to the
theory itself. Given this state of affairs, it is difficult to envision disconfirming evidence that
would be widely accepted as such.

Their framework impact doesn’t meet the falsifiability standard

MUTZ 2008 (Diana, Department of Political Science and Annenberg School, University of
Pennsylvania, “Is Deliberative Democracy a Falsifiable Theory?” Annual Review of Political Science Vol.
11: 521-538)
The dialogue between political theorists interested in deliberative democracy and those who study
deliberative democracy empirically has been strained at best. As Thompson (2008) describes in this
volume, both groups seem to realize that they have much to gain from one another, yet frustration
remains on both sides due to our inability to accept one another's assumptions and even to understand
one another's terms. Indeed, for many political scientists, reading theorists’ accounts of deliberative
democracy can be aggravating. On the one hand, many of the assertions seem to cry out for
empirical verification. On the other hand, much of the empirical work in this vein has been
deemed irrelevant to the theory of deliberative democracy by political theorists.
Excellent reviews of this literature have been provided elsewhere (in addition to Thompson's article, see
also Ryfe 2005, Delli Carpini et al. 2004, Mendelberg 2002). My purpose here is to delve deeper into the
conversation—or lack thereof—between theory and empirical research in this important area to see what
progress might be made. In contrast to Thompson, I approach this dilemma from the perspective of
empirical social scientists who want to test the posited beneficial consequences of deliberative theory. The
general question before us as empirical researchers is: How can we take what has been, by its origins, a
normative theory and turn it into an empirically testable theory?
I begin with an overview of the problems involved in constructing deliberative democratic theory in terms
that satisfy the requirements for a productive and testable social theory. A great deal of the difficulty in
this conversation results from definitions of deliberative democracy that are too broad and that
effectively insulate the theory from falsification . Falsifiability—the possibility of refutation—is held to
be essential to the scientific method because it offers the possibility of scientific progress: Faulty theories
will encounter refuting evidence and will be discarded in favor of other theories. Philosophers of science
consider falsifiability an essential requirement for a theory to be deemed scientific (see Popper 1963);
some go so far as to say that unfalsifiable hypotheses are meaningless. As I describe below, unfalsifiable
aspects of deliberative theory translate into concrete obstacles that prevent testing and
improving the theory.

Lack of an ideal speech situation makes their framework claim non falsifiable
MUTZ 2008 (Diana, Department of Political Science and Annenberg School, University of
Pennsylvania, “Is Deliberative Democracy a Falsifiable Theory?” Annual Review of Political Science Vol.
11: 521-538)
The fact that the ideal conditions do not exist introduces a painful circularity into studies that
attempt to test whether deliberation produces any of the benefits that are theoretically
predicted. If negative evidence is produced by a study that attempts to look at the consequences
of deliberation, such evidence is easily dismissed because the discussion in question did not
meet all of the necessary and sufficient conditions to qualify as deliberation. Once again,
deliberative theory is rendered unfalsifiable.
 A2: Your Fault for Broadening
The aff’s claimed benefits for deliberation violate their theoretical basis—
attempting to account for both fairness and portable skills makes the benefits of
deliberation untestable
MUTZ 2008 (Diana, Department of Political Science and Annenberg School, University of
Pennsylvania, “Is Deliberative Democracy a Falsifiable Theory?” Annual Review of Political Science Vol.
11: 521-538)
Theorists are loath to exclude many kinds of political talk from the deliberative framework; in fact, the
trajectory has been toward progressively greater inclusiveness, incorporating emotional as well as rational
appeals, informal speech as well as rule-bound discourse, and so forth. This very openness delays progress
in understanding deliberation's consequences. If the deliberative umbrella is too broad, then it is not
clear how deliberative theory can be differentiated from any of dozens of other theories. Indeed,
much of the literature cited in overviews of evidence on deliberation does not purport to be
about deliberation so much as about persuasion, social interaction, procedural fairness, etc.
(see, e.g., Delli Carpini et al. 2004). Nor is it clear what a given confirmation or disconfirmation says
about deliberative theory. A more narrowly specified independent variable might better serve
progress toward understanding how to achieve the ends sought by advocates of deliberation.
 A2: Some Kinds of Deliberation Better than Others
Their argument amounts to “good deliberation is good”—it’s circular and
untestable
MUTZ 2008 (Diana, Department of Political Science and Annenberg School, University of
Pennsylvania, “Is Deliberative Democracy a Falsifiable Theory?” Annual Review of Political Science Vol.
11: 521-538)
In short, my quarrel is not with how theorists have chosen to define deliberation but with the fact that
the concept itself is a moving target. If every theorist's definition is somewhat different from the next,
then it is impossible to study deliberation in a way that theorists collectively find relevant to their work.
Upon encountering an unsupportive (or supportive) finding, it is far too easy to dismiss it as
uninformative because the deliberation that took place in that particular study did not satisfy all
of the prerequisites offered collectively by deliberative theory, even if it did satisfy some
theorists’ definitions.
The solution that theorists have generally offered is not a clear definition of this phenomenon
but an evaluative distinction between “good” deliberation and “bad” deliberation. If we grade the
many forms of deliberation along a continuous scale from good to bad, then we can predict that
more beneficial consequences will result from good deliberation than from bad. To the extent that
good deliberation actually brings about more of the beneficial consequences than bad
deliberation, we can conclude that deliberation is delivering the benefits that the theory
promises. The more that political discourse approaches the ideal of equal opportunities to speak,
for example, the more it will bring about the proposed benefits . The more reason-giving that occurs,
the more valuable should be the consequences of this activity. Fishkin (1995, p. 41) calls this continuum
“incompleteness”:
When some citizens are unwilling to weigh some of the arguments in the debate, the process is less
deliberative because it is incomplete in the manner specified. In practical contexts, a great deal of
incompleteness must be tolerated. Hence, when we talk of improving deliberation, it is a matter of
improving the completeness of the debate and the public's engagement in it, not a matter of perfecting it…
It is unclear, however, at what point a process of this kind is so “incomplete” as to be irrelevant
to the study of deliberation. Moreover, the logic behind the idea of a continuum of predictions is
not as simple as it first appears. For example, should bad deliberation merely produce fewer
beneficial effects than good deliberation? Or should bad deliberation produce deleterious effects ,
such that bad deliberation is worse than no deliberation at all? Moreover, are some evaluative
standards more important than others, such that no beneficial consequences should be expected
unless some minimal conditions are first met?
Because so many different criteria have been proposed for the deliberative ideal, using
evaluative standards is unfortunately no easier than establishing clear conceptual criteria. In
practice, good deliberation is often defined as deliberation that produces the desired
consequences outlined in the theory. This circularity makes it impossible to use this approach to
evaluate the claims of deliberative theory.

And their combination of link and impact arguments exacerbates this

MUTZ 2008 (Diana, Department of Political Science and Annenberg School, University of
Pennsylvania, “Is Deliberative Democracy a Falsifiable Theory?” Annual Review of Political Science Vol.
11: 521-538)
A related confounding of cause and effect manifests itself in two different kinds of claims involving
deliberation and its consequences. The more obviously difficult situation is when the independent
variable (deliberation) is defined in terms of its hypothesized effects. As Elster (1998, p. 9) notes,
empiricists tend to be interested in “whether and when the empirically identifiable phenomenon
of discussion has good results, rather than to define it such that it is intrinsically desirable.”
Theorists are more likely to treat deliberation as something to promote rather than evaluate . As
Fearon (1998, p. 63) notes, to facilitate meaningful empirical claims about deliberation, “we should
keep distinct (a) arguments for why more deliberation would be a good thing and (b) arguments
that in effect define deliberation or ‘deliberative democracy’ so that these entail good things.”
 A2: Portable Skills
Their link arguments and portable skills impacts are separate research questions—
this doesn’t meet the standards of social science and good research shows that
procedural rules aren’t necessary to solve their impact
MUTZ 2008 (Diana, Department of Political Science and Annenberg School, University of
Pennsylvania, “Is Deliberative Democracy a Falsifiable Theory?” Annual Review of Political Science Vol.
11: 521-538)
A second source of confusion in understanding the consequences of deliberation is studies that “test”
deliberative theory by focusing on the extent to which political discourse meets some set of qualifications.
Based on such assessments, some scholars infer various benefits from the quality of the discussion.
Just as an analysis of the content of a political advertisement tells us nothing about its effects on
voters, the content of deliberation tells us nothing about whether it changes its participants in
the directions theorists hope. More importantly, this confusion means that those claiming to “test”
or “evaluate” deliberative theory are often testing completely different hypotheses. For example,
some of the “tests” of deliberative theory identified by Thompson (2008) are examinations of
whether political discussion in a particular time or place meets the standards to be considered
deliberative. Does the discussion involve reason-giving, equal participation, and so forth? Other studies
also reviewed as empirical tests of deliberative theory evaluate whether, once discussion does meet
one or more standards for deliberation, it produces any of its theoretically claimed benefits.
These are two very different research questions, and their conclusions are logically independent
of one another. A given instance of political discourse might meet all of a given set of
requirements for deliberation and yet still not produce the benefits that have been assumed.
Likewise, political discourse might not meet the criteria for deliberation but still produce some
of the beneficial consequences claimed by deliberative theory. For example, in my social network
studies (see Mutz 2002), I find that exposure to cross-cutting political discourse produces greater
tolerance and greater awareness of rationales for oppositional political views. These effects
result from exposure to oppositional political views even without all the trappings of deliberative
interaction. In our study of political discussions in the American workplace, Jeff Mondak and I similarly
find that people are influenced in the direction of political tolerance and greater awareness of the
rationales for oppositional views simply by listening to their coworkers talk about their political
views (Mutz & Mondak 2006). No one would call such experiences deliberation; participation in
the conversation is not even necessary. Yet understanding the kinds of benefits that derive from
simply listening to others is central to understanding the benefits of the deliberative process as a
whole (Mutz & Mondak 2006, Mondak & Mutz 2006).
 A2: Echo Chamber, Education, Tolerance
Education, the echo chamber argument, and tolerance are all wrong—debate isn’t
key to any of them
MUTZ 2008 (Diana, Department of Political Science and Annenberg School, University of
Pennsylvania, “Is Deliberative Democracy a Falsifiable Theory?” Annual Review of Political Science Vol.
11: 521-538)
For example, the kind of direct, face-to-face exchange that traditionally characterizes deliberation
need not occur in order for people to become better informed. There are undoubtedly easier, far
less expensive means of producing that end than hosting a deliberative poll, as successful
information campaigns have demonstrated (see, e.g., Klingemann & Roemmele 2007). Moreover,
enhancing the depth of understanding of one's own position relative to others’ probably does not
require a public forum; it happens commonly in private settings as well. If one wants to enhance
mutual respect among those of opposing views, then civility is probably a requirement for the
discourse to be effective, but requiring that the group reach a consensus seems superfluous to
this particular goal. If one envisions Table 1 as a matching game, in which everything on the right must be
matched to one or more factors on the left, then we have a primitive middle-range theory generator for
purposes of deliberative theory.
 A2: Info Processing/Education/Tolerance
Debate does not change preexisting opinions or promote tolerance
MUTZ 2008 (Diana, Department of Political Science and Annenberg School, University of
Pennsylvania, “Is Deliberative Democracy a Falsifiable Theory?” Annual Review of Political Science Vol.
11: 521-538)
Within political science, the most commonly investigated source of bias in processing new information is
the person doing the processing. Deliberative theory typically assumes that people come to the
table with opinions and that they are willing to justify those views publicly in a way that brings
people's views closer together rather than increases conflict. The problem with this assumption
is that people with different pre-existing opinions and partisan orientations are unlikely to
respond the same way to a given argument, regardless of its inherent rationality and appeal.
In a deliberative encounter, given the requirement of respectful attention, we should assume
that people will not be able to selectively expose themselves to different types of information.
Unfortunately, people may still selectively interpret the implications and importance of new
information, typically so that it does not threaten their initial predispositions. In the earliest
empirical studies of the impact of information on mass opinion, Campbell et al. (1960, p. 133)
noted, “Identification with a party raises a perceptual screen through which an individual tends
to see what is favorable to his partisan orientation.” Subsequent research has accentuated the
importance of this original observation. The now extensive literature on selective processing of
information calls into question the idea that deliberation, through the force of rational
argument, will gradually bring people closer together and make mutually agreeable compromise
possible (see Bartels 2002, cf. Gerber & Green 1998, 1999). When new information enters an
environment, opinionated citizens tend to adjust their views in the same general direction, but
they seldom converge—even when the new information seems to have obviously unidirectional
implications for the issue at hand. Of course, open-mindedness is also a prerequisite in some definitions
of deliberation, which might seem to eliminate the potential for this problem. But so long as people hold
initial opinions on an issue, as is true of most issues worth discussing among the public, their
information processing is likely to be influenced by them. People need not be closed-minded and
dogmatic in order for biased processing to be problematic.
 A2: Policymaking
There’s no internal link between better deliberation and better policymaking
MUTZ 2008 (Diana, Department of Political Science and Annenberg School, University of
Pennsylvania, “Is Deliberative Democracy a Falsifiable Theory?” Annual Review of Political Science Vol.
11: 521-538)
Whether social scientists like it or not, deliberative encounters are inevitably social situations.
Whenever people interact with one another, they will inevitably have many motives beyond
simply the desire to reach the best policy position. They also want to be perceived as likable and
smart, for example. Models of political reasoning must consider that political reasoning is often
motivated by goals other than accuracy (e.g., Taber et al. 2001).
Most organizers of deliberative events go to great lengths to assure us that the information
provided is valid and unbiased toward any particular outcome, but faith in the deliberative
enterprise rests on believing that organizers and moderators have somehow overcome their own
biases and also counteracted social psychological biases among their participants . Their efforts to
ensure more deliberative group dynamics are admirable, yet many possible dynamics are unlikely to
be recognized based on casual observation. And even when people are motivated purely by a
desire to reach the best, most accurate conclusion with their fellow deliberators, they are still
subject to conscious and unconscious biases as they process what they hear. These biases call
into question whether the process of persuasive argumentation will necessarily lead to a better
outcome. For example, if one person claims to have a larger number of arguments than another,
he or she will be more persuasive, even when both people in fact give the same number of
arguments (see Petty & Cacioppo 1981, Chaiken 1987). In addition, even if everyone in the
deliberative encounter views one another as equal in status, it is likely that some will attribute
their views or arguments to entities of higher status who are not present (e.g., God), thus making
it impossible for the argument to stand solely on the force of its own merit (see, e.g., Petty &
Cacioppo 1981).
 A2: Ev from Debate People
Evidence from debate people should be ignored—it’s necessarily biased
MUTZ 2008 (Diana, Department of Political Science and Annenberg School, University of
Pennsylvania, “Is Deliberative Democracy a Falsifiable Theory?” Annual Review of Political Science Vol.
11: 521-538)
It is in some ways unfortunate that deliberative theory is a cause célèbre for its advocates, as well
as an important social theory. I say this not because I anticipate that it will necessarily have negative
effects on democracy when implemented, but rather because once a phenomenon acquires such a
head of steam as the deliberative democracy movement has, it seldom slows down for purposes
of advancing scientific understanding. Instead, there is a rush to implement deliberative
encounters willy-nilly, because advocates genuinely believe that its consequences must, of
necessity, be beneficial. Just as drug companies cannot be counted on to publicize the negative
side effects of their drugs, advocates—whether individuals or large organizations—who have
invested huge amounts of time, energy, and money into organizing and promoting deliberation
are not likely to be the first to perceive, let alone publicize, any shortcomings . Thus, whether the
consequences of deliberation are, in fact, consistently beneficial or not, without careful, methodical study,
we will not know why in either case.
Attention has now turned to large-scale, institutional implementation of deliberative practices.
These projects are not oriented around the best possible research designs for purposes of
understanding what deliberation can and cannot deliver so much as they are designed to spread
an already accepted practice as widely as possible. I think this kind of action is premature.
Answers
 AT: Can’t Explain IR
Psychoanalysis is a critical starting point in examining international
relations --- there is not a single leader who acted completely
according to the aff’s positivist theory of IR --- why did the US adopt
domino theory when none of our allies accepted it? --- absent the alt’s
analysis, policymakers will always shift their failed desire onto an
external scapegoat, ensuring dangerous interventions
Jacobsen 2013 --- University of Chicago (Kurt, “Why Freud matters: Psychoanalysis and international relations
revisited”, International Relations, SagePub)//trepka
Scholars of politics, not just international relations (IR), long have neglected psychoanalysis. The
attacks on Freud and his followers over the last generation evidently discouraged political scientists from exploring psychoanalytic methods.1 An earlier
generation of scholars – Paul Roazen, Fred Alford, Michael Rogin, Fred Greenstein, Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph, and others – had taken a deep
interest and produced many works of distinction. That interest is long gone, except for a minor and embattled presence in the sub-field of political
psychology. Even there, little has changed in three decades since a volume entitled Psychological Models in International Politics appeared, devoid of a
single reference to psychoanalysis.2 Freud, as Paul Roazen lamented long ago, ‘has remained throughout political science something of a spook’.3
Roazen referred to American political science. Critics of this summation combed political science to cite at best a few marginal forays (usually British or
Commonwealth in origin) into psychoanalysis, which is of interest only insofar as a particular analyst thereby buttresses his or her paradigmatic
preferences in constructivism or poststructural discourse analysis.4 A major methodological objection to psychoanalysis is that an investigative means
devised for individuals is inadvisable to apply to collective entities. States cannot possess egos, ids, or superegos – although a case has been made by
Zizek, and Erich Fromm long before him, for the palpable influence of an ‘institutional unconscious’.5 Freud was alert to the perils of overstepping
domains when he pondered whether civilizations could be neurotic.6 Psychoanalysts, an eminent analyst cautions, are: uniquely qualified to
understand, analyze and assist the patient on the couch, but as soon as they move away from this personal confrontation (or the modification of a small
group) to comment on matters outside their training and experience, the value of their comments would appear to depend on their knowledge and
wisdom, not on their qualification.7 While some scholars draw upon cognitive frameworks to analyze otherwise overlooked political phenomena,
psychoanalysis remains firmly on the fringes of IR where Lacanian discourse analysts treat us to such illuminating
sentences as, ‘It then endeavors, via constructing fantasies, to use transitive discourse objects to sustain the desire for the constructed dichotomies,
which hankers for discursive closure’.8 Psychoanalysis, contrary to his proponents, neither begins nor ends with Lacan. Few scholars deny
that psychological factors exert a significant effect upon politics . Hans Morgenthau wrote that
international politics was primarily psychological in character, and that the personal inclinations and oddities of

leaders can at crucial times matter a great deal.9 If anarchy is ‘what we make of it’ (and the rise of Athenian power created
anxiety in Sparta), then it pays to ask who we are in our inner worlds as well as in our outer guises when we make something out of whatever we
behold.10 At what point in an explanation do psychological factors – from personal quirks to group dynamics to mass perceptions – become
important? From the very beginning of our lives, is the psychoanalytic answer. Indeed, psychoanalysis aims to change where the beginning is reckoned
psychoanalysis
to begin in any explanatory probe. In the 1930s, radical analyst Wilhelm Reich was really rather moderate when arguing that

had a role in explaining why actors pursue what to the external observer are irrational ,
blinkered, and self-injurious actions.11 Reich’s intent was not only to explain ‘deviations from rationality’ but to inquire into the
adequacy of our notion of rationality, especially as this seductive and problematic concept is buffeted by changing contexts and personal interests.12
Misperception is a widely accepted phenomenon in IR now, as is the imputed sway in decision-making circles of
analogical reasoning, such as the domino theory .13 But important differences exist between Freud’s depth psychology and, to use
shorthand for a bundle of related practices, ‘cognitive psychology’.14 The purpose of psychoanalysis is to pry into our

unconscious drives and defenses to illuminate their influence over the motives and behavior of
the beholder as well as the beheld.15 Cognitive psychology, unlike psychoanalysis, usually exempts practitioners from being prey to their own forms of
unexamined irrationality, which may be one reason for its relative toleration in the field. This essay reconsiders, long after Lasswell’s heyday, whether
psychoanalysis, beyond discourse analysis, can be a useful interpretive approach in international
politics. What is the significance in human behavior of the unconscious, that is, of motives and forces of which we are largely unaware?16
(Extremely significant, Freud says, because unconscious forces, if unexposed, tend to make our decisions for us.) The first section examines Freudian
analysis and its uneasy relation to political analysis.Zizthen examine key issues raised by psychoanalysis regarding the efficacy of IR models, the
concept of selfinterest, and the waging of war. Finally, to appraise the ‘value added’ of this approach,Zizexamine psychoanalytic understandings of
intervention in Vietnam and, more briefly, the ‘war on terror’. The argument is that psychoanalytically attuned approaches yield important insights into
the wielding of power. Psychoanalytic triggers Psychoanalysts regard human emotional life as a continuum in which we share every
feeling and impulse to some degree, and indulge or capitulate to them if the combination of internal and external conditions is right.
Violent emotions are universal, as much so as love, though they usually are channeled in muted ways that avert harm in everyday
life. One is only tempted to summon the psychoanalyst when excesses form a profoundly damaging pattern. The same rule of thumb
goes for bringing psychoanalytic perspectives, or psychological predilections of leaders, to the fore in inquiries: Do so when behavior
is very much out of keeping with observable circumstances. Freud, while shying away from direct applications to politics, always
intended that psychoanalysis contribute to the social sciences and even to public health.17 At minimum, such exploratory
expeditions demand considerable knowledge both of psychoanalysis and of the social scientific field into which one introduces
analytic concepts. One may well ask whether we need to know what, for example, the youthful years of leaders have to do with their
professional lives. Their actions surely are overdetermined.18 Methodological humility, a rare enough trait anywhere, is called for. In
1965, after the long-distance ‘analysis’ of candidate Barry Goldwater, the American Psychiatric Association president rebuked those
who diagnosed political personalities from afar.19 Psychological reductionism is a tempting pitfall, though anyone trained in
political science, with its overvaluation of quantitative methods and formal theory, is unlikely to stumble into it.20 One thereby
would underestimate familiar tangible forces that shape political decisions. Still, seasoned scholars cannot credibly
deny that international politics is at best only partly a rational enterprise. If so, IR is a valid
arena for psychoanalytic inquiry. What some players within IR deem rational – ‘thinking about the unthinkable’,
‘brinksmanship’, or ‘winning hearts and minds’ through supposedly selective violence – will
appear irrational to beholders who apply different standards. ‘You can’t be too careful’ is a bromide
that counterproductively spurs dangerous imbroglios , such as the security dilemma.21
Rationality often is what we choose to make of it, under institutional pressure, disciplinary habits, and
unexamined personal traits. Mercer notes how rational choice notions, supposedly stripped of
emotion, consistently lead to distorted depictions of human action, although this insight harks back half a
century or more in Freudian annals.22 Consider too Mannheim’s classic distinction where what is functionally rational is
not always substantively rational.23 Ellul captured this significant divide acutely when he defined technology as the
application of increasingly refined means to ever more carelessly considered ends.24 Rationality is conceived as rationalization, a
defense mechanism cloaking other motives, which may or may not be conscious. Psychoanalysis is applied not only to
the leadership but also to relations between elites and the citizenry. Rose notes that actors must be
understood not only in terms of their material interests and institutional constraints but also in terms of their images (of reality) and
identifications.25 This venerable formulation sets up interestingly porous dichotomies between
inside and outside (private and public), and between the social and psychic . A lack of personality and
group psychology studies only deprives us of useful ways to burrow into the ‘agentic’, which is, after all, where the ‘mutual
constitution’ of agency and structure that constructivists are so concerned about occurs. As for realists, the political murderers in a
Brecht play apologize to their victim: ‘Sorry – force of circumstance’ – a sentiment realists readily understand. But one trouble with
halting inquiry here is that Freud demonstrated how often, to quell a conscience or to fool an outsider, we attribute to circumstances
what are our own impulsions. ‘A
common psychodynamic mechanism is to convert desire so that it
appears an external necessity’ , Bakan explains, ‘It is thus an open question in each instance whether what appears
to be external necessity really is that, or simply a facet concealing some internal pressure’.26 Hence, even when interests seem to do
the trick in explaining behavior, actors may resort to pleasing or exculpating rationales to justify callous
aims. Acknowledging this slippery fact of political life is useful to understanding and even anticipating what actors do. The
story that the US elites invaded Iraq because they feared a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) threat does
not play well anymore despite interesting but tenuous defenses.27 If key actors say they were misled by faulty intelligence,
which they had a strong hand in purveying, then one is well advised to look elsewhere for explanation. Typically, we can
come up with a plausible answer based on material interests such as oil (ridiculed in mainstream circles
at the time). Typically too, there are ‘multiple equilibria’ in policy choice. Why did these leaders select this course of action when
force of circumstances was not determinative? Why impute credence to what is ‘in actors’ heads’ when imputation of material factors
or structural forces can do the job? The reason is that although social structural forces operate apart from
individual human agency, they remain dependent on the character of human beings to
carry them out. ‘It is precisely at this juncture that Freudian theory proves so suggestive’, Lichtman argued, ‘For the
conjunction of individual intentions and social structures is embedded dialectically in the alienated institutions of social life and in
the repressed unconscious of specific social agents’.28 How does this apply in IR?
 AT: Death Drive Not a Thing

The death drive is real, has clinical and empirical support, applies to
countries, and ends in nuclear war—we’ve also got the most qualified
author
KNOLL 2013 (James L. Knoll, IV, M.D. is Associate Professor & Director of Forensic Psychiatry at
SUNY Upstate Medical University & the Forensic Fellowship training program at the Central New York
Psychiatric Center. He has worked as a forensic evaluator for the courts, corrections, and the private
sector. He is the author of over 90 articles and book chapters relating to both psychiatry and forensic
psychiatry, and is the Editor-in-Chief of The Psychiatric Times, “Fearful Symmetry: The Balance of Life &
Death,” Dec. 20, http://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=30278)
The death drive may sometimes be directed outward. If this is the case, the
drive is observed as aggression or
destruction. Part of the confusion surrounding Freud’s concept of the death drive may be due to the fact that he originally
regarded the life and death instincts “as forces underlying the sexual and aggressive instincts.” [6] In subsequent decades, the more
prevalent psychoanalytic view became one in which the dual instincts of sexuality and aggression sufficed to explain most clinical
phenomena. Regardless, we need look no further than our own street corner for validation of
aggression/destruction diverted into the external world .
According to a recent study by the Centers for Disease control, an estimated 50,000 persons die annually
in the United States as a result of violence-related injuries. [7] The study summarizes data from the National Violent
Death Reporting System (NVDRS) on violent deaths from 16 U.S. states for the year 2006. It found that homicides (outward directed
aggression) were precipitated primarily by interpersonal conflicts, mental-health problems, and recent crises. But just as the death
drive can be directed outward, it is sometimes the case that “self-destructiveness is brought about by diverting the aggressivness”
inward, towards oneself. [8] Again, not only clinical evidence confirms this, but research data does as well .
In a study of the deaths of 132 young persons, a strong link was found between childhood environment, the development of
antisocial behavior, and “sudden violent death” at an early age. [9] The most common causes of the violent deaths were accidents,
suicides, murder/manslaughter, and alcohol/drug abuse.
As alluded to earlier, there is and always has been controversy around the concept of a “death drive.” [10] One eminent
psychoanalyst, Otto Kernberg, has noted that, “The death drive runs deeply against more optimistic views of human nature, based
on the assumption that if severe frustrations or trauma were absent in early development then aggression would not be a major
human problem.” [11] Yet as Kernberg points out, his work over “the last 30 years has given even further
evidence to the fundamental nature of deep self-destructive tendencies in human beings that
clinically would support the concept of a death drive.” [12]
Kernberg has argued that the death drive is more perceptible in severe personality disorders, particularly “severe narcissistic
pathology.” [13] This observation is consistent with recent suicidology research suggesting that suicide attempters diagnosed with
narcissistic personality disorder have suicide attempts characterized by higher lethality. [14] But while the aggressive drive is
thought of as naturally present, the concept of a death drive is not invoked unless “such aggression becomes dominant… and when
its main objective is… the elimination of the representations of all significant others and, in that context, the elimination of the self
as well.” [15]
I shall not here attempt to resolve the long-standing controversy surrounding the death drive, as this subject could fill several texts.
Instead, let us proceed for now under the assumption that humans do, in fact, possess sexual and aggressive/destructive drives
which can be observed in everyday life. Next, if we are to consider this dual drive theory in more depth and, “[i]f… Freud’s
conception of the two instincts is taken to its ultimate conclusion, the interaction of the life and death instincts will
be seen to govern the whole of mental life.” [16] The outcome of this interaction then may be attributed to the
manner in which these two instincts are balanced against one another.
3. Homeostasis: Eros & Thanatos
Nothing, whether public or private, is stable; the destinies of men, no less than those of cities, are in a whirl. Whatever structure has
been reared by a long sequence of years…. an instant of time, suffices for the overthrow of empires.
– Seneca
The routinely observable process in the natural world is for biological organisms to undergo a
pattern of decay, disintegration, and ultimate return to their constituent, non-living particles. Freud simply applied
this scientific fact to the mind and its constituent instincts. He asserted that “instincts tend towards a return to an earlier
state,” and theorized that the two basic instincts were simply two sides of the same coin. That is, they are a “pair of opposing forces –
attraction and repulsion – which rule in the inorganic world.” [17] Thus, he believed an aggressive/destructive instinct could be
traced back to the “original death instinct of living matter.” [18]
Eschewing any value judgments and pressing forward, Freud stressed that “[i]t is not a question of an antithesis between an
optimistic and a pessimistic theory of life,” rather, it was merely an issue of biologically “concurrent or mutually opposing action of
the two primal instincts” which explained the “rich multiplicity of the phenomena of life.” [19] Thus, one way of conceptualizing
Freud’s theory on the death instinct is to view it as part of the organism’s natural function of homeostasis.
While the libidinal instinct endeavored to “combine what exists into ever greater unities,” the destructive instinct sought to “dissolve
those combinations and to destroy the structures to which they have given rise.” [20] In essence, this was a balancing act between
creation and destruction, observed regularly in the natural world, where the death instinct was simply one side of the equation that
acted on living matter in an effort to “return it to an inanimate state.” [21]
To clarify, Freud seemed to simply imply that all living matter inexorably “returns” to non-living matter – no great controversy here.
It is in the application of this process to mental life where the controversy arises. Having already described the phenomenon in
which humans pursue pleasure and avoid pain (the Pleasure Principle), he went on to explain why some individuals appeared to
violate this principle. By invoking a natural homeostatic process, the pleasure principle remains intact.
How? By observing that some individuals may become fixed in an emotional state so painful, that
“escape” into death is preferable, as it means no more pain. The immensity of pain weighing in on the side of continued
life can only be balanced by the finality of the weight in direct opposition: non-life. This is simply an early metaphor for describing
what more recent social science has confirmed. For example, the “escape theory” of suicide has been used to explain the suicidal
individual’s motivation to escape from aversive (excessively painful) self-awareness. [22] When the drive to avoid painful emotions
becomes strong enough, there is a significantly increased risk of distorted judgment that may lead to suicide and/or self-destructive
behaviors.
Returning to Kernberg, he singles out specific, severe “personality disorders” when pointing out the relevance of a death drive. [23]
Further, he notes that the death drive is not invoked unless aggression becomes “dominant,” and produces the desire to eliminate
the self and/or others. Yet I would like to broaden this hypothesis with the observation of a simple fact: aggression has been
dominant throughout the entire history of Homo sapiens for many thousands of years . Indeed, we
all “belong to the human race that killed over one hundred million members of its own species in the
twentieth century alone.” [24]
Just as the homeostatic conception of life and death can be applied to the individual, it may also
be applied to groups, nations and species. In sum, while the “individual dies of his internal
[instinctual] conflicts… the species dies of its unsuccessful struggle against the external world if
the latter changes in a fashion which cannot be adequately dealt with by the adaptations which
the species has acquired.” [25] How often has our species been on the brink of potential self-
destruction, particularly since the advent of nuclear weaponry?
There are certainly no guarantees that we will continue to tip the balance for our species in the
favor of life. It is a sobering fact that “no society, no country is free of the history of senseless
wholesale massacre of imagined or real enemies. The relative ubiquity of these phenomena
throughout the history of civilization cannot be ignored.” [26] Yet, as Ernest Becker so keenly observed, death is
ignored. In fact, it is outright denied in a variety of ways.

The death drive is real—critics misunderstand the meaning of death

and ignore evidence to the contrary
MILLS 2006 (Jon, Psy.D., Ph.D., ABPP, “Reflections on the Death Drive,” Psychoanalytic
Psychology 23:2, http://www.processpsychology.com/new-articles2/Freud%20on%20Todestrieb.pdf)
The force of the negative is so prevalent in psychoanalytic practice that it becomes perplexing
why the death drive would remain a questionable tenet among psychoanalysts today. From a
phenomenological standpoint, it is impossible to negate the force and salience of the negative.
The world evening news is about nothing but death, destruction, chaos, conflict, tragedy, and human
agony. Even advocates who champion a pure trauma model of self-destruction or externalized
negativity in the service of explaining human aggressivity must contend with inherently
destructive organizing elements that imperil the organism from within. Even medical science is
perplexed with the internally derived forces that deleteriously ebb the healthy organism from
life, adaptation, and survival based upon attacks by its own immune system or endogenous constitution (e.g., cancer, AIDS, ALS).
Consider the paradoxical processes of how sleep is both regressive yet restorative, and particularly how going to sleep is associated
with wanting to return to a previously aborted state of peace, tranquility, or oceanic “quiescence”—perhaps a wish for a tensionless
state, perhaps a return to the womb. Excessive sleep is also one of the most salient symptoms of clinical depression and the will
toward death. Furthermore, it would be inconceivable to argue that mankind’s externalized aggression is
not inherently self-destructive for the simple fact that it generates more retaliatory hate,
aggression, and mayhem that threatens world accord and the progression of civil societies.
Given the global ubiquity of war, genocide, and geopolitical atrocities, in all likelihood we as a
human race will die by actions brought about by our own hands rather than the impersonal forces
of nature. Homo homini lupus—“Man is a wolf to man.” 2
Contemporary psychoanalysis seems to be uninterested in Freud’s classic texts on the primacy
of death, to the point that they are dismissed outright without even being read simply because
credible authorities in the field say so. Here I have in mind the whole relational school’s anti-drive theory campaign. In
my opinion, proponents against the death drive simply do not grasp the inherent complexity, non-
concretization, anti-reductionism, and non-linearity of what Freud has to offer us. Critics claim
that the death drive defies evolutionary biology, therefore it must be bogus. But this criticism is merely
begging the question of what we mean by death. And more specifically, what we mean by the
function of death in psychic reality. To be even more precise, how death is organized as
unconscious experience. Just because a species is organically impelled to thrive does not mean it
is devoid of destructive principles derived from within its own constitution that imperil its
existence and proliferation. A logical claim can be advanced that life is only possible through the force of
the negative that brings about higher developmental achievements through the destruction of
the old. This is the positive significance of the negative, an artifact of psychic reality that derives its source from internal negation
and anguish while at the same time transcending its descent into psychic pain. Psychoanalysts are often confused by
viewing death as merely a physical end-state or the termination of life, when it may be
memorialized in the psyche as a primary ontological principle that informs the trajectory of all
psychic activity. Death has multiple facets of interpretation and meaning within conscious experience that are radically
opposed to the logic of negativity that infiltrates unconscious semiotics. What I hope to impress upon the reader is that death is an
ontological category for unconscious experience that can never elude psychic existence; for what we know or profess to know
epistemically as mediated inner experience is always predicated on our feltrelation to death, that is, to the primordial force of
repetitive negation, conflict, and destruction that alerts us to being and life, a dialectic that is ontologically inseparable and mutually
implicative. What we call a life force, drive, urge, or impetus is intimately conjoined with its opposition , that is,
its negation, termination, or lack. Here life = death: being and nothing are the same.

Even if the death drive is totally wrong it’s a useful heuristic to

describe the observed conflation of pleasure and destruction
MILLS 2006 (Jon, Psy.D., Ph.D., ABPP, “Reflections on the Death Drive,” Psychoanalytic
Psychology 23:2, http://www.processpsychology.com/new-articles2/Freud%20on%20Todestrieb.pdf)
Even if critics find the death drive theoretically untenable, I still believe it is a useful clinical
heuristic that guides therapeutic practice. What we as analysts face everyday is the inherent self-
destructiveness of patients who can neither find amity nor reprieve from psychic conflict and the
repetitions that fuel their suffering. These inherent capacities for selfdestruction are not merely
located from external sources, for they are both interiorized and internalized, thus becoming the
organizing death-principles at work on myriad levels of unconscious experience. Inherent
capacities for self-destruction take many circuitous and compromised paths , what the modern conflict
theorists would ascribe to symptom formation, addictions, self-victimization, pernicious patterns of recurrence, and harmful
behaviors that hasten physical deterioration or health. All of these tragedies may be further compounded by external trauma and
affliction—what Freud first identified in his trauma model of hysteria, but it does not necessarily negate the presence of internally
derived deleterious aggressions turned on the self. We see it everyday in the consulting room. From oppressive guilt, disabling
shame, explosive rage, contagious hate, self-loathing, and unbearable symptomatic agony, there is a perverse appeal to
suffering, to embrace our masochistic jouissance—our ecstasy in pain ; whether this be an addict’s craving
for a bottle or a drag off a cigarette, there is an inherent destructiveness imbued in the very act of the
pursuit of pleasure. All aspects of the progression of civilization and its decay are the
determinate teleological fulfillment of death-work.
 AT: Perm
The permutation is impossible. Our alternative relies on admitting the failure of
utopianism—to combine that with utopianism is to eliminate the radical potential
of the alternative.
Stavrakakis 99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, pages
116-117). DJ
Since, however, Lacanian political theory aims at bringing to the fore, again and again, the lack in the
Other, the same lack that utopian fantasy attempts to mask, it would be self-defeating, if not
absurd, to engage itself in utopian or quasi-utopian fantasy construction. Is it really possible and
consistent to point to the lack in the Other and, at the same time, to attempt to fill it in a quasi-
utopian move? Such a question can also be posed in ethical or even strategic terms. It could be argued of course that Homer’s vision of a
psychoanalytic politics does not foreclose the recognition of the impossibility of the social but that in his schema this recognition, and the promise to
eliminate it (as part of a quasi-utopian regulative principle) go side by side; that in fact this political promise is legitimised by the conclusions of
psychoanalytic political theory. But this coexistence is nothing new. This
recognition of the ‘impossibility of society’, of an
antagonism that cross-cuts the social field, constitutes the starting point for almost every
political ideology. Only if presented against the background of this ‘disorder’ the final
harmonious ‘order’ promised by a utopian fantasy acquires hegemonic force. The problem is that all this
schema is based on the elimination of the first moment, of the recognition of impossibility. The
centrality of political dislocation is always repressed in favour of the second moment, the
utopian promise. Utopian fantasy can sound appealing only if presented as the final solution to
the problem that constitutes its starting point . In that sense, the moment of impossibility is only
acknowledged in order to be eliminated. In Marx, for instance, the constitutivity of class struggle
is recognised only to be eliminated in the future communist society . Thus, when Homer says that he wants to
repeat Marx’s error today he is simply acknowledging that his psychoanalytic politics is nothing but traditional fantasmatic politics articulated with the
use of a psychoanalytic vocabulary.

We cannot both accept that utopianism is impossible and endorse it. The crisis
highlighted by the affirmative is an opportunity to reject the fantasmic ideal of
harmony.
Stavrakakis, 99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, pages 109-110).
DJ
What is at stake in the Lacanian conception of fantasy is , as we have already pointed out, enjoyment (jouissance).
If the effects of the normative idealist or Enlightenment-style critique of racism are severely limited, if this critique is not enough
(Lipowatz, 1995a:213), this is because, to use one of Sloterdijk’s formulations, it ‘has remained more naive than the
consciousness it wanted to expose’ (Sloterdijk, 1988:3). In its rationality it has exhausted itself. In other words, it
didn’t take into account that what is at stake here is not rational argumentation but the
organisation and administration of enjoyment: The impotence of the attitude of traditional Enlightenment is best
exemplified by the anti-racist who, at the level of rational argumentation, produces a series of convincing reasons against the racist Other, but is
nonetheless clearly fascinated by the object of his critique—and consequently, all his defence disintegrates in the moment of real crisis (when ‘the
fatherland is in danger’ for example). (Sloterdijk, 1988:3) Thus, the
question of la traversée du fantasme, that is to say
‘of how to gain the minimum of distance from the fantasmatic frame that organises our
enjoyment, of how to suspend its efficiency, is crucial not only for the concept of the
psychoanalytic cure and its conclusion: today, in our era of renewed racist tensions, of
universalised anti-Semitism, it is perhaps the foremost political question’ (Žižek, 1996a:117–18). In light
of this, traversing the fantasy of utopian thought seems to be one of the most important political
tasks of our age. The current crisis of utopia is not cause for concern but for celebration . But
then why is the politics of today a politics of aporia? There can be only one plausible explanation :
just because, in the ethical sphere, the fantasmatic ideal of harmony is still dominant. If we are
situated today in a terrain of aporia and frustration it is because we still fantasise something that
is increasingly revealed as impossible and catastrophic. Accepting this ultimate impossibility
seems to be the only way out of this troubling state.
The permutation fails—the alternative depends upon maintaining distance from
the fantasmic politics of utopia.
Stavrakakis, 99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, pages 118-119) DJ
In fact, articulating Lacanian theory with fantasmatic politics is equivalent to affirming the
irrelevance of Lacanian theory for radical politics since this articulation presupposes the
repression of all the political insights implicit in Lacan’s reading and highlighted in this book. The alleged irrelevance of Lacan for
radical politics is also the argument put forward by Collier in a recent article in Radical Philosophy. Collier’s argument is that since it is capitalism that
shatters our wholeness and disempowers us (as if without capitalism we would be on the road to utopia; obviously, capitalism occupies the structural
position of the antichrist in this sort of leftist preaching), then Lacan’s theory is, in fact, normalising capitalist damage, precisely because alienation is
so deep for Lacan that nothing can be done to eliminate it (‘Lacan is deeply pessimistic, rejecting cure or happiness as possible goals’, my emphasis).19
Thus Lacan has nothing to offer radical politics. Something not entirely surprising since, according to Collier, psychological theory in general has no
political implications whatsoever. The conclusion is predictable: ‘Let us go to Freud and Klein for our psychotherapy [Lacan is of course excluded] and
to Marx and the environmental sciences for our politics, and not get our lines crossed’ (Collier, 1998:41–3). Surprisingly enough this is almost identical
with Homer’s conclusion: Lacanian theory is OK as an analytical tool but let us go back to Marx for our ideological seminar and our utopian catechism!
It is clear that from
a Lacanian point of view it is necessary to resist all such ‘reoccupations’ of
traditional fantasmatic politics. At least this is the strategy that Lacan follows on similar occasions. Faced with the
alienating dimension of every identification, Lacan locates the end of analysis beyond
identification. Since utopian or quasi-utopian constructions function through identification it is
legitimate, I think, to draw the analogies with the social field. If analysis resists the ‘reoccupation’ of
the traditional strategy of identification—although it recognises its crucial, but alienating, role in
the formation of subjectivity—why should psychoanalytic politics, after unmasking the crucial
but alienating character of traditional, fantasmatic, identificatory politics, ‘reoccupy’ their
ground? This rationale underlying the Lacanian position is not far away from what Beardsworth articulates as a political reading of Derrida. For
Beardsworth, deconstruction also refuses to implicate itself in traditional politics, in the ‘local sense of politics’ in Beardsworth’s terminology: In its
affirmative refusal to advocate a politics, deconstruction forms, firstly, an account of why all political projects fail. Since the projection of any decision
has ethical implications, deconstruction in fact generalizes what is meant by the political well beyond the local sense of politics. In this sense it becomes
a radical ‘critique’ of institutions. (Beardsworth, 1996:19) Similarly, the
radicality and political importance of the
Lacanian critique depends on its ability to keep its distance from 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.
 AT: Robinson
Robinson is wrong --- misunderstands the lack, too vague, ignores
society’s role, and sets up useless binaries
Thomassen, Department of Government, University of Essex, 4 (Dr Lasse, “LACANIAN POLITICAL
THEORY: A REPLY TO ROBINSON”, BJPIR: 2004 VOL 6, P558-561)//trepka
In this response to Andrew Robinson’s review of ‘The politics of lack,’Zizargue that, although
Robinson puts forward a
number of interesting and succinct points about Lacanian political theory, his review rests on
misunderstandings of post-structuralist political theory and misreadings of the texts under consideration. More
specifically,Zizargue that his use of the labels ‘Lacanian’ and ‘theorist of lack’ is problematic; that his position rests on a
misunderstanding of the relationship between ontology and politics in post-structuralist theory; and that it is a mistake to allege that
Lacanian political theory is inherently conservative. In the May 2004 issue of this Journal, Andrew Robinson (2004)
reviewed recent books by Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, SlavojZizek, Chantal
Mouffe and Yannis Stavrakakis under the heading ‘The politics of lack’. Robinson argues that a post-
structuralist conception of politics oriented by a notion of constitutive lack and inspired by Lacanian psychoanalysis is
fundamentally misguided. This approach to politics and political theory is guided by the idea that identity is constituted
around a fundamental lack at the heart of the subject, and that identity is constituted through the identification with external
objects, thus temporarily filling the lack. There are three basic problems with this approach to politics,
according to Robinson. First, as it relies on an abstract ontology, it is unable to properly engage with
concrete politics, and the study of politics is reduced to the subsumption of empirical cases to pregiven ontological categories,
which the former merely exemplify. Second, the kind of radical democratic theory emerging from the lack/Lacanian
approach is only radical in name, but in fact uncritical of existing liberal democracy. Finally , this approach is
conservative and nihilistic, according to Robinson, because it refuses the possibility of progress. While Robinson makes
some succinct points about some of the texts under consideration,Zizwould like to address some of the general points Robinson
makes as well as the assumptions about political theorising behind his critique of these authors.Zizshall address three points: (1) the
use of the labels ‘Lacanian’ and ‘theorist of lack’; (2) the relationship between ontology and politics; and (3) the alleged conservatism
of the Lacanian political theory. (1) Robinson tells us that, although there are differences among the books under review,
‘[t]here
are, however, sufficient similarities between the books under review here to suggest that they
belong to a single approach, sufficiently similar to each other and sufficiently different from other varieties of post-
structuralism to qualify as a distinct paradigm’ (p. 259). The ‘approach’ or ‘paradigm’ is referred to as ‘an ontology of lack’, (p. 269),
‘[a]n approach to politics drawn from Lacanian psychoanalysis’ (p. 259), ‘Lacanian politics’ (p. 260) and ‘Lacanianism’ (p. 267), and
the theorists are referred to as ‘Lacanians’ (p. 260) and ‘Lacanian theorists’ (p. 268). Although the use of labels like
these can be useful, one must be careful . First of all, althoughZizwould contend that Mouffe could be
classified as a theorist of lack, she is hardly a Lacanian . In the book reviewed by Robinson, she makes only
a general reference to Lacan (Mouffe 2000, 34). In addition, she makes reference to the developments of an ethics of psychoanalysis
inspired by the work of Lacan in the works of Slavoj Zizek, Yannis Stavrakakis and John Rajchman (Mouffe 2000, 137–139). These
developments, she argues, dovetail with her own approach, but neither she nor anyone else has ever claimed that she is ‘a Lacanian’
(Robinson 2004, 263). It thus seems to be possible to be a ‘theorist of lack’ without being a ‘Lacanian’,
and one should not confuse the two. Indeed, it seems that we are dealing here with an instance of what Robinson is
criticising, namely the subsumption of a concrete instance (Mouffe) to an a priori category
(‘Lacanian’) with no regard to the specificity of the former. Moreover, there are important
differences between the theorists reviewed by Robinson. Stavrakakis, for instance, has criticised the
work of Badiou and Zizek (Stavrakakis 2003), and Zizek has criticised Laclau for not being radical
enough (Butler, Laclau and Zizek 2000). More examples could be given, but the important point here is that when one talks about
‘approaches’ and ‘paradigms’, one must be careful to specify exactly what it is that unites the theorists within the approach or
paradigm. Robinson also recognises this: ‘The differences between the texts under review mainly arise around the issue of how to
articulate Lacanian themes into a concrete political discourse’ (p. 261). That is, we can talk about a Lacanian approach or an
approach inspired by an ontology of lack even though there are differences in the extent to which the theorists
interpret Lacanian themes or the ontology of lack respectively. The identification of an approach can, for
instance, serve as the focal point for a discussion of the relative merits of different poststructuralist approaches (see Tønder and
Thomassen (forthcoming)). Indeed, Robinson seems to aim at precisely this; that is, Robinson’s aim is to rescue
poststructuralist political theory from Lacanian political theory (pp. 259, 268ff.). However, his critique
of Lacanian
political theory (asZizshall call it) seems to rest on a conception of political theory hardly
reconcilable with what can broadly be referred to as post-structuralism . What is at stake here is what
kind of political theory is possible from a post-structuralist perspective. (2) The first issueZizwould like to raise in this regard
concerns the relation between ontology and politics. Robinson writes: ‘The books discussed here thus tend to suggest
that it is not possible to derive an original, distinct and attractive political agenda from Lacanian
politics’ (p. 268, emphasis added). And: ‘since Lacan’s work deals with politics only very occasionally, the entire project of using
Lacan politically is fraught with hazards’ (p. 261). Hazards indeed, but not quite in the way that Robinson thinks. What would
be the condition of possibility of deriving a political agenda from a political theory or ontology?
Such derivation would presuppose that one could move in a necessary fashion from a set of
theoretical or ontological assumptions to a set of political conclusions applicable to a concrete
context. Ontology, theory and political agenda would have to be part of the same homogeneous
whole comprising ontological, theoretical and political elements linked by necessity. Clearly , if one
subscribes to a post-structuralist viewpoint, there can be no such homogeneity , whether between ontological,
theoretical and political elements or whether within a particular political agenda, for instance. This is a recurring theme in post-
structuralism. The impossibility of this sort of derivation may be a ‘hazard’, but one that we will just have to live with. Robinson
believes that, since Lacan did not provide a specific theory of politics , but only a more abstract ontology,
all the political appropriations of Lacan can do is to subsume politics to pregiven Lacanian
categories (p. 261). This is obviously a potential danger, and one that must be avoided. One must insist that
analytical categories are always rearticulated when applied; as Wittgenstein has shown, there is no application that leaves intact the
rule being applied. But
this does not preclude the theorisation of politics through categories
that were not originally thought to apply (directly or indirectly) to politics . This would assume a regional
conception of politics: politics as determined as a particular region with particular (essential) limits and requiring a theory only
applicable to this region. This, in turn, would require a theory transcending all regions and thus capable of delimiting the specifically
political region—again not a feasible alternative from a post-structuralist viewpoint. It is the merit of, among others, the theorists
considered by Robinson, that they have introduced a distinction between, on the one hand, politics as the region of practices usually
referred to as politics and, on the other hand, the political as the moment of the contingent institution of politics and the social. The
political cannot be reduced to a specific region , but instead refers to a logic permeating
society in its entirety , even if in some places more than others. Since the political understood as contingency permeates
politics, we can use the political as a principle of analysing politics. This is one of the contributions of post-structuralist (including
Lacanian) political theory. (3) According to Robinson, Lacanian political theory is inherently
conservative. ‘Lacanians’, Robinson writes, ‘urge that one reconcile oneself to the inevitability of lack. Lacanian politics
is therefore about coming to terms with violence, exclusion and antagonism, not about resolving or
removing these’ (p. 260). And, about Mouffe, he writes that, ‘as a Lacanian, Mouffe cannot reject exclusion; it is, on a certain level,
necessary according to such a theory’ (p. 263). 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
poststructuralist (and Lacanian) view thus precludes a progressive politics. Of course, this is not to say that a progressive politics is
guaranteed—if one wants guarantees, post-structuralist political theory is not the place to look. There are similar problems with
Robinson’s characterisation of Zizek’s ‘nihilistic variety of Lacanianism’: ‘the basic structure of existence is unchangeable ... [Zizek’s]
Lacanian revolutionism must stop short of the claim that a better world can be constructed’ (p. 267). This, 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 improvement—with the proviso that what counts as improvement cannot be established according to some
transcendental yardstick. Thus, while Robinson raises many interesting points, there are also some problems with his position.
Here,Zizhave focused on some misunderstandings of the status of the claims made by post-structuralist political theorists, but there
are also some simple misreadings of the texts under review. For instance, when dealing with Mouffe’s view that antagonism is
ineradicable, Robinson links this to a Hobbesian statism: ‘the exclusionary and violent operations of coercive state apparatuses must
be accepted as an absolute necessity for any kind of social life. This is Hobbesian statism updated for a post-modern era’ (p. 261).
How Robinson is able to move from the ineradicability of antagonism and exclusion to ‘the exclusionary and violent operations of
coercive state apparatuses ... as an absolute necessity’ and ‘Hobbesian statism’ is beyond comprehension. There is certainly nothing
to suggest such an interpretation in the pages referred to by Robinson (Mouffe 2000, 43, 105, 129–132).
AT: Not Falsifiable
 Psychoanalysis = Falsifiable
Experimental data and empirical evidence prove the validity of psychoanalysis –
their authors are dogmatic hacks
Petocz 15 – PhD in Psychology, currently teaches history, psychology, and critical thinking at the University of Western
Sydney. Visiting researcher at the Department of Philosophy, Kings College, London University in 2000 (Agnes, 1/12/2015, “The
scientific status of psychoananalysis revisited”, Philosophy, Science, and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Meeting // SM)
A reservoir of experimental data pertinent to Freud’s work currently exists and, as
we have shown in detail, offers support for a respectable number of his major ideas and theories …
However, a sizeable proportion of those observers who are presumably concerned with
evaluating the standing of psychoanalysis have simply refused to acknowledge the
existence, or accept the credibility, of such findings. (Fisher & Greenberg, 1996, pp. 284-285) After a
hundred years of controversy, we can now put to rest the criticism of psychoanalysis that its most
fundamental assertion- the importance of unconscious processes—is mistaken or without empirical
foundation. The data are incontrovertible : consciousness is the tip of the psychic iceberg that Freud imagined
it to be. (Western, 1999, p. 1097) There is a cornucopia of empirical evidence in the cognitive neurosciences,
attachment field, infant-observation research, develop- mental psychology, clinical
psychopathology, and the therapeutic process that are corroborations, validations, extensions,
revisions and emendations of Freud’: contributions. (Mills, ZIIJ7, p. 540)
Psychoanalysis is both falsifiable and accurate
GRANT AND HARARI 2005 (Don and Edwin, psychiatrists, “Psychoanalysis, science and the
seductive theory of Karl Popper,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 39)
Attacks on psychoanalysis and the long-term therapies derived from it, have enjoyed a long history and much publicity [1-4]. Yet, the
justification for such attacks has been challenged on many grounds, including their methodology [5] and the empirically
demonstrable va- lidity of core psychoanalytic concepts [6,7]. Also, bur- geoning neuroscience research, some of which
is sum- marized below, indicates
likely neurological correlates for many key clinically derived
psychoanalytic concepts such as self-coherence [8], repression [9] and projective identification
[10].
Furthermore, the effectiveness of psychoanalysis and its derivative therapies has been supported by
empiri- cal research [11,12], particularly for patients with DSM axis II pathology. Despite this evidence, the attacks on
psychoanalysis continue unabated, not only from some psychiatrists [13,14] but also from the highest levels of politics and health
bureaucrats [15], although what ex- actly is being attacked is often unclear.
 Drives Real
Falsifiable evidence from the hard sciences confirms the psychoanalytic theory of
the drive—even if our theory isn’t perfect it’s the best alternative
GUTERL 2002 (Fred, “What Freud Got Right,” Newsweek, Nov 11,
http://www.neuropsa.org.uk/what-freud-got-right)
But a funny thing happened to Freud on the way to becoming a trivia question: as researchers looked
deeper into the physical structure of the brain, they began to find support for some of his theories.
Now a small but influential group of researchers are using his insights as a guide to future research;
they even have a journal, Neuropsychoanalysis, founded three years ago. “Freud’s insights on the
nature of consciousness are consonant with the most advanced contemporary neuroscience
views,” wrote Antonio Damasio, head of neurology at the University of Iowa College of Medicine .
Note that Damasio did not refer to psychoanalysis or the Oedipus complex. Instead the work is going on
at the fundamental level where emotions are born and primitive passions lurk in the shadows of
dreams.
HOW THE MIND WORKS
Beyond the basic animal instincts to seek food and avoid pain, Freud identified two sources of
psychic energy, which he called “drives”: aggression and libido (the latter encompasses sexuality but also
had a more expansive meaning, involving the desire for stimulation and achievement). The key to his
theory is that these were unconscious drives, shaping our behavior without the mediation of our waking
minds; they surface, heavily disguised, only in our dreams. The work of the past half-century in
psychology and neuroscience has been to downplay the role of unconscious universal drives, focusing
instead on rational processes in conscious life. Meanwhile, dreams were downgraded to a kind of mental
static, random scraps of memory flickering through the sleeping brain. But researchers have found
evidence that Freud’s drives really do exist, and they have their roots in the limbic system, a
primitive part of the brain that operates mostly below the horizon of consciousness . Now more
commonly referred to as emotions, the modern suite of drives comprises five: rage, panic, separation
distress, lust and a variation on libido sometimes called seeking. Freud presaged this finding in 1915,
when he wrote that drives originate “from within the organism” in response to demands placed
on the mind “in consequence of its connection with the body.” Drives, in other words, are
primitive brain circuits that control how we respond to our environment —foraging when we’re
hungry, running when we’re scared and lusting for a mate.
The seeking drive is proving a particularly fruitful subject for researchers. Although like the others it
originates in the limbic system, it also involves parts of the forebrain, the seat of higher mental functions.
In the 1980s, Jaak Panksepp, a neurobiologist at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, became
interested in a place near the cortex known as the ventraltegmental area , which in humans lies just
above the hairline. When Panksepp stimulated the corresponding region in a mouse, the animal
would sniff the air and walk around, as though it were looking for something. Was it hunger? No.
The mouse would walk right by a plate of food, or for that matter any other object Panksepp could think
of. This brain tissue seemed to cause a general desire for something new. “What I was seeing,” he says,
“was the urge to do stuff.” Panksepp called this seeking.
To neuropsychologist Mark Solms of University College in London, that sounds very much like
libido. “Freud needed some sort of general, appetitive desire to seek pleasure in the world of
objects,” says Solms. “Panksepp discovered as a neuroscientist what Freud discovered
psychologically.” Solms studied the same region of the brain for his work on dreams. Since the 1970s,
neurologists have known that dreaming takes place during a particular form of sleep known as REM—
rapid eye movement—which is associated with a primitive part of the brain known as the pons.
Accordingly, they regarded dreaming as a low-level phenomenon of no great psychological interest. When
Solms looked into it, though, it turned out that the key structure involved in dreaming was actually the
ventral tegmental, the same structure that Panksepp had identified as the seat of the “seeking” emotion.
Dreams, it seemed, originate with the libido—which is just what Freud had believed.
 Freud’s psychological map may have been flawed in many ways, but it also happens to be the
most coherent and, from the standpoint of individual experience, meaningful theory of the mind
there is. “Freud should be placed in the same category as Darwin, who lived before the discovery
of genes,” says Panksepp. “Freud gave us a vision of a mental apparatus. We need to talk about
it, develop it, test it.” Perhaps it’s not a matter of proving Freud wrong or right, but of finishing the job.
 Big Other Real
Neurological experiments validate Lacan’s Big Other
BRYANT 2009 (Levi, former Lacanian psychoanalyst, now Prof of Philosophy at Collins College,
“Neurology Discovers the Lacanian Big Other,” March 10,
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/03/10/neurology-discovers-the-lacanian-big-other/)
Today NPR reported on fMRI research that indicates that when people think of issues pertaining to
religion regions of the brain involved in interpersonal relations light up.
The human brain, it appears, responds to God as if he were just another person, according to a team at the
National Institutes of Health.
A study of 40 people — some religious, some nonreligious — found that phrases such as “I believe God is
with me throughout the day and watches over me” lit up the same areas of the brain we use to decipher
the emotions and intentions of other people.
The researchers speculate that the development of this sort of cognition was crucial to the
development of civilization:
Without religion, Bulbulia says, “large scale cooperation, which now spans the world, would be
impossible. He adds that humans differ from other species in their ability to cooperate in very large
groups.
Religion can help foster cooperation because it ensures that people share the same set of rules about
behavior, and think they’ll be punished if they don’t follow them, Bulbulia says. Religion also unites
people, especially in times of great uncertainty.
This theory, I think, would indicate that it’s rather inaccurate to suggest that the brain processes thoughts
of God exactly as it processes thoughts of other persons. Rather, if the evolution of religious thought
played a large role in the ability of humans to engage in large scale cooperation, then this is
because the thought of God would be something like the “Person = x” similar Kant’s famous “object =
x”, functioning as a general structure allowing for the possibility of empathy towards all people
irregardless of their differences. Just as Kant’s “object = x” isn’t any particular object but a formal
structure that allows objects to be thinkable, so too would the person = x be a formal structure enabling all
interpersonal relations (cf. Deleuz’es “Tournier and a World Without Others” for a good gloss on this
Other-structure). Where individual encounters with particular people tend to be governed by the
same/different schema, allowing for empathy towards those whom we code as “like us”, the
formal schema of the “Person = x” would allow these individual differences to be surmounted –
to a greater or lesser degree, anyway –allowing for the different to be seen as a part of the same. In this
way, differences between different tribes, cultures, languages, customs, etc., could be surmounted to allow
for cooperative activity. Of course, at this meta or transcendental level of personhood– the person = x –
the same/different schema would still be operative but in a way in which sameness was no longer defined
by local and immediate social relations between individuals. In other words, what this neuro-research
seems to have uncovered is something like belief in the existence of the Lacanian big Other,
where the subject believes, through the screen of fantasy, that the Other is structured in a
particular way and that it desires specific things (the transformation of desire into demand via
fantasy that fills out the lack in the Other).
 General A2: Falsifiability (Psychoanalysis)
Their falsifiability argument is wrong—seven reasons
GRANT AND HARARI 2005 (Don and Edwin, psychiatrists, “Psychoanalysis, science and the
seductive theory of Karl Popper,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 39)
Popper's falsifiability
criterion of science is seductive in its simplicity, but its simplicity is achieved
by its failure to address not only the clinical issues but also the many philosophical issues, which
have been raised in the extensive scholarly published work critical of Popper's account. Curiously, this
published work is ig- nored by those who invoke Popper to criticize psycho- analysis . The main criticisms may
be summarized as:
1 Historians of science [23,24] using the case-study method of theory change in science, including psy- choanalysis
[23], have
shown the inadequacy of Pop- per’s criterion as a description of how scientists ac-
tually work and how theories change in the practice of science . In these accounts, inductive reasoning and the
verification of hypotheses play a crucial role.
2 Some medical scientists describe Popper’s criterion as counterproductive in the real
world [25]. For ex- ample, in formulating epidemiological hypotheses concerning the spread of HIV-AIDS, which have
public health and clinical implications, a Popperian approach which insists on strict falsification of hy-
potheses is less useful and less frequently used in actual practice than one which uses induction
to gen- eralize from observations in a professionally disci- plined way.
3 Popper neglected the crucial role played by concepts and models in scientific theorizing
[24,26]. Concepts and models (including ideational, mathematical and material models) are not epiphenomena produced as an
incidental by-product of scientific thinking, but actively shape the way scientists think about their field and the questions they ask.
Watson and Crick’s use of a material model to discover the double helix structure of DNA is a well-
known example.
4 The probability calculus posed difficulties for Popper as did Heisenberg's Uncertainty
Principle which challenged a strict falsificationist view of sci- ence and led to some personal friction
between Pop- per and Heisenberg [16, pp.257-259).
5 Popper insisted that there is but one scientific method, equally applicable to the natural
sciences (mathemat- ics, physics, biology, astronomy, geology) social sci- ences (anthropology, linguistics, sociology,
ethnol- ogy, history) and all other endeavours which claim to be scientific [27,28].
6 Popper misrepresented historicism in general and Marxist theory in particular [29,30]. The term *his-
toricism’ was used by historians long before Popper to refer to the historian's attempt to empathize with peo- ple about whom they
were writing so as to understand them and their social conditions as they understood themselves and which gave rise to certain
actions and events, that is, a contextualist, empathic method of historical scholarship. Popper used the term his- toricism in
an idiosyncratic way to mean a belief in deterministic or teleological laws governing histor- ical change
which he attributed to Plato, Marx and Hegel. Thus, Popper claimed that some of Marx's predictions, such as
the increasing pauperization of the working class under capitalism which would cre- ate the conditions for
revolution, were clearly falsified by the time he (Popper) was writing, almost a cen- tury after Marx. In response, some
scholars have ar- gued that two World Wars and the rise of the Welfare State served to distract
the working class in devel- oped society from its lack of economic and political power, while the pauperization that Marx
predicted has occurred in the so-called underdeveloped coun- tries. Other commentators believe that the
pauperiza- tion of the working class has in fact occurred, relative to the advance of other socioeconomic groups.
Still others hold that the Welfare State was a direct re- sponse to Marx's theory, raising the
question of how human will operates in the social sciences in ways that make them radically
different from the natural sciences. So social sciences may still claim to be scientific but Popper’s
falsification criterion is irrele- vant/inappropriate to social science.
7 Contrary to Popper’s claim against psychoanalysis, the use of a theory to save itself from
apparently fal- sifying instances does not, prima facie, render it un- scientific. Most scientific
theories include so-called auxiliary statements, including those which guide the use of instruments and methods of
observation that may be relevant to the apparent falsification of the theory in question [31). Thus, the fact that an aero-
plane crashes on take-off is not a valid refutation of the Newtonian mechanics which were
applied to the design of the aeroplane. On the contrary, auxil- iary hypotheses to do with wind
resistance, surface friction and metal fatigue are invoked to explain the accident, explanations
which are themselves derived from Newtonian mechanics.
 Falsifiability Inapplicable/Bad
Falsifiability is a bad standard and doesn’t apply to psychoanalysis—this also turns
their framework impact because it’s an excuse to avoid argumentative clash
CASTELLANO 2012 (Daniel, The Insufficiency of Empiricism,
http://www.arcaneknowledge.org/philtheo/empiricism2.htm)
The successful use of controlled experiments in science to corroborate or falsify hypotheses has led many
to consider this testing process as the defining characteristic of scientific inquiry. Sir Karl Popper
articulated this criterion when trying to find a way to distinguish apparent pseudosciences such as
Freudianism and Marxism from genuine science. Popper asserted that a truly scientific theory must
be “falsifiable,” that is to say, it can be subjected to a controlled experiment that could conceivably
contradict it. Conversely, any theory that does not admit the possibility of empirical falsification is
regarded as pseudoscience.
The falsifiability standard has attained widespread acceptance among scientists, though philosophers of
science have pointed out several problems with such a definition of scientific method.
First, the falsifiability standard was chosen by Popper deliberately to exclude theories he
intuitively judged unscientific, so it possibly contains more cultural bias than an objective theory of
knowledge should. Second, it is not clear that this standard includes or excludes the theories that
Popper intended. Some Marxists and Freudians are quite amenable to refutation by experiment,
while some mathematical theories of physics deal with particle interactions that are
fundamentally unobservable. Moreover, Popper’s definition might be interpreted to exclude
mathematics and many of the social sciences, particularly those studying the unrepeatable past.
Falsifiability might be a good standard for empirical natural science, but not science in the broader,
classical sense of the term.
So-called pseudosciences such as Freudianism, Marxism, and astrology do not meet the falsifiability
standard, to the extent that their defenders resort to special pleading to explain away failed predictions,
rather than admit a failure of their theory. This seems to make the scientific or pseudoscientific status
of a theory depend more on the behavior of its adherents than on any intrinsic characteristic of
the theory as such.
Tautological knowledge, which may be deduced by philosophers and mathematicians, would
seem to be inherently unfalsifiable. This exclusion reminds us that a theory of empirical science
can never serve as a general theory of knowledge, as there are other possible paths to knowledge.
Thus pseudosciences that do not meet the falsifiability standard are not thereby discredited in
the least. All that is proven is that they are not empirical sciences of nature, but neither are
mathematics and philosophy, and that is not to their discredit.
The falsifiability standard counterintuitively suggests that the credibility of a scientific theory is derived
from the possibility of it being wrong. It is more accurate to assert that a scientific theory gains credibility
from its verifiability, by successfully passing tests where it might have been proven wrong. What is
paramount is that a theory is consistent with observation, and this has been the hallmark of
physical science for the last three centuries, without explicit reference to a falsifiability standard.
As long as a theory is confirmed by controlled experiment, the hypothetical possibility of a
negative result is of secondary importance.
Equally counterintuitive is the implication that a theory lacking falsifiability loses credibility. Intuitively, if
a proposition is absolutely not falsifiable, it is certainly true, though it may be merely a tautology.
Regarding pseudosciences as non-falsifiable gives them too much credit, when in fact their
excuses for failed predictions can be refuted by evidence and argument. All too often the
falsifiability standard is used as an excuse to refuse to engage a theory, maintaining that its
exponents will not accept any refutation.
 Falsifiability Internal Link Turn
Falsifiability is a bad standard—it incorporates unexamined materialism which
undermines the basis of the theory and also turns their framework arguments by
undercutting metaphysical debate and argumentative clash. There’s no offense
because metaphysical belief is inevitable but falsifiability drives us to hold them
without debate
CASTELLANO 2012 (Daniel, The Insufficiency of Empiricism,
http://www.arcaneknowledge.org/philtheo/empiricism2.htm)
Since falsifiability really means being empirically falsifiable, and the empirical is restricted to
physical observation, Popper’s theory furtively incorporates philosophical materialism into his
theory of science, which is then misused as a general theory of knowledge. With one stroke, any
sort of metaphysical, religious, or spiritual speculation is dismissed as not meriting credibility.
Rather than be forced to honestly engage metaphysical arguments with counterarguments, we
are excused from debating them altogether, as if they were beyond reason. Clearly, this position
is unwarranted, and it arises from the error of equating non-empiricism with irrationality.
The scientific method is an excellent way to arrive at near-certain knowledge in areas that are susceptible
to both physical observation and controlled experiment. Many ordinary types of knowledge are not
susceptible to controlled experiment, as is the case with the study of history or any other aspect of
the past, which can never be replicated. Such sciences must use different rules of evidence , and
the basis of certitude in their results is of a different quality than that of the natural sciences. Other types
of knowledge are not susceptible to physical observation, such as our conscious experiences (as
opposed to their neural correlates), or abstract reasoning about mathematical or metaphysical
entities. This non-physical knowledge is not inferior to that of the empirical sciences, but on the
contrary is considered the most certain knowledge of all, as we directly comprehend the truth of
a tautology and directly experience our own consciousness. The knowledge of empirical
sciences, on the other hand, is mediated indirectly through the exercise of our consciousness
and abstract reasoning. From this, the foolishness of philosophical materialism is evident: we
only know matter through the mind, so it is absurd to doubt the existence of the mind or soul
without doubting the existence of matter. Similarly, physics is only intelligible against a background
of logical, metaphysical, and mathematical assumptions.
The natural sciences are still epistemologically subordinate to philosophy , in fact if not in culture.
Our cultural rejection of abstract philosophy in favor of “hard” science has not eliminated the
need for philosophy, but has simply removed it from conscious discourse, reducing it to a set of
unconsciously held and poorly understood assumptions. Popper himself recognized this in his study
of quantum mechanics, which he called “the great quantum muddle,” in reference to how physicists
incoherently invoked contradictory philosophical interpretations of quantum mechanics. Even the most
radically anti-philosophical man has a philosophy, but if he consciously rejects the study of
philosophy, he is doomed to hold his philosophy unconsciously and incoherently.
 Empiricism Bad
Lacan’s approach is rationalist rather than empirical—it’s still scientific and
contrasts with other kinds of psychoanalysis
EVANS 2009 (Dylan, “Science and Truth: an introduction I,” The Symptom 10,
http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?p=59 I added “Jung” in brackets to correct a typo by the author)
Lacan bases this account of the history of science on the writings of Koyré, whose account of
Newtonian physics seems to have been a great influence on Lacan. In addition to Koyré, Lacan is indebted
to the philosophical work of Bachelard and Canguilhem, which clearly place him in the rationalist
rather than the empiricist tradition in the philosophy of science. In other words, for Lacan, what
marks a discourse as scientific is a high degree of mathematical formalization . This is what lies
behind Lacan’s attempts to formalize psychoanalytic theory in terms of various mathematical formulae.
These formulae also encapsulate a further characteristic of scientific discourse (perhaps the most
fundamental one in Lacan’s view), which is that it should be transmissible (Lacan, 1973: 60).
Lacan’s allegiance to the rationalist tradition helps to explain the often biting criticisms which
he levels at much modern scientific research. These criticisms are almost always aimed at forms
of science based on empiricist assumptions (whicb Lacan regards ultimately as a false form of
science), and not at science itself. When he criticises modern science for ignoring the symbolic
dimension of human existence and thus encouraging modern man “to forget his subjectivity” (Lacan,
1953: 70), he clearly has sueh empiricist vehicles as communication science and behaviourist psychology
in mind. Thus Lacan is not criticizing Science itself, but only a particular form which he regards as
a deviation from ‘true science’.Thus it would certainly be wrong to describe Lacan as a luddite, fiercely
opposing the advance of any and all scientific enquiry. Far from it; he insists that the subject of
psychoanalysis can only be the subject of science, for in the era of science it is impossible to
recapture any ‘humanistic’ subject. Indeed, Lacan stresses that this is what separates Freud from
[Jung]lung. Whereas lung wanted to restore ‘a subject gifted with depths’, a subject with some direct,
archetypal access to knowledge (which can be seen as a form of intuitionism), Freud insisted that an
exclusively rational route to knowledge is now such a common presupposition that it cannot be
ignored. In stating that psychoanalysis operates only on the subject of science, Lacan is arguing
that psychoanalysis is not based on any appeal to an ineffable experience or flash of intuition,
but on a process of reasoned dialogue, even when reason confronts its limit in madness.

Lacanian psychoanalysis is scientific—it’s rationalist, not empiricist—but they first

have to win that empiricism is better than rationalism or their mode of science is
just paranoia
EVANS 2009 (Dylan, “Science and Truth: an introduction I,” The Symptom 10, paragraph ends with a
comma for some reason, http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?p=59)
This brings us back to our initial problem. What status are we to attribute to psychoanalytic theory? Is it a
truly scientific discourse? Lacan’s confident claims in 1964 about psychoanalysis ‘proceeding
from the same status as science’ seem to imply that it has already attained scientific status.
However, in “Science and truth”, only a year later, there are signs that Lacan is becoming more
cautious. Thus he now distinguishes psychoanalysis from science on the grounds that each has a different
mode of relationship to truth as cause. His growing uncertainty is reflected by apparently contradictory
statements in the same paper; he both states that psychoanalysis is not a science but a “practice”
(pratique) with a “scientific vocation” (Lacan, 1965: 863), and also speaks of ‘the psychoanalytic science’
(Lacan, 1965: 876). By 1977 he has moved even further away from the confident claims of 1964,
and now explicitly denies that psychoanalysis is a science;
Psychoanalysis is not a science. It has no scientific status – it merely waits and hopes for it.
Psychoanalysis is a delusion—a delusion which is expected to produce a science… It is a scientific
delusion, but this doesn’t mean that analytic practice will ever produce a science. (Lacan, 1976-7: Ornicar?
14: 4 [seminar of 11.01.77])
However, this statement is perhaps less categorical than it seems at first sight. For in
psychoanalytic theory, ever since Freud’s remark on the similarity between delusions and philosophical
systems, there has been an awareness of the logical rigour of psychotic phenomena (Freud, 1912-
13: 73). Indeed, in his later work, Lacan goes on to describe psychosis as “an essay in rigor”, and half-
jokingly (but only half) muses that if he had been a little more psycholic he might have produced a more
rigorous theorisation of psychoanalysis than he did. However, in the paper on science and truth, it is
not psychoanalysis that Lacan compares to a delusion. but science itself; he describes science as
“a fully realised paranoia” (Lacan. 1965: 874). This is because scientific constructions resemble
the architecture of a delusion in their rigour and explanatory power, and because both science
and paranoia are based on the operation of foreclosure.
Thus the statement in 1977 that psychoanalysis is not a science but a delusion invokes an
opposition that is simply not present, even undermined, in the 1965 paper on science and truth.
In terms of the 1965 paper, the statement that psychoanalysis is a delusion can only be read as
confirming its scientific status. This radical position places, Lacan at an even further distance from the
empiricist tradition than do his appeals to rationalist philosophers. And this is what makes Lacan
particularly impervious to’the kind of criticisms levelled at psychoanalysis today by Anglo-
American philosophers of science. Inspired by Eysenck’s famous tirade against psychoanalysis in the
1970′s (Eysenck & Wilson, 1973), a new generation of philosophers have argued in recent years that
psychoanalytic theory is not scientific because it is not falsifiable (eg. Grunbaum, 1984; Macmillan,
1991;’ Esterson, 1993). Such criticisms are based entirely on the empiricist account of science
which Lacan rejects,
 Alt: Internal Consistency
Internal consistency is a better standard for evidence—even the requirement of
material proof would exclude most scientific knowledge
CASTELLANO 2012 (Daniel, The Insufficiency of Empiricism,
http://www.arcaneknowledge.org/philtheo/empiricism2.htm)
All scientific theory worthy of the name, not just that which uses thought experiments, explains the
observable in terms of the unobservable. Our intelligible, mathematical principles are believed to be the
real underlying basis of the regularity of what we observe, even though we almost never see them
operating in ideal conditions. Observed reality is messy: there is always friction or air drag or other
complicating factors, as well as measurement error, leading us to results that at best
approximate the mathematical ideals of our theories. Yet we consider the terms of our
mathematical theories to have real explanatory force, and do not regard them as mere
descriptions of observations. These theories have their own internal deductive logic which, when
followed, can lead to predictions of things not yet observed. This has been repeatedly the case in
physics for the last century, as theory, for the most part, has been ahead of observation.
Sometimes the theory is so firmly established that scientists speak of certain entities (e.g., black
holes) as definitely existing even before they have been unequivocally observed.
 AT: Not Science
Scientific analysis creates a psychic split and sutures the subject –
Also, psychoanalysis is verifiable
Kalaidjian 12 Walter, professor at Johns Hopkins. “Traversing Psychosis: Lacan, Topology, and ‘The Jet-
Propelled Couch’”. Pgs. 190-191. American Imago, Vol. 69, No. 2, 185–213. 2012 by The Johns Hopkins University
Press. PWoods.
the subject of scientific knowledge as
Thus, the Möbius strip gives topological representation to the division that splits
the latter “forgets a dimension of truth that psychoanalysis seriously puts to work” (p. 738).
Psychoanalysis asserts the subject’s determination by the unconscious and —as the topology of the Möbius strip
demonstrates—that psychic truth, as an interior void, marks the impasse of science’s “deadlocked
endeavor to suture the subject” within the regime of its logic and formal procedures. As lacan puts it in
“On the Subject Who is Finally in Question,” truth effects “its detour [biais] in knowledge” (1953a, p. 194) or, in alexandre leupin’s
blunt translation, “Truth makes a hole in science” (leupin, 2004, p. 56). Insofar as this “hole” bears on the
real, its traumatic detour in knowledge befalls science as a kind of psychotic break. Indeed, “a
successful paranoia,” lacan asserts, “might just as well seem to constitute the closure of science” insofar
as the latter “does not-want-to-know-anything about the truth as cause ” (1965–66, p. 742) but instead
sustains its regime of knowledge through the foreclosure (Verwerfung) of incompleteness. Science’s
divide between reason and epistemological crisis reaches back to its enlightenment origins in the
Cartesian cogito, split as it is between, on the one hand, an insistence on clarity and certainty driven
by, on the other hand, a passionate self-doubt. While the latter’s truth as cause is ultimately foreclosed in the modern
regime of science’s objectified axiomatics, psychoanalysis holds its own rational methodology in productive
tension with the fading of the subject. Thus, psychoanalysis brings a rational, scientific rigor to
bear on its analysis of the unconscious structured as a language without, however, suturing the gap
between its disciplinary knowledge and the particular psychic disposition of the subject rooted in
an unconscious truth as cause. This qualified and paradoxical identification of the subject of science with the
psychoanalytic subject turns on the understanding that, as Jean-Claude Milner (1991) has it, “Just because there is an ideal of
science, there is no ideal science” (p. 33). Perhaps, however, the loss of its own status as an “ideal science” is most traumatic for
psychoanalysis precisely in its encounter with the ideal of science not just as it sutures the subject of science but as it likewise drives
the systematic rigor of the psychotic subject.

Falsifiability is useless and even if they win it’s good, we’re falsifiable
Dean 5 COLIN LESLIE DEAN, BSC, BA, B.LITT(HON) ,MA, B.LITT(HON), MA, MA(PSYCHOANALYTIC
STUDIES), "THE IRRATIONAL AND ILLOGICAL NATURE OF SCIENCE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS: THE
DEMARCATIONOF SCIENCE AND NON-SCIENCE IS A PSEUDO PROBLEM"
gamahucherpress.yellowgum.com/books/psychoanalysis/THE_IRRATIONAL_AND_ILLOGICAL_NATURE_OF_S
CIENCE_AND_PSYCHOANA.pdf. PWoods.
Grunbaum, in 1984, published a book which took issue with the positivist attack upon the un-falsifiablity of psychoanalysis
Grunbaum " argues that, although perhaps more difficult to study than in the physical sciences, cause-
effect principles apply just as strongly in psychology as in physics . He also shows that many
psychoanalytical postulates are falsifiable ..." A, Bateman, & J, Holmes claim that repression,
unconscious awareness, identification and internalization are scientifically proven . Now
despite Grunbaum's apparent demonstration of the falsifablity of psychoanalysis some theorists claim that the external
validation of psychoanalysis is doomed to fail. These theorists follow Ricoeur in claiming a hermeneutic understanding of
psychoanalysis. They claim that instead of a correspondence with reality, as being the criteria upon which to assess
psychoanalysis, they claim that ". internal coherence and narrative plausibility as the basis for settling disputes." Thus we see
there are those, like Grunbaum, who argue that psychoanalysis can be tested against the facts of
reality and potentially its postulates can be falsified by reality. On the other hand there are those,
like Ricoeur, who advocate a hermenutical approach where it is not a correspondence with
reality that matters but whether the psychoanalytic theory is internally consistent and its
interpretations or narratives satisfying or not. A theory is falsifiable, in the correspondence theory of 'truth' if it does not
agree with reality. In the coherence theory of 'truth' a theory is falsifiable ifit is inconsistent in terms of the system. I will argue
that both criteria are flawed and lack epistemological support. In this regard we see that the debate on the falsifiablity
of psychoanalysis is a debate between correspondence and coherence theorists . Now the
correspondence and coherence theories of 'truth' are philosophically flawed . I will show how they are flawed and
lack epistemological support. What I will draw from this is my claim that it does not matter
whether psychoanalysis is falsifiable or not either in terms of the correspondence or coherence theories of
'truth' because both lack epistemological support. A way of looking at a theory is to see at as a set of statements which say
something about a state of affair about reality. Under this viewpoint the issue is what is the relation between the
statement and reality that makes it 'true' or 'false' . O'Hear notes 'true' statements correspond or
picture reality . But the problem with this is that " how can a statement- something linguistic -
correspond to a fact or state of affairs. Certainly it cannot be a replica of a state of affairs , nor does it fit with it in the way
a nut might be said to correspond with a nut. Further, even if we could make some sense of a simple affirmative factual
statement .... There are considerable problems with knowing just what it is other statements are supposed to correspond to."
What about negative statements that say something is not or does not exist? What
aboutcounterfactural statements? Do mathematical and moral statements correspond to something
in reality? Are there universal statements that correspond to reality? The correspondence theory of 'truth'
that sees statements as corresponding to reality is thus problematic. The problems are such that, as O'Hear notes " ... the
correspondence relation are simply shadowy reflections of statements we regard as true for other reasons rather than as
generally mind-independent realities." When we realize that there is no non-conceptual view about reality we realize that
even 'reality' is a value-laden conceptual laden term . As some argue all theory is value laden
there are no facts uncontaminated by epistemological, metaphysical, other theories, and ontological views. The result of all this
is to undermine the claims of the correspondence theory such that "... there is something futile in thinking that
what we know is achieved by direct access to a mind-independent reality, which would suggest
that a naive correspondence view of truth, at least, is likely to be able to give us little guidance in
our actual inquiries and researches." We shall see that the coherence theory of 'truth' fares no better in guiding our
research or acessing our actual statements about 'truth' or falsidity. In the coherence theory of 'truth' the criteria of 'truth' is that
a statement does not contradict other statements. O'Hear notes that "systems here are regarded as being governed by nothing
more mysterious than normal relations of implication and contradiction." But as has been pointed out it is quite easy to avoid
contradiction by dropping inconsistent statements . If a statement is inconsistent with theory or observation we can just drop
either the theory or observational statement. Also many scientific theory suffer from empirical counter-evidence which we
nevertheless still accept. What happens when two or more theories i.e. Kleinian, Lacanian, Freudian, ego-psychology etc, are lets
say coherent but contain mutually contradictory statements in regard to each other. In other words what about the situation
when theories are coherent but contradict each other. O'Hear points out " that many would regard this as a conclusive objection
to the coherence theory of truth, for surely whether a statement is true or not depends on the facts and not on the systems we are
using to interpret the facts." But here is the big problem. We showed above that facts are themselves value conceptual laden. The
correspondence theory of 'truth' in fact is not epistemologically or metaphysically etc neutral- we see the facts through other
theories. But we have just seen that in seeing the facts through other theories assumes that the theories are coherence, but
coherence theories of 'truth' as we have seen are epistemologically flawed. Thus we see that epistemologically both the
correspondence and coherence theories of 'truth' are flawed. This to my mind say that it does not matter whether
psychoanalysis is falsifiable. Whether it is, or is not is based upon a particular theory of 'truth'
that has no epistemological support. Now regardless of these philosophical investigations I will
show that in terms of each theory there is evidence that even though their criteria are not met
for some theories these theories are still used with ongoing validity. This evidence will also lend
weight to my claim that it does not matter whether psychoanalysis is falsifiable or not, it can still
have validity. There are examples from physics where correspondence with reality has not
resulted in the abandonment of the theory. A theory has been falsified yet nevertheless it is still used.
A classic example is that of Newtonian physics. Newtonian prediction of black-body radiation failed -this was left
to quantum physics to do. Also Newtonian physics failed to predict the motion of three bodies in combined gravitational motion
i.e. planets . Kuhn points out that no one denied that Newtonian physic was not as science because it could not predict the speed
of sound, or Newton's laws of gravitation failed to predict and account for the perigee of the moon or the motion of the moon; as
he states " no one seriously questioned Newtonian theory because of the long recognized discrepancies between predictions from
the theory and both the speed the speed of sound and the motion of Mercury." Thus we see that even if
psychoanalysis is falsified in terms of the correspondence theory of 'truth ,the case of Newtonian
physics shows us that it need not matter in the least. In this regard there is truth in Freud's
provocative idea, when he states, " even if psychoanalysis showed itself as unsuccessful in every
other form of nervous and psychical disease as it does in delusions, it would still remain completely justified as
an irreplacable instrument of scientific research . It is true that in that case we should not be in a position to
practice it." Now even
in science and mathematics there are un-falsifiable entities but this does not
stop them being used in those disciplines. At the very core of science and mathematics there are
un-falsifiable entities. Such things as matter, the mathematical point, anti-matter force etc. are
unfalsifiable. Freud notes the presence of un-falsiable objects in psychoanalysis when he states " too it will be entirely in
accord with our expectations if the basic concepts and principles of the new science (instincts, nervous energy, etc) remain for a
considerable time no less indeterminate than those of the older sciences (force, mass, attraction, etc)." Thus we see that even if
psychoanalysis is not falsifiable, in terms of the correspondence theory of 'truth'. just like in mathematics and science, it does
not matter for a theories validity. The coherence theory of 'truth's says that if a theory or statement is inconsistent then it is false.
But there are examples where this is the state of affairs but nevertheless the theories are still used.

Our version of psychoanalysis is falsifiable --- we can empirically

examine repeated elements of signification and determine the aff’s
method is terrible for achieving change
Lundberg 12 --- Professor and Communication Strategies Consultant (Christian, Lacan in Public,
Published by The University of Alabama Press, Project Muse)//trepka
Provocation: Returning to a Science of Oratory One of the
most hallowed maxims of rhetorical
studies is that rhetoric is an art—a techne for engaging discourse in the properly Aristotelian
sense of the term. Techne implies a systematic mode of experiential knowledge , but often in declaring
that rhetoric is an art, the accent of this declaration falls on the intuitive and the experiential facets of techne at the expense of the
more systematic charge inherent in it. While for much of the rhetorical tradition, techne has primarily
taken the valence of a prudential guide for intuitive judgment, Lacan turns to rhetoric to confer
on psychoanalysis a scientific status. Lacan’s claims to the “science” of rhetoric respond to a
number of critics who had framed psychoanalysis as an alchemical mix of unfounded theories,
intuitions and inherited practices. Borrowing from Karl Popper’s philosophy of science, such critiques of
psychoanalysis argued that analytic practice was non-falsifiable, resting on the idea that no empirical
evidence could be mustered to refute it. Any claim to evidence to the contrary of Freudian theories could always be elided by
generating another explanation with dubious empirical grounding to account for potential exceptions. In drawing on
rhetoric as a systematic mode for theorizing the nature of the sign, representation, and the logic
and social functions of discourse, Lacan rescues Freudian categories from non-falsifiability.
Rhetoric, which is so squarely rooted in “art,” became one of Lacan’s most powerful allies in articulating
psychoanalysis as a science, providing a vocabulary for attending to the repeatable elements
of signification that might be held up to empirical verification.

Even if psychoanalysis is nonfalsifiable, it shouldn’t be disregarded –

other philosophical theories indicate it can still be true
Levine, 1 – Winthrop Professor of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, University of
Western Australia (Michael, “A Fun Night Out: Horror and Other Pleasures of the Cinema,”
July, http://sensesofcinema.com/2001/freuds-worst-nightmares-psychoanalysis-and-the-
horror-film/horror_fun/)//SY

Psychoanalytic theories of film, and of horror film in particular, have been subject to attack from various quarters. This essay
addresses these criticisms-defending a psychoanalytic approach to horror cinema from objections raised by theorists such as
Stephen Prince, Andrew Tudor, Jonathan Crane, Noël Carroll, and Berys Gaut. Some of these objections do little more than
wheel out the well-worn objection-a common one even in Freud’s time-that psychoanalysis is
“unscientific.” But even if is true that psychoanalysis is unscientific (by some often objectionable
standard), this does not ipso facto show that it is false. Adolf Grünbaum’s critique of Freud’s so-called “Tally
Argument” (see below) is an example of one such “objectionable standard.” This critique is basically a gussied-up version of the
claim that psychoanalysis is not falsifiable. However, the falsifiability (in principle), of a scientific theory, has
to
be interpreted in way suitable to the theory in question. It is clear that psychoanalysis is not going to be
falsifiable (in principle) in the way that the physical or biological sciences are- that is, by producing an
experiment that can conclusively falsify it. Nevertheless, as I point out below, aspects of psychoanalysis
certainly are falsifiable, and indeed have been falsified. (1) It is also not difficult to produce examples
of disciplines and theories that are (by certain standards) unscientific but true, or likely to be true. Many
philosophical theories-whether broadly or narrowly construed-are unscientific and true, though it may be difficult to
say which are the true ones. Similarly, some very general theories in social science may be true but
unscientific according to the standards of the physical and biological sciences. Thus, Clifford Geertz’s
enormously influential theory of “religion as a cultural system” (1973: 90) is in my view true but not
experimentally falsifiable. Other criticisms are based on a misunderstanding of fundamental
aspects of psychoanalysis. (2) Although there are many interesting issues in film theory that relate specifically to the horror
genre, the critique of psychoanalytic approaches to interpreting horror is usually more general. Such criticism is often directed at
any kind of psychoanalytic approach to understanding film and spectatorship. My approach therefore mirrors the form of this
criticism. It often discusses critiques of psychoanalytic approaches to film generally rather than horror in particular- even where
horror films are the examples used.
 AT: Sexist
Psychoanalysis is not inherently antifeminist—our account of the
unconscious is useful for feminist criticism
ZAKIN 2011 (Zakin, Emily, Prof of Philosophy, Miami University, "Psychoanalytic Feminism", The
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, May 16, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-
psychoanalysis/#Con)
Psychoanalysis presents a critical and diagnostic project, not necessarily a normative or
liberatory one. In developing a theory of the drives and the non-rational forces that move and impel us,
the idea that we are opaque rather than transparent to ourselves, incapable of complete self-knowledge or
self-mastery, psychoanalytic theory also challenges the rationalist, humanist ego and proposes
that our ethical characters and political communities are not perfectable, exposing the
precariousness of both psychic and political identity. The unconscious cannot be assumed to be
inherently either a transgressive or a conservative force, but an unreliable one, promoting revolt
or rebellion sometimes, intransigence and rigid border preservation at other times.
Although they are in often uneasy alliance, the psychoanalytic account of the unconscious provides
feminist theory with resources for both political and ontological inquiry. Ontologically,
psychoanalysis offers a distinctively psychical understanding of sexual difference, how we come
to inhabit our bodies and our identities, and misinhabit them, an analysis reducible to neither
social nor biological categories. Politically, psychoanalysis offers a depiction of the forces that
impel us to organize, disorganize, and reorganize the bonds that hold us together. By offering
insight into the formation of subjectivity and the animating fantasies of social life,
psychoanalysis thus also facilitates feminist analysis of the obdurate elements of patriarchal social
relations, including the symbolic bonds and internal forces that undergird identity and attach sexed
subjects to relations of dominance and subordination. Psychoanalytic feminist attention to the core
constituents of civilization, to the nuclei of sexual difference and communal affiliation, helps
explain the perpetuation of masculine power and enables feminist theorists to articulate
possible correctives, challenges, routes of amelioration, or ethical interruptions that go to the
roots of political life and to its beyond and do not simply operate on the given social terrain.
AT: Specific Internal Links//Pragmatism
Reject their claims of “specific” internal links --- the 1AC ignores the
structural impossibility of fulfilling the demand for decreased
surveillance because of the necessity of recognition from the other
Lundberg 12 --- Professor and Communication Strategies Consultant (Christian, Lacan in Public,
Published by The University of Alabama Press, Project Muse)//trepka
Freud relocates the site of
Later, in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, and Civilization and Its Discontents,
the ego’s genesis beyond the parent/child relationship and in the broader social relationships
that animate it. Life with others inevitably produces blockages in the individual’s attempts to fulfill certain desires, since some
demands for the fulfillment of desires must be frustrated. This blockage produces feelings of guilt, which in turn are sublimated as a
general social morality. The frustration of demand is both productive in that it authorizes social moral codes and, by extension,
civilization writ large, although it does so at the cost of imposing a contested relationship between desire and social mores.32
Confronted by student calls to join the movement of 1968 Lacan famously quipped: “as hysterics
you demand a new master: you will get it!” Understanding the meaning of his response requires
a treatment of Lacan’s theory of the demand and its relationship to hysteria as a n enabling and
constraining political subject position. Lacan’s theory of the demand picks up at Freud’s
movement outward from the paradigmatic relationships between the parent/ child and individual/civilization
toward a more general account of the subject, sociality, and signification. The infrastructure
supporting this theoretical movement transposes Freud’s comparatively natural and genetic account of development to a set of
metaphors for dealing with the subject’s entry into signification. The site of this excess, where the subject negotiates the terms of a
non-relationship with the Symbolic, is also the primary site differentiating need, demand, and desire. Need approximates the
position of the Freudian id, in that it is a precursor to demand. Demand is the filtering of the need through signification, but as
Sheridan notes, “there is no adequation between need and demand.”35 The same type of split that inheres in the Freudian demand
inheres in the Lacanian demand, although in Lacan’s case it is crucial to notice that the split does not derive from
the empirical impossibility of fulfilling demands as much as it stems
from the impossibility of articulating needs
to or receiving a satisfactory response from the Other. Thus, the specificity of the demand
becomes less relevant than the structural fact that demand presupposes the ability of
the addressee to fulfill the demand . This impossibility points to the paradoxical nature of demand: the
demand is less a way of addressing need to the other than a call for love and recognition by it.
“In this way,” writes Lacan, “demand annuls the particularity of everything that can be granted by transmuting it into a proof of love,
and the very satisfactions that it obtains for need are reduced to the level of being no more than the crushing of the demand for
love.”36 The
Other cannot, by definition, ever give this gift: the starting presupposition of
the mirror stage is the constitutive impossibility of comfortably inhabiting the
Symbolic . The structural impossibility of fulfilling demands resonates with the Freudian demand in that the frustration of
demand produces the articulation of desire. Thus, Lacan argues that “desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand
for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second.” 37 This sentiment animates the crucial
Lacanian claim for the impossibility of the other giving a gift that it does not have, namely the gift of love: “ all demand
implies . . . a request for love. . . . Desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from
need: this margin being that which is opened up by demand, the appeal of which can be unconditional only in
regards to the Other . . . having no universal satisfaction. . . . It is this whim that introduces the phantom of omnipotence, not
of the subject, but of the other in which his demand is installed.”38 This framing of demand reverses the classically liberal
presupposition regarding demand and agency. Contemporary and classical liberal democratic theories presume that the demand is a
way of exerting agency and, further, that the more firmly the demand is lodged, the greater the production of an agential effect. The
Lacanian framing of the demand sees the relationship as exactly the opposite: the more firmly
one lodges a demand, the more desperately one clings to the legitimate ability of an
institution to fulfill it. Hypothetically, demands ought reach a kind of breaking point where the inability of an institution or
order to proffer a response should produce a reevaluation of the economy of demand and desire. In analytic terms, this is the
moment of subtraction, where the manifest content of the demand is stripped away and the
desire that underwrites it is laid bare. The result of this “subtraction” is that the subject is in a
position to relate to its desire , not as a set of deferrals, avoidances, or transposition but
rather as an owned political disposition.
 AT: Psycho Only Individual
Psychoanalysis applies the social unconscious connect the individual
to the group
Hollander 14 – Currently a research psychoanalyst, educated at the Psychoanalytic Center of California, Former
Professor of History at California State University, Dominguez Hills (Nancy Caro Hollander, 4/8/2014, Routledge, Uprooted
Minds: Surviving the Politics of Terror in the Americas, ISBN: 978-0881634914 // SM)
Psychoanalysis in the group psychotherapy tradition accounts for a socially constructed
subjectivity through the concept of the social unconscious by which they mean the
coconstructed and shared unconscious of members of particular social systems such as community,
society, nation, or culture. The social unconscious includes shared anxieties, fantasies, defenses, myths,
and memories, and its building blocks are made of chosen traumas and chosen glories (Weinberg,
2007). For some theorists in this tradition, The social unconscious represents the installation of social
power relations within the core of psychic structure and functions as a bridge between the
individual and the group that shapes drives, affects, and defenses. The I of the individual is
constructed inevitably out of the preexisting we, which in turn exists in relation to a designated not we, always
characterized by power hierarchies. Thus the psychology of individuals is constituted within the vicissitudes of
the power-relational field they inhabit to shape how they feel about themselves and behave toward
others (Dalal, 2001). In the British psychosocial studies tradition that examines subjectivity through a psychoanalytically
informed lens, Wendy Hollway defines the concept psycho-social in this way: We are psycho-social because we are
products of a unique life history of anxiety- and desire-provoking life events and the manner in
which they have been transformed in internal reality. We are psycho-social because such defensive activities affect
and are affected by material conditions and discourses (systems of meaning which pre-exist any given individual), because
unconscious defenses are intersubjective processes...and because of the real events in the external, social world which are
discursively, desirously and defensively appropriated. (Hook, 2008, p. 351)
 AT: No Apply to Policy
Lacan’s theories are applicable to policy
Gunder 6—Michael Gunder is an Associate Professor in the School of Architecture and
Planning at the University of Auckland, and is a past president of the New Zealand Planning
Institute. (“Lacan, Planning and Urban Policy Formation,” August 22nd 2006,
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/0811114042000335287, HSA)

This article has illustrated that Lacan’s theoretical conceptualisation of human identity and desire can provide insight
into urban policy formulation and implementation . Planning and its associated urban policy
disciplines not only supply ‘scientific’ knowledge and analysis, but also inform the public’s views
by providing, and even imposing, ideal ‘master signifiers’ and supporting narratives that
emotively, as well as rationally, frame and define what constitutes our major urban policy issues
and their scope for viable ‘reasoned’ resolution (Gunder, 2003b). These signifiers shape and contain the urban
policy debate. They identify what is lacking, or missing, from the contemporary ideal of the ‘good’ city and then supply the
solution to fill this lack. Desire is a central component within this process. ¶ Urban policy master signifiers
first provide points of anchor from which to construct and constrain the ego-ideal of the
fledgling planner who then deploys these master signifiers as their planning policy ideals . These
professional master signifiers, and the value and knowledge arrays that underwrite them, construct our strategic
urban visioning narratives, plans and solutions. They shape issues as deficiencies, or as a lack,
detracting from a whole, complete, ‘good’ city and then provide the content of our urban policies
to fill these identified deficient voids. These prescriptions, in turn, set the limits of our social realities and desires of
what ought to be, at least for the production of the spaces constituting our built environments. ¶ Policy planning is not
just delivering facts from the expert to the public . The initial evolution and subsequent imposition of
urban policy “gives rise to alienation and transmission of knowledge, resulting in group formation around shared signifiers, i.e. a
‘doxa’” (Verhaeghe, 2001, p. 47). This is a common set of identity shaping beliefs that initially forms the
professional identifications of planners and these beliefs are then induced onto the public as the
only ‘rational’ urban policy narratives for producing viable answers and city forming policy
behaviours. Urban policy formulation involves the partial shaping of the public’s identity as urban residents and actors through
shaping their adoption of narratives and master signifiers that produce specific modes of urban behaviours—i.e. urban practices and
submission to regulatory compliance (Gunder, 2003b); and, as this article suggests, the resultant production and loss of pleasure—
jouissance—that this incurs.¶ Yet planning and urban policy formulation should not be dismissed because
they are comprised of ideological ideas that are imposed on the public. Rather their ideological
nature is a consequence of policy planning being central to a key dimension of society’s
fundamental desire for harmony and security in a ‘better’ future city, even if this can only be
fulfilled through illusion (Gunder, 2003a). Those who know—urban policy experts and their political
masters—can only survive because the public believes in them (Hillier & Gunder, 2003). Urban policy
formation constitutes new narratives of a better future city and hence new urban realities because this is socially desired
 AT: We Need to Do Things
Psychoanalysis is more than just ideology or passivity – it leads to a radical break
from status quo violence
García & Sánchez, 8 – Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Universidad de Costa Rica AND
Professor, Department of Linguistics, Universidad de Costa Rica (George I. and Carlos Guillermo
Aguilar, “Psychoanalysis and politics: the theory of ideology in Slavoj Žižek,” International Journal of
Žižek Studies, Vol. 2, No. 3, 9, http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/viewFile/149/243)//SY ***
modified for gender language

Here stands out the anti-sacrificial character of the proposal that Žižek retakes from Lacan. In doing so,
moreover, the Left radical character of such proposal also becomes manifest. Whereas Fascism - as the
prototype of ideology according to Žižek - identifies with the symbolic big Other and extols it,
ideological critique must, on the contrary, suspend it. Subjective destitution presupposes, in Žižek’s
words, assuming that “the big Other does not posses what the subject lacks, and no sacrifice can
compensate the former’s lack” (1994: 78) [29]. The aim of psychoanalysis is not, therefore, that the
analisand should be able to accept his [or her] resignation / renouncing as a condition to access
desire. Rather than assuming this lack, the subject would have to assume the lack of the big Other -
which, as Žižek points out, is incomparably more unbearable. As the big Other is the (presu)position of
an immaterial and ideal order, its (libidinal) function is to guarantee the ultimate meaning and consistency
of the subject’s experience. This withdrawal with respect to the big Other is not a sacrifice - because
sacrifice is always directed towards the Other-, but “an act of abandonment that sacrifices the very
sacrifice” (1994: 79). As a consequence, the ultimate aim of ideological critique is to place the
historical subject (barred, of course) face to face with the possibility of its own action confronting the
Other, so far considered to be full and complete. Far [from preparing] for the acceptance of a
totalitarian symbolic order, the ideological critique based on Lacanian psychoanalysis would be a
propedeutics for the rupture with the status quo ; it would first of all attempt to confront the
trauma generated by ideological fantasy [30].. In this way, visualising the conflict and assuming it is
a fundamental part for breaking from ideology. Hence, according to Žižek, the Left “must preserve the
historical traces of all the traumas, dreams and catastrophes that the prevailing ‘end of history’ ideology
would prefer to obliterate; it must become a live monument, so that while the Left remains, those traumas
remain marked. This attitude, far from confining the Left to a nostalgic love affair with the past, is
the only possible way to take a distance from the present, a distance that allows us to discern the
signs [of] the New” (1998: 352-353).
Extinction K
 Two Death Cards

The aff’s attempt to ascribe a meaning to extinction and mass violence

relies on a big Other with access to the truth of existence. Imagining
extinction is the purest fantasy of observation without a location for
the human subject which sets up a meaningful “nature” versus a
constructed “human world.” For the aff, nature must then be the big
Other and all violence must have a hidden purpose which plays on our
inner pathologies. This sets up a division between our observed
environment and the catastrophe the aff depicts which makes us
unable to act against ecological collapse and the real threat of
extinction. We should instead acknowledge the meaninglessness of
their impact, not to accept it, but to overcome the symbolic separation
of human and nature that makes us incapable of addressing their
impact and all other threats of destruction
ZIZEK 2007 (Slavoj, Censorship Today: Violence, or........ Ecology as a New Opium for the Masses,
http://www.lacan.com/zizecology2.htm)
The lesson to be fully endorsed is thus that of another environmental scientist who came to the result that, while one cannot be sure
what the ultimate result of humanity's interventions into geo-sphere will be, one thing is sure: if humanity were to stop abruptly its
immense industrial activity and let nature on Earth take its balanced course, the result would have been a total breakdown, an
imaginable catastrophe. "Nature" on Earth is already to such an extent "adapted" to human interventions, the human "pollutions"
are already to such an extent included into the shaky and fragile balance of the "natural" reproduction on Earth, that its cessation
would cause a catastrophic imbalance. This is what it means that humanity has nowhere to retreat: not only "there is no big Other"
(self-contained symbolic order as the ultimate guarantee of Meaning); there is also no Nature
qua balanced order of self-reproduction whose homeostasis is disturbed, thrown off the rails, by the
imbalanced human interventions. Indeed, what we need is ecology without nature: the ultimate
obstacle to protecting nature is the very notion of nature we rely on.
Alan Weisman's The World Without Us is a vision of what would have happened if humanity (and ONLY
humanity) were suddenly to disappear from the earth - natural diversity blooming again, nature gradually regaining
human artefacts. We, humans, are reduced to a pure disembodied gaze observing our own absence . (As
Lacan pointed out, this is the fundamental subjective position of fantasy: to be reduced to a, the gaze
which observes the world in the condition of the subject's non-existence - like the fantasy of
witnessing the act of one's own conception, the parental copulation, or the act of witnessing one's own burial,
like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. A jealous child likes to indulge in the fantasy of imagining how his
parents would react to his own death, putting at stake his own absence.) "The world without us"
is thus fantasy at its purest: witnessing the Earth itself retaining its pre-castrated state of innocence,
before we humans spoiled it with our hubris. The irony is that the most prominent example comes from the
catastrophe of Chernobyl: the exuberant nature taking over the disintegrating debris of the nearby city Pripyat which was
abandoned, left the way it was.
Against this background, one should also render problematic Badiou's distinction between man qua mortal "human animal" and the
"inhuman" subject as the agent of a Truth-procedure: man is pursuing happiness and pleasures, worrying about death, etc., it is an
animal endowed with higher instruments to reach its goals, while only as a subject faithful to a Truth-Event does it truly raise above
animality. The problem with this dualism is that it ignores Freud's basic lesson: there is no "human animal," a human
being is from its birth (and even before) torn out of the animal constraints, its instincts are
"denaturalized," caught in the circularity of the (death-)drive, functioning "beyond the pleasure principle,"
marked by the stigma of what Eric Santner called "undeadness" or the excess of life. This is why there is no place for "death drive" in
Badiou's edifice, for the "distortion" of human animality which precedes fidelity to an Event. It is not only the "miracle" of a
traumatic encounter with an Event which derails a human subject from its animality: its libido is already in itself derailed. One
should thus turn around the usual criticism of Badiou: what is problematic is not the quasi-religious miracle of the Event, but the
very "natural" order disturbed by the Event.
So, back to the prospect of ecological catastrophe, why do we not act? It is too short to attribute our
disbelief in the catastrophe to the impregnation of our mind by scientific ideology, which leads us to dismiss the sane concerns of our
common reason, i.e., the gut sense which tells us that something is fundamentally wrong with the scientific-technological attitude.
The problem is much deeper, it resides in the unreliability of our common sense itself which,
habituated as it is to our ordinary life-world, finds it difficult really to accept that the flow of
everyday reality can be perturbed. Our attitude here is that of the fetishist split: "I know very
well (that the global warming is a threat to the entire humanity), but nonetheless... (I cannot
really believe it). It is enough to look at my environs to which my mind is wired: the green grass
and trees, the whistle of the wind, the rising of the sun... can one really imagine that all this will be disturbed?
You talk about the ozone hole - but no matter how much I look into the sky, I don't see it - all I see is the same sky, blue or grey!"
And therein resides the horror of the Chernobyl accident: when one visits the site, with the exception of the sarcophagus, things look
exactly the same as before, life seems to have deserted the site, leaving everything the way it is, and nonetheless we are aware that
something is terribly wrong. The change is not at the level of the visible reality itself, it is a more
fundamental one, it affects the very texture of reality . No wonder there are some lone farmers around the
Chernobyl site who continued to lead their lives as before - they simply ignore all the incomprehensible talk about radiations. Do
these farmers not behave like the madman in the old joke circulating among Lacanians to exemplify the key role of the Other's
knowledge: a man who believes himself to be a grain of seed is taken to the mental institution where the doctors do their best to
finally convince him that he is not a grain but a man; however, when he is cured (convinced that he is not a grain of seed but a man)
and allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately comes back very trembling of scare - there is a chicken outside the door and that
he is afraid that it would eat him. "Dear fellow," says his doctor, "you know very well that you are not a grain of seed but a man". "Of
course I know that," replies the patient, "but does the chicken know it?" The chicken from the joke stands for the big Other which
doesn't know. In the last years of Tito's life, he was effectively such a chicken: some archives and memoirs show that, already in the
mid-1970s, the leading figures around Tito were aware that Yugoslavia's economic situation was catastrophic; however, since Tito
was nearing his death, they made a collective decision to postpone the outbreak of a crisis till his death - the price was the fast
accumulation of external debt in the last years of Tito's life. When, in 1980, Tito finally dies, the economic crisis did strike with
revenge, leading to a 40 per cent fall of standard of living, to ethnic tensions and, finally, civil and ethnic war that destroyed the
country - the moment to confront the crisis adequately was missed. One can thus say that what put the last nail in the coffin of
Yugoslavia was the very attempt by its leading circle to protect the ignorance of the Leader, to keep his gaze happy.
Is this not what, ultimately, culture is? One of the elementary rules of culture is to know when (and how) to
pretend NOT to know (or notice), to go on and act as if something which happened did not
happen. When a person near me accidentally produces an unpleasant vulgar noise, the proper thing to do is to ignore it, not to
comfort him: "I know it was an accident, don't worry, it doesn't really matter!" We should thus understand in the right way the joke
about the chicken: a madman's question is a quite pertinent question in many everyday situations. When parents with a young child
have affairs, fight and shout at each other, they as a rule (if they retain a minimum of decency) try to prevent the child to notice it,
well aware that the child's knowledge would have had a devastating effect on him - so what they try to maintain is precisely a
situation of "We know that we cheat and fight and shout, but the child/chicken doesn't know it." (Of course, in many cases, the child
knows it very well, but merely feigns not to notice anything wrong, aware that in this way his parents' life is a little bit easier.) Or, at
a less vulgar level, recall a parent in a difficult predicament (dying of cancer, in financial difficulties), but trying to keep this secret
from his nearest and dearest...
And this is also our problem with ecology : we know it, but the chicken doesn't know it... The problem is thus that we
can rely neither on scientific mind nor on our common sense - they both mutually reinforce each other's
blindness. The scientific mind advocates a cold objective appraisal of dangers and risks involved
where no such appraisal is effectively possible, while common sense finds it hard to accept that a
catastrophe can really occur. The difficult ethical task is thus to "un-learn" the most basic
coordinates of our immersion into our life-world: what usually served as the recourse to
Wisdom (the basic trust in the background-coordinates of our world) is now THE source of
danger.
One can learn even more from the Rumsfeldian theory of knowledge - the expression, of course, refers to
the well-known accident in March 2003, when Donald Rumsfeld engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophizing about the
relationship between the known and the unknown: "There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are
known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are
things we don't know we don't know." What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the "unknown
knowns," things we don't know that we know - which is precisely the Freudian unconscious, the
"knowledge which doesn't know itself," as Lacan used to say. If Rumsfeld thinks that the main dangers in the
confrontation with Iraq are the "unknown unknowns," the threats from Saddam about which we do not even suspect what they may
be, what we should reply is that the main dangers are, on the contrary, the "unknown knowns," the disavowed beliefs and
suppositions we are not even aware of adhering to ourselves. In the case of ecology, these
disavowed beliefs and suppositions are the ones which prevent us from really believing in the
possibility of the catastrophe, and they combine with the "unknown unknowns." The situation is
like that of the blind spot in our visual field: we do not see the gap, the picture appears
continuous.
If the Freudian name for the "unknown known" is the Unconscious , the Freudian name for the "unknown
unknowns" is TRAUMA, the violent intrusion of something radically unexpected , something the
subject was absolutely not ready for, something the subject cannot integrate in any way. In her Les nouveaux blessés (The New
Wounded), Catherine Malabou proposed a critical reformulation of psychoanalysis along these lines. Her starting point is the
delicate echoing between internal and external Real in psychoanalysis: for Freud and Lacan, external shocks, brutal
unexpected encounters or intrusions, due their properly traumatic impact to the way they touch
a pre-existing traumatic "psychic reality." Malabou rereads along these lines Lacan's reading of the Freudian dream of
"Father, can't you see I'm burning?" The contingent external encounter of the real (the candle collapses and
inflames the cloth covering the dead child, and the smell of the smoke disturbs the father on a night-watch) triggers the true
Real, the unbearable fantasy-apparition of the dead child reproaching his father. In this way, for Freud (and
Lacan), every external trauma is "sublated," internalized, owing its impact to the way a pre-
existing Real of the "psychic reality" is aroused through it. Even the most violent intrusions of
the external real - say, the shocking effect on the victims of bomb-explosions in war - owe their
traumatic effect to the resonance they find in perverse masochism, in death-drive, in
unconscious guilt-feeling, etc. Today, however, our socio-political reality itself imposes multiple versions of
external intrusions, traumas, which are just that, meaningless brutal interruptions that destroy the
symbolic texture of subject's identity. First, there is the brutal external physical violence : terror
attacks like 98/11, the US "shock and awe" bombing of Iraq, street violence, rapes, etc., but also natural catastrophes, earthquakes,
tsunamis, etc.; then, there is the "irrational" (meaningless) destruction of the material base of our
inner reality (brain-tumors, Alzheimer's disease, organic cerebral lesions, etc., which can utterly change, destroy
even, the victim's personality; finally, there are the destructive effects of socio-symbolic violence (social
exclusion, etc.). (Note how this triad echoes the triad of commons: the commons of external nature, of inner nature, of
symbolic substance.) Basically, Malabou's reproach is that Freud himself succumbs here to the temptation of
meaning: he is not ready to accept the direct destructive efficiency of external shocks - they
destroy the psyche of the victim (or, at least, wound it in an unredeemable way) without resonating in any
inner traumatic truth. It would be obviously obscene to link, say, the psychic devastation of a
"Muslim" in a Nazi camp to his masochism, death-drive, or guilt feeling: a Muslim (or a victim of multiple rape,
of brutal torture...) is not devastated by unconscious anxieties, but directly by a "meaningless"
external shock which can in no way be hermeneutically appropriated/integrated.
For Freud, if external violence gets too strong, we simply exit the psychic domain proper: the choice is "either the shock is re-
integrated into a pre-existing libidinal frame, or it destroys psyche and nothing is left." What he cannot envisage is that the victim as
if were survives its own death: all different forms of traumatic encounters, independently of their specific nature (social, natural,
biological, symbol...) lead to the same result - a new subject emerges which survives its own death, the death (erasure) of its
symbolic identity. There is no continuity between this new "post-traumatic" subject (suffering Alzheimer's or other cerebral lesions,
etc.): after the shock, literally a new subject emerges. Its features are well-known from numerous descriptions: lack of emotional
engagement, profound indifference and detachment - it is a subject who is no longer "in-the-world" in the Heideggerian sense of
engaged embodied existence. This subject lives death as a form of life - his life is death-drive embodied, a life deprived of erotic
engagement; and this holds for henchmen no less than for his victims. If the XXth century was the Freudian century, the century of
libido, so that even the worst nightmares were read as (sado-masochist) vicissitudes of the libido, will the XXIst century be the
century of such post-traumatic disengaged subjects whose first emblematic figure, that of the Muslim in concentration camps, is not
multiplying in the guise of refugees, terror victims, survivors of natural catastrophes, of family violence...? The feature that runs
through all these figures is that the cause of the catastrophe remains libidinally meaningless, resisting any interpretation.
The constellation is properly frustrating: although we (individual or collective agents) know that it all
depends on us, we cannot ever predict the consequences of our acts - we are not impotent, but, quite on the
contrary, omnipotent, without being able to determine the scope of our powers. The gap between causes and effects is
irreducible, and there is no "big Other" to guarantee the harmony between the levels, to
guarantee that the overall outcome of our interactions will be satisfactory. The problem is that,
although our (sometimes even individual) acts can have catastrophic (ecological, etc.) consequences, the big
Other prevents us from believing in it, from assuming this knowledge and responsibility:
"Contrary to what the promoters of the principle of precaution think, the cause of our non-
action is not the scientific uncertainty. We know it, but we cannot make ourselves believe in
what we know." This situation confronts us with the deadlock of the contemporary "society of choice" at its most radical. In the
standard situation of the forced choice (a situation in which I am free to choose on condition that I make the right choice, so that the
only thing left for me to do is the empty gesture of pretending to accomplish freely what is in any case imposed on me). Here, on the
contrary, the choice really is free and is, for this very reason, experienced as even more frustrating: we
find ourselves
constantly in the position of having to decide about matters that will fundamentally affect our
lives, but without a proper foundation in knowledge - as John Gray put it:
we have been thrown into a time in which everything is provisional. New technologies alter our lives daily. The
traditions of the past cannot be retrieved. At the same time we have little idea of what the future
will bring. We are forced to live as if we were free.
It is thus not enough to vary the standard motif of the Marxist critique: "although we allegedly live in a society of choices, the choices
effectively left to us are trivial, and their proliferation masks the absence of true choices, choices that would affect the basic features
of our lives..." While this is true, the problem is rather that we are forced to choose without having at our
disposal the knowledge that would enable a qualified choice.
The lesson is thus the old Lacanian one: there is no big Other. The first to get it was Job - after Job is hit by
calamities, his theological friends come, offering interpretations which render these calamities
meaningful, and the greatness of Job is not so much to protest his innocence as to insist on the
meaninglessness of his calamities (when God appears afterwards, he gives right to Job against the theological defenders
of faith). The function of the three theological friends is to obfuscate the impact of the trauma with a symbolic semblance.
This need to discover a meaning is crucial when we are confronting potential or actual
catastrophes, from AIDS and ecological disasters to holocaust: they have no "deeper meaning."
The legacy of Job prohibits us such a gesture of taking a refuge in the standard transcendent
figure of God as a secret Master who knows the meaning of what appears to us as meaningless
catastrophe, the God who sees the entire picture in which what we perceive as a stain
contributes to global harmony. When confronted with an event like the holocaust or the death of
millions in Congo in the last years, is it not obscene to claim that these stains have a deeper meaning in
that they contribute to the harmony of the Whole? Is there a Whole which can teleologically justify an event like
the holocaust? Christ's death on the cross thus means that one should drop without restraint the notion of God as a transcendent
caretaker who guarantees the happy outcome of our acts, the guarantee of historical teleology - Christ's death on the cross is the
death of this God, it repeats Job's stance, it refuses any "deeper meaning" that obfuscates the brutal real of historical catastrophes.
And the lesson of ecology is that we should go to the end here and accept the non-existence of
the ultimate big Other, nature itself with its pattern of regular rhythms, the ultimate reference of
order and stability.
However, this lack of the big Other does not entail that we are irrevocably caught in the misery
of our finitude, deprived of any redemptive moments. In his The Cattle Truck, Jorge Semprun reports how he
witnessed the arrival of a truckload of Polish Jews at Buchenwald; they were stacked into the freight train almost 200 to a car,
traveling for days without food and water in the coldest winter of the war. On arrival all in the carriage had frozen to death except for
15 children, kept warm by the others in the centre of the bundle of bodies. When the children were emptied from the car the Nazis let
their dogs loose on them. Soon only two fleeing children were left:
The little one began to fall behind, the SS were howling behind them and then the dogs began to howl too, the smell of blood was
driving them mad, and then the bigger of the two children slowed his pace to take the hand of the smaller... together they covered a
few more yards... till the blows of the clubs felled them and, together they dropped, their faces to the ground, their hands clasped for
all eternity.
One can easily imagine how this scene should be filmed: while the soundtrack renders what goes on in reality (the two children are
clubbed to death), the image of their hands clasped freezes, immobilized for eternity - while the sound renders temporary reality, the
image renders the eternal Real. It is the pure surface of such fixed images of eternity, not any deeper Meaning, which allows for
redemptive moments in the bleak story of the Shoah. One should read this imagined scene together with the final shot of Thelma
and Louise: the frozen image of the car with the two women "flying" above the precipice: is this the positive utopia (triumph of the
feminine subjectivity over death), or the masking of the miserable wreck the car IS in reality at that time? The weakness of the final
shot from Thelma and Louise is that the frozen image is not accompanied by the soundtrack depicting what "really" went on (the car
crash, terrible cries of the dying women) - strangely, this lack of reality undermines the very utopian dimension of the frozen image.
In contrast to this scene, our imagined filmed scene from Semprun would fully assert the Platonic duality of temporal empirical
reality and eternal Idea.
What this means is that, without shame, in conceiving art, we should return to Plato. Plato's reputation suffers because of his claim
that poets should be thrown out of the city - a rather sensible advice, judging from my post-Yugoslav experience, where ethnic
cleansing was prepared by poets' dangerous dreams (the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic being only one among them). If the
West has the industrial-military complex, we in the ex-Yugoslavia had a poetic-military complex: the post-Yugoslav war was
triggered by the explosive mixture of the poetic and the military component. So, from a Platonic standpoint, what does a poem about
the holocaust do? It provides its "description without place": in renders the Idea of holocaust.
Recall the old Catholic strategy to guard men against the temptation of the flesh: when you see in front of
you a voluptuous feminine body, imagine
how it will look in a couple of decades - the dried skin, sagging
breasts... (Or, even better, imagine what lurks now already beneath the skin: raw flesh and
bones, inner fluids, half-digested food and excrements...) Far from enacting a return to the Real
destined to break the imaginary spell of the body, such a procedure equals the escape from the
Real, the Real which announces itself in the seductive appearance of the naked body. That is to
say, in the opposition between the spectral appearance of the sexualized body and the repulsive
body in decay, it is the spectral appearance with is the Real, and the decaying body which is
reality - we take recourse to the decaying body in order to avoid the deadly fascination of the
Real which threatens to draw us into its vortex of jouissance.
 Melancholy Alt

Imagining the narrative of extinction and its ethical value

domesticates the event and permits an attitude of mourning where we
attach ourselves to humanity understood as an object outside of
nature. We should adopt a melancholy perspective instead—don’t
imagine the death of humanity and mourn for the loss, but accept it in
the narrative of this debate to revise our relationship to the world and
threats of ecological destruction
MATTS AND TYNAN 2012 (Tim Matts holds a Ph.D in Critical Theory from Cardiff
University, Aidan Tynan also holds a Ph.D in Critical Theory from Cardiff University, “The Melancholy of
Extinction: Lars von Trier's "Melancholia" as an Environmental Film,” M/C Journal, Vol. 15, No. 3)
The discoveries of Charles Darwin in the nineteenth century constituted a major thought event which placed
the emergence of humanity within a temporal context extending far beyond the limits of human
memory. Claire Colebrook suggests that the equivalent event for present times is the thought of our own
extinction, the awareness that environmental changes could bring about the end of the species: “[the] extinction awareness that
is coming to the fore in the twenty-first century adds the sense of an ending to the broader awareness of the historical emergence of
the human species.” While the scientific data is stark, our mediated cultural experience provides us
with plenty of opportunities to, in Colebrook’s words, “[domesticate] the sense of the human end” by
affirming “various modes of ‘post-humanism’” in ways which ultimately deny the shattering truth of
extinction.
This domestication obviously takes place in one sense on the level of a conscious denial of the scale of the ecological crisis. On
another level, however, environmentally conscious representations of “the planet” or “nature” as a sheer
autonomous objectivity, a
self-contained but endangered natural order, may ultimately be the greatest
obstacle to genuine ecological thinking. By invoking the concept of a non-human nature in perfect balance with itself
we factor ourselves out of the ecological equation while simultaneously drawing on the power of
an objectifying gaze. Slavoj Žižek gives the example of Alan Weisman’s book The World Without Us which imagines a
contemporary world in which all humans have disappeared and nature reasserts itself in the ruins of our abandoned cities. Žižek
describes this as the ultimate expression of ideology because:
we, the humans, are here reduced to a pure disembodied gaze observing our own absence [...] this is the fundamental subjective
position of fantasy: to be reduced to a gaze observing the world in the condition of the subject’s non-existence—like the fantasy of
witnessing the act of one’s own conception, parental copulation, or the act of witnessing one’s own burial (80).
In many ways, the very spectacle or fantasy of our own destruction has provided us with a powerful
means of naturalising it—environmental catastrophe occurs to and in a “nature” whose essence
excludes us—and this renders it compatible with a psychology by which the human end is itself
internalised, processed, and normalised. Ironically, this normalisation may have been affected
to a great extent through the popularisation, over the last ten years or so, of environmental discourses
relating to the grave threats of climate change. A film such as Wall-E, for example, shows us an entirely
depopulated, desertified world in which the eponymous robot character sorts through the trash of human history, living an almost-
human life among the ruins. The robot functions as a kind of proxy humanity, placing us, the viewers, in a position posterior to our
own species extinction and thus sending us the ultimately reassuring message that, even in our absence, our absence will be noted.
In a similar way, the drama-documentary The Age of Stupid presents a future world devastated by environmental collapse in which a
lone archivist presides over the whole digitised memory of humanity and carefully constructs out of actual news and documentary
footage the story of our demise. These narratives and others like them ultimately serve, whatever their
intentions, to domesticate the end of humanity through the logic of a post-human mastery of the
story of our own obliteration.
The starker truth with which Melancholia confronts us is that the end of humanity cannot and
will not be internalised by any process of human memorialisation . Von Trier’s film does not portray any
post-catastrophe world from which we might be able to extract a degree of psychological comfort or residual sense of mastery.
Rather, the narrative frame is entirely bounded by the impact event , which we witness first in the film’s
opening shots and then again at its close. There
is no narrative time posterior to the impact and yet for us,
the viewers, everything happens in its shattering aftermath, according to the strange non-
successional logic of the future-anterior. Everything begins and ends with the moment of
impact.
If the narrative itself is concerned with the lives of the characters, particularly the effects of the main character’s depression on her
family relationships, then the film’s central event remains radically disjunctive, incapable of being processed on this interpersonal
level through the standard cinematic tropes of the disaster or survival genres. The value of regarding Melancholia as an
environmental film, then, is that it profoundly de-psychologises the prospect of our extinction while forcing the burden of this
event’s unfathomable content onto us. Von Trier’s film suggests that melancholy, not mourning, is a more apt emotional register for
ecological crisis and for the extinction awareness it brings, and in this sense Melancholia represents a valuable alternative to more
standard environmental narratives which remain susceptible to ideological reinscriptions of human (or post-human) mastery. As
ecocritic Timothy Morton suggests, “melancholy is more apt, even more ethically appropriate, to an
ecological situation in which the worst has already happened, and in which we find ourselves
[...] already fully implicated” (75–6).
The most influential account of mourning and melancholia comes from Sigmund Freud, who described these attitudes as two
different ways of dealing with loss. In the process of mourning, Freud states that there comes the realisation “that the loved object no
longer exists” which “[demands] that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that object” (245). The healthy outcome of
this very painful process is that our libidinal attachments are free once again to take on another object of love; the lost object can be
replaced according to a logic of temporal succession. Melancholia also results from a loss, says Freud, but this time it relates not
simply or primarily to a replaceable external object but, more complexly, to something in the ego itself, not a discrete thing in the
world but a certain way of being in the world which the lost object facilitated. Freud writes that the trauma of melancholia is thus
manifested by the ego itself taking on or embodying the loss.
The ego, stripped of its sense of being, comes to mimic the non-existence of that which once
supported it. The “delusion” of the melancholic’s depressive state, says Freud, stems from the
fact that something has ruptured her affective and libidinal attachment to the world, but this
cannot be psychologically processed in terms of a replaceable loss since what is lost was never
simply an external object. Her world is struck by an absence that cannot be mourned because it
is kept alive as a non-being which she is. She has taken on the burden of this structural
impossibility and does not pursue an imaginary resolution of it which , to invoke Žižek’s Lacanian terms
once more, would involve her submitting to the subjective position of fantasy (i.e. becoming a
witness to her own non-existence). The melancholic’s attitude is , Freud observes, “psychologically very
remarkable” because it involves “an overcoming of the instinct which compels every living thing
to cling to life” (246). The melancholic carves out an existence apparently contrary to nature.
This is the context in which Justine remarks that the earth, as an ungrievable object, is “evil.”
Her melancholia is never explained in the course of the film, and, indeed, we see little of her
personality apart from the events which manifest her psychological crisis. The film opens with
the moment of interplanetary impact itself. The great blue planet of Melancholia approaches
and begins to swallow the earth into its atmosphere. We cut immediately to Justine and her
sister in the moments just before the impact: the air is electrified by the approaching collision
and birds cascade from the trees. Our way into the narrative is this moment of chaos and
dispersion, but von Trier’s depiction of it, his use of highly choreographed slow-motion shots
resembling tableaux vivants, distance us from any sense of urgency or immediacy. It is as if the
closer we come to the collision, the less real and the more stylised the world becomes; as if the
impact holds a content which cannot be rendered in realist terms.
By contrast, the subsequent scenes focusing on Justine’s interpersonal drama use a shaky, handheld camera which embeds us in the
action. The narrative follows Justine on her wedding day. As events unfold we see cracks appear in the wedding party’s luxurious
facade: Justine’s divorced parents argue viciously; her wealthy brother-in-law, who funded the wedding, fears that the occasion may
be ruined by petty squabbling, to his great expense. Beneath these cracks, however, we realise that there is a deeper, more
inexplicable crack opening up within Justine herself. At one point she retreats with her newlywed husband from the tumult of the
wedding party. We expect from this scene an articulation or partial resolution, perhaps, of Justine’s mental conflict, or at least an
insight into her character. In a more conventional story, this moment of conjugal intimacy would allow Justine to express an
“authentic” desire, distinct from the superficial squabbling of her family, a means to “be herself.” But this doesn’t happen. Justine
inexplicably rejects her husband’s overtures.
In clinical terms, we might say that Justine’s behaviour corresponds to “anhedonia,” a loss of interest in the normal sources of
pleasure or enjoyment. Invoking Freud, we could add to this that the very objective viability of her libidinal attachments has been
called into question and that this is what precipitates her crisis. If such attachments are what ground us in reality, Justine’s desire
seems to have become ungrounded through the emergence of something “nonobjectifiable,” to borrow a term from philosophers
Deleuze and Guattari (What is Philosophy?, 209). This “something” is revealed only in the second half of the film with the
appearance of Melancholia and the prospect of its obliterating impact. Justine is drawn to this new planet, in one scene luxuriating
naked beneath its blue glow. We could argue, in one sense, that she has discovered in Melancholia a correlate to
her own self-destructive desire: the only thing that can possibly gratify her is the annihilation of
the earth itself.
However in another, more constructive sense, we can say that her melancholic desire amounts
to a kind of geophilosophical critique, a political and ultimately ecological protest against the
territorialisation of her desire according to a supposed acceptability of objects. Deleuze and Guattari
suggest that, if desire’s libidinal attachments form a kind of ground or “territory” then all territories
interact with one another at some level because they are all equally founded on “lines of
deterritorialization” sweeping them towards a mutually shared, extra-territorial outside (A
Thousand Plateaus, 9). Or, putting it in plainer terms: beneath every ground is a non-ground such that
the earth cannot ultimately ground itself in itself. Every mental, material, or social territory is
founded upon this global movement of ungrounding .
The trauma of Justine’s melancholia refers us to something which cannot be resolved within the
given territories of her social or interpersonal milieus . While her illness can be registered in terms of the events
of the film’s narrative time, the film’s central event—the collision with Melancholia—remains irreducible to the memorial properties
of storytelling. We may thus argue that the impact event is not strictly speaking an element of the film’s narrative, but rather a pure
cinematic sign evoking a radical form of ecological openness. The film moves through different territories—conjugal, familial,
economic, scientific—but what propels us from one territory to another is the impact event whose content is reducible to none of
these territories.
Of all the film’s characters, only Justine is “open” to this absolute irreducibility, this resistance
to closure. Her openness to Melancholia is not determined by whether or not it can be
objectified, that is, rendered assimilable to the terms of a given territory. Both her brother-in-
law (an amateur astronomer) and her sister attempt to calculate the chances of impact, but
Justine remains open to it in a manner which does not close off that which precludes survival. In
the end, as Melancholia bears down on the Earth, Justine’s attitude—which in Freud’s terms is
antithetical to the instinct for life—turns out to be the most appropriate one.
The point of this article is certainly not to argue that we should acquiesce to the traumatic realities
of environmental crisis. Its aim, rather, is to suggest that well-being and harmony may no longer
describe the appropriate emotional register for ecological thinking, given the current urgency of
the crisis. Human and ecological health may, after all, be radically different and
incommensurable things. The great anthropologist and structuralist thinker Claude Lévi-Strauss once remarked:
I am concerned with the well-being of plants and animals that are threatened by humanity. I think ecologists make the mistake of
thinking that they can defend humans and nature at the same time. I think it is necessary to decide if one prefers humans or nature.
I am on the side of nature (qtd in Conley, 66).
Lévi-Strauss may well be right when he says that a common human and ecological health may be an illusion of wishful thinking.
However, what if there is a common trauma, whose ineradicability would not be a tragedy but,
rather, evidence of radical openness in which we no longer have to pick sides (humans or plants
and animals)? What if the proper “base” from which to begin thinking ecologically were not a
conception of a harmonious human-ecological whole but a foundational non-harmony, an
encounter with which contains something ineliminably traumatising? In a recent paper, the philosopher
Reza Negarestani proposes just such a traumatic account of ecological openness. All existence, understood
geophilosophically, is, says Negarestani, “conditioned by a concatenation of traumas or cuts [...] there is no
single or isolated psychic trauma [...] there is no psychic trauma without an organic trauma and
no organic trauma without a terrestrial trauma that in turn is deepened into open cosmic vistas.”
Ecological openness, in this sense, would be necessarily melancholic , in the terms described above, in
that it would necessitate the perpetual precariousness of those links by which we seek to ground
ourselves.
Ecology is all too often given to a “mournful” attitude, which is , as we’ve argued, the very attitude of
psychological incorporation, healing, and normalisation. Similarly, “nature,” we are told, holds
the key to harmonious self-regulation. But what if today such notions are obstacles to a genuine
awareness of the ecological realities facing us all (humans and non-humans)? What if this ideal
of nature were just a product of our own desire for stability, order, and regularity—for some
imaginary extra-social and non-human point of reference by which to attain to a position of
mastery in the telling of the story of ourselves?
Narcissism K
 America 1NC

The assumption that foreign decisions are made in reaction to

American leadership is the height of narcissism—it’s not only wrong
but causes the US to be blamed for every failure and turns the case
WEINER 2013 (Greg, teaches political science at Assumption College, “Narcissistic Polity
Disorder: Its Diagnosis and Treatment,” Library of Law and Liberty, July 9,
http://www.libertylawsite.org/2013/07/09/narcissistic-polity-disorder-its-diagnosis-and-treatment/)
The recently published fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual contains no
diagnosis for Narcissistic Polity Disorder—the book’s scope being confined to the personality disorder of a similar
name—but should the editors ever wish to expand into political science, they will find an excellent
case study in the interview Senator John McCain gave on CBS’ Face the Nation last Sunday. It turns out the Egyptian
coup, which gave all signs of being a conflict among Egyptians about Egypt, was in fact about —
well, us.
“It’s a strong indicator,” McCain said, “of the lack of American leadership and influence since we
urged the military not to do that,” McCain explained. The attentive reader will recognize “failure of American
leadership” as an emission from the F6 button of McCain’s keyboard, which he hits anytime an adverse event
occurs anywhere in the world. But it turns out Egypt is not the only country into whose water the Senator gazes and sees
America’s reflection. He continued:
[T]he place is descending into chaos but so is the entire Middle East because of the total vacuum and lack of American leadership
whether it be the massacres in Syria—Lebanon is—is beset by sectarian violence, Jordan is about to collapse under the weight of
refugees, Iraq is unraveling, Afghanistan, we’re having grave problems organizing a follow on force in Afghanistan. America has not
led and America is not leading and when America doesn’t lead bad things happen and other people do lead and Egypt is just one
segment of a failure of American leadership over the last five years and we need to start being leaders rather than—than—than
bystanders.
Sectarian violence in the Middle East, an ancient and evidently incurable phenomenon, an American failure?
It is also a powerful fantasy, with roots in the same
That’s one powerful reflection staring back from the water.
place—and the metaphor is separated from reality by only the narrowest of margins— as narcissistic personality
disorder, one of whose hallmarks is the proclivity to interpret foreign events in terms of oneself. Any
event, anywhere, anytime becomes a test of American leadership: He who does what America
wished he had not done had no autonomous motives; he meant to stick a thumb in the American
eye.
Thus McCain’s understanding of leadership and its breathtaking condescension—in, ironically, the name of the neoconservative
project of spreading freedom. Note that within that model—someone is going to lead and it is therefore best for it to be a,
make that the, righteous nation— little
room is left for the very thing McCain claims he wants to promote: nations
actually making choices about their own futures from within. In the present case, Egyptians are fighting
about Egypt; the real issue, according to McCain, must be what the United States had to say, or failed to say, about it. The generals
could not possibly have been motivated by (a) different aspirations for Egypt, (b) venality, (c) power or (d) some combination of the
above: We must understand their motives for the coup in terms of whether they complied with our request that they “not do that.”
To be sure, north of $1.5 billion in foreign aid ought to buy some influence with Egypt’s governors, although primarily what it buys is
assurance of Egyptian compliance with the country’s peace with Israel—which the generals may be likelier to keep than the Muslim
Brotherhood. If what it was supposed to buy was democracy as an American gift to the Egyptian people, we ought not to be
surprised if Egyptians turn around and resent the arrogance of our beneficence—and hold us
accountable for its failures too.
McCain’s interpretation of the turmoil in the Middle East—note, incidentally, the utter lack of self-awareness as to Iraq’s descent
into chaos—is powerful evidence of the extent to which American exceptionalism, poorly understood, can
slouch into narcissism. So widespread is the phenomenon that all politicians , even those accused of
harboring heretical thoughts about exceptionalism, must make obeisance to it. (President Obama: “[T]here is no
substitute for American leadership.”)
It did not start this way. John Winthrop’s
“City on a Hill” address was not a boast. It was a warning.
The fact that Heaven had special plans for America meant not that America had special
privileges but rather that Americans, should they fail, faced special punishments :
For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with
our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a
by-word through the world.
That was 1630; this is 2013. No one seriously believes the United States can retreat from the world .
But leadership can be exercised with arrogance or
Superpower status brings obligations of leadership.
humility and in a spirit of adventure or restraint. Conservatism used to prize the latter qualities. They
would also be effective therapy for the ailment disordering the nation’s thinking about its
responsibilities—and capacities—overseas.

Narcissism is founded on a refusal of vulnerability and pain which

both guarantees its reoccurrence and leads us to distance ourselves
from the Other who is the object of our desire—on a national scale
this results in endless war and violence for security. We should see
others as truly Other and accept the fact that we can’t make them into
our own image—this shatters narcissism and allows a genuine respect
and love for the Other
KIMMEL 2011 (Kenneth, practicing psychoanalyst, Eros and the Shattering Gaze, p. 1-5)
Jacques Lacan's notion of the mirror stage helps us to understand the essential alienation inherent in narcissism and its search for
perfection in an idealized image of another. Lacan describes a moment in infancy when the six-month-old child
"recognizes" himself in the mirror and falsely identifies the reflection as an image of the unified
wholeness and mastery he does not in fact possess. In that moment, the infant, with his smiling mother's
assent, is lured into an illusion of false certainty and omnipotence that splits him off from his frag-
mented body/self with its accompanying experiences of terror and uncertainty . Lacan's conception of
the mirror sequence describes the way a mental construction of a perfect, alienating identity can originate,
separating the infant from his own insufficient self image . The / itself that takes form here is an artificial
representation, a self split between its idealized mirror image and the raw truth of human existence.3 It is not difficult to imagine,
then, how this narcissistic ideal can be later projected onto objects of desire who mirror this ideal .
Narcissism is not limited to the psychology of individuals . American culture, politics, and
its recent national wounding uncannily mirror these narcissistic phenomena. The Patriot Act
and the War on Terror can be seen as unconscious fantasies enacted upon the world stage . In this
post-September 11 world many individuals err on the side of security and rigid borders, thereby sacrificing
freedom, relationality, and dimensionality. Nor is narcissism merely a contemporary phenomenon. Literature and
history provide ample illustrations of the historical and cultural contexts underlying the problem of narcissism and the way it is
transcended.
The essence of narcissism is the repudiation of the other in its differences. Sometimes this takes
the form of appropriating the other under the guise of romantic love, and some- times it takes the form
of casting out the other to protect the vulnerable self. In these pages I attempt to present a theory of the
transcendence of narcissism, in which the humble capacity to love comes about through the surrender of the self to the shattering
truth of the other.
Western culture's most ancient tale of love, "Psyche and Amor," which forms part of Apuleius' The Golden Ass, will introduce us to
these dynamics. The story features a leading man—Amor, the very personification of Love—whose amorous desires are so embedded
in narcissism that he never dares to reveal himself to the object of his passion. The couple. Psyche and Amor, remains suspended in
a dark fusion removed from life until Psyche has finally had enough; the illusion is pierced and shattered, and loss ensues. Emerging
from his state of wounding, Amor comes in a new way to the side of his beloved, the mortal human Psyche, his act signifying the
inner "awakening of the sleeping soul through love," as James Hillman puts it.4 How many hundreds of modern romantic dramas
follow in the train of the Tale of Psyche and Amor, telling the story of the selfish or hardened man who uses everyone, then loses
everything, but then finds a woman from whom he learns how to love?
More than a millennium later, the tales of medieval courtly romances portray the fate of lovers whose longing for oneness can be
realized not on earth but only in their sacrifi- cial death and reunion in Heaven. These are tragedies portraying an idealized longing
for true love that can never be sustained in our flawed human condition.
The blissful fantasy of everlasting union merely conceals the face of narcissism . This romantic ideal
privileges the allure of the lovers' paradise over the enduring struggles in human relationships in all their vicissitudes. These are the
romantic fantasies of a happi- ly-ever-after ending, illusions ultimately deriving from childhood experiences. Time and again,
lovers plunge blindly into brief enthrallments that are doomed to failure , yet hold fast to their
unquestioned, cherished beliefs, and to a faith in an idyllic innocence that is inevitably shattered. Young lovers blindly enter
marriage with the fantasy that romantic love will endure forever. But predictably, when the burning fires of first love's desires have
cooled to warm embers, many men devalue the apparently known quantity at home and look to a passionate love affair with a
mysterious other, in which to be absorbed. For the narcissist this process signals the avoidance of human
relationship in its fullness, rife with difficulties, limitations, and ethical responsibilities, in favor
of the grandiose illusion of ecstatic oneness and freedom from all pain .
Ultimately the narcissistic avoidance of the difficulties of life arises in response to a pri- mal experience—
the inevitable wounding and loss suffered in the earliest infant-mother relationship. Thus narcissistic dynamics are
deeply impacted by the experience of trauma. Psychological wounds too devastating to bear are reflexively
partitioned and buried, while si- multaneously, reactionary wars of retaliation against
one's pain are staged in order to provide safeguards from disavowed shame and profound
vulnerabilities. Throughout life grandiose fantasies in all their forms will magically supplant the
experience of unbearable vulnerabil- ity, literally obliterating it.
These clinical themes are richly amplified by cultural signifiers found in the myths and mysteries of antiquity and from the medieval
Tales of Courtly Love through the literature of the mystics and Romantics, to Gothic horror stories and modern romances from
contempo- rary popular culture. These provide the historical and cultural contexts for the contemporary problem of narcissism as
well as its transcendence.
As we will see, Levinas's postmodern philosophy describes the way the encounter with the ineffable Face of the
Other shocks and deconstructs the sameness and narcissism within eros, freeing the subject to
assume an enduring responsibility for the other from which new and transcendent capacities to
love may be envisioned.
My theory of the transcendence of narcissism is based on the work of two men: C. G. Jung and the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas.
Jung's theory of the complexes (see the Glossary for italicized terms) illuminates two vital concepts that are threaded throughout
this book: the ego's primitive identification with the negative or overly positive aspects of the Mother, and the relationship of the
puer aetemus, the eternal boy, with his split-off counterpart, the senex, the old man. We can see how these complexes come about by
observing the characters in Apuleius' The Golden Ass, which contains the immortal “Tale of Psyche and Amor." The path through
which they are overcome leads from the romantic, narcissistic, predatory preoccu- pations of what I call the mother-bound man to
the wound that shatters the isolation of his standpoint. Through the work of the transcendent fimction this shattering may culminate
in the emergence of empathic dimensions of emotion and a humble yet still masculine stand- point.
One of the ways this book contributes to the development of contemporary analytic psychology is through the cross-fertilization of
Jungian and contemporary psychoanalytic ideas. For instance, I argue that narcissistic defenses arise not after the development of
the complexes, but prior to them. The puer aeternus psychology described by Jung comes into being in reaction to the narcissistic
defenses that have appropriated the infant's most archaic, unsignifiable complex—the mother. These narcissistic defenses
encapsulate the infant's ego, protecting it from experiences reminiscent of its original loss of maternal containing. Another original
area of contribution may be found in my analysis of the Grail Legend, where I view von Eschenbach's Parzival through the lens of
eros development in its dual guise, as both a narcissistic and wounding process and one that is relational and healing.
The work of the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas provides the second major source for my theory of how narcissism may be
transcended. A traumatic encounter with an utterly unknowable, transcendent Other *—sometimes
initiated by analytical work or psychotherapy—may violently shatter the narcissistic illusions that maintain ,
among other things, the individual's endless, romantically driven projections and erotic fantasies . There is
therefore a painful, even violent, yet redemptive potential to the wounding. Levinas's postmodern philosophy is essential to an
understanding of this kind of encounter with the Other by a subject; he too emphasizes its capacity to decenter the ego's
"solipsism"— the belief that the self is the only reality and the only thing that we can be certain of. Levinas attempts to describe this
shift from an ego-centered view of the universe as some- thing that defies understanding or category. All religious experience
perhaps stems from such a primordial awareness. His ethical philosophy, informed by the Holocaust in which his entire family was
murdered, centers upon the "relation of infinite responsibility to the other person."6 Levinas provides a profound
insight into the dangers of how individuals can be so easily subsumed in the vision of a
tyrannical utopia which he often refers to as a "totality."
To Levinas, the Other is unknowable, ineffable, ungraspable, tormenting, enigmatic, infinite, irreducible, sacred.
Its mere trace can only be glimpsed interpersonally or inter- subjectively—a term defining a psychological
experience created between individuals. The Other does not originate in the psyche. It is infinite, already
there, before subject or object exists, and our subjective awareness of it comes through the
primacy of its impact upon us. It transcends subjective being, defies our concepts or categories,
and cannot be engulfed or appropriated by ego consciousness .7
As Levinas would say, the trace of the Other is glimpsed in the irreducible "face of the human other," who is revealed in (her)
vulnerability, sacredness, and nakedness.8 In Levi- nas's ethical view, one's responsibility emerges from the trauma
he feels for
the useless suffering and destitution of the one now standing before him. He is taken
hostage to the guilt of surviving when the other is stricken. He is even compelled to wish to
substitute himself for the other, to put himself in (her) place—but it is too late. This is the
torment of which Levinas speaks—the unavoidable responsibility to the other invoked by the shatter-
ing Other. It is impossible to evade this summons, which accuses one and even leads him to wonder just
how much truth he can bear.
In moving from the ethics of human justice and compassion to personal psychology, one can observe how the traumatic
impact of the Other destabilizes and shatters the ego's narcis- sism , awakening the subject from his
slumber. Such a violent blow often appears to the ego in forms that are dark and shadowy, or that threaten
to obliterate its fixed orientation and need for certainty, its wish for everything to remain the
same. For Levinas, the ego's need to appropriate alterity—the other's difference—and to reduce it to
sameness is the origin of all violence: narcissism is violence. In those cases where the shattering
encounter is successfully navigated, a restructuring of a man's core of being occurs. An inner cohesion develops that
enables him as an ethical subject to bear love's separations, uncertainties, longing, as well as its
closeness.
Here I propose a significant revisioning of Jung's concept of the enigmatic Self, concep- tualizing it as an idea akin to Levinas's
unknowable Other, where both, I contend, transcend subjective being and the boundaries of the psyche. I argue that this revised
understanding of the Self provides the basis for what I have previously described as a unifying theory of the
transcendence of narcissism.

The obsession with policy solutions in debate and the belief that we
can change the world through what we do here is simply hubris—
recognizing that we are not all-powerful is the necessary condition for
empathy
RAHNEMA 1997 (Majid, Professor American Univ in Paris. The Post Development
Reader)
If the post-development era is to be free of the illusions, ideological perversions, hypocrisy and falsehoods that pervaded the
development world, the search for signposts and trails leading to a flow of 'good life' (the fidnaal° in Dadacha's language)
should be informed by an entirely new rationale and set of assumptions. This should help, at the local and
transnational levels, the jen and the min to rediscover themselves, to learn from each other, to explore new possibilities of
dialogue and action, and to weave together relationships of a different kind, transcending the
present barriers of language, and thereby going beyond the paradigms that the development era has so persistently
maintained for the last fifty years. The search for new possibilities of change The end of development should not be seen as an end to
the search for new possibilities of change, for a relational world of friendship, or for genuine processes of regeneration able to give
birth to new forms of solidarity. It should only mean that the binary, the mechanistic, the reductionist, the
inhumane and the ultimately self-destructive approach to change is over. It should represent a
call to the 'good people' everywhere to think and work together. It should prompt everyone to
begin the genuine work of self-knowledge and `self polishing' (as the ahle sayqal do, according to Rilrni), an
exercise that enables us to listen more carefully to others, in particular to friends who are ready to do the same
thing. It could be the beginning of a long process aiming at replacing the present 'clis-order' by an 'aesthetic
order' based on respect for differences and the uniqueness of every single person and culture. On powerlessness and
the 'mask of love' A first condition for such a search is to look at things as they are, rather than as we
want them to be; to overcome our fears of the unknown; and, instead of claiming to be able to
change the world and to save 'humanity', to try saving ourselves from our own compelling need
for comforting illusions. The hubris of the modern individual has led him or her to believe that
the existential powerlessness of humankind can usefully be replaced with compulsive ‘actomania'.
This illusion is similar to the modern obsession with fighting death at all costs. Both
compulsions tend, in fact, to undermine, disfigure and eventually destroy the only forms of power that define
true life. Paradoxically, it is through fully experiencing our powerlessness, as painful as that may
be, that it becomes possible for us to be in tune with human suffering , in all its manifestations; to
understand the 'power of the powerless' (to use Vaclay Havel's expression); and to rediscover our oneness with all
those in pain. Blinkered by the Promethean myth of Progress, development called on all the 'powerless' people to
join in a world-wide crusade against the very idea of powerlessness, building its own power of seduction and conviction on the mass
production of new illusions. It designed for every taste a 'mask of love' — an expression coined by John McKnight" to
define the modern notion of ‘care' — which various 'developers' could deploy when inviting new
recruits to join the crusade. It is because development incarnated a false love for an abstract
humanity that it ended up by upsetting the lives of millions of living human beings. For half a
century its 'target populations' suffered the intrusion in their lives of an army of development
teachers and experts, including well-intentioned field workers and activists, who spoke big words —
from conscientization to learning from and living with the people. Often they had studied Marx, Gramsci, Freire and the latest
research about empowerment and participation. However, their lives (and often careers) seldom allowed them to enter the intimate
world of their 'target populations'. They were good at giving people passionate lectures about their rights, their
entitlements, the class struggle and land reform. Yet
few asked themselves about the deeper motivations
prompting them to do what they were doing. Often they knew neither the people they were working with, nor
themselves. And they were so busy achieving what they thought they had to do for the people, that
they could not learn enough from them about how actually to 'care' for them , as they would for their
closest relatives and friends whom they knew and loved. My intention in bringing up this point is not to blame such activists or field
workers — many of them may have been kind and loving persons. It is,rather, to make the point that 'the masks of love' to
which they became addicted prevented them discovering the extraordinary redeeming power of
human powerlessness, when it opens one's soul to the world of true love and compassion.
Similar 'masks of love' have now destroyed the possibilities of our truly `caring'. Thus, when we
hear about the massacres in Algeria, Rwanda, Zaire, the Middle East or Bosnia, or the innumerable children, women
and men dying from starvation, or being tortured and killed with impunity, we feel comforted and relieved when we
send a cheque to the right organization or demonstrate on their behalf in the streets. And although
we are fully aware that such gestures are, at very best, like distributing aspirin pills to dying
people whom nothing can save; although we may have doubts as to whether our money will reach the victims, or
fears that it might even ultimately serve those governments, institutions or interests who are
responsible for this suffering; we continue to do these things. We continue to cheat ourselves,
because we consider it not decent, not morally justifiable, not 'politically correct', to do
otherwise. Such gestures, which we insist on calling acts of solidarity rather than ‘charity', may however be explained
differently: by the great fear we have of becoming fully aware of our powerlessness in situations
when nothing can be done. And yet this is perhaps the most authentic way of rediscovering our
oneness with those in pain. For the experiencing of our powerlessness can lead us to encounter
the kind of deep and redeeming suffering that provides entry to the world of compassion and
discovery of our true limits and possibilities. It can also be the first step in the direction of
starting a truthful relationship with the world, as it is. Finally, it can help us understand this
very simple tautology: that no one is in a position to do more than one can. As one humbly
recognizes this limitation, and learns to free oneself from the egocentric illusions inculcated by
the Promethean myth, one discovers the secrets of a power of a different quality: that genuine
and extraordinary power that enables a tiny seed, in all its difference and uniqueness, to start its
journey into the unknown.
 Heg/Deterrence Link

Deterrence relies on a narcissistic myth—it relates all foreign

behavior to US policy
WEINER 2014 (Greg Weiner, who teaches political science at Assumption College, “Narcissistic
Polity Disorder: Treating the Advanced Case,” Library of Law and Liberty, March 6,
http://www.libertylawsite.org/2014/03/06/narcissistic-polity-disorder-treating-the-advanced-case/)
Or, OK, not, but don’t tell Senator Lindsey Graham, for whom no bad thing happens without a vacuum of
American leadership being to blame. It is perhaps an overstatement regarding overstatement to award anyone the
distinction of having made the single most inane remark on the situation in Ukraine, but Graham—whose thumbs need to be
separated from his Twitter account—has made a compelling case. “It started,” he tweeted—“with Benghazi. When
you kill Americans and nobody pays a price, you invite this type of aggression .”
This is a textbook and, for Graham’s sake, distressing because perhaps incurable case of narcissistic polity
disorder, a nation’s vain belief that anything that happens in the world is a reflection on itself.
Coup in Egypt? Lack of American leadership. Russian occupation of Crimea? The same—never
mind that massive quantities of Russian natural gas flow in pipelines across Ukraine, to say
nothing of ethnic disputes that predate the American republic, both of which might, perish the
thought, give Vladimir Putin motives of his own that do not involve reacting to the United
States.
Graham is not alone in this variation on the blame-America-first theme. His Senate compatriot John McCain recently assigned
responsibility for events in Ukraine to a “feckless foreign policy where nobody believes in American strength anymore.” Of course,
neither, apparently, does McCain, who moments earlier said himself that there was no viable military option available in Crimea,
which did not deter him from proceeding to link the events in Ukraine to America’s failure to stop atrocities in Syria (how?) and (no,
seriously) the stolen 2009 election in Tehran.
According to this view, Putin, sitting in the Kremlin contemplating his options , was not thinking of his
natural gas. He was not thinking of his country’s historic ambitions. He was not thinking of the ethnic Russians who populate the
Crimean peninsula. He was thinking about—wait for it—us. It is the delusion of those who insist on
interpreting events that have nothing to do with them as personal insults. Psychiatrists call this
narcissism, and the problem with treating it is the near incapacity of those who suffer from the
disorder to see it in themselves.
 Prolif Link

The concept of a US prolif signal is narcissism—countries make

decisions unrelated to US models
MIRENGOFF 2014 (Paul, GEORGE WILL AND THE NARCISSISTIC VIEW OF AMERICAN
FOREIGN POLICY, PowerLine, July 21, http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/07/george-will-
and-the-narcissistic-view-of-american-foreign-policy.php)
Scott did an excellent job of responding to George Will’s defense of diplomacy as the proper response to Iran’s development of
nuclear weapons. Scott is particularly persuasive in answering Will’s claim that “United States policy has taught
certain regimes the importance of having nuclear weapons .” It would be interesting to know just how pacific
U.S. policy would have to be in order to unteach the importance of having nukes.
Will has fallen, quite uncharacteristically, into the narcissistic view of
American foreign relations. This
approach deems the perfectly normal actions and desires of other countries to be a reflection of
American conduct.
Worse yet, in the case of Iran, Will has gotten the effect, if any, of the American conduct he alludes to exactly wrong.
Other things being equal, any foreign power with aggressive territorial and/or ideological
ambitions would like to have nuclear weapons. And any such foreign power with substantial
resources and firm control over its population will be strongly tempted to pursue their
acquisition.
Having nuclear weapons serves many purposes other than dissuading America from imposing
regime change. For example, as Scott points out, obtaining nuclear weapons would help preserve the
rule of the mullahs in Iran quite apart from anything the U.S. might do to bring about regime
change. (There has been plenty of regime change in the Middle East lately; the U.S. has had little
to do with almost all of it). In addition, nukes would enhance Iran’s regional dominance and enable
the mullahs to threaten, if not attack, Israel.
What could teach Iran the importance of not having nukes? Probably nothing at this juncture.
 Nuclear War Impact

National narcissism results in every form of violence including

nuclear war when our self-regard is challenged
BAUMEISTER et al 1996 (Roy F. Baumeister Department of Psychology, Case Western
Reserve University; Laura Smart Department of Psychology, University of Virginia Joseph M. Boden
Department of Psychology, Case Western Reserve University, Relation of threatened egotism to violence
and aggression: The dark side of high self-esteem. By: Baumeister, Roy F., Smart, Laura, Boden, Joseph
M., Psychological Review, 0033295X, 1996, Vol. 103, Issue 1)
Unlike assassination, war has been extremely common; indeed, Sluka (1992) summarized various estimates that there
have
been approximately 14, 000 wars since 3600 B.C ., and the four decades following World War II contained only 26
days of world peace. Generalization is therefore quite hazardous. Still, recent and salient evidence seems hard to
reconcile with the view that low self-esteem (as in lack of national pride) prompts nations to go
to war. It is difficult to characterize imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, or Hussein’s Iraq , for example,
as suffering from low self-esteem; rather, such cases seem to fit the pattern of excessively
favorable views of self that produce dreams of glory and anger that the rest of the world fails to
pay sufficient respect. Staub (1985) concluded that cultural attitudes of superiority are important causes
of warfare and other violence.
If we examine war from the perspective of the individuals who carry it out rather than from the perspective of national ideology,
once again there seems ample evidence of egotism. Keegan (1993) has concluded that professional soldiers, from the
Romans to the present, were not generally attracted and sustained in military life by financial gain but rather by
pride in belonging to a valued group, concern over winning admiration and fellowship of colleagues, accumulation of honor, and
largely symbolic recognitions of success.
Recent efforts to understand the attitudes that make people favorably inclined toward war have been summarized by Feshbach
(1994). In his research program, two sets of attitudes stood out (see Kosterman & Feshbach, 1989). He called the first of these
patriotism, which he explained chiefly in terms of attachment feelings, although some element of pride is involved. The second
attitude he referred to as nationalism, which he explicitly defined in terms of belief in the superiority of one’s nation over others.
Both of these attitudes are positively related to militaristic attitudes, but nationalism shows much stronger
relationships to prowar and pronuclear attitudes. Nationalism is also positively correlated with
individual aggressive tendencies. These results indicate that feelings of collective superiority are
linked to violent, militaristic inclinations, ranging from personal conflicts to nuclear war .
Critique
Most of the work reviewed in this section was done by historians, sociologists, and political scientists. When judged by psychologists’
standards of methodological rigor, this work is relatively weak, but when judged on its own terms it fares better. Moreover, the
convergence of evidence across different disciplines helps rule out the danger that disciplinary
biases or methodological artifacts have shaped the conclusions .
Conclusion
Except for assassination, it appears that political violence is often correlated with (and preceded by) strongly
favorable self-regard and the perception that these views are threatened or disputed by others . In
most cases it is the collective self-perception of superiority that is involved. Some signs indicate that individuals who carry
out political violence are either indoctrinated with the view of their own superiority or marked by narcissistic
traits. Psychologists may question the methodological rigor of these studies, but the conclusion does seem consistent
with the general patterns we have already seen in other spheres, and interdisciplinary
convergence is itself a persuasive indicator . The only contrary view was Long’s (1990) characterization of terrorists
as having low self-esteem, but as we noted his elaboration seemed to indicate high self-esteem after all.
 Violence Impacts

The belief that American institutions are a model for the world will
only result in frustration and violence—anyone who fails to conform
will be branded an outcast and subject to destruction
CALDWELL 2006 (Wilbur, author of several books, American Narcissism: The Myth of National
Superiority, pp. 6-8)
Many nations fear the United States practices a contemporary' brand of “soft imperialism,” which is engulfing the world under the
auspice of economic globalization. Inherent in these fears is the notion that globalization carries with it inevitable Americanization.
At the same time, a broader globalization debate rages as to whether American led globalization will save the Third World or simply
exploit it. In spite of such fears, and despite the setbacks, Americans remain convinced that eventually all
nations are destined to fall into step and adopt “the American way." All the while, we decry the
rigid fundamentalism of our enemies while we remain utterly blind to our own .
Very early on in the American experience, citizens began to harbor the notion that American
institutions, values, and way of life were so superior to those of other nations and that their spread
throughout the world was inevi- table. Despite the now obvious pluralistic nature of the modern (or post- modern)
world, such ideas still engage the American mind . In 2002, US State Department Planning Director Richard Haass,
described what he called the doc^ trine of integration. Its aim is to integrate “other countries and organizations into arrangements
that will sustain a world consistent with US interests and values and thereby promote peace, prosperity, and justice.” These “arrange
^ ments" involve ideas thought to be universal like the rule of law, human rights, private property, and religious tolerance. It is
believed that this kind of inte gration will lead to prosperity, liberalization, and democratization and thus to peace and stability.
Surely, this is all well and good and very much in line with America’s core values. Still, such a scheme is grounded in the
idea of the superi ority of our values and the assumption that our culture and institutions will
follow on the heels of reform.
For many Americans, the inevitable world victory is as simple as the facts of economics, commerce, and material progress. “Our
population, our wealth,... our manufacturers, and our agricultural resources are all so expanding that the commercial relations of
this country' will be such that they must come and go with us. Here is the full brown myth of national economic superiority exuding
a shameless pride, the self-satisfied musing of a people who feel that they have materially acquitted themselves so admirably as to
“prove their superi ority over all peoples.”21
Others are convinced that the United States possesses "the most perfect form of government
ever devised by man;"22 that US institutions, moral fiber, and ideology are so superior to those of
other nations that all will fall prey, not to force but to a superior population, changing their
customs until, one by one, the entire world will be drawn to our civilization, our laws, and our
culture. As George Boutwell pompously and incorrectly wrote in 1869, “Other nations take by force of arms, ours by force of
ideas.”2’
Over the years, the halls of Congress have continued to ring with the same arrogance that inspired Boutwell in the 1860s and
inflamed Rodo in 1900. Senator Beveridge waxed poetic in 1898, “Our institutions will follow on the wings of commerce. And
American law, American order, American civilization, and the American flag will plant themselves on shores hitherto bloody and
benighted, but, by those agencies of God, henceforth to be made beautiful and bright.”24 Or as Tyler Dennett put it in 1922,
American policy is “adopted in great ignorance of the actual facts... and in a blissful and exalted assumption that any race ought to
regard conquest by the American people as a superlative blessing.”
All of this blindly overlooks the undeniable fact that the transfer of insti- tutions, laws , economic
systems and social mores, not to mention entire cultures, from one people to another is not a simple matter. Rod6
points to the great fallacy of the evangelical American superiority myth by quoting the 19th'Century French historian Jules Michelet:
“the transferal of what is natural and sponta- neous in one society to another where it has neither natural nor historical roots, ... [is]
like attempting to introduce a dead organism into a living one by simple implantation.”"
None of this is intended to imply that the original core values put forth in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution
do not represent important steps toward a universal common good. Certainly, Americans have good reason to be proud and to be
faithful to the causes of universal liberty and equality. However, such faith must be tempered with a realistic and therefore modest
sense of our own significance. We must openly approach the world in a quest for knowledge and
certitude,27 acknowledging that American ideals, values, institutions, and the American way of
life are works in progress, not con- summate Ultimate Truths.
Still, Americans are sure that they, like Woodrow Wilson, have seen “visions that other nations have
not seen," and that, accordingly, the United States’ mission has always been to become the “light
of the world."28 Indeed, from the very beginning, the American national identity was built on audacious visions of choseivness,
destiny, and mission. Ronald Reagan was not the first nor the last in a long line of entrenched American visionaries to proclaim
American exceptionalism, with its missionary implications of the Puritan "city on the hill,” no longer a stationary beacon, but an
active force, the "leader of the free world" directing its forces against “empires of evil."29
With such visions comes a warning: “the adoption of political and social values... as a framework
for national identification is possible only if these values arc based on some source of apparent ultimate truth
which confers on them absolute validity — if they can claim universality.”30 If Americans unflinchingly believe
that theirs is the single principle of Absolute Truth representing the uni versal interests of
humankind, then any opposition will appear either criminal or inhuman. As Arthur Schlcsingcr Jr.
puts it, “Those who are convinced that they have a monopoly on Truth always feel that they are
saving the world when they slaughter heretics. Their object remains the making of the world over in the
image of their dogmatic ideology — their goal is a monolithic world, organized on the principle of the infallibility of a single
creed."32 If Americans are so egotis- tical as to believe that their nation with its gleaming lamp of
Ultimate Truth is
the envy of the world, then they will perceive no wrong in trying to make the world
over in America’s image, by whatever means. However, the world is a very- complex and diverse place, and Ultimate
Truth is a highly elusive and unstable substance. Thus, these are not only very arrogant ideas; they are also very dan gerous ideas.

Narcissism underpins violence from crime to genocide

BAUMEISTER et al 1996 (Roy F. Baumeister Department of Psychology, Case Western
Reserve University; Laura Smart Department of Psychology, University of Virginia Joseph M. Boden
Department of Psychology, Case Western Reserve University, Relation of threatened egotism to violence
and aggression: The dark side of high self-esteem. By: Baumeister, Roy F., Smart, Laura, Boden, Joseph
M., Psychological Review, 0033295X, 1996, Vol. 103, Issue 1)
Several main conclusions can be drawn from our survey of relevant empirical evidence. It must be noted that direct, prospective
studies linking sophisticated measures of self-appraisal to real violence have been quite rare, and so it has been necessary to look for
converging evidence from diverse sources and multiple methods. The volume and diversity of the evidence are necessary to
compensate for the lack of unambiguous, rigorous work focused on the hypotheses. With a topic as full of ethical, practical, and
theoretical complexities as violence, this problem may be inevitable.
The traditional view that low self-esteem is a cause of violence and aggression is not tenable in
light of the present evidence. Most studies failed to find any support for it, and many provided
clear and direct contradictory findings. Aggressors seem to believe that they are superior,
capable beings. Signs of low self-esteem, such as self-deprecation, humility, modesty, and self-effacing mannerisms,
seem to be rare (underrepresented) among violent criminals and other aggressors. The typical, self-defining
statements by both groups and individuals who aggress indicate a belief in their superiority, not
inferiority. Violent and criminal individuals have been repeatedly characterized as arrogant,
confident, narcissistic, egotistical, assertive, proud, and the like. By the same token, violent, aggressive, and
criminal groups tend to share beliefs in their own superiority, ranging from the “man of honor”
designation of Mafia initiates to the “master race” ideology of the Nazis. Also, from individual
hate crimes to genocidal projects, violence that is linked to prejudice is generally associated with
strong views that one’s own group is superior and the out-group is inferior , even subhuman.

Narcissism causes violence—inflated egos are more vulnerable to

criticism and respond with aggression
BAUMEISTER et al 1996 (Roy F. Baumeister Department of Psychology, Case Western
Reserve University; Laura Smart Department of Psychology, University of Virginia Joseph M. Boden
Department of Psychology, Case Western Reserve University, Relation of threatened egotism to violence
and aggression: The dark side of high self-esteem. By: Baumeister, Roy F., Smart, Laura, Boden, Joseph
M., Psychological Review, 0033295X, 1996, Vol. 103, Issue 1)
In contrast to the low self-esteem view, we propose that highly
favorable self-appraisals are the ones most likely
to lead to violence. As noted in the previous section, the traditional theories linking low self-esteem to
violence suffer from ambiguities, inconsistencies, and contradictory empirical evidence . The
opposite view therefore deserves consideration.
There are some bases for suggesting that egotism
could lead directly to violence. People who regard
themselves as superior beings might feel entitled to help themselves to the resources of other,
seemingly lesser beings, and indeed they might even aggress against these lesser beings without
compunction, just as people kill insects or mice without remorse ( Myers, 1980). Also, many violent
episodes involve a substantial element of risk, and a favorable self-appraisal might furnish the
requisite confidence to take such a chance. In plain terms, egotists might be more likely to
assume that they will win a fight, and so they would be more willing to start it .
Our main argument, however, does not depict self-esteem as an independent and direct cause of violence. Rather, we propose that
the major cause of violence is high self-esteem combined with an ego threat. When favorable
views about oneself are questioned, contradicted, impugned, mocked, challenged, or otherwise put in jeopardy,
people may aggress. In particular, they will aggress against the source of the threat.
In this view, then, aggression emerges from a particular discrepancy between two views of self: a
favorable self-appraisal and an external appraisal that is much less favorable. That is, people
turn aggressive when they receive feedback that contradicts their favorable views of themselves
and implies that they should adopt less favorable views. More to the point, it is mainly the people who
refuse to lower their self-appraisals who become violent.

Collective narcissism results in constant violence

DE ZAVALA 2009 (Agnieszka Golec de Zavala Department of Psychology, School of Health and
Social Sciences, Middlesex University, London, United Kingdom; Aleksandra Cichocka Department of
Psychology, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland Roy Eidelson Edielson Consulting, Philadelphia, PA
Nuwan Jayawickreme Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety, University of Pennsylvania,
“Collective Narcissism and Its Social Consequences,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
00223514, 2009, Vol. 97, Issue 6)
Collective narcissism is seen as an extension of individual narcissism to the social aspects of self .
It is an ingroup, rather than an individual self, that is idealized. A positive relationship between individual and collective narcissism
can be expected because the self-concept consists of personal self and social identities based on the groups to which people belong
( Hornsey, 2003). Idealization of self may be followed by idealization of ingroups (see Rocass, Klar, & Liviatan, 2006). It has been
demonstrated that the evaluation of novel ingroups (created in minimal group paradigm tasks) is shaped by peoples’ evaluations of
themselves: Individuals with high personal self-esteem evaluate their new ingroups more positively
than do individuals with low self-esteem ( Gramzow & Gaertner, 2005). Collective narcissists may see
groups as extensions of themselves and expect everybody to recognize not only their individual
greatness but also the prominence of their ingroups. It has also been suggested that, especially in collectivistic
cultures, individual narcissism may stem from the reputation and honor of the groups to which one belongs (e.g., Warren &
Capponi, 1996).
However, narcissistic idealization of a group may also be a strategy to protect a weak and
threatened ego. This possibility has been suggested by Adorno (1998; see also Arendt, 1971; Vaknin, 2003), Fromm (1941), and
status politics theorists ( Gusfield, 1963; Hofstadter, 1965; Lipset & Raab, 1970). These authors suggested that narcissistic
identification with an ingroup is likely to emerge in social and cultural contexts that diminish the ego and/or socialize individuals to
put their group in the center of their lives, attention, emotions, and actions. Thus, the development of narcissistic group
identification can be fostered by certain social contexts independent of individual-level narcissism.
Therefore, one form of narcissism does not have to automatically lead to another, and people can be narcissistic only at an individual
or only at a collective level. The relationship between individual and collective narcissism, although positive, is likely not to be high.
Most important, collective narcissism is expected to predict intergroup attitudes and actions, whereas individual narcissism is
expected to be related to interpersonal actions and attitudes (see Abrams & Hogg, 1988; Crocker & Luhtanen, 1990; but see also
Jordan, Spencer, & Zanna, 2005).
Collective Narcissism and Intergroup Aggression
The threatened egotism theory provides an explanation for numerous findings linking individual
narcissism and interpersonal aggressiveness and hostility ( Baumeister et al., 2000; Baumeister, Smart, &
Boden, 1996; Bushman & Baumeister, 1998; Raskin, Novacek, & Hogan, 1991; Rhodewalt & Morf, 1995, 1998), interpersonal
dominance tendencies ( Ruiz, Smith, & Rhodewalt, 2001), and the inability to forgive ( Exline, Baumeister,
Bushman, Campbell, & Finkel, 2004), accompanied by a tendency to seek vengeance ( Brown, 2004).
According to the threatened egotism theory, individual narcissism is a risk factor that contributes to a violent
and aggressive response to perceived provocation: unfair treatment, criticism, doubts, or insult.
Interpersonal aggression is a means of defending the grandiose self-image. Narcissists invest
emotionally in their high opinion of themselves, demand that others confirm that opinion, and
punish those who seem unlikely to do so. Because they require constant validation of unrealistic
greatness of the self, narcissists are likely to continually encounter threats to their self-image
and be chronically intolerant of them ( Baumeister et al., 1996). Individual narcissists are suggested to possess high
but unstable personal self-esteem (e.g., Kernis, 1993). Such personal self-esteem is vulnerable to sudden drops that produce
heightened sensitivity to ego threats, in turn leading to hostility ( Bushman & Baumeister, 1998; Kernis, 1993). Thus, individual
narcissism is related to cognitive, motivational, and emotional functioning that impairs interpersonal relations (e.g., Morf &
Rhodewalt, 2001), even though it is, at the same time, associated with subjective well-being ( Sedikides, Rudich, Gregg, Kumashiro,
& Rusbult, 2004). Few studies suggest that defensive personal self-esteem that is proposed to characterize individual narcissists
( Jordan, Spencer, Zanna, Hoshino-Browne, & Correll, 2003) may be also related to intergroup bias ( Jordan, Spencer, & Zanna,
2005).
The threatened egotism theory explains the link between individual aggressiveness and retaliatory aggression in interpersonal
contexts. We argue that collective (rather than individual) narcissism explains variance in intergroup (rather
than interpersonal) aggressiveness and hostility. The mechanism underlying this relationship should be analogous to the
mechanism underlying the link between individual narcissism and interpersonal aggressiveness (see Baumeister et al., 1996;
Emmons, 1987; Staub, 1989, for suggestions that some form of group-level narcissism should be linked to intergroup
aggressiveness). Collective narcissists are assumed to be emotionally invested in a grandiose image of their ingroup. This image
is excessive and demands constant validation. Therefore, it is vulnerable to challenges from
within (e.g., internal criticism) or from outside (e.g., from outgroups that endanger or put into doubt the prominence of an
ingroup). It is expected that intergroup hostility and aggression are a means of protecting the group’s
image. Thus, collective narcissists are expected to be particularly prone to interpret the actions
of others as signs of disrespect, criticism, or disapproval of an ingroup and to react aggressively .
They are also expected to react aggressively to actual criticism and other situations that threaten a positive image of an ingroup.
They are expected often to feel unfairly and unjustly treated in an intergroup context, because no treatment or recognition is seen as
good enough for the deserving ingroup. Moreover, it is expected that collective narcissists are not willing to forgive and forget
previous insults or unfairness to an ingroup experienced from other groups. Thus, they are likely to hold prejudice toward outgroups
with whom they share a history of mutual grievances and wrongdoings. Collective narcissism is also expected to predict a preference
for violent and coercive actions toward outgroups in intergroup conflicts and a likelihood of perceiving intergroup situations as
conflictual, even before they turn into open conflicts. In an intergroup situation that is not yet an open conflict, people who are
sensitive to signs of disrespect are more likely to interpret ambiguous events in an ingroup-
threatening manner and to react aggressively.
 Turns the Case (Constitution)

Policy narcissism will undermine the Constitution and focus power in

the executive—turns the case
WEINER 2014 (Greg Weiner, who teaches political science at Assumption College, “Narcissistic
Polity Disorder: Treating the Advanced Case,” Library of Law and Liberty, March 6,
http://www.libertylawsite.org/2014/03/06/narcissistic-polity-disorder-treating-the-advanced-case/)
The more serious point is how grossly disorienting narcissistic polity disorder can be—not merely in
foreign policy, in which it demands boots on every ground (has it occurred to McCain, by the way, that bogging
ourselves down in Syria would have diminished the credibility of any American deterrent against Russia?)— but in
constitutional balance too. If any adverse event anywhere in the world is America’s fault,
America must be empowered to inhibit any such event, and the only person capable of moving
on that fast of a pivot is the president—which may explain why neither McCain nor Graham has
yet met a presidential national security power he did not like .
The president emerges in this constitutional structure as Gene Healy’s father figure, for McCain
and Graham embody what is literally a child’s attitude. They labor under the myth of causation:
If something bad happens, some discrete actor must be to blame . In these events, of course, someone is—
Putin in Russia, Assad in Syria. But they are unreachable, so McCain and Graham turn to the closest parental
figure in sight. Rather than acknowledge the world is big and scary and largely beyond our control,
we assert, more in rage than in reason, that matters are otherwise.
To the extent that requires listening to absurdities like the comical linkage of Benghazi to Ukraine, the cost is minimal. But to the
extent attempting to render matters otherwise requires empowering individuals beyond what
the constitutional balance can bear, the price is palpable. Constitutional imbalance may thus be
one of the most reliable diagnostic signs of narcissistic polity disorder. The good news is that
this appears to be more a disorder of the ruling elite than of the body politic . Graham and McCain are
far gone. It may not be too late to save others .
 Empathy Alt

Empathy for the other breaks narcissism and is necessary for the
survival of all humanity—our alternative is the only one with rigorous
scientific support
KAIVALYA 2013 (Alanna, author of several books, “Rethinking the Demise of Narcissus: Healing
Modern Day Narcissism,” The Kaivalya Yoga Method, December, 2013,
http://alannak.com/resources/blog/rethinking-narcissus-healing-modern-day-narcissism)
Indeed, the remedy for narcissistic tendencies is to get over oneself and love another . Because, “here in
the United States, we have taken the desire for self-admiration too far—so far that our culture has blurred the distinction between
self-esteem and narcissism in an extreme, self-destructive way” (Twenge & Campbell, 18). The obsessive use of self-reflective outlets
of the digital age are contributing to disconnection, rather than connection. Connection to others is what will turn the
tides. It is what provides the substrate for the potential of mental health and well-being. This has been shown over and
over again in a series of studies with various psychologists , maybe none so dramatic as the work of Harry
Harlow and his experiments with baby rhesus monkeys in which he substituted their real mothers for wire-frame mothers. The lack
of connection to their real mothers resulted in significant mental health disorders and “baby monkeys without playmates or real
mothers behaved in socially incompetent ways” (Honig, web). In the modern, scientifically based age, researchers are taking a
different look at the importance and effects of empathy and connection in the human being. At
the University of
California, researchers, Dr. V.S. Ramachandran and Dr. Dacher Keltner, are studying the neuroscientific aspect of
empathy in something called, ironically, mirror neurons. These are neurons that fire in the brain when the brain
recognizes something (an experience, a sensation, a situation) it has encountered before. For example, when someone is poked with
a needle in their arm and another person witnesses it, the witness will empathize because their mirror neurons will produce the
same neurological effect as if he or she were being poked with the needle. It is the neuroscientific reason why
humans can step into someone else’s shoes. These mirror neurons cannot distinguish between a
real and imagined experience, so witnessing another’s pain is literally the equivalent of
experiencing it oneself. Cognitively speaking, everyone is capable of putting themselves in
everyone else’s shoes through this mirroring effect in the brain .
But, of course, interaction with another human being is necessary to experience this mirrored empathy. Solving the problem of
narcissism may not be as simple as activating mirror neurons, but it certainly provides a starting point. Focusing on the
power of interconnectivity increases mental health and well-being and, actually, ensures our survival as a
species. Despite the bad reputation Charles Darwin received for his treatise on The Origin of the Species, he is quoted as saying,
“Sympathy is the strongest instinct in human nature.” Science is showing that rather than the old oft-quoted adage “survival of the
fittest,” survival and evolution as a species has been dependent on interactivity and the ability to cultivate compassion and sympathy
for fellow humans. In a recent study by Corradini and Antonietti, mirror neurons are explored as the basis of empathy, as well as the
key to understanding the intentions of others and in it they determined “that the activation of the Mirror Neuron System in
preadolescents while observing and imitating emotional facial expressions is positively correlated with the level of empathic skills”
(1155). It is only through the external mirror of relationships to others—psychologically, and neuroscientifically—that humans are
able to discern how the actions of one will affect another. Amazingly, there doesn’t even need to be a common
language because “intentions are embodied. Such an embodiment is shared both by the actor
and the observer” so that by merely looking outside oneself “others are conceived not as bodies
endowed with a mind but as persons like us” (Corradini & Antonetti, 1155). Jungian thought would agree from a
psychological point of view, that it is through the lens of relationship to another that unconscious projections are brought to life so
that they may be resolved. It is through relationship that humans have learned not just to interact and create healthy human
relationship, but also to avoid unhealthy relationship and destructive behavior. Through empathy, humans have built
bonds that help one another to survive—in the most primal sense of the word, but also in the
psychological sense—by building healthy relationships that allow for growth and harmony . As the
tragic story of Narcissus illustrates, without connection to others, one cannot survive. Loneliness may be the most tragic affliction of
humankind, as it cuts us off from the life-giving source of connection that fuels psychological, emotional and physical well-being. In
the words of Narcissus, “Was ever...anyone more fatally in love? And do you remember anyone who ever thus pined away? It both
pleases me and I see it; but what I see and what pleases me, yet I cannot obtain...we are kept asunder by a little water” (Ovid, 67). A
little water, indeed. It is cracking through the surface of the water and delving into the depths through
relationship and support of others that heals both the surface wounds and reveals the true
nature of what lies beneath that perfect reflection. Without the ability to reach out, those with
narcissistic tendencies may never reach in to dredge up the depths of their soul to lay it bare and
open for all—including themselves—to see. It is when a human sees the reflection of his own depths
in another that the wound of Narcissus can be healed, by stepping through the surface of the
water to pull up the soul that lurks below.
 Solves Violence

Our alternative solves international violence—we’ve got empirical and

experimental evidence
CAI AND GRIES 2013 (Huajian Cai1 and Peter Gries2 1Key Laboratory of Behavior Science,
Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, 2Institute for US–China Issues,
University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, USA, National narcissism: Internal dimensions and
international correlates, PsyCh Journal 2)
Consistent with previous research on collective narcissism (de Zavala et al., 2009), we found low correlations between national
narcissism and individual narcissism, but moderate correlations with CSE (Study 1 and Study 2), as well as SDO and RWA (Study 1).
The low to moderate correlations suggest that national narcissism is both conceptually and empirically
distinct from these related constructs. National narcissism was the most stable and powerful predictor of
variance in all outcome variables. Notably, it predicted not only political outcomes (such as
international attitudes and foreign policy preferences, Study 1 and Study 2) but also an economic
outcome (purchase intentions, Study 2) over and above individual narcissism, CSE, and variables such as SDO
and RWA, which are well established as reliable predictors of attitudes and behaviors towards
outgroups. By contrast, individual narcissism and national CSE did not contribute any unique variance to the political outcome
variables. This suggests that individual narcissism does not impact attitudes towards international affairs and that national
narcissism, an excessive love of one’s nation, is more harmful than patriotism (national CSE), a more positive love of or loyalty to
one’s own country. Drawing on Brown et al. (2009), we further hypothesized that national narcissism would be composed of two
distinct internal dimensions, national grandiosity and national entitlement. Our data supported this idea. First, like national
narcissism, both national grandiosity and national entitlement were positively and moderately correlated with national CSE (Study 1
and Study 2), SDO, and RWA (Study 1). Second, although national grandiosity and national entitlement were significantly correlated
with each other, they both predicted national narcissism uniquely. Notably, this pattern held true in both China and the U.S.,
suggesting the robustness of the relations. These findings provide convergent evidence about the distinctiveness and relatedness of
national entitlement and national grandiosity as two internal dimensions of national narcissism.
By using diverse outcome variables, we found ample evidence of the unique predictive power of national
entitlement and national grandiosity. For policy preferences toward the competing nation, both
national entitlement and grandiosity were uniquely predictive (in both the U.S. and China); for prejudice
against the people of the competing nation, national entitlement was predictive (in both the U.S. and China), but national
grandiosity was not; for negative attitudes toward the competing government, both national entitlement (in China) and national
grandiosity (in both the U.S. and China) were predictive; and for purchase intentions, both national entitlement and national
grandiosity (in China) were predictive. These findings suggest that both national entitlement and national grandiosity are useful and
distinctive, although their predictive ability varied by outcome variable and culture. A strength of our study is that we
used relatively diverse samples from two different cultures. Psychological research is
increasingly criticized for relying too heavily on well educated and largely White college
students, undermining the external validity of research findings (e.g., Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010; Kitayama, 2010). As
noted above, only 44.8% of the Study 1 sample and 64% the Study 2 sample were college students, the participants’ age ranged from
18 to 66 years (Study 1) and 11 to 66 years (Study 2), and our second sample was not White but Chinese. Replication in other
countries, particularly those associated with different psychological distances (or those construed at different levels; Trope &
Liberman, 2010), however, is still needed to determine whether the findings obtained in this study can be reliably generalized to
other international contexts.
The findings reported in this study have important implications. Theoretically, we contribute to the extant literature by
introducing and validating the concept of national narcissism and its two internal dimensions, national grandiosity and national
entitlement. This has implications for both individual difference psychology and political psychology. These findings also have
foreign policy implications. If national narcissism and its internal dimensions appear to have a
greater impact on international attitudes than even CSE, SDO, and RWA, might some of the therapeutic
interventions suggested in the narcissism literature be applied to national narcissism? We hope that
national narcissism can help bridge the gap between the social psychological and personality
sciences on the one hand, and political psychology on the other hand, and perhaps even contribute
to the reduction of global conflict.
 Solves China

Narcissism underpins US-China relations—the alt is necessary to

avoid war
CAI AND GRIES 2013 (Huajian Cai1 and Peter Gries2 1Key Laboratory of Behavior Science,
Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, 2Institute for US–China Issues,
University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, USA, National narcissism: Internal dimensions and
international correlates, PsyCh Journal 2)
We chose the case of U.S.–China relations for several reasons. First, America is an established superpower today while China is a
former and rising superpower. As citizens of powerful nations, Americans and Chinese are more likely
than people from other nations to maintain narcissistic feelings about their nations (Young & Pinsky,
2006). Second, because they are competing for global influence, both Americans and Chinese tend to
view each other as peer competitors, and thus as threats to those high on national narcissism.
Third, from a foreign policy perspective, U.S.– China relations are intrinsically important as the most consequential bilateral
relationship of the 21st century. If national narcissism is found to operate in the context of U.S.–China
relations, therapeutic interventions suggested in the narcissism literature may be able to
contribute to the prevention of future U.S.–China conflict .
 A2: Only Individual Psychology

There’s quantitative data to support our argument for collective

narcissism
BAUMEISTER et al 1996 (Roy F. Baumeister Department of Psychology, Case Western
Reserve University; Laura Smart Department of Psychology, University of Virginia Joseph M. Boden
Department of Psychology, Case Western Reserve University, Relation of threatened egotism to violence
and aggression: The dark side of high self-esteem. By: Baumeister, Roy F., Smart, Laura, Boden, Joseph
M., Psychological Review, 0033295X, 1996, Vol. 103, Issue 1)
The most important situational factor that interacts with favorable self-appraisals to cause violence is an ego threat. The evidence
conformed broadly to the view that violence is often caused by an encounter in which a favorable self-appraisal is confronted with an
external, less favorable evaluation. In all spheres we examined, we found that violence emerged from threatened egotism, whether
this was labeled as wounded pride, disrespect, verbal abuse, insults, anger manipulations, status inconsistency, or something else.
For huge nationalities, medium and small groups, and lone individuals, the same pattern was
found: Violence resulted most commonly from feeling that one’s superiority was somehow being
undermined, jeopardized, or contradicted by current circumstances.
We do not wish to claim that threatened egotism is the sole cause of aggression, and indeed there is ample room to discuss
biochemical or genetic causes, modeling effects, instrumental aggression, and other factors. But in terms of the potent link between
self-appraisals and violence, the discrepancy between favorable self-views and external threats is the most important cause.
The theory that the discrepancy between self-appraisals and external evaluations causes
violence led to the further prediction that violence would be increased by anything that raised
the frequency or impact of such discrepancies. We proposed that inflated or unrealistically
positive self-appraisals would tend to lead to violent responses , because to the extent that feedback clusters
around accurate, realistic appraisals, it will tend to contradict such unrealistically favorable opinions of self. There was moderate
support for that view, including evidence about tyrants, career criminals, psychopaths, and convicted rapists. Also, some of the
most effective direct predictors of violence were narcissism scales , particularly subscales for grandiosity and
exhibitionism. It remains to be determined how these self-enhancing illusions compare with the positive illusions of nonviolent
people and how widely disseminated they are. For the present, however, it seems reasonable to accept the view that inflated, overly
positive self-appraisals are associated with violence.
 A2: Our Case Matters

Violence is not rational—our theory is the only one that accounts for
any of their impacts so offense only goes one way
BAUMEISTER et al 1996 (Roy F. Baumeister Department of Psychology, Case Western
Reserve University; Laura Smart Department of Psychology, University of Virginia Joseph M. Boden
Department of Psychology, Case Western Reserve University, Relation of threatened egotism to violence
and aggression: The dark side of high self-esteem. By: Baumeister, Roy F., Smart, Laura, Boden, Joseph
M., Psychological Review, 0033295X, 1996, Vol. 103, Issue 1)
Only a minority of human violence can be understood as rational, instrumental behavior aimed
at securing or protecting material rewards. The pragmatic futility of most violence has been
widely recognized: Wars harm both sides, most crimes yield little financial gain, terrorism and
assassination almost never bring about the desired political changes, most rapes fail to bring sexual
pleasure, torture rarely elicits accurate or useful information, and most murderers soon regret their actions as pointless and self-
defeating ( Ford, 1985; Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1990; Groth, 1979; Keegan, 1993; Sampson & Laub, 1993; Scarry, 1985). What
drives people to commit violent and oppressive actions that so often are tangential or even
contrary to the rational pursuit of material self-interest? This article reviews literature relevant to the
hypothesis that one main source of such violence is threatened egotism , particularly when it consists of
favorable self-appraisals that may be inflated or ill-founded and that are confronted with an external evaluation that disputes them.
The focus on egotism (i.e., favorable self-appraisals) as one cause of violent aggression runs contrary to an
entrenched body of wisdom that has long pointed to low self-esteem as the root of violence and
other antisocial behavior. We shall examine the arguments for the low self-esteem view and treat it as a rival hypothesis to
our emphasis on high self-esteem. Clearly, there are abundant theoretical and practical implications that
attend the question of which level of self-esteem is associated with greater violence. The widely
publicized popular efforts to bolster the self-esteem of various segments of the American population in recent decades (e.g., see
California Task Force, 1990) may be valuable aids for reducing violence if low self-esteem is the culprit—or they may be
making the problems worse.
 A2: Framework

The myth of American superiority fosters bad policy and also

interpersonal violence and contempt for cultural difference
CALDWELL 2006 (Wilbur, author of several books, American Narcissism: The Myth of National
Superiority, pp. 141-142)
Still, what is remarkable about the American myth of national superiority is neither its all inclusive scope nor its blind audacity. As
Orwell points out, such myths are typical of modern nationalism everywhere. What is extraordinary about the
American conviction of national superiority is the fanatical fervor with which it is believed and
the ferocious tenacity with which it is defended. Self-serving ideas of American superiority
generate pseudo-religious feelings, notions of serving something larger than the self, and
unshakable cer- tainties that such ideas are right.561 Many today place “an excessive,
exaggerated and exclusive emphasis" on the superiority of the nation at the expense of other
critical values.562 This vain obsession results in an overestimation of the nation and of co-
nationals to the detraction of all other nations and national peoples . As Kecmanovic observes, the
logical result of such an overestimation is "dislike and hostility" toward other nations and other
nationals and "a belief that they are inferior and deserving of contempt ."563 This in turn results
in placing national issues above broad humanitarian issues .
American contempt for other nations has followed hand in hand with notions of American
superiority and faith in a national providential destiny. Despite its universal intent, the rhetoric of
America's presumed predestined mission abounds with aggressive language, threats, and culturally
denigrating slurs. John O’Sullivan, the “author" of Manifest Destiny, lashed out at a world of inferior nations:
For this blessed mission to the nations of the world, which are shut from the light giving light of truth, has America
been chosen; and her high example shall smite unto death the ty ranny of kings, hierarchs and
oligarchs, and carry the glad tidings of peace and good will where myriads now endure an
existence scarcely more envi able than that of the beasts of the field .564
Linking other nationals to “the beasts of the field” exemplifies a kind of dehumanization that is
often the natural conclusion of American contempt for non Americans . According to Kecmanovic, this
kind of dehumanization is widely employed in the denigration of rival national groups. 565
Underlying the de humanization of non-Americans is the notion that Americans are a “pseudo
species” created with “supernatural intent" and possessors of not only a “distinct sense of identity," but the
only “true human identity."566 The logical result of such a belief is to place the nation of “true
humanity" above all other “sub human" nations, thus in effect placing the national cause above
the cause of mankind as a whole. This reordering of priorities has a tendency to “falsify', to
misrepresent the real relations between national groups and the intensions of the people ."567 We
arc human. They are not. It is the nationalist’s classical justi- fication for murder .

Their framework arguments are symptomatic of narcissism—in

reaction to criticism, they cry fairness and think we should be
punished
DE ZAVALA 2009 (Agnieszka Golec de Zavala Department of Psychology, School of Health and
Social Sciences, Middlesex University, London, United Kingdom; Aleksandra Cichocka Department of
Psychology, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland Roy Eidelson Edielson Consulting, Philadelphia, PA
Nuwan Jayawickreme Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety, University of Pennsylvania,
“Collective Narcissism and Its Social Consequences,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
00223514, 2009, Vol. 97, Issue 6)
The threatened egotism theory explains the link between individual aggressiveness and retaliatory aggression in interpersonal
contexts. We argue that collective (rather than individual) narcissism explains variance in intergroup (rather than interpersonal)
aggressiveness and hostility. The mechanism underlying this relationship should be analogous to the mechanism underlying the link
between individual narcissism and interpersonal aggressiveness (see Baumeister et al., 1996; Emmons, 1987; Staub, 1989, for
suggestions that some form of group-level narcissism should be linked to intergroup aggressiveness). Collective narcissists
are
assumed to be emotionally
invested in a grandiose image of their ingroup. This image is excessive and
demands constant validation. Therefore, it is vulnerable to challenges from within (e.g., internal criticism)
or from outside (e.g., from outgroups that endanger or put into doubt the prominence of an ingroup). It is expected that intergroup
hostility and aggression are a means of protecting the group’s image. Thus, collective narcissists are expected to be
particularly prone to interpret the actions of others as signs of disrespect, criticism, or disapproval of an ingroup and to react
aggressively. They are also expected to react aggressively to actual criticism and other situations that threaten a
positive image of an ingroup. They are expected often to feel
unfairly and unjustly treated in an intergroup
context, because no treatment or recognition is seen as good enough for the deserving ingroup.
Moreover, it is expected that collective narcissists are not willing to forgive and forget previous insults or
unfairness to an ingroup experienced from other groups. Thus, they are likely to hold prejudice toward outgroups with whom
they share a history of mutual grievances and wrongdoings. Collective narcissism is also expected to predict a preference for violent
and coercive actions toward outgroups in intergroup conflicts and a likelihood of perceiving intergroup situations as conflictual,
even before they turn into open conflicts. In an intergroup situation that is not yet an open conflict, people
who are sensitive to signs of disrespect are more likely to interpret ambiguous events in an
ingroup-threatening manner and to react aggressively.
 More Social Science Data

Social science data confirms our impact

GRIES 2014 (Peter Hays Gries is the Harold J. & Ruth Newman Chair & Director, Institute for US-
China Issues and Professor in the Department of International and Area Studies at the University of
Oklahoma, The Politics of American Foreign Policy: How Ideology Divides Liberals and Conservatives
Over Foreign Affairs, pp 119-120)
The survey data suggests otherwise. Patriotism, nationalism, and national
narcissism all correlate positively and
strongly with our measures of support for the use of military force (r = .49, .58, .55, respectively) and
overall desires for tougher foreign policies (r = .21, .26, .27). Indeed, of the fifteen countries we measured foreign
policy preferences towards, patriotism correlated significant- ly with all except South Korea, Japan, and Germany, nationalism with
all except Japan and Germany, and national narcissism with all except England. In other words, these three different measures of
Americanness correlated positively with desires for tougher policies towards specific foreign
countries the vast ma-jority of the time. In general, the correlations were the highest for
countries seen as posing the greatest threats to the United States, such as Iran (r = .34, .38, .28,
respectively) and North Korea (r = .29, .29, .17). As we will see in Chapter 8, the one exception was Israel: greater patriotism (r
= -.22), nationalism (r = -.30), and national narcissism (r = -.21) as an American were associated with desires for friendlier policies
towards Israel.
Seshadri-Crooks K
 1NC—K
The affirmative’s celebration of racial identity establishes racism as a
political object but effaces the concept of race. This annihilates
difference in the name of racial sameness
Seshadri-Crooks 2K—Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks is a professor at Boston College
(Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race, pg. 6-9, HSA)

I am suggesting two things: first, the order of racial difference attempts to compensate for sex’s failure in language; second, we must
Whiteness tries
not therefore analogize race and sex on the sexual model of linguistic excess or contradiction. The signifier
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 characterized 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 understood 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 one’s 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 psychoanalysis. 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
annihilation 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. 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
visibility, which is the mistake made by some well-meaning and not-so-wellmeaning 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 deconstruction,
whereas in the case of race, visibility maintains a bulwark against the historicity and
historicization of race . (In fact, Brennan suggests that the “ego’s era” is characterized by a resistance to history.) It is this
function of visibility that renders cases of racial passing fraught and anxious . 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 distinguishing 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 misappropriation, 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
rather myopic perspective refuses to address the peculiar resiliency of
identity. This
“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
distinctions 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 .” Lukács, who elaborated Marx’s 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 autonomy 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.

Vote neg to traverse the fantasy of unity—only by grounding racial

politics in other identifications can we confront whiteness
Seshadri-Crooks 2K—Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks is a professor at Boston College
(Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race, pg. 158-160, HSA)

We must develop a new adversarial aesthetics that will throw racial signification into
disarray . Given that race discourse was produced in a thoroughly visual culture, it is necessary that the visual itself be used
against the scopic regime of race. I have laid the basis for such an aesthetics in Chapters 4 and 5, where the relation of the bodily mark to
the signifier is thrown into perplexity. In Suture, we as spectators are asked to give up our investment in Whiteness ,
the signifier that promises access to absolute humanness . The film puts pressure on the purely symbolic origins of race by
unraveling the relation between racial gestalt and one’s identity. Clay is Vincent if he takes up his place in the signifying chain. Similitude is
established not on the basis of the body’s gestalt, but the part object— ears, eyes, etc . In Toni Morrison’s
“Recitatif,” it is racial reference that is called into question. As with Suture, the relation between visibility and the signifier is

refused, but for another purpose. By emptying the racial signifier of its properties , so
that white and black have no connotations , Morrison renders meaningless the relations
among the signifier, the body, and identity. For Morrison, it is such emptiness that makes love approachable. I am
proposing an adversarial aesthetics that will destabilize racial looking so that racial
identity will always be uncertain and unstable . The point of such a practice would be to
confront the symbolic constitution of race and of racial looking as the investment we make in difference for
sameness. The confrontation has to entail more than an exploration of the fantasy, which process I detailed in Chapter 2 on “The secret sharer.”
There we took measure of the fantasy of wholeness as the obliteration of difference that Whiteness holds out to the subject of race. A simple rejection of
this fantasy of selfinflation on a political or ethical basis, such as the repugnance we see exhibited by Orwell, in Chapter 3, cannot be adequate. In
Orwell’s case, his liberal rejection of mastery can only lead to the reproduction of the system of race. For it
is not enough to be aware of
the affect of anxiety that race invariably generates . One must traverse the fundamental
fantasy of singular humanity upon which racial identity is founded . It is a question of
resituating oneself in relation to the raced signifier . Such a practice would not aim so much at a
cross-identification, such as ticking the “wrong” box on a questionnaire, or passing for another
race. It would confound racial signification by stressing the continuity , the point of doubt among the
so-called races, to the extent that each and every one of us must mistrust the knowledge of our

racial belonging . The idea would be to void racial knowledge by releasing the racial signifier
from its historical mooring in a signified. Such practices can only be, and must be representational , as
what they necessitate is a radical intervention into language and signification. This entails
the reinvention of culture as organized by differences based on other kinds of “reasonings” than
race. Every medium of representation can and must be harnessed for such a practice. In addition to those I have cited
earlier such as film, painting and literature, we must consider the possibilities presented by that other mode of representation, namely representation
by proxy. The possibility of unsettling political representation, for instance, or procedures of verification based on race such as the passport, the visa
The idea is not to erase
and the driver’s license may renew and refresh questions of identity—what is worth preserving, what is not.

identity, even if such a preposterous act were possible . Rather, we must rethink
identity in tension with our usual habits of visual categorization of individuals. Ideally, the practice
that I am advocating will deploy the visual against the visual . Such redefinition is thinkable only as a collective and normalizing
project; it should be aimed at infiltrating normative bourgeois self-definition. The practice of “discoloration” will be more effective if it is not restricted
to particular intellectual groups or artists. Gramsci suggests that a philosophical movement, even as it elaborates a form of thought superior to
“common sense” and coherent on a scientific plane…. never forgets to remain in contact with the “simple” and indeed finds in this contact the source of
the problems it sets out to study and to resolve. (Gramsci 1971:330) In other words, we cannot voluntarily abandon the quotidian logic of race. To do so
would be a form of vanguardism that will only reinforce the system as the necessary point of differentiation. Rather, it is to the common sense of race
that we must appeal. Otherwise, we will fail to address social contradiction in its specificity. Thus producing a sub-culture of “discolorationists” or
encouraging subjects voluntarily to refuse racial identity (as advocated for “white” people by the journal Race Traitor) possibly will not be effective.
An anti-race praxis must aim at a fundamental transformation of social and political
logic . It cannot be a mere “phenomenon of individuals” which, as Gramsci reminds us, only marks the “‘high points’ of the progress made by
common sense” (1971:331). As a praxis, psychoanalysis is the most appropriate discourse for the examination
of why we or certain groups may resist such an adversarial aesthetics. Working through our
fantasies will involve the risk of desubjectification that many of us dread. Such dread , such an encounter with our
own limit, is the only means of articulating the possibility of an ethics beyond the

specious enjoyment promised by Whiteness .

 2NC—Overview / Impact

The 1AC’s assignment of signifiers is a microcosm of their allegiance

to the master signifier – a point which defines everyone around
them– this turns the case – the desire for wholeness is a form of
suturing the lack destined to fail
Seshadri-Crooks 2K—Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks is a professor at Boston College
(Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race, pg. 58-60, HSA)

The striking phrase "the

visible absence of color" refers to Whiteness as the simultaneous presence and
absence of a certain substance. It is precisely the indefniteness, the ambivalence, the mute
meaningfulness, the colorless, all-color of Whiteness that fascinates and mesmerizes the subject as
the promise of being itself. For Melville, it is the absent cause of perceptible hues of nature which are but "the subtile
deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without" ( 186). This cause is the "great principle of light" which
"for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and
roses, with its own blank tingepondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us as a lepe1" ( 186). Whiteness here is the
great and immanent absence that sustains the system of chromatism; it actually enables one to see,
even as it presents a threat to ordinary vision. As the cause of color, of visibility itself, Whiteness
as light is beyond mere perception ; he who looks upon it would, in Melville's terms, end as "the wretched
infidel [who] gazes himself blind" (l86). Melville's notion of Whiteness as the formless and dangerous essence
of visibility is wholly compatible with the view of Whiteness as the master signifier of race that I
have been delineating so far. In the last chapter, my emphasis was on the capacity of Whiteness to engender the
structure of racial difference. Here, I will focus on the lethal and illegal fantasy of sameness and
mastery that Whiteness offers as the real yet concealed motivation for the maintenance of race. The
master signifier makes difference possible, but it is also excluded from the play of signification that
it supports. In Lacan's terms, we could propose that the dual character of Whiteness, as support and panic-inducing kernel,
exists in a relation of "extimacy" (Lacan's term for the paradox of the excluded interior) to the symbolic system it engenders. This
signifier, in its awesome and terrifying aspect, discloses itself as something inassimilable
to the very system that it causes and upholds. In our terms, Whiteness engenders the scale of
human difference as racial embodiment, but this ostensibly " neutral" system of differences is
organized around the exclusion of Whiteness, particularly the terror that it presents as pure and
blinding light, which would annihilate and erase difference . I argue that this " terror"
should be understood as the raison d'etre for race itself- the will to preeminence, to mastery, to
being- which must necessarily be prohibited by social and juridical law. This ineffable and excluded
power of Whiteness, as that which makes perception possible but is itself the blinding possibility
beyond the visible, should be explored as the " lure" that fuels and perpetuates racial visibility while holding out a
promise of something beyond the empirical mark. I suggested in the previous chapter that the visible bodily marks of race
serve to guarantee Whiteness as something more than its discursive construction. Whiteness, I
argue, attempts to signify being, but this audacious attempt is impossible because of the simple fact
that Whiteness is only a cultural inventio n. This impossibility, based on the historicity of
Whiteness, generates anxiety. But anxiety in race identity is endemic insofar as Whiteness tries to
fill a space which must remain empty, or unsignified. This is where so-called ordinary visible difference, telling
people apart on basis of bodily detail, comes to sustain the regime of race. If we can find a
non-discursive basis (the marks on the body) for our faith in race, then th e function of
Whiteness, as the unconscious promise of wholeness, is preserved. Our
investment in phenotype actually serves a dual function . On the one hand, it allows the
co-existence of race as social construction, which serves to defend against the jouissance of
Whiteness. On the other, it preserves that fantasy of wholeness by valorizing phenotype as
something pre-discursive. In this chapter, I explore the lethal fantasy at the core of race, which is
the possibility of transcending or reaching beyond the visible phenotype. It is the possibility of
being itself, where difference and lack are wholly extinguished. As the master signifier of race,
Whiteness maintains the structure of (visible) diffe rence- the chain of metonymic substitutions which locates the subject
as desiring (thus eternally lacking) Whiteness. The fantasy of encountering Whiteness would be, for
the subject of race, to recover the missing substance of one's being. It would be to coincide, not with a
transcendental ideal, some rarefied model of bodily perfection, but with the "gaze," that void in the Other, a piece of the
Real, that could annihilate difference. The Lacanian view about our general sense of visual reality or conscious
perception is that it is itself subtended by our drive to search, recognize and recover the object of desire. In other words, what we
take to be the evidence of our eyes, the fruit of our active looking, is largely caused by an
unrecognized and underlying need to encounter that which Lacan terms "the gaze." The gaze is "that which always
escapes the grasp of that form of vision that is satisfied with imagining itself as consciousness" (XI: 74). It is beyond reality
and visual perception which, as Freud established, are founded on language and thought. The gaze is of the
order of the Real, because it directly addresses lack- the lack in the Other and the lack in the
subject. Encountering it would be lethal, insofar as it is contingent on the subject's
constitutive lack or castration (XI: 73), the subject as manque a etre (or subject as a want-to-be.) To encounter
the gaze would be to relinquish one's subject status, to give up meaning for being. The gaze
promotes the fantasy of wholeness, but at the price of one's distinctive subject status. The gaze
thus causes desire , it is the consummate version of the objet petit a, and more importantly it is the object of
the scopic drive. Translated or extended to the sphere of race, it is Whiteness as being itself that
functions as the lure-the gaze that causes desire and is at the center of the drive's trajectory. Put
more starkly, it is our drive for supremacy, for the jouissance of absolute humanness , that sustains our
active looking. Setting aside the historical fact that such a goal is impossible because race has no
purchase on the body's jouissance, or in anything beyond its own cultural origins, we must
nevertheless take up the persistence of the fantasy of Whiteness.
 2NC—Link—Policymaking / AT: Reformism

The aff’s legislation works in the service of race—they preserve

difference for the ultimate goal of maintaining the master signifier of
whiteness
Seshadri-Crooks 2K—Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks is a professor at Boston College
(Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race, pg. 55-56, HSA)

The discourse of Whiteness is above all, to use Guillaumin’s terms, “autoreferential” rather than “altero-referential.” Guillaumin
writes: The auto-referential system, centered on the Self, was historically the first to be put in place; it coincided with the pre-
eminence of the aristocracy, to whom its race symbolism was specific…. Their eyes remain fixed on their own existence which, both
in their own minds and in reality, regulates the course and symbolism of social activity. It is perhaps legitimate to see in this system
a form of ethnocentrism…. However, “aristocratism” is not yet racism because unlike racism, it is not founded on a belief in its own
“naturalness”. Altero-referential racism is centered on the Other, and seems to arise only in egalitarian societies. A fundamental trait
of such a system is the occultation of the Self, of which people have no spontaneous awareness; there is no sense of belonging to a
specific group. (Guillaumin 1995:50) Guillaumin’s terms are useful not so much in distinguishing between premodern and
contemporary notions of race, as she suggests, but rather in discerning the emergence of race through the self-splitting referred to
earlier. Guillaumin’s 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 volk, 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.Gunther’s (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 Gunther’s 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, antidiscrimination, etc. Anti-racist legislations and practices, in other words, work
ultimately in the service of race, which is inherently , unambiguously, structurally
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 sameness ,
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.
 2NC—Prior Question / AT: Pragmatism Good

The K comes first—every conclusion in the 1AC relies on the concept

of the master signifier
Seshadri-Crooks 2K—Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks is a professor at Boston College
(Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race, pg. 34-35, HSA)
The above view of the ego and the body image raises the question of the relation of the ego ideal to race.
What is the status of the master signifier of race in the constitution of the bodily ego? If we agree that the
body image is constituted with the help of the signifier, then are all body images necessarily raced? Is Whiteness a
founding signifier for the subject as such, and of his/her ego? Is the racial signifier necessary for the
constitution of the bodily ego? 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 Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, James Weldon
Johnson's 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 socalled
"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 (Fanon's thesis). Other problematic views might be that "white" people impose an identity
upon those they have colonized 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 one's identity, not promote more fulsome claims to such identity.
 2NC—AT: Perm / BW Binary Good
References to racial signifiers are what we critique – they preserve
the designation of “black” by signifying its properties as part of group
identity
Seshadri-Crooks 2K—Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks is a professor at Boston College
(Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race, pg. 141-143, HSA)

Racial identity, too, I would like to suggest— i.e., words like black and white, when used as nouns
— works like names. 10 That is, they are rigid designators — they are signifiers that have no
signified. They establish a reference, but deliver no connotations or meaning whatsoever. We can,
of course, reasonably argue that race does not exist insofar as the identity of a person as “black” or
“white” is contingent upon a cluster of concepts that are themselves too protean to be able to
uphold anything like a necessary truth. We can cite historical evidence to show that groups that
were once considered white are no longer classified as such for this or that reason, etc. But as my
discussion in Chapter 1 specified, arguments leveled at race theory are highly
ineffectual and possess insufficient explanatory power . Thus rather than lapse into the
historicist argument, it may be more productive to view racial color designators as operating not
unlike proper names. The proper name is neither wholly one’s own (i.e., we are all named by
others) nor is it meaningful. One inhabits the name as the reference of oneself, and as Kripke
asserts, it bears no relation to a set of properties that establish either its meaning or its
reference: Nixon is Nixon, or as he says, quoting Bishop Butler, “everything is what it is and not
another thing” (Kripke 1982:94). Is this not true for “black” and “white”? If someone is
designated as one or the other, there is a necessary truth to that designation, but does it mean?
What would be the cluster of concepts that could establish such an identity? Even in identity
statements such as “blacks are people of African descent” or “whites are people of European
descent,” though the predicates supposedly define and give the meaning of black and white,
establishing the necessity of these concepts in every counter-factual situation will not be possible if
only because national designations, and the notion of descent, are historically volatile and
scientifically invalid respectively. No set of qualitative descriptions can establish black
or white identity across all possible worlds, but we cannot therefore say that black and white
do not exist, which is the error that a number of critical race theorists fall into. 11 As Kripke says, it
is not how the speaker thinks he got the reference, but the actual chain of communication, which
is relevant…. Obviously the name is passed on from link to link. But of course not every sort of
causal chain reaching from me to a certain man will do for me to make a reference. There may
be a causal chain from our use of the term “Santa Claus” to a certain historical saint, but still the
children, when they use this, by this time probably do not refer to that saint…. It seems to me
wrong to think we give ourselves some properties which somehow qualitatively uniquely pick
out an object and determine our reference in that manner. (Kripke 1982:93– 4) If we substitute
“black” or “white,” etc. for Santa Claus in the above quotation, we discern two things
immediately: first, the paradigm of “black” as reaching back to “Africa,” as Santa Claus could to a
medieval saint, is the source of an insurmountable confusion in critical race theory. The idea that
“black” means “people of African descent” leads into the thicket of debates about biological
descent, which will inevitably run into the false contradiction between culture and biology.
Second, we can now see that the notion of racial passing is nothing but an intervention into
the passing of the name from link to link . Changing one’s identity from black to white, or
viceversa, means that one passes from one chain of communication to another. For instance, when
the “Ex-Colored Man” in James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man decides
to pass from black to white, he does so by passing from one chain to another: “I finally made up my
mind that I would neither disclaim the black race nor claim the white race; but that I would
change my name, raise a mustache, and let the world take me for what it would” (Johnson
1995:90, emphasis added). In his last lecture, Kripke himself suggests the possibility of “black”
and “white” as rigid designators by advocating the view that terms for natural kinds are much
closer to proper names than is ordinarily supposed…Perhaps some “general” names (“foolish,”
“fat,” “yellow”) express properties. In a significant sense, such general names as “cow” and “tiger”
do not, unless being a cow counts trivially as a property. Certainly “cow” and “tiger” are not short
for the conjunction of properties a dictionary would take to define them. (Kripke 1982:127– 8) It
should be noted that Kripke’s use of “yellow” in the above quotation is a reference to color and not
to a human race, which could not, according to the above logic, express properties. In this context,
we can understand the utterance “black is beautiful” not as an attempt at substituting a negative
cluster of concepts with a positive one in order to reclaim the properties attached to “black”
identity; rather, it is intelligible as an attempt to preserve the rigid designation of
“black ,” by displacing its so-called properties onto black as a color, to mark its
function as a general name, than as a property of group identity .
 2NC—AT: Perm

Regimes of visibility force us to accept race as an a priori fact of

human difference—symbolic criticism becomes foreclosed with the
introduction of the aff
Seshadri-Crooks 2K—Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks is a professor at Boston College
(Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race, pg. 31-32, HSA)

12 If we reduce racial practice to racism, defined as power’s agency to hierarchize and discriminate, we must accept race
as an a priori fact of human difference . The concept of race as a system that fixates on
arbitrary marks on the body becomes neutralized , and racism becomes the enemy. In other words, there
is no possibility of interrogating the structure and constitution of the subject of race . The question
“How do we become white, black, brown, or yellow ?” will be foreclosed. We will fail to discern racial

practice as stemming from race rather than from racism. By locating our reading of race on the
ostensibly dual plane of the mirror relation alone, which leads to the simpler opposition now entrenched in cultural studies between the “self” and

the “other,” we risk confining race to a notion of the ego as false consciousness . Race,
we will then be led to assert, is an illusory, narcissistic construct, and racism is an ego defense . If the
order of race or Whiteness pertained only to the subject’s assimilation of his/her ego ideal, then
race as such would seem to have nothing to do with the symbolic or the real of the
unconscious , that is, with the psychical structure of the subject. It would seem to be free of the effects of the signifier ,
thereby rendering language “neutral” and free of “race.” As Fanon implies, racial visibility must be distinguished from the moment when

the subject introjects an ego ideal as a coherent body image. But by marking the temporal difference in the constitution of the

bodily ego and the raced body, we will see that the anxiety that Fanon refers to is not caused by the ideology of
blackness, but by the structure of Whiteness . Less cryptically: we will see that racial anxiety, the unconscious anxiety
that is entailed by the sight of racial difference, has its cause not in ideology, but in the structure of race itself, and in the

functioning of its master signifier, “Whiteness.” In the following, I return to the theory of the mirror stage, and examine the process of the
integration of the bodily image to magnify the role of the symbolic in subtending the body image. I undertake this brief elaboration of Lacan’s notion of the imaginary, which will
be familiar to many readers, to clarify my claim that race cannot be mapped onto the simpler theory of misrecognition and ego identification, and that one can do so only
through an inadequate understanding of the imaginary, and of the raced subject.
**Aff**
 Can’t Explain IR
Psychoanalysis can’t explain international relations --- the move from
the clinic to the macro-sphere is too great --- obviously not everyone
shares the exact same fantasies and there’s no mechanism to actualize
change
Boucher 2010 --- literary and psychoanalytic studies at Deakin University (Geoff M., “Zizek and
Politics: A Critical Introduction”, https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=_hmrBgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=
%C5%BDi%C5%BEek+and+Politics:
+An+Introduction&ots=3uqgdGUwxC&sig=MNP7oMG7JXgWMj49yz2DHRTs6BI#v=onepage&q&f=false)//trepka
Can we bring some order to this host of criticisms? It is remark- able that, for all the criticisms of Zizek's political
Romanticism, no one has argued that the ultra-extremism of Zizek's political position might reflect his
untenable attempt to shape his model for political action on the curative final moment in
clinical psychoanalysis. The differences between these two realms, listed in Figure 5.1, are nearly too
many and too great to restate - which has perhaps caused the theoretical oversight. The key thing is this. Lacan's
notion of travers- ing the fantasy involves the radical transformation of people's sub- jective
structure: a refounding of their most elementary beliefs about themselves, the world, and sexual difference. This is
undertaken in the security of the clinic, on the basis of the analysands' volun- tary desire to
overcome their inhibitions, symptoms and anxieties. As a clinical and existential process, it has its own
independent importance and authenticity . The analysands, in transforming their subjective world, change the
way they regard the objective, shared social reality outside the clinic. But they do not transform
the world. The political relevance of the clinic can only be (a) as a support- ing moment in
ideology critique or (b) as a fully-fledged model of politics, provided that the political subject and its social
object are ultimately identical. Option ((7), Zizek's option, rests on the idea, not only of a subject who becomes who he is only
through his (mis) recognition of the objective sociopolitical order, but whose 'traversal of the fantasy' is immediately identical with
his transformation of the socio-political system or Other. I-Ience, according to Zizek, we can analyse the
institutional embodiments of this Other using psy- choanalytic categories. In Chapter 4, we saw Zi2ek's
resulting elision of the distinction between the (subjective) Ego Ideal and the (objec- tive) Symbolic Order. This leads him to
analyse our entire culture as a single subject-object, whose perverse (or perhaps even psychotic)
structure is expressed in every manifestation of contemporary life. Zizek's decisive political-theoretic
errors, one substantive and the other methodological, are different (see Figure 5.1) The substantive problem is to equate any
political change worth the name with the total change of the subject-object that is, today, global capitalism. This is a type
of change that can only mean equat- ing politics with violent regime change, and ultimately
embrac- ing dictatorial govermnent, as Zizek now frankly avows (IDLC 412-19). We have seen that
the ultra-political form of Zizek's criti- cism of everyone else, the theoretical Left and the wider
politics, is that no one is sufficiently radical for him - even, we will discover, Chairman Mao. We now see
that this is because Zizek's model of politics proper is modelled on a pre-critical analogy with the total transformation of a subiect's
entire subjective structure, at the end of the talking cure. For what could the concrete consequences of this governing analogy be?
We have seen that Zizek equates the individual fantasy with the collective identity of an
entire people . The social fantasy, he says, structures the regime's 'inherent transgressions' : at
once subjects' habitual ways of living the letter of the law, and the regime's myths of origin and of identity. If political action
is modelled on the Lacanian cure, it must involve the complete 'traversal' - in Hegel's terms, the
abstract versus the determinate negation - of all these lived myths, practices and habits. Politics must involve the periodic founding
of of entire new subject–objects. Providing the model for this set of ideas, the first Žižekian political subject was Schelling’s divided
God, who gave birth to the entire Symbolic Order before the beginning of time (IDLC 153; OB 144–8). But can the political
theorist reasonably hope or expect that subjects will simply give up on all their inherited
ways , myths and beliefs, all in one world- creating moment? And can they be legitimately
asked or expected to, on the basis of a set of ideals whose legitimacy they will only
retrospectively see, after they have acceded to the Great Leap Forward ? And if they do not
– for Žižek laments that today subjects are politically disengaged in unprecedented ways – what
means can the theorist and his allies use to move them to do so?
 Not Science
Psychoanalysis is a bunk science --- it’s untestable, produces
contradictory analyses, and can’t make predictions
Beystehner 13 --- J.D. from University of Georgia (Kristen M, “Psychoanalysis: Freud's Revolutionary
Approach to Human Personality”, http://www.personalityresearch.org/papers/beystehner.html)//trepka
Storr (1981) insists, "Only a few fundamentalist psychoanalysts of an old-fashioned kind think that Freud was a
scientist or that psychoanalysis was or could be a scientific enterprise," and that, "...to understand persons cannot
be a scientific enterprise" (p. 260). Although many psychoanalysts themselves would undoubtedly consider psychoanalysis to be a
science, many critics would disagree. Popper, by far one of psychoanalysis' most well-known critics and a strong critic of Grünbaum,
insists that psychoanalysis cannot be considered a science because it is not falsifiable. He claims that psychoanalysis' "so-
called predictions are not predictions of overt behavior but of hidden psychological states. This
is why they are so untestable" (Popper, 1986, p. 254). Popper (1986) claims that only when individuals are not neurotic is
it possible to empirically determine if prospective patients are currently neurotic (p. 254). Popper (1986) asserts that
psychoanalysis has often maintained that every individual is neurotic to some degree due to the fact
that everyone has suffered and repressed a trauma at one point or another in his or her life (p. 255). However, this concept of
ubiquitous repression is impossible to test because there is no overt behavioral method of doing
so (p. 254). Other critics claim that psychoanalysis cannot be considered a science due to its lack of
predictions. Psychoanalysts, critics maintain, state that certain childhood experiences, such as abuse or
molestation, produce certain outcomes or states of neurosis. To take this idea one step further, one
should be able to predict that if children experience abuse, for instance, they will become
characterized by certain personality traits. In addition, this concept would theoretically work in reverse. For instance,
if individuals are observed in a particular neurotic state, one should be able to predict that they had this or that childhood
experience. However, neither of these predictions can be made with any accuracy (Colby, 1960, p. 55).
Additional critics insist that psychoanalysis is not a science because of the lack of interpretive rules or regulations. Colby (1960)
contends that critics of psychoanalysis have difficulties with the idea that "there are no clear, intersubjectively shared lines of
reasoning between theories and observations" (p. 54). For instance, one psychoanalyst will observe one
phenomenon and interpret it one way, whereas another psychoanalyst will observe the same
phenomenon and interpret it in a completely different way that is contradictory to the first
psychoanalyst's interpretation (Colby, 1960, p. 54). Colby (1960) concludes that if analysts themselves cannot
concur that a certain observation is an example of a certain theory, then the regulations that
govern psychoanalytic interpretation are undependable (p. 55). Eysenck (1986) maintains:Zizhave always taken
it for granted that the obvious failure of Freudian therapy to significantly improve on spontaneous remission or placebo
treatment is the clearest proof we have of the inadequacy of Freudian theory, closely followed by
the success of alternative methods of treatment, such as behavior therapy. (p. 236) Whereas critics, such as Popper
(1986), insist that Freud's theories cannot be falsified and therefore are not scientific, Eysenck claims that because Freud's theories
can be falsified, they are scientific. Grünbaum (1986) concurs with Eysenck that Freud's theory is falsifiable and
therefore scientific, but he goes one step further and claims that Freud's theory of
psychoanalysis has been proven wrong and is simply bad science.
 Not Falsifiable
Pyschoanalysis is non-falsifiable hindsight thinking
Samuels 93—Training Analyst – Society of Analytical Psychology and Science Associate –
American Academy of Psychoanalysis (Andrew, Free Associations, “The mirror and the
hammer: depth psychology and political transformation”, Vol. 3D, Psychoanalytic Electronic
Publishing) DJ
The paper is about the depth psychology of political processes, focusing on processes of political change. It is a contribution to the longstanding
ambition of depth psychology to develop a form of political and cultural analysis that will, in Freud's words, 'under-stand the riddles of the world'. It
has to be admitted that there is an equally longstanding reluctance in the non-psychological commun¬ity to accept the many and varied ideas and
suggestions concerning political matters that have been offered by analysts of all persua¬sions. I do not believe this can all be put down to resistance.
There is something offensive above reductive interpretations of complex socio-political problems
in exclusively psychological terms. The tendency to panpsychism on the part of some depth psychologists has led
me to wonder if an adequate methodology and ethos actually exists with which to make an engagement
of depth psychology with the public sphere possible.¶ By 'politics' I mean the arrangements within a
culture for the organization and distribution of power, especially economic power, and the way in which power is deployed to
maintain the survival and enhance the quality of human life. Economic and political power includes control of processes of information and
representation as well as the use of physical force and possession of vital resources such as land, food and water. On a more personal level, political
power reflects the ability to choose freely whether to act and what action to take in a given situation. 'Politics'
refers to the interplay
between the personal and public dimensions of power. That is, there is an articulation between public, economic power
and power as expressed on the personal, private level. This articulation is demonstrated in family organization, gender and race relations, and in
religious and artistic assumptions as they affect the life of individuals. (I have also tried to be consistent in my use of the terms 'culture', 'society' and
'collective'.)'¶ Here is an example of the difficulty with psychological rcduc-tionism to which I am referring. At a conference 1 attended in London in
1990, a distinguished psychoanalyst referred to the revolutionary students in Paris in 1968 as 'functioning as a regressive group'. Now, for a large group
of students to be said to regress, there must be, in the speaker's mind, some sort of normative developmental starting point for them to regress to. The
social group is supposed to have a babyhood, as it were. Similarly, the speaker must have had in mind the possibility of a healthier, progressive group
process — what a more mature group of revolutionary students would have looked like. But complex
social and political
phenomena do not conform to the individualistic, chronological, moralistic, pathologizing
framework that is often imported.¶ The problem stems from treating the entire culture , or large chunks
of it, as if it were an individual or, worse, as if it were a baby . Psychoanalysts project a version of
personality development couched in judgemental terms onto a collective cultural and political
process. If we look in this manner for pathology in the culture, we will surely find it . As we are
looking with a psychological theory in mind, then, lo and behold, the theory will explain the
pathology, but this is a retrospective prophecy (to use a phrase of Freud's), twenty-twenty hindsight. In this
psychoanalytic tautologizing there is really nothing much to get excited about. Too much psychological writing on the
culture, my own included, has suffered from this kind of smug 'correctness' when the 'material' proves the theoretical point. Of course it does! If we are
interested in envy or greed, then we will find envy or greed in capitalistic organization. If we set out to demonstrate the presence of archetypal patterns,
such as projection of the shadow, in geopolitical relations, then, without a doubt, they will seem to leap out at us. We influence what we analyse and so
psychological reflection on culture and politics needs to be muted- there is not so much 'aha!' as one hoped.

Psychoanalysis is not verifiable – continual contradictions and no base criteria

Tuck, 2014, B.S. from University of Michigan, (Andrew, “Why Did American Psychiatry Abandon
Psychoanalysis?”, http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/107788/antuck.pdf?
sequence=1)
To say that psychoanalysis has grown stagnant as a scientific field may at first seem a sweeping and
completely unwarranted claim. After all, in terms of producing new branches of thought, psychoanalytic
theory has undoubtedly proven an expansive and fruitful domain; to argue that psychoanalytic progress
suddenly stopped after Freud would require answering to object relations theory, ego psychology, self
psychology, and Lacanian psychoanalysis, to name but a few. Furthermore, rather than dying with Freud
in 1939, psychoanalysis produced these subfields through a variety of different thinkers—the role of
Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, Heinz Kohut, and Jacques Lacan in their respective theories above seem to
demonstrate that psychoanalysis was not a one-man show after all. In fact, it was during the decades
immediately following Freud’s death that dynamic psychiatry was at the peak of its influence in the
United States. 11,12 Given the proliferation of new models and theories of psychoanalytic thought under
an equally diverse group of psychoanalysts, on what grounds could the argument that psychoanalysis
failed to produce visible and useful knowledge possibly possess any merit? The answer is in the question:
it was precisely the sheer amount and diversity of psychoanalytic subfields that delegitimized
psychoanalysis as a whole: the presence of such diversity of opinion within the same field undermined the
authority of any one subfield. Rather than adding to a collective fund of psychoanalytic knowledge, each
of these different subfields took a different approach to psychoanalytic theory and practice. Former
American Psychiatric Association president Alan Stone said: Today, at least in my opinion, and I am not
entirely alone in thinking this, neither Anna Freud's Ego Psychology nor Melanie Klein's Object Relations
Theory seem like systematic advances on Freud's ideas. Rather they seem like divergent schools of
thought, no closer to Freud than Karen Horney who rebelled against Freudian orthodoxy. 13 The frequent
emergence of these competing “divergent schools of thought” and their dissenting followers, then, made
any developments in psychoanalysis seem to other scientists less like legitimate scientific discoveries and
more like competing hypotheses. In contrast with more established fields like biology, innovations in
psychoanalysis often seemed to contradict earlier psychoanalytic ideas as well as one another, frequently
forming branches and sub-branches without regard to maintaining any sort of continuity or internal
consistency in psychoanalysis as a whole. 14,15 In fact, many of these developments were reactionary in
nature, responding to other trends in psychoanalysis rather than to new clinical data. This is the case of
Heinz Kohut’s development of self psychology, which was a reaction against the subfields of ego
psychology and classical drive theory. The revival of American interest in the work of Melanie Klein in
the second half of the twentieth century has also been described as a reaction against ego psychology. 16
Furthermore, never did one of these new theories thoroughly abrogate and replace a previous one in the
way that, for example, Einstein’s theory of general relativity transformed Newtonian physics. This is not
to say that a new idea in psychoanalysis would not have been met with resistance upon its introduction;
however, it soon proved that psychoanalysis on the whole lacked the tools that other disciplines had to
debunk or prove new theories. By what criteria could psychoanalysts reject or accept a new hypothesis?
In physics, a new model was expected to be compatible with currently available data, as well as able to
make predictions to be confirmed by observation17; similarly, a new pharmaceutical drug was expected
to prove itself by beating a control in a double-blind trial. But such criteria, even if psychoanalysts wanted
to use them, were not as conveniently applied to unconscious phenomena proposed by psychoanalysis.
Even the gathering of data from clinical psychotherapy was typically unable to resolve the conflict
between two competing subfields; problematically, any clinical data that could potentially prove the
efficacy of one psychoanalytic school could be interpreted to support others as well. 18 In an article for
Psychoanalytic Psychology, psychologist Robert Holt, even as he argued for the validity of
psychoanalysis as a “testable scientific theory,”19 admitted the difficulty of producing data that could
settle disputes between psychoanalytic and non-psychoanalytic theories, let alone between schools within
psychoanalysis:
 Prevents Action
Lacan’s politics of lack is misguided --- it’s too abstract and can’t solve
politics
Thomassen, Department of Government, University of Essex, 4 (Dr Lasse, “LACANIAN POLITICAL
THEORY: A REPLY TO ROBINSON”, BJPIR: 2004 VOL 6, P558-561)//trepka
In the May 2004 issue of this Journal, Andrew Robinson (2004) reviewed recent books by Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Ernesto
Laclau, SlavojZizek, Chantal Mouffe and Yannis Stavrakakis under the heading ‘The politics of lack’. Robinson argues that a post-
structuralist conception of politics oriented by a notion of constitutive lack and inspired by
Lacanian psychoanalysis is fundamentally misguided. This approach to politics and political theory is guided by
the idea that identity is constituted around a fundamental lack at the heart of the subject, and that identity is constituted through the
identification with external objects, thus temporarily filling the lack. There are three basic problems with this
approach to politics, according to Robinson. First, as it relies on an abstract ontology, it is unable to
properly engage with concrete politics, and the study of politics is reduced to the subsumption of
empirical cases to pregiven ontological categories, which the former merely exemplify. Second, the kind of
radical democratic theory emerging from the lack/Lacanian approach is only radical in name ,
but in fact uncritical of existing liberal democracy. Finally, this approach is conservative and
nihilistic, according to Robinson, because it refuses the possibility of progress.

Lacanian politics are too pessimistic --- too theoretical, precludes

action and reinforces the worst aspects of the status quo
Robinson 5 --- PhD in political theory at the University of Nottingham (Andrew, “The Political Theory
of Constitutive Lack: A Critique”, Project Muse)//trepka
Conclusion: The constitutive lack of radicalism in Lacanian politics There is more than an accidental relationship between the
mythical operation of the concept of "constitutive lack" and Lacanians' conservative and pragmatist politics. Myth is a way of
reducing thought to the present: the isolated signs which are included in the mythical gesture are thereby attached to extra-historical
abstractions. On an analytical level, Lacanian theory can be very "radical" , unscrupulously exposing the
underlying relations and assumptions concealed beneath officially-sanctioned discourse. This
radicalism, however,
never translates into political conclusions : as shown above, a radical rejection of anti-"crime"
rhetoric turns into an endorsement of punishment, and a radical critique of neo-liberalism turns
into a pragmatist endorsement of structural adjustment. It is as if there is a magical barrier
between theory and politics which insulates the latter from the former. One should recall a remark once
made by Wilhelm Reich: 'You plead for happiness in life, but security means more to you'133. Lacanians have a "radical" theory
oriented towards happiness, but politically, their primary concern is security. As long as they are engaged in
politically ineffectual critique, Lacanians will denounce and criticize the social system, but once
it comes to practical problems , the "order not to think" becomes operative. This "magic" barrier is
the alibi function of myth. The short-circuit between specific instances and high-level
abstractions is politically consequential. A present evil can be denounced and overthrown if
located in an analysis with a "middle level", but Lacanian theory tends in practice to add an
"always" which prevents change . At the very most, such change cannot affect the basic matrix posited by Lacanian
theory, because this is assumed to operate above history. In this way, Lacanian theory operates as an alibi: it offers a little bit of
theoretical radicalism to inoculate the system against the threat posed by a lot of politicized radicalism134. In Laclau and Mouffe's
version, this takes the classic Barthesian form: "yes, liberal democracy involves violent exclusions, but what is
this compared to the desert of the real outside it?" The Zizekian version is more complex: "yes, there can be a
revolution, but after the revolution, one must return to the pragmatic tasks of the present". A good example is provided in one of
Zizek's texts. The author presents an excellent analysis of a Kafkaesque incident in the former Yugoslavia where the state gives a
soldier a direct, compulsory order to take a voluntary oath - in other words, attempts to compel consent. He then ruins the impact of
this example by insisting that there is always such a moment of "forced choice", and that one should not attempt to escape it lest one
end up in psychosis or totalitarianism135. The political function of Lacanian theory is to preclude
critique by encoding the present as myth. There is a danger of a stultifying conservatism arising from within
Lacanian political theory, echoing the 'terrifying conservatism' Deleuze suggests is active in any reduction of history to
negativity136. The addition of an "always" to contemporary evils amounts to a " pessimism of the
will ", or a " repressive reduction of thought to the present". Stavrakakis, for instance, claims
that attempts to find causes and thereby to solve problems are always fantasmatic1 37,
while Zizek states that an object which is perceived as blocking something does nothing but
materialize the already-operative constitutive lack138. While this does not strictly entail the necessity of a
conservative attitude to the possibility of any specific reform, it creates a danger of discursive slippage and
hostility to "utopianism" which could have conservative consequences . Even if Lacanians believe
in surplus/contingent as well as constitutive lack, there are no standards for distinguishing the two. If one cannot tell which social
blockages result from constitutive lack and which are contingent, how can one know they are not all of the latter type? And even if
constitutive lack exists, Lacanian theory runs a risk of "misdiagnoses" which have a neophobe or even reactionary effect . To take
an imagined example, a Lacanian living in France in 1788 would probably conclude that
democracy is a utopian fantasmatic ideal and would settle for a pragmatic reinterpretation of the
ancien regime. Laclau and Mouffe's hostility to workers' councils and Zizek's insistence on the
need for a state and a Party139 exemplify this neophobe tendency. The pervasive
negativity and cynicism of Lacanian theory offers little basis for constructive activity . Instead
of radical transformation, one is left with a pragmatics of "containment" which involves a
conservative de-problematization of the worst aspects of the status quo. The inactivity it
counsels would make its claims a self-fulfilling prophecy by acting as a barrier to
transformative activity. To conclude, the political theory of "constitutive lack" does not hold together as an analytical
project and falls short of its radical claims as a theoretical and political one. It relies on central concepts which are constructed
through the operation of a mythical discourse in the Barthesian sense, with the result that it is unable to offer sufficient openness to
engage with complex issues. If political theory is to make use of poststructuralist conceptions of contingency, it would do better to
look to the examples provided by Deleuze and Guattari, whose conception of contingency is active and affirmative. In contrast, the
idea of "constitutive lack" turns Lacanian theory into something its most vocal proponent, Zizek, claims to
attack: a " plague of fantasies".

Alt fails – psychoanalysis cannot be the basis for political change

Sharpe, lecturer, philosophy and psychoanalytic studies, and Goucher, senior lecturer, literary and
psychoanalytic studies – Deakin University, ‘10
(Matthew and Geoff, Žižek and Politics: An Introduction, p. 182 – 185, Figure 1.5
included)
Can we bring some order to this host of criticisms? It is remarkable that, for all the criticisms of Žižek’s political Romanticism, no one has argued that the ultra-
extremism of Žižek’s political position might reflect his untenable attempt to shape his model for political
action on the curative final moment in clinical psychoanalysis. The differences between these two realms, listed in
Figure 5.1, are nearly too many and too great to restate – which has perhaps caused the theoretical oversight. The key thing is
this. Lacan’s notion of traversing the fantasy involves the radical transformation of people’s subjective structure:
a refounding of their most elementary beliefs about themselves, the world, and sexual difference. This is undertaken in the security of
the clinic, on the basis of the analysands’ voluntary desire to overcome their inhibitions, symptoms and anxieties. As a clinical and existential process, it has its
own independent importance and authenticity. The analysands, in transforming their subjective world, change the way they regard the
objective, shared social reality outside the clinic. But they do not transform the world. The political relevance of the
clinic can only be (a) as a supporting moment in ideology critique or (b) as a fully- fl edged model of politics, provided that the political subject and its social
object are ultimately identical. Option (b), Žižek’s option, rests on the idea, not only of a subject who becomes who he is only through his (mis)
recognition of the objective sociopolitical order, but whose ‘traversal of the fantasy’ is immediately identical with his
transformation of the socio- political system or Other. Hence, according to Žižek, we can analyse the institutional embodiments of this Other
using psychoanalytic categories. In Chapter 4, we saw Žižek’s resulting elision of the distinction between the (subjective) Ego Ideal and the (objective) Symbolic
Order. This leads him to analyse our entire culture as a single subject–object, whose perverse (or perhaps even psychotic)
structure is expressed in every manifestation of contemporary life. Žižek’s decisive political- theoretic errors, one substantive and the other methodological, are
different (see Figure 5.1) The
substantive problem is to equate any political change worth the name with the total change of
the subject–object that is, today, global capitalism. This is a type of change that can only mean equating politics with violent regime change, and ultimately
embracing dictatorial government, as Žižek now frankly avows (IDLC 412–19). We have seen that the ultra- political form of Žižek’s criticism of everyone else, the
theoretical Left and the wider politics, is that no one is sufficiently radical for him – even, we will discover, Chairman Mao.
We now see that this is because Žižek’s model of politics proper is modelled on a pre- critical analogy with the total
transformation of a subject’s entire subjective structure, at the end of the talking cure. For what could the concrete consequences of
this governing analogy be? We have seen that Žižek equates the individual fantasy with the collective identity of an entire
people. The social fantasy, he says, structures the regime’s ‘inherent transgressions’: at once subjects’ habitual ways of living the letter of the law, and the
regime’s myths of origin and of identity. If political action is modelled on the Lacanian cure, it must involve the
complete ‘traversal’ – in Hegel’s terms, the abstract versus the determinate negation – of all these lived myths, practices and habits. Politics must
involve the periodic founding of entire new subject–objects. Providing the model for this set of ideas, the fi rst Žižekian political subject was Schelling’s divided God,
who gave birth to the entire Symbolic Order before the beginning of time (IDLC 153; OB 144–8). But can
the political theorist reasonably hope or
expect that subjects will simply give up on all their inherited ways, myths and beliefs, all in one world- creating
moment? And can they be legitimately asked or expected to, on the basis of a set of ideals whose legitimacy they will only retrospectively see, after they have
acceded to the Great Leap Forward? And if
they do not – for Žižek laments that today subjects are politically disengaged in unprecedented ways – what
means can the theorist and his allies use to move them to do so?

Psychoanalytic critique causes passivity and destroys political struggle

Paul Gordon, psychotherapist living and working in London, Race & Class, 2001, v. 42, n. 4, p. 30-1
The postmodernists' problem is that they cannot live with disappointment. All
the tragedies of the political
project of emancipation -- the evils of Stalinism in particular -- are seen as the inevitable product of
men and women trying to create a better society. But, rather than engage in a critical
assessment of how, for instance, radical political movements go wrong, they discard the
emancipatory project and impulse itself. The postmodernists, as Sivanandan puts it, blame modernity
for having failed them: `the intellectuals and academics have fled into discourse and deconstruction and
representation -- as though to interpret the world is more important than to change it , as
though changing the interpretation is all we could do in a changing world'.58 To justify their flight from a politics holding out
the prospect of radical change through self-activity, the disappointed intellectuals find abundant
intellectual alibis for themselves in the very work they champion, including, in Cohen's case,
psychoanalysis. What Marshall Berman says of Foucault seems true also of psychoanalysis; that it offers `a
world-historical alibi' for the passivity and helplessness felt by many in the 1970s, and that it has
nothing but contempt for those naive enough to imagine that it might be possible for modern human- kind to be free. At every
turn for such theorists, as Berman argues, whether in sexuality, politics, even our imagination, we are nothing
but prisoners: there is no freedom in Foucault's world, because his language forms a seamless web, a cage far more
airtight than anything Weber ever dreamed of, into which no life can break . . . There is no point in trying to resist the
oppressions and injustices of modern life, since even our dreams of freedom only add more links to our chains; however, once
we grasp the futility of it all, at least we can relax.59 Cohen's political defeatism and his conviction in the explanatory power of
his new faith of psychoanalysis lead him to be contemptuous and dismissive of any attempt
at political solidarity or collective action. For him, `communities' are always `imagined', which, in his view,
means based on fantasy, while different forms of working-class organisation, from the craft fraternity to the revolutionary group,
are dismissed as `fantasies of self-sufficient combination'.60 In this scenario, the idea that people might come
together, think together, analyse together and act together as rational beings is
impossible. The idea of a genuine community of equals becomes a pure fantasy, a `symbolic retrieval' of something that
never existed in the first place: `Community is a magical device for conjuring something apparently solidary out of the thin air of
modern times, a mechanism of re-enchantment.' As for history, it is always false, since `We are always dealing with invented
traditions.'61 Now, this is not only nonsense, but dangerous nonsense at that. Is history `always false'? Did the
Judeocide happen or did it not? And did not some people even try to resist it? Did
slavery exist or did it not, and
did not people resist that too and, ultimately, bring it to an end? And are communities always
 Furthermore,
`imagined'? Or, as Sivanandan states, are they beaten out on the smithy of a people's collective struggle?
all attempts to legislate against ideology are bound to fail because they have to adopt
`technologies of surveillance and control identical to those used by the state' . Note here the
Foucauldian language to set up the notion that all `surveillance' is bad. But is it? No society can function without
surveillance of some kind. The point, surely, is that there should be a public conversation about such moves and that those
responsible for implementing them be at all times accountable. To equate, as Cohen does, a council poster about `Stamping out
racism' with Orwell's horrendous prophecy in 1984 of a boot stamping on a human face is ludicrous and insulting. (Orwell's
image was intensely personal and destructive; the other is about the need to challenge not individuals, but a collective evil.)
Cohen reveals himself to be deeply ambivalent about punitive action against racists, as though punishment or other firm action
against them (or anyone else transgressing agreed social or legal norms) precluded `understanding' or even help through
psychotherapy. It is indeed a strange kind of `anti-racism' that portrays active racists as the `victims', those who are in need of
`help'. But this is where Cohen's argument ends up. In their move from politics to the academy and the world of `discourse', the
postmodernists may have simply exchanged one grand narrative, historical materialism,
for another, psychoanalysis.62 For psychoanalysis is a grand narrative, par excellence . It is a
theory that seeks to account for the world and which recognises few limits on its explanatory potential. And the claimed
radicalism of psychoanalysis, in the hands of the postmodernists at least, is not a
radicalism at all but a prescription for a politics of quietism, fatalism and defeat . Those
wanting to change the world, not just to interpret it, need to look elsewhere.
 Perm
The perm solves --- privacy laws allow an outlet for individual
autonomy
Meyers 6/16/14 --- Masters of Public and International Law candidate, University of
Melbourne (Zach, “Autonomy as a Fantasy”, Taylor and Francis Online)//trepka
This article seeks to understand why, despite its deconstruction by a range of critical theorists, there remains a stubborn
reliance on the concept of autonomy to justify privacy law , even among post-structuralists. It seeks to explain
the connection between privacy and autonomy through psychoanalytic theory (particularly the work of Jacques Lacan). This article
suggests that psychoanalytic theory can help explain why autonomy is a necessary but unachievable
fantasy, and that lawʼs purpose is to support this fantasy by allowing individuals to defer
confronting it as a fantasy. Using the example of Australian data protection law, this article suggests that
the law facilitates an economy of personal information, which imbues personal information with value and
enables individuals to attempt to ʻpractiseʼ autonomy by controlling the disclosure and use
of ʻtheirʼ personal information. But the law provides only imperfect control. It therefore provides an explanation for why
complete autonomy cannot be achieved. In this way, privacy law functions as a means to manage anxiety.
The article concludes by suggesting that data protection laws can and should recognise this role ,
and offers some tentative views on how psychoanalytic work can and should inform future law
reform in this area. If recent proposals for reform are any indication, the justification for privacy law in Australia is
increasingly about protecting individual autonomy: ensuring that individuals do not ‘lose control
over what others may do with … [ their] personal data’ .1 This focus has developed despite the concept of
autonomy increasingly coming under critique by scholars writing from a range of perspectives, though each with the objective of
deconstructing the autonomous, Cartesian subject that privacy laws are presumed to protect.2 Clearly, these critiques have not yet
disrupted the ‘unsettled intuitions’3 that interlink autonomy and privacy. These stubborn intuitions are particularly interesting from
an Australian perspective, given that most federal law reform in this area historically has been progressed with very different
justifications, 4 which are less about autonomy than communal interests such as economic growth and national security. 5 Equally
interesting is that, in the United States, autonomy has been used to justify non-intervention in management of personal information
by the private sector.6 Even in Australia, the emphasis on autonomy comes almost as a cover to the erosion of the protection of
personal data in other areas. 7 Autonomy is a theme that seems to resonate with popular understandings of privacy, even if it can be
deployed selectively and for divergent purposes. This article seeks to explain the connection between privacy and autonomy through
psychoanalytic theory (particularly the work of Jacques Lacan). Its thesis is that autonomy is a necessary but
unachievable fantasy , and that privacy law’s purpose is to support this fantasy by allowing individuals to defer
confronting it as a fantasy. Writing from Australia (which has to date been reluctant to protect privacy rights through the common
law, and which lacks a statutory tort of privacy),8 the article applies Lacan’s work to Australian data protection
laws, particularly the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth).9 The article ultimately suggests that we should acknowledge privacy
law’s role in supporting the fantasy of autonomy, and tentatively suggests ways in which it could
better support this fantasy. The article proceeds in the following way. The first section provides a brief summary of
the role of ‘autonomy’ in privacy theory to date – in particular, the traditional justification of privacy as protecting autonomy, the
recent post-structuralist critiques of autonomy, and the way these critiques have been applied to
reconceptualise privacy laws . The article then demonstrates how tenets of Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory explain
why, despite the comprehensive deconstruction of autonomy by post-structuralist legal theorists, autonomy
remains a
necessary fantasy . The third section applies this understanding to data protection laws. The final section makes some
tentative suggestions about how a better understanding of the psychological needs fulfilled by privacy laws can and should inform
future law reform in this area.
Specifically, data protection laws are good
Meyers 6/16/14 --- Masters of Public and International Law candidate, University of
Melbourne (Zach, “Autonomy as a Fantasy”, Taylor and Francis Online)//trepka
Linguistic systems structure identity and cannot represent the infant’s unstructured existence, the omnipotence it has lost69 – after
all, linguistic systems are entirely constituted by divisions, which cannot express ‘wholeness’
except through further divisions. Indeed, Lacan sees the metaphoric significance the infant associates with the reel, the
treatment of objects as signifiers for something else, as ‘the first mark of the subject’.70 The mirror stage (that is, the creation of a
sense of self) involves the repression of this wholeness. The social order, like language or the law, is therefore useful
precisely because it enables a person to both purport to be confronting a loss, while always
deferring it , leaving the reel (or the repressed loss) suspended between, and requiring the
constant repetition of, fort and da. The pleasure for which the infant is searching in the fort-da game is therefore a way
to overcome the castration – to exceed the boundary of the cot that reminds of the absent mother, and to manage the loss of
omnipotence, which existed prior to the mirror stage. The game results in pleasure from the infant’s attempt
to
transgress the boundaries of the self, the (social) law governing the boundaries of identity. But
this pleasure is combined with pain (what Lacan refers to as a joissance), because all that can be
achieved through the game is a substitute for that omnipotence , in the form of an imagined sense of
autonomy. Each return of the reel to the infant functions as a reminder that the infant is still not ‘whole’ in the sense it was prior to
entering the social realm. The reel itself, in this game, means nothing – it is simply an object that supports and explains the
individual’s existing desire,71 an object that is imagined and treated by the individual as offering the potential to overcome its
structured and split self of identity. Desire in Data Protection Laws Collectively, these aspects of Lacan’s
reinterpretations of the game provide a compelling explanation of individuals’ concern with
their personal information, in the context of data protection laws . In particular, Lacan’s work draws a
distinction between the concepts of the (small O) ‘other’ and (big O) ‘Other’. Žižek, in his description of Lacan’s work, describes the
‘Other’ as the framework underlying interaction with ‘others’, the symbolic order that we enter into that already assumes our
complicity in the fantasy of autonomy: When we speak (or listen, for that matter), we never merely interact with others; our speech
activity is grounded on our accepting and relying on a complex network of rules and other kinds of presuppositions. 72

Staring with the wrong choice is key --- creates the conditions for
future change --- the juxtaposition of the aff and alternative is
uniquely important
Rée 12 --- writer, philosopher and historian (Jonathan, “Less Than Nothing by Slavoj Žižek – review”,
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/27/less-than-nothing-slavoj-zizek-review?newsfeed=true)//trepka
Of course he relies on a formula: to be Žižekian is to hold that Freudian psychoanalysis is essentially correct, and that its
implications are absolutely revolutionary. But Žižek's Freud is not everyone's. Old-fashioned Freudians believe that we have masses
of juicy secrets locked up inside us, unacknowledged by our well-ordered rational consciousness and clamouring to be set free. For
Žižek, however, as for Lacan before him, Freud's great insight was that everything about us – our
vaunted rationality as much as our unavowable impulses – is soaked with craziness and
ambivalence all the way through. "The first choice has to be the wrong choice ," as Žižek
says in his monumental new book, because "the wrong choice creates the conditions for the right
choice". There is no such thing as being wholly in the right, or wholly in the wrong; and this
principle applies to politics as much as to personal life . Politics, as Žižek understands it, is a rare and splendid
thing: no actions are genuinely political unless they are revolutionary, and revolution is not revolution unless it institutes "true
change" – the kind of comprehensive makeover that "sets its own standards" and "can only be measured by criteria that result from
it". Genuine revolutionaries are not interested in operating on "the enemy's turf", haggling over various strategies for satisfying pre-
existing needs or securing pre-existing rights: they want to break completely with the past and create "an opening for the truly New".
Authentic revolutions have often been betrayed, but as far as Žižek is concerned, they are never misconceived.
 AT: Death Drive
Death drive is a reductive, dogmatic theory that doesn’t explain behavior – their
assertions reify violence
Carel 06 – Havi Carel is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of the West of England. (“Life and Death in Freud and Heidegger”)
The notion of the death drive is on the one hand too wide, explaining all types of aggression as well as the
putative urge towards complete rest. This leads the notion to be economically incoherent , as will be discussed in the
next section. But a prior point must be examined: are all types of aggression the same ? Freud suggests a positive answer, but as a psychological
taxonomy this approach seems to erase important differences . For example, if both sadism and masochism stem
from the same aggressive source, should they be classified as belonging to the same group ? Should they
be clinically approached in a similar fashion? The answer to both these questions seems to be no. The problems and symptoms
characterising sadism are very different from the ones characterising masochism, as is their treatment. Another example, group aggression and
individual aggression: should we attempt to describe or treat the two as belonging to the same cluster ?
Again, the answer seems to be negative. As to the second point, one could justifiably ask: what does the death drive mean? Because it is so general,

the notion of the death drive is vague. The death drive cannot explain a given situation because it
itself becomes meaningful only as a collection of situations . On Freud's account, any behaviour meriting the
adjective 'aggressive' arises from the death drive . If we take a certain set of aggressive behaviours, say, sadistic ones, the death drive would
come to signify this set. If we take another set of masochistic behaviours, the death drive would mean this set. As it stands, the significance of the
notion seems entirely dependent on the observed phenomenon. If Freud were never to meet any
masochists, would his notion of the death drive exclude masochism ? Any science relying on observation and empirical data
relics on this data and should be willing, in principle, to modify and update its concepts in accordance with new empirical observations. The opening paragraph of
Instincts and Their Vicissitudes describes this process. We have often heard it maintained that sciences should be built up on clear and sharply defined basic concepts.
In actual fact no science, not even the most exact, begins with such definitions. The true beginning of scientific activity consists rather in describing phenomena and
then in proceeding to group, classify and correlate them. Even at the stage of description it is not possible to avoid applying certain abstract ideas to the material in
hand, ideas derived from somewhere or other but certainly not from the new observations alone [...]. They must at first necessarily possess some degree of
indefiniteness; there can be no question of any clear delimitation of their content. So long as they remain in this condition, we come to an understanding about their
meaning by making repeated references to the material of observation from which they appear to have been derived, but upon which, in fact, they have been imposed
There is no
<SK 14:1U;GW 10:210). This seems to be a sophisticated, fruitfully flexible approach. But in the case of the death drive, it seems to be too flexible.
initial restriction on the type of behaviour that could be classified as aggressive or as lowering tension .
Hence we find sadism and masochism, passive-aggressive and substance-induced aggression, aggression
displayed in group situation and aggressive fantasy, all tied to the death drive as their source . By analogy,
any behaviour that leads to discharge of energy or lowering of tension would be in accordance with the
Nirvana principle. One way of responding to this issue is by applying the term 'aggression* purely descriptively. Karli, for example, proposes the following
definition: aggression means, "threatening or striking at the physical or psychic integrity of another living being" (Karli, 1991, p. 10). He sees the danger in the shift
from using aggression descriptively to attributing to it an explanatory and causal role. When accorded a causal role, aggression is reified
and becomes a natural entity, a danger that can be avoided by using the term strictly descriptively. This suggestion makes a lot of sense, but it would
be unacceptable for Freud. For he is proposing a metaphysical view, which cannot be taken to be purely descriptive, because
it is embedded in a physicalist view of the drives as elements connecting body and psyche, and is meant
to have an explanatory and causal role in the explanation of behaviour . Although Freud would reject the purely descriptive use
of the concept of aggression, this suggestion will be useful when we discuss the reconstruction of the death drive. As to the third point, it seems that the
explanatory value of the death drive is not satisfactory . Because of the two problems set out above - the excessive promiscuity of the
notion of aggression and the fact that it irons significant differences between the various phenomena — its explanatory value is limited The concept as
presented by Freud does allow too much in and lumps together behaviours and tendencies whose differences are significant . In

this sense, those rejecting the death drive as an unhelpful speculation are justified in their criticism.

Accepting the death drive is bad—it dissolves all potential for

community
RHIZOMATICK 2012 (I am a Belgian philosophy student from Leuven university, “A POLITICS OF
THE DEATH DRIVE,” Sep 22, http://rhizomatick.wordpress.com/2012/09/22/a-politics-of-the-death-
drive/)
Can we then just do away with repression and lead lives under the sign of the death drive? No,
this would perpetuate the violence of the trauma of nature . The breaking of community in the
disintegration of meaning cannot be completed, but remains to-come . This disintegration is always a
scream and a scream is a scream-to-someone. The scream adresses itself to someone (this someone is more exactly an anyone, since
we don’t care whom exactly is adressed). The scream presupposes a broken community, but a community
nonetheless. We cannot perform the scream (death drive) nor hear it (the uncanny) without
standing in community. We can make this more concrete with Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. While the protagonists
await death (in the form of Godot, the utopia they dream of), they await it together. While the play is an allegory for the loss of
communication and the breaking of community , it is also the appearance of a community in this breaking,
a
communication of communication itself (the scream speaks the speaking). The result of this politics of the
death drive is a baseless community, a community without anything in-common, without a
shared culture.
 AT: Scapegoating
Best data proves scapegoating is wrong --- if the aff doesn’t solve, the
US will be more lenient towards other countries
Gollwitzer 4 --- University of Trier, Germany (Mario, “Do Normative Transgressions Affect Punitive Judgments?
An Empirical Test of the Psychoanalytic Scapegoat Hypothesis”, SagePub)//trepka
DISCUSSION The psychoanalytic scapegoat hypothesis implies (a) that individuals who are guilty of
violating a law or norm tend to impose harsher punitive judgments on comparable wrongdoers
than nonguilty individuals and (b) that transgressors’ punitiveness should be amplified by the
subjectively perceived decision conflict. A new alternative hypothesis was derived from research
on blame avoidance and empathy: If individuals were really fundamentally concerned with avoiding self-ascriptions of
blame by applying “defensive” attributions (Shaver, 1970, 1985), then it follows that transgressors should impose more
lenient punishment on comparable offenders, especially under circumstances of similarity.
Although the blame-avoidance hypothesis directly contradicts the implications of the
scapegoat hypothesis, both effects might be present depending on situationspecific or person-specific factors. If these
factors are not controlled for, the paradoxical situation could occur that the two effects cancel each other out (Schmitt et al., 2003).
Among the most theoretically plausible of such person-specific factors is authoritarianism. This variable is expected to moderate the
transgression-punitiveness relation. In other words: The scapegoat effect is expected to occur among high authoritarians, whereas
the leniency effect should occur among low authoritarians. The
data presented here largely support the
blame-avoidance motivation account: Punitive judgment scores were higher among
nontransgressors, regarding both vignette transgressions in immoral temptation situations and
actually committed transgressions reported by participants. This effect was consistent across all
six criminal cases in both vignette and actual transgressions. Furthermore, compared with a “baseline measure” of punitive
judgments, the present results suggest that it is not a harshness bias on the side of the nontransgressors that causes this effect but
rather, a mildness bias on the side of the transgressors. Although this finding is a clear corroboration for the blame-avoidance
hypothesis, one could argue (a) that transgressors simply do not care about the norm they transgress and
(b) that transgression
decision and punitiveness share a common cause, that is, the moral
reprehensibility of the deed. The first explanation implies that conflict scores do not differ
between transgressors and nontransgressors. This is, however, not the case, because conflict scores were—except
for the moonlighter scenario—consistently higher among transgressors than among nontransgressors. The suggestion that
transgressors’ mildness bias was simply due to their recklessness can therefore be ruled out. The second explanation would result in
the argument that the relation between transgression decision and punitive judgments is spurious, because they can both be traced
back to the same cause, that is, the moral evaluation of the deed. The mediation effect of moral evaluation was not significant in the
present analyses: The effect sizes of transgression decisions on punitive judgments remained largely unaffected by entering moral
evaluation scores as a covariate. This finding contradicts the alternative hypothesis that moral evaluation was the common cause for
transgression decisions as well as for punitive judgments. Besides investigating the main effect of transgression decision on
punitiveness, we tested whether the subjectively experienced decision conflict in a dilemma
situation affects punitive judgments among transgressors. Although the size of this correlation was
consistently positive in sign across the six scenarios, it was not statistically deviant from 0. Thus, this particular
finding cannot be used as an argument for or against the scapegoat hypothesis. Taking
authoritarianism as a possible moderator variable into account was a further attempt to demonstrate scapegoating effects in a
subpopulation where they appear to be most likely to occur. The negative sign of the three-way interaction regression coefficient
shows that this was not the case. One might think of the possibility that this three-way interaction did not emerge because
authoritarianism and transgression decisions were confounded. This would be a reasonable interpretation because authoritarianism
implies conventionalism, which means refraining from committing something unlawful because it is unlawful (Adorno et al., 1950).
Therefore, it could be that individuals high in authoritarianism principally do not give in to immoral temptations. Contrary to this
speculation, however, transgression decisions in each of the six vignettes were correlated only weakly with authoritarianism (–.05 <
r < .12, average r = .04). Thus, nontransgressors are not automatically high authoritarians. Taken together, the present study
presents both weak and strong results. The major aim was to test the psychoanalytic scapegoat
hypothesis against an alternative hypothesis based on a blame-avoidance motivation . Concerning the
main effect of transgression on punitive judgments, the results strongly support the blame-avoidance
hypothesis. Concerning the effect of transgressors’ decision conflict on punitive judgments, however, the results support neither
the scapegoat nor the blame-avoidance motivation hypothesis. One could think of other empirical accesses to
the effect of decision conflicts. For example, the subjective quality of experienced decision conflicts in tempting situations
might have trait-like qualities: Individuals might consistently differ in the way they perceive and solve moral decision conflicts and
in the amount of unease connected to these decision conflicts. These interindividual differences could be assessed and tested as
predictors for punitive judgments. Second, moral conflicts may be better captured by assessing them on a more idiosyncratic level.
Participants could be interviewed about temptation situations in which they recall having experienced a strong decision conflict;
subsequently, their punitive judgments could be assessed in an adaptively constructed criminal case vignette that resembles this
particular temptation. Finally, a possible conflict- punitiveness relation might be moderated by other variables than
authoritarianism. Because fear of an “Idbreakthrough” is considered the crucial motor of
scapegoating by Freud (1923/1990), trait anxiety appears to be a suitable moderator variable. It
is remarkable that a prominent theoretical account such as the psychoanalytic scapegoat hypothesis, which is
discussed among principal penological theories in standard textbooks on legal studies (e.g., Göppinger, 1997; Kaiser, 1996; Schwind,
2002), hasnever received the empirical attention that it might deserve. The present study was
a first attempt to test specifically derived implications of the scapegoat hypothesis. It seems that
although the process of scapegoating and its psychodynamic roots, as conceptualized in psychoanalytic writings, is not testable as
such, its implications can be incorporated into contemporary accounts of punitiveness and retributive justice. If these implications
repeatedly fail to receive empirical backup, the scapegoat hypothesis should be at least reformulated, or
dismissed .
 AT: Zizek Alt
Zizek’s alternative is full of holes --- its blatant ignorance of history
and mindless embrace of violence make it politically worthless
Gray 2012 --- Emeritus Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics
(John, “The Violent Visions of Slavoj Žižek”, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jul/12/violent-visions-slavoj-zizek/?
pagination=false)//trepka
While he rejects Marx’s conception of communism, Žižek devotes none of the over one thousand pages of Less Than Nothing to
specifying the economic system or institutions of government that would feature in a communist society of the kind he favors. In
effect a compendium of Žižek’s work to date, Less Than Nothing is devoted instead to reinterpreting Marx by way of Hegel—
one of the book’s sections is called “Marx as a Reader of Hegel, Hegel as a Reader of Marx”—and reformulating
Hegelian
philosophy by reference to the thought of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. A “post-
structuralist” who rejected the belief that reality can be captured in language, Lacan also rejected the standard interpretation of
Hegel’s idea of “the cunning of reason,” according to which world history is the realization by oblique and indirect means of reason
in human life. For Lacan as Žižek summarizes him, “The Cunning of Reason…in no way involves a faith in a secret guiding hand
guaranteeing that all the apparent contingency of unreason will somehow contribute to the harmony of the Totality of Reason: if
anything, it involves a trust in un-Reason.” On this Lacanian reading, the message of Hegel’s philosophy is not the progressive
unfolding of rationality in history but instead the impotence of reason. The Hegel that emerges in Žižek’s writings thus bears little
resemblance to the idealist philosopher who features in standard histories of thought. Hegel is commonly associated with the idea
that history has an inherent logic in which ideas are embodied in practice and then left behind in a dialectical process in which they
are transcended by their opposites. Drawing on the contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou, Žižek radicalizes this idea of
dialectic to mean the rejection of the logical principle of noncontradiction, so that rather than seeing rationality at work in history,
Hegel rejects reason itself as it has been understood in the past. Implicit in Hegel (according to Žižek) is a new kind of
“paraconsistent logic” in which a proposition “is not really suppressed by its negation.” This new logic, Žižek suggests, is well suited
to understanding capitalism today. “Is not ‘postmodern’ capitalism an increasingly paraconsistent system,” he asks rhetorically, “in
which, in a variety of modes, P is non-P: the order is its own transgression, capitalism can thrive under communist rule, and so on?”
Living in the End Times is presented by Žižek as being concerned with this situation. Summarizing the book’s central theme, he
writes: The underlying premise of the present book is a simple one: the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-
point. Its “four riders of the apocalypse” are comprised by the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution,
imbalances within the system itself (problems with intellectual property; forthcoming struggles over raw materials, food and water),
and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions. With its sweeping claims and magniloquent rhetoric,
this passage is typical of much in Žižek’s work. What he describes as the premise of the book is
simple only because it passes over historical facts . Reading it, no one would suspect that, putting aside the
killings of many millions for ideological reasons, some of the last century’s worst ecological disasters—the destruction of nature in
the former Soviet Union and the devastation of the countryside during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, for example—occurred in
centrally planned economies. Ecological devastation is not a result only of the economic system that exists in much of the world at
the present time; while it may be true that the prevailing version of capitalism is unsustainable in environmental terms, there is
nothing in the history of the past century that suggests the environment will be better protected if a socialist system is installed. But
to criticize Žižek for neglecting these facts is to misunderstand his intent, for unlike Marx he does not aim to ground his theorizing in
a reading of history that is based in facts. “Today’s historical juncture does not compel us to drop the notion of the proletariat, or of
the proletarian position—on the contrary, it compels us to radicalize it to an existential level beyond even Marx’s imagination,” he
writes. “We need a more radical notion of the proletarian subject [i.e., the thinking and acting human being], a subject reduced to
the evanescent point of the Cartesian cogito, deprived of its substantial content.” In Žižek’s hands, Marxian ideas—which in Marx’s
materialist view were meant to designate objective social facts—become subjective expressions of revolutionary commitment.
Whether such ideas correspond to anything in the world is irrelevant. There is a problem at this point, however: Why should
anyone adopt Žižek’s ideas rather than any others? The answer cannot be that Žižek’s are true in
any traditional sense. “The truth we are dealing with here is not ‘objective’ truth,” Žižek writes,
“but the self-relating truth about one’s own subjective position ; as such, it is an engaged truth, measured not
by its factual accuracy but by the way it affects the subjective position of enunciation.” If this means anything, it is that truth is
determined by reference to how an idea accords with the projects to which the speaker is committed—in Žižek’s case, a project of
revolution. But this only poses the problem at another level: Why should anyone adopt Žižek’s project? The question cannot
be answered in any simple way, since it is far from clear what Žižek’s revolutionary project
consists in. He shows no signs of doubting that a society in which communism was realized would be better than any that has
ever existed. On the other hand, he is unable to envision any circumstances in which communism might be realized: “Capitalism is
not just a historical epoch among others…. Francis Fukuyama was right: global capitalism is ‘the end of history.’”1 Communism is
not for Žižek—as it was for Marx—a realizable condition, but what Badiou describes as a “hypothesis,” a conception with little
positive content but that enables radical resistance against prevailing institutions. Žižek is insistent that such resistance must
include the use of terror: Badiou’s provocative idea that one should reinvent emancipatory terror today is one of his most profound
insights…. Recall Badiou’s exalted defense of Terror in the French Revolution, in which he quotes the justification of the guillotine
for Lavoisier: “The Republic has no need for scientists.”2 Along with Badiou, Žižek
celebrates Mao’s Cultural
Revolution as “the last truly great revolutionary explosion of the twentieth century.” But he also
regards the Cultural Revolution as a failure, citing Badiou’s conclusion that “the Cultural Revolution, even in its very impasse, bears
witness to the impossibility truly and globally to free politics from the framework of the party-State.”3 Mao in encouraging the
Cultural Revolution evidently should have found a way to break the power of the party-state. Again, Žižek praises the
Khmer Rouge for attempting a total break with the past. The attempt involved mass killing and
torture on a colossal scale; but in his view that is not why it failed: “The Khmer Rouge were, in a
way, not radical enough: while they took the abstract negation of the past to the limit, they did not invent any
new form of collectivity.” (Here and elsewhere the italics are Žižek’s.) A genuine revolution may be
impossible in present circumstances, or any that can be currently imagined. Even so,
revolutionary violence should be celebrated as “redemptive,” even “divine.” While Žižek has
described himself as a Leninist,4 there can be no doubt that this position would be anathema to the Bolshevik leader. Lenin had no
qualms in using terror in order to promote the cause of communism (for him, a practically attainable objective). Always deployed as
part of a political strategy, violence was instrumental in nature. In contrast, though Žižek accepts that violence has failed to
achieve its communist goals and has no prospect of doing so, he insists that revolutionary
violence has intrinsic
value as a symbolic expression of rebellion—a position that has no parallel in either Marx or Lenin. A
precedent may be seen in the work of the French psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who defended the use of violence against colonialism as
an assertion of the identity of subjects of colonial power; but Fanon viewed this violence as part of a struggle for national
independence, an objective that was in fact achieved. A clearer precedent can be found in the work of the early-twentieth-century
French theorist of syndicalism Georges Sorel. In Reflections on Violence (1908), Sorel argued that communism was a utopian myth
—but a myth that had value in inspiring a morally regenerative revolt against the corruption of bourgeois society. The parallels
between this view and Žižek’s account of “redemptive violence” inspired by the “communist hypothesis” are telling. A
celebration of violence is one of the most prominent strands in Žižek’s work . He finds fault with Marx
for thinking that violence can be justified as part of the conflict between objectively defined social classes. Class war must not be
understood as “a conflict between particular agents within social reality: it is not a difference between agents (which can be
described by means of a detailed social analysis), but an antagonism (‘struggle’) which constitutes these agents.” Applying this view
when discussing Stalin’s assault on the peasantry, Žižek describes how the distinction between kulaks (rich peasants) and others
became “blurred and unworkable: in a situation of generalized poverty, clear criteria no longer applied, and the other two classes of
peasants often joined the kulaks in their resistance to forced collectivization.” In response to this situation the Soviet authorities
introduced a new category, the sub-kulak, a peasant too poor to be classified as a kulak but who shared kulak values: The art of
identifying a kulak was thus no longer a matter of objective social analysis; it became a kind of complex “hermeneutics of suspicion,”
of identifying an individual’s “true political attitudes” hidden beneath his or her deceptive public proclamations. Describing
mass murder in this way as an exercise in hermeneutics is repugnant and grotesque; it is also
characteristic of Žižek’s work. He criticizes Stalin’s policy of collectivization, but not on account
of the millions of human lives that were violently truncated or broken in its course. What Žižek
criticizes is Stalin’s lingering attachment (however inconsistent or hypocritical) to “‘scientific’ Marxist
terms.” Relying on “objective social analysis” for guidance in revolutionary situations is an error: “at some point, the process has to
be cut short with a massive and brutal intervention of subjectivity: class belonging is never a purely objective social fact, but is
always also the result of struggle and social engagement.” Rather than Stalin’s relentless use of torture and lethal force, it is the fact
that he tried to justify the systematic use of violence by reference to Marxian theory that Žižek condemns. Žižek’s rejection of
anything that might be described as social fact comes together with his admiration of violence in his interpretation of Nazism.
Commenting on the German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s much-discussed involvement with the Nazi regime, Žižek writes: “His
involvement with the Nazis was not a simple mistake, but rather a ‘right step in the wrong direction.’” Contrary to many
interpretations, Heidegger was not a radical reactionary. “Reading Heidegger against the grain, one discovers a thinker who was, at
some points, strangely close to communism”—indeed, during the mid-Thirties, Heidegger might be described as “a future
communist.” If Heidegger mistakenly chose to back Hitler, the mistake was not in underestimating the violence that Hitler would
unleash: The problem with Hitler was that he was “not violent enough,” his violence was not “essential” enough. Hitler did not really
act, all his actions were fundamentally reactions, for he acted so that nothing would really change, staging a gigantic spectacle of
pseudo-Revolution so that the capitalist order would survive…. The true problem of Nazism is not that it “went too far” in its
subjectivist-nihilist hubris of exercising total power, but that it did not go far enough, that its violence was an impotent acting-out
which, ultimately, remained in the service of the very order it despised. What was wrong with Nazism, it seems, is that—like the later
experiment in total revolution of the Khmer Rouge—it failed to create any new kind of collective life. Žižek says little regarding the
nature of the form of life that might have come into being had Germany been governed by a regime less reactive and powerless than
he judges Hitler’s to have been. He does make plain that there would be no room in this new life for one particular form of human
identity: The fantasmatic status of anti- Semitism is clearly revealed by a statement attributed to Hitler: “We have to kill the Jew
within us.” …Hitler’s statement says more than it wants to say: against his intentions, it confirms that the Gentiles need the anti-
Semitic figure of the “Jew” in order to maintain their identity. It is thus not only that “the Jew is within us”—what Hitler fatefully
forgot to add is that he, the anti-Semite, is also in the Jew. What does this paradoxical entwinement mean for the destiny of anti-
Semitism? Žižek is explicit in censuring “certain elements of the radical Left” for “their uneasiness when it comes to unambiguously
condemning anti-Semitism.” But it is difficult to understand the claim that the identities of anti-Semites and Jewish people are in
some way mutually reinforcing—which is repeated, word for word, in Less Than Nothing—except as suggesting that the only world
in which anti-Semitism can cease to exist is one in which there are no longer any Jews. Interpreting Žižek on this or any issue is not
without difficulties. There
is his inordinate prolixity, the stream of texts that no one could read in
their entirety, if only because the torrent never ceases flowing. There is his use of a type of
academic jargon featuring allusive references to other thinkers, which has the effect of enabling
him to use language in an artful, hermetic way. As he acknowledges, Žižek borrows the term “divine violence” from
Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” (1921). It is doubtful whether Benjamin—a thinker who had important affinities with the
Frankfurt School of humanistic Marxism—would have described the destructive frenzy of Mao’s Cultural Revolution or the Khmer
Rouge as divine. But this is beside the point, for by using Benjamin’s construction Žižek is able to praise violence and at the same
time claim that he is speaking of violence in a special, recondite sense—a sense in which Gandhi can be described as being more
violent than Hitler.5 And there is Žižek’s regular recourse to a laborious kind of clowning wordplay: The…virtualization of capitalism
is ultimately the same as that of the electron in particle physics. The mass of each elementary particle is composed of its mass at rest
plus the surplus provided by the acceleration of its movement; however, an electron’s mass at rest is zero, its mass consists only of
the surplus generated by the acceleration, as if we are dealing with a nothing which acquires some deceptive substance only by
magically spinning itself into an excess of itself. It is impossible to read this without recalling the Sokal affair in which Alan Sokal, a
professor of physics, submitted a spoof article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum
Gravity,” to a journal of postmodern cultural studies. Equally, it is hard to read this and many similar passages in Žižek without
suspecting that he is engaged—wittingly or otherwise—in a kind of auto-parody. There may be some who are tempted to condemn
Žižek as a philosopher of irrationalism whose praise of violence is more reminiscent of the far right than the radical left . His
writings are often offensive and at times (as when he writes of Hitler being present “in the Jew”) obscene. There is
a mocking frivolity in Žižek’s paeans to terror that recalls the Italian Futurist and ultra-nationalist Gabriele D’Annunzio and the
Fascist (and later Maoist) fellow traveler Curzio Malaparte more than any thinker in the Marxian tradition. But there is another
reading of Žižek, which may be more plausible, in which he is no more an epigone of the right than he is a disciple of Marx or Lenin.
Whether or not Marx’s vision of communism is “the inherent capitalist fantasy,” Žižek’s vision—which apart from rejecting earlier
conceptions lacks any definite content—is well adapted to an economy based on the continuous production of novel commodities
and experiences, each supposed to be different from any that has gone before. With the prevailing capitalist order aware that it is in
trouble but unable to conceive of practicable alternatives, Žižek’s formless radicalism is ideally suited to a culture transfixed by the
spectacle of its own fragility. That there should be this isomorphism between Žižek’s thinking and contemporary capitalism is not
surprising. After all, it is only an economy of the kind that exists today that could produce a thinker such as Žižek. The role of global
public intellectual Žižek performs has emerged along with a media apparatus and a culture of celebrity that are integral to the
current model of capitalist expansion. In a stupendous feat of intellectual overproduction Žižek has created
a fantasmatic critique of the present order, a critique that claims to repudiate practically
everything that currently exists and in some sense actually does, but that at the same time
reproduces the compulsive, purposeless dynamism that he perceives in the operations of capitalism.
Achieving a deceptive substance by endlessly reiterating an essentially empty vision, Žižek’s
work—nicely illustrating the principles of paraconsistent logic —amounts in the end to less
than nothing .

Seriously, he thinks the Holocaust is not only okay, but didn’t go far
enough
Rée 12 --- writer, philosopher and historian (Jonathan, “Less Than Nothing by Slavoj Žižek – review”,
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/27/less-than-nothing-slavoj-zizek-review?newsfeed=true)//trepka
Žižek refuses to indulge in sanctimonious regrets over the failings of 20th-century communism. He has always had a soft spot for
Stalin, and likes to tell the story of Uncle Joe's response when asked which of two deviations was worse: both of them are worse, he
said, with perfect Lacanian panache. Žižek's objection to Stalinism is not that it involved terror and mass
murder, but that it sought to justify them by reference to a happy communist tomorrow: the
trouble with Soviet communism, as he puts it, is "not that it is too immoral , but that it is
secretly too moral ". Hitler elicits similar even-handedness: the unfortunate Führer was "trapped within the
horizon of bourgeois society", Ž ižek says, and the "true problem of nazism" was "not that it
went too far … but that it did not go far enough".
**Other**
 Surveillance/Gaze
FYI – explains the gaze in relation to surveillance and interprets
Sartre’s “The Look”
Friesen et al. 12 – Dr. Norm Friesen is Canada Research Chair in E-Learning Practices at Thompson Rivers
University. His academic credentials include a PhD in Education from the University of Alberta. Andrew Feenberg, School of
Communication, Simon Fraser University. Grace Smith, Arapiki Solutions, Inc. (Norm Friesen, Andrew Feenberg, Grace Smith, and
Shannon Lowe, 2012, “Experiencing Surveillance”, pp. 82-83, (Re)Inventing The Internet,
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-94-6091-734-9_4 // SM)
The passage begins with a description of a hypothetical situation described from a first person
perspective (“I have just glued my ear to the door and looked through a keyhole. I am alone,”
1956, p. 259). This situation is, in a sense, a prototypical scenario of surveillance that is complete
with the effacement or anonymity of the observer from the perspective of the observed that is
characteristic of Bentham’s panopticon and of other forms of surveillance.
Sartre characterizes this situation using verb phrases that are common in phenomenological
analysis: Things are presented as “to be heard” and “to be seen.” The door and keyhole are
presented as “to be looked through close by and a little to one side.” The point, as Sartre himself
says, is to describe things not from an objective, impartial view (as if from nowhere), but rather,
as they are tied up in our existence, projects, and intentions: “No transcending view comes to
confer upon my acts the character of a given on which a judgment can be brought to bear”
(Sartre, 1956, p. 259, emphasis in original). From the perspective of the person who would be
spying, that is precisely how the door and keyhole appear: not in terms of their physical
dimensions or material composition, but as an arrangement that can be looked through in a
particular way in order to gain surreptitious access to what is said and done on the other side.
But this entails special care and stealth, and the keyhole requires of the onlooker a specific and
telling kneeling or bending posture. Sartre continues, arguing that in this surreptitious situation,
his acts “are in no way known. [Instead] I am my acts . . . I am a pure consciousness of things,
and things [are] caught up in the circuit of my selfness” (p. 259; emphasis in original).
Sartre’s point is not that this observing self exists in solipsistic isolation, but that the self or
consciousness is fully absorbed in the act of viewing and in the object of its gaze: “My attitude . . .
has no ’outside’; it is a pure process of relating the instrument (the keyhole) to the end to be
attained (the spectacle to be seen), a pure mode of losing myself in the world, of causing myself
to be drunk in by things as ink is by a blotter” (Sartre, 1956, p. 259). Lived space, in this
instance, is constituted solely by the space or the world observed through the keyhole. The lived
body momentarily disappears, as the observer’s intentional focus is absorbed wholly in what he is
seeing and hearing on the other side. Lived relation is defined for a moment by the objectifying
gaze of a hidden and anonymous observer, and by the people, actions, or objects observed on the
other side.
But phenomenologically speaking, this is only half of the story. Sartre begins to explore the
other half by introducing a kind of “eidetic variation,” as it is called: A deliberate change is
introduced in a particular aspect of the circumstances constituting the scenario or the larger
lifeworld for the purposes of discovering how this aspect affects the configuration of meanings,
projects and objects, and their interrelationship in that world: “But all of a sudden, I hear
footsteps in the hall.” By introducing the presence of another who is able to view the secretively
observing self, Sartre is able to explore an entirely different ontological modality: “First of all, I
now exist as myself for my unreflective consciousness. It is this irruption of the self which has
been most often described [as follows]: I see myself because somebody sees me” (Sartre, 1956, p.
260). The self, earlier absorbed in the observation of others, now becomes itself the object of
observation.
Being caught in the act of surreptitious surveillance, however, is not a matter of suddenly and
simply “knowing” that someone is watching you; it is a change in one’s way of being. The self is
transformed from a subject to an object. It is no longer absorbed by what is being viewed through
the keyhole; it becomes less of a subject or a consciousness, absorbed by the acts of others, and
instead becomes an object, something fixed in the gaze of another. It experiences itself as seen
through the eyes of the person who is viewing it. Lived space suddenly becomes the space of the
hallway rather than the space on the other side of the keyhole. Lived relation is now largely
determined by the objectifying gaze of a second observer. The lived body now becomes an object of
acute awareness, and lived time is defined by anticipation of the response of the other.
Sartre’s description also reveals a further aspect of the body that is significant for surveillance.
This corporeal element is indicated in what Levinas referred to as the “autosignifying” function of
the body in the gaze of another, and what Feenberg has called the “extended” body, manifest in
forms of objectification such as signs and traces (1987, pp. 120, 112; Feenberg, 2006). This aspect
is registered by the audible footsteps in the hall, and in the telling posture of the body of the
observer at the keyhole. It is, in other words, the material aspect of the body that is perceived as
meaningful by others, and indirectly by ourselves as well.
The audible footsteps and the posture at the keyhole, moreover, act as signals that go beyond the
body’s physical boundaries: They are the results of bodily presence that indicate a particular
intention or consequence, but that are not tantamount to it: The observer at the keyhole may
discover that the footsteps are those of an unconcerned child or a blind person; from the
perspective of the person coming down the hall, the observer at the keyhole may well turn out to
be a locksmith—someone looking at the keyhole, rather than through it. The significance of these
“extensions” of the body, or of its various auto-significations is clearly contingent, depending on
their interpretation and on the circumstances surrounding them. They do not precisely belong
to our body and yet they are indices of our bodily presence that track us, and for which we can be
held responsible. In today’s world, they include the traces of DNA we shed as a natural organic
function, and the automatic registration of movements, transactions, logins and downloads that
increasingly accompany our everyday activities. As such, these aspects of the extended body
provide new avenues for identification and control, as well as means for deception and resistance
that are further explored in the next section.
Surveillance Bad
 Colonialism
The colonial desire to make people more identifiable is the worst form of
objectification
Eileraas, Karina received her doctorate in Women's Studies from UCLA in June 2003. Her areas of interest include feminist
theory, colonization and transnational studies, performance and visual culture, 4, September 2003 (Reframing the Colonial
Gaze: Photography, Ownership, and Feminist Resistance, MLN, Volume 118, Number 4 (French Issue), pp.807-840) DJ
During the Algerian revolution, Algerians were required to carry identity cards that would render them
"visible and 'legible'" to French colonial authorities. Soldiers rounded up entire communities of Algerians, and
forcibly unveiled Algerian women, to take their ID card portraits. Although the French practice of unveiling sought to render
Algerian women identifiable to colonial authorities, it also violated local custom and religious practice.
Identity cards formalized the French fantasy of empire, and functioned within a broader discursive network to deny citizenship rights [End
Page 812] to colonial Algerians who were not of French descent. As a final attempt at French signature or authorship within the receding colony,
Algerian identity cards marked an effort to both defer and compensate for impending national loss on the dawn of a traumatic rupture within l'empire
français. Within this context, the Algerian identity portraits composed by French army photographer Marc Garanger can be read as ambivalent
performances of national fantasy. Photography
enlists Garanger and his subjects in arduous negotiations
with popular narratives of racial, sexual, and national identity. In a sense, their fraught subject positions bear out
the Freudian psychoanalytic understanding of subjectivity as an ongoing struggle to negotiate ambivalent identifications—or as the history of those
shifting affiliations. 17 Yet the asymmetric positions occupied by Garanger and his
photographic subjects highlight the need
for a critical vocabulary with which to address a broad range of national traumatic experience.
Colonial representation and identification, in particular, need to be rethought in terms of the
negotiations between fantasy and identity that they may permit relative to visual stagings of
race, gender, and ethnicity. In the context of forced unveiling, Algerian women's identity card photographs can be understood as
uniquely staged. Although they are military rather than studio photographs, they bear some resemblance to the posed images exhibited in Malek
Alloula's study of French colonial postcards entitled TheColonial Harem. Both
sets of photographs manifest a history of
colonialist intervention into the image or self-presentation of women, especially efforts to
refashion or redress Algerian women's bodies according to divergent political objectives. Aesthetic
investments in the fantasy of the unveiled Algerian woman—and in the veil itself as the primary trope for the "Oriental feminine"—impact colonial
postcards and identity photographs alike. Marc Garanger, a Frenchman born in Normandy, helped to orchestrate women's images during the
revolution. Garanger served as a photographer in the French army from 1960-1962, where he composed Algerian cartes d'identité. His photographic
experiences converted Garanger to a staunch critic of colonial policy and practice. He especially opposed the campaigns of torture conducted by the
French [End Page 813] Organisation de l'Armée Sécrète (OAS), and the forced unveiling of Algerian women prior to their portraiture. An evolving
consciousness spurred Garanger to work feverishly during his two-year tenure to create a
portfolio of images that would memorialize colonial injustice. Although photography constituted
Garanger's official duty relative to the French nation, it also offered a tool with which to record
his opposition to colonial practice: To express myself with my eye, I took up my camera. To shout my
disagreement. For twenty-four months I never stopped, sure that one day I would be able to testify, to tell stories with these images. . . . All of
this I did with more force than the dominant military ideology of the era that surrounded me with hatred and violence. My spirit's revolt was
proportionate to the horrors that I witnessed. 18 Driven by this spirit of revolt, Garanger
exploited photography's capacity to
shape the national imaginary. He tried to create images that would question the authoring (and
authorizing) functions of the colonial gaze. Given his ambivalent position vis-à-vis la mission civilatrice, Garanger
opens up a space for dis-identification with the racial and sexual politics embedded in colonial
imagery. Garanger's photography foregrounds tense encounters between colonial desire and the
disarming looks of photographed subjects. During his tour of duty in Algeria, Garanger was repeatedly struck
by the violence in Algerian women's eyes as they met his camera's gaze. His work registers
profound ambivalence about the objectifying function of colonial photography —ambivalence that
frequently haunts or disturbs the surface of his images. Garanger's most provocative images record not only the violence of colonial representation, but
also the destabilizing potential of Algerian women's looks.
 Control
Surveillance is not just a collection of information, but a material force used to
control subjects. And as technology grows so does the modes of surveillance
Thompson, teaches in the English Departments of Fordham University and Adelphi University. A former student of Seamus
Deane at the University of Notre Dame where he completed his Ph.D., 2002 ( Spurgeon, Vol. 2, pp. 96-97) DJ
It is my premise that surveillance in general is less about information , as most theorists would claim, and
more about the material display of force -1ess about taking notes than spatializing the force
monopolized by the state. The most influential theorization of surveillance for cultural studies scholars is that of Michel
Foucault, in Discipline and Punish (1977). lt is clear, however, that something has changed between the older forms of surveillance
that Foucault critiques -the model of surveillance, for him, being the Panopticon that Bentham sketched out- and contemporary
surveillance. For one, these modes of surveillance are material forces of social control , not sketches and not
plans or theories to be generalized later, hypothetically, into all possible social institutions. They are not, in other words, Bentharn's
unbuilt architecture. Secondly, what once was to be applied in prisons, insane asylums, or schools, is
being applied to society in general. out 'in the open', in public space. And third, expensive technologies and
procedures of instruction (backed by the accumulated resources only available to the state) are
necessitated by these new modes of surveillance (most exemplified by helicopter surveillance). These
developments, I think, transform the concept of surveillance itself. We can no longer think of it as an activity in
which anybody off the street can participate, for example, as a sort of self-sustaining auto-
mechanistic practice. Foucault's observation about the ultimate surveillance "machine", the Panopticon, no longer holds:
"Any individual, taken almost at random, can operate the machine: in the absence of the
director, his family, his friends, his visitors, even his servants " (Foucault, 1977: 202). Today the servants
would be powerless to operate (or to turn off) the machine of surveillance or in the case of helicopter surveillance- powerless even to
access the equipment. With the advent of photographic, and specifically filmic modes of surveillance
the concept of surveillance within critical discourses needs to be retrofitted . One reason why is that
surveillance has always been for its theorists a problem of information: it involves the recording and
processing of information about (national, colonial, etc.) subjects as a way of locating and fixing
individuals by means of a vast structure of data. The central point about surveillance in the plague town for
Foucault is that it is based "on a system of permanent registration: reports from the syndics to the intendants, frorn the intendants
to the rnagistrates or mayor" (196). At the heart of this logic of surveillance is an "uninterrupted work of writing" (197). It is a
body of information, written down in "reports", which enables the "capillary functioning of
power". This description of the relations between power, information, and surveillance is still of
course useful to critiques of the state. The North of Ireland is a site of constant and pervasive processing of
inforrnation by the colonial state. For exarnple, soldiers flying aerial surveillance for the RAF in Belfast have boasted publically that
not only do they have the license plate nurnbers of every car moving in and out of the city in their on-board cornputers, but that they
know the color of every sofa in every living roorn in the city. (Whether this is true, or even possible is of course another question.)
This is indeed an advanced exarnple of the kind of inforrnation-based rnodel of surveillance Foucault rightly foregrounds. The
advancernent of cornputer technology, as some critics have noted, represents a sort of technological
amplification of the structures states or imperial powers employed to control and reproduce
subjects. This, to some theorists, represents simply an intensification of surveillance. And ways of
describing and critiquing it must therefore match this exponential expansion. Cornputers, by this logic,
sirnply enhance the sarne, classic structures of information behind surveillance. The cornputer and the technologies accornpanying
it, like closed circuit television (CCTV), are sirnply conceived of as more sophisticated procedures of writing, recording, of
registration. In sum, the practice of surveillance has always been theorized as a sort of locator
service, which produces and secures subjects by keeping track of them in textual forms. New
technologies simply ramify and reproduce on a massive scale old modalities of surveillance.
 Patriarchy
The normalizing power of the gaze reinscribes a patriarchal society fixated on
fulfilling sexual desires.
Roof, Judith work ranges through many areas of twentieth-century and contemporary studies, including comparative
modernisms; drama and performance studies; film studies; theories of sexuality; science, literature, and culture; and contemporary
British and American fiction, 2007 (Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender: Culture Society History, vol. 2. Detroit: Macmillan
Reference p.610-612) DJ
To gaze is to look at something, often with concentration, curiosity, or pleasure. Simply gazing is
more a practice of contemplation or fascination than it is either a manifestation of voyeurism
(looking for the purposes of sexual pleasure) or a practice of surveillance or control associated with various
forms of punishment. Gazing constitutes a large portion of cultural activity in modern societies. Theater, film, and television
all offer themselves as spectacles to be seen, and form themselves in relation to viewers' predilections. Other venues for gazing
include sports, zoos, casinos, travel and sightseeing, and even computer games. As viewers find pleasure in these
entertainments, they rarely think about either how the displayed activities are actually arranged
to be seen or what power relations there are between the display and the viewer. Viewers often
feel they have a choice in how and what they watch, though they are equally powerless to change
or often even participate in what they see. Computer games bring a measure of control to the gazer. To gaze may
well muster curiosity, sexual pleasure, and issues of power. Sexualized control scenarios tend to
gender this power, especially in so far as gazing is associated with active volition, whereas the
image or object to be looked at is associated with passivity and sometimes victimhood. In its
connections to the activity and phallic character of looking, gazing is often associated with
masculinity and looking with sexual aggressiveness. The image or object to be looked at is associated with
femininity and passive objecthood. Thus, in its most extreme forms, gazing is linked both to gender stereotypes
and to less traditional sexual satisfactions such as scopophilia, or pleasure in watching, and the
passive/active dynamics of sadomasochism. Voyeurism and scopophilia are most often practiced
by males, sometimes in public spaces such as strip shows and pornographic films, sometimes privately as with pornographic
magazines and Internet sites, and sometimes illegally and covertly as peeping toms. Often voyeuristic activities are restricted to
certain areas and to adult consumers; sometimes voyeurism is a crime. Exhibitionism, or setting out one's sexual organs to be seen,
is practiced by both males and females, often, though not always, as a component of sexual arousal. Males constitute the
majority of those who expose their genitals to strangers; doing so constitutes the crime of
indecent exposure. Sigmund Freud theorized that those who enjoy exhibitionism also wish to look, while those who look also
wish to be seen. Gazing also reflects and effects a complex distribution of power that in its sexualized form
constitutes sadomasochism, or sexual pleasure derived from taking or relinquishing power . To be constrained
as the object of someone else's gaze is to be in the watcher's power. The viewer may wield sadistic power in
humiliating what he or she watches. At the same time, the one who offers her- or himself up to the gaze
might exert a certain power in commanding the gaze as well as in delaying or withholding full
view. The one who watches may be constrained from doing more than watching, experiencing a type of bondage produced by the
rules of viewing. Most often what is offered for view is presented in costumes designed to constrain movement, limit access, and
signal the distribution of power via leather, chains, harnesses, and masks.

The development of cinema has reproduce a new panoptic structure where women
are created a powerless object
Block, Marcelline has a BA, Harvard; MA, Princeton; PhD candidate, Princeton is Lecturer in History at Princeton, 2008 (
Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema. Newcastle upon Tyne, GBR: Cambridge Scholars Publishing)
DJ
Laura Mulvey’s work launched the field of feminist film theory in the 1970s. Mulvey’s foundational essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975)
explained the impact of visual relations and gender in celluloid and formed the basis for most subsequent psychoanalytic readings of women in film.
Specifically, Mulvey notes that Hollywood
narrative film construed looking relations, or more properly, the
investment of pleasure in looking relations, as relying on the operation of a gendered binary,
with man as “bearer of the look” and woman as “object of the gaze.” Today, this observation
informs readings of nearly all visual media, despite the advances that Mulvey, among others, have noted in technologies
that have profoundly altered what can be packed into a second of screen time . 7 Feminist film theorists
such as Barbara Creed, Cynthia Freeland, and Sue Thornham have long worked to account for different gazes and subject positions in order to
gaze in
supplement and/or problematize the heteronormative binary of Mulvey’s theory of subjectobject looking relations. 8 Considerations of the
feminist psychoanalytic readings can also work against a primary circumstance of power
formation. The distinction between who— or what— is doing the looking and who— or what— is
being observed is an important binary. In his 1975 Surveiller et punir (translated in 1977 as Discipline and Punish ), Michel
Foucault identified the function of this binary through the social operation of carceral and educational authority. Foucault’s figural Panopticon, like
Jeremy Bentham’s literal prison design, deprives certain subjects of any gaze, transforming looking relations into power relations, an ability to
discipline and punish without physical violence or bodily disfiguration. 9 This binary also evokes Lacan’s sardine can, which is seen as an object
precisely because it does not possess a gaze with which to look back at the seeing subject. By
considering power or function
separately from gender, one can problematize the unspoken assumption that an attractive
woman will be the powerless object of the gaze in narrative films. For example, Linda Williams notes that
female subjects in horror films often have the first access to a gaze that incorporates a view of
the monster, but this gaze translates into victimization , a circumstance that Cynthia Freeland sees as symptomatic of the
bleak horizon for feminist studies of horror. 10 I would like to suggest that, if not a recuperation, at least a revision of Freeland’s claim is possible.
 White Gaze
To conceptualize the presence of power the USFG has over our bodies is not wrong,
but to disassociate that power as something wholly external to yourself is an error
of the framers and debaters who do not recognize the false cognition of non-white
bodies that has left many under the watch of the White Gaze.
Deborah Heggs, 11-19-2013, ("The White Gaze – Is it Fear or Racism?," Guardian Liberty Voice,
http://guardianlv.com/2013/11/the-white-gaze-is-it-fear-or-racism/ Read more at http://guardianlv.com/2013/11/the-white-gaze-
is-it-fear-or-racism/#fZQjZylwQfYDjQvb.99) DJ
The White Gaze should be terrifying to anyone aware of its meaning. Not only does it strike without
warning; but in many cases, it takes, and destroys lives when it does. Is the White Gaze fear or racism?
Though it’s not a physical ailment, the White Gaze is a debilitating sickness, caused by the horribly
apathetic state of mind, called racism. It can cause such mental devastation that even if you
survive, the pain is indelibly etched on your brain with heart-wrenching torment. George Yancy,
Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University stated in a recent article, that the White Gaze is the fear that white
people have of blacks. In short, it’s defined as looking at the world through the eyes of a white
person who has undertones of, or is blatant in, their racism. Simply put, the gaze means that you
that you have no right to belong. You have no right to belong in certain neighborhoods; you have no right to belong in
certain schools. And if you’re black, you have no right to belong anywhere that those affected by the
White Gaze feel that you shouldn’t be. When those who are gazing see you as a threat, or
someone to be feared, even if the feeling is contrived, murder often follows. Sadly, for many,
being at the wrong place or in the wrong situation has proven fatal . Many Michigan residents are outraged
of the November 2nd murder of 19-year-old Renisha McBride. Even more are wondering if 54-year-old Theodore
P. Wafer was afflicted by the White Gaze when he took the life of this innocent, unarmed, young black woman. Wafer, of
Dearborn Heights, Michigan shot McBride in the face with a shotgun when she knocked on his front door seeking help after being in
a car accident. Sources say that McBride, who had been drinking crashed her car sometime around 1:00 a.m. A woman at the scene
said that Miss McBride sustained minor injuries from the accident and was bleeding from the head. According to the unidentified
woman, McBride kept saying “I want to go home.” According to sources, McBride, who appeared shaky and disoriented left the
scene and somehow wandered to Wafer’s front porch. The distressed and dazed McBride knocked on Wafer’s door seeking help, but
instead, she was met with a deadly shotgun blast which ended her young life. The question again arises, was the White Gaze
responsible for Police shooting and killing 24-year-old Jonathan Ferrell? Reports indicate that Ferrell, an unarmed black
man, was shot and killed by police in Charlotte, North Carolina. Ferrell, who was in a devastating car crash on Saturday, September
14, 2013, ran towards Police for help, but instead he was tased and shot to death. The former Florida A&M University football star
was seeking assistance after he was in a serious car wreck. According to Police Chief Rodney Monroe, Ferrell more than likely
climbed out of the back window of his badly damaged vehicle and ran to the closest house for help. Upon answering the door, the
homeowner inside thought it was her husband knocking at the door, but opened the door to find Ferrell. Chief Monroe further stated
that the woman closed the door, hit her panic alarm and called 911. When Police arrived at the scene, a man matching the
homeowner’s description of Ferrell ran towards them. Upon seeing the young black man running in their direction, one officer fired
his stun gun, but Ferrell still ran towards them for help. At that time Officer Randall Kerrick opened fire; shooting Ferrell multiple
times, killing him at the scene. No one gave Jonathan Ferrell the benefit-of-doubt because in their eyes, he didn’t belong.
Undoubtedly, the most publicized story of the White Gaze is that of George Zimmerman. For over a year, papers were satiated with
news of the 28-year-old man who took the life of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012. Zimmerman, who was
a neighborhood watch patrolman in Sanford, Florida for a private community, stalked and fatally shot Martin, because in his eyes,
Martin didn’t belong in the gated community which he was patrolling. After police arrived, Zimmerman, an armed White-Hispanic
man was taken to the hospital for head injuries. While Trayvon Martin, an unarmed young Black man, was taken to the morgue.
Though no one can say for sure that these murders were White Gaze related, we can undoubtedly say, that they were senseless.
When life is lost to violence, it doesn’t matter whether it’s because of the White Gaze, fear,
blinding racism or just plain-old-hatred, it doesn’t diminish the pain of those left behind.
Though we may never know the true motive for these senseless acts of violence, one certainty
prevails, “No one knows what lurks in the hearts of men,” but men themselves. And the White
Gaze is proof-positive of that.
Through inheriting the oppositional gaze, the Black Body can form a resisitance
against dominating modes of power and gain possible agency
Bell Hooks, 1992 (Boston: South End Press, “Black Looks: Race and Representation pg115-116,”
http://www.umass.edu/afroam/downloads/reading14.pdf) DJ
those hard intense direct looks
When thinking about black female spectators, I remember being punished as a child for staring, for
children would give grown-ups, looks that were seen as confronta tional, as gestures of
resistance, challenges to authority. The "gaze" has always been political in my life. Imagine the
terror felt by the child who has come to understand through repeated punishments that one's
gaze can be dangerous. The child who has learned so well to look the other way when necessary.
Yet, when punished, the child is told by parents, "Look at me when I talk to you." Only, the child
is afraid to look. Afraid to look, but fascinated by the gaze. There is power in looking. Amazed the first
time I read in history classes that white slaveowners (men, women, and children) punished enslaved black
people for looking, I wondered how this traumatic relationship to the gaze had informed black parenting and black spectatorship. The politics
of slavery, of racialized power relations, were such that the slaves were denied their right to gaze.
Connecting this strategy of domination to that used by grown folks in southern black rural
communities where I grew up, I was pained to think that there was no absolute difference
between whites who had oppressed black people and ourselves. Years later, reading Michel Foucault, I thought again
about these connections, about the ways power as domination reproduces itself in different locations employing similar apparatuses, strategies, and
mechanisms of control. Since I knew as a child that the dominating power adults exercised over me and over my
gaze was never so
absolute that I did not dare to look, to sneak a peep, to stare dangerously, I knew that the slaves
had looked. That all attempts to repress our/black peoples' right to gaze had produced in us an
overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze. By courageously looking, we defiantly
declared: "Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality." Even in the worse circumstances
of domination, the ability to manipulate one's gaze in the face of structures of domination that
would contain it, opens up the possibility of agency. In much of his work, Michel Foucault insists on describing domination in
terms of "relations of power" as part of an effort to challenge the assumption that "power is a system of domination which controls everything and which leaves no
room for freedom." Emphatically stating that in all relations of power "there is necessarily the possibility
of resistance," he invites the critical thinker to search those margins, gaps, and locations on and
through the body where agency can be found. Stuart Hall calls for recognition of our agency as black spectators in his essay "Cultural
Identity and Cinematic Representation." Speaking against the construction of white representations of blackness as totalizing, Hall says of white presence: "The
error is not to conceptualize this 'presence' in terms of power, but to locate that power as wholly
external to us—as extrinsic force, whose influence can be thrown off like the serpent sheds its
skin. What Franz Fanon reminds us, in Black Skin, White Masks, is how power is inside as well as outside: .. .the movements, the attitudes, the glances of the Other
fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. I was indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst apart. Now the fragments have been put
together again by another self. This
"look," from—so to speak—the place of the Other, fixes us, not only in its
violence, hostility and aggression, but in the ambivalence of its desire. Spaces of agency exist for
black people, wherein we can both interrogate the gaze of the Other but also look back, and at
one another, naming what we see. The "gaze" has been and is a site of resistance for colonized
black people globally. Subordinates in relations of power learn experientially that there is a
critical gaze, one that "looks" to document, one that is oppositional. In resistance struggle, the
power of the dominated to assert agency by claiming and cultivating "aware ness" politicizes
"looking" relations—one learns to look a certain way in order to resist.
 Biopower
Surveillance electronically extends panoptic power – that results in
biopolitical control over the populace
Koskela 3 – Senior Lecturer, Department of Geography, University of Helsinki (FI) (Hille, Vol 1, No 3 (2003): Foucault and
Panopticism Revisited, “‘Cam Era’ — the contemporary urban Panopticon”, http://www.surveillance-and-
society.org/articles1(3)/camera.pdf // SM)
In Michel Foucault’s words, Jeremy Bentham – the designer of the Panopticon – ‘invented a technology of power designed to solve
the problems of surveillance’ (1980: 148). The idea of video surveillance is almost literally the same: a technological
solution designed to solve the problems of surveillance in urban space. People under surveillance
are – as in the Panopticon – to be seen but to never know when or by whom; under control but
without physical intervention. Recently, the number of surveillance cameras in urban space has grown massively (different
cities in detail, see e.g. Takala, 1998; Lyon, 2002; McCahill and Norris, 2002; Töpfer et al., forthcoming). It can be claimed that
through surveillance cameras the panoptic technology of power has been electronically
extended: our cities have become like enormous Panopticons (Lyon, 1994; Fyfe and Bannister,
1998; Tabor, 2001). A number of authors have pointed out that the surveillance of cities shows interesting and important parallels to
Foucault’s thought (Fyfe and Bannister, 1996; Herbert, 1996; Soja, 1996; Hannah, 1997b; Norris and Armstrong, 1999; Fox, 2001
among others). Cities, like the Panopticon, can be seen as a ‘laboratory of power’ (Foucault, 1977: 204). In
both cases surveillance ‘links knowledge, power and space’ (Herbert, 1996: 49). In cities, the routine of
surveillance makes the use of power almost instinctive: people are controlled, categorised,
disciplined and normalised without any particular reason.

Computerized surveillance purifies and homogenizes urban space,

eventually ending in its total destruction
Koskela 3 – Senior Lecturer, Department of Geography, University of Helsinki (FI) (Hille, Vol 1, No 3 (2003): Foucault and
Panopticism Revisited, “‘Cam Era’ — the contemporary urban Panopticon”, http://www.surveillance-and-
society.org/articles1(3)/camera.pdf // SM)
The critique of increasing surveillance has focused on the presumed changes it might cause in space and social practices. It is feared
that surveillance will lead to a ‘vicious circle of defence’ . It is likely to make urban space
segregated, polarised, more difficult to approach and stay in, less lively, less spontaneous and even ‘dead’ (Davis, 1990;
Flusty, 1994; Mitchell, 1995; Ellin, 1997; Koskela, 2000a). Furthermore, surveillance can be used as a tool for
reinforcing the ‘purification’ and ‘homogenisation’ processes of urban space . What
follows is ‘[t]he destruction of the street, or city centre, as an arena for the celebration of difference’
(Bannister et al., 1998: 26). The urban experience of being watched through a surveillance camera is, naturally, only one of the
approaches to surveillance. With computerisation, surveillance is becoming more subtle and intense . It also
spreads from material space to cyberspace. It has been argued that the real ‘superpanopticon’ exists in electronic environments – in
the ‘word wide web of surveillance’ (Lyon, 2001). The ‘webcams’ distribute images to the audience on the Internet connecting ‘local
gazes’ with the global community (Green, 1999). Local presence is replaced not by absence but, rather, by ‘tele-
presence’ (Virilio, 2002: 109). The computer integrated surveillance systems link visible surveillance to
the other forms of technological control (e.g. Curry, 1997; Graham, 1998; Whitaker, 1999). When surveillance
cameras are combined with visitors’ registers and ‘people-finding tools’ , such as face recognition systems,
supervision touches a wide range of issues around privacy and human rights . While older surveillance
systems mainly watched over the public as anonymous crowd new technologies make it possible to recognise
individuals and to combine faces to data bases of criminals, activists, etc. We are accompanied
by our ‘data doubles’ (Lyon, 2002) or ‘digital individuals’ (Curry, 1997), and this
‘exponentially increases’ the panoptic power of surveillance (Norris, 2002: 270).
‘Telesurveillance’ is the main component of representation and control in what has been called ‘the
era of the great global optic’ (Virilio, 2002: 110).