1AC

Contention 1 is AnxietyFirst, the surveillance method of counter-terrorism in the status quo fails to recognize the impossibility of complete security our desire for infinite pleasure means that the war on terror becomes infinitely sustained. We have come to enjoy the war because it symbolizes the retaking of the American Identity and a satiation of the anxiety we experience as a result of loss. This makes the war and conflict a self-fulfilling prophecy

McGowan, 2013Todd McGowan, Associate Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Vermont; Enjoying What We Dont Have: A Psychoanalytic Politics, University of Nebraska, 2013, pg. 160-163

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 Americains.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 apart 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 satisfies, and pleasure always disappoints. The 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 attempt 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 infinite expansion. The 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 cant conquer. In this same way, the Afghanistan War disappointed the American leadership because it didnt provide even the possibility for loss. Donald Rumsfelds lament that the country didnt have any targets to bomb points in this direction. Iraq, in contrast, promised a possible defeat, and if it hadnt, 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 identification 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 Eiffel 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 The dialectic of pleasure and enjoyment also plays itself out in the relationship that subjects in society have to their leader. According to Freud, all group members install the leader in the position of an ego ideal, and this ego ideal held in common furthers the bond among members of society. But the identification with the leader has two sides to it: on the one hand, subjects identify with the leaders symbolic position as a non castrated ideal existing beyond the world of lack; but on the other hand, subjects identify with the leaders weaknesses, which exist in spite of the powerful image.30 Both modes of identification work together in order to give subjects a sense of being a member of society, but they work in radically different ways. The identification with the leaders power provides the subject with a sense of symbolic identity and recognition, whereas the identification with the leaders weaknesses allows the subject to enjoy being a part of the community. The identification with the leaders strength provides the pleasure that obscures the enjoyment deriving from the identification with the leaders weaknesses. The weaknesses indicate that the leader is a subject of loss, that she/he enjoys rather than being entirely devoted to ruling as a neutral embodiment of the people. The weaknesses are evidence of the leaders enjoyment, points at which a private enjoyment stains the public image. By identifying with these points, subjects in a community affirm the association of enjoyment with loss rather than with presence. But at the same time, the leaders weaknesses cannot completely eclipse the evidence for the leaders strength. The strength allows subjects who identify with the leader in her/his weakness to disavow this would-be traumatic identification and to associate themselves consciously with strength rather than weakness. The trajectory of Bill Clintons popularity during his presidency illustrates precisely how identification with the leader unfolds. When accusations of sexual impropriety with Monica Lewinsky first appeared, Clintons public approval rating reached its highest levels. Most thought that Clinton was probably guilty of some private wrongdoing, but they also felt that his sexual peccadilloes should remain private. Though they infuriated his Republican accusers, his sexual weaknesses had the effect of enhancing his overall popularity. This trend continued until it became undeniably clear that Clinton really was guilty, when it became impossible to disavow his weakness. At this point, identifying with Clinton became inescapably apparent as identifying with Clinton in his weakness, which rendered it more difficult to sustain. The American populace could enjoy Clintons weakness and form a social bond through this weakness only as long as it remained partially obscured. 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 paranoid anxiety of the status quo results in the projection of threats onto the other in an effort to suture the Lack this type of politics mobilizes the population toward fascism

McGowan, 2013Todd McGowan, Associate Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Vermont; Enjoying What We Dont Have: A Psychoanalytic Politics, University of Nebraska, 2013, pg. 44-49

While nostalgia locates the ultimate enjoyment in the subjects own past, paranoia locates it in the other. Paranoia thus offers the subject not just the image of the ultimate enjoyment (like nostalgia) but also an explanation for its absence. Nostalgia and paranoia usually operate side by side in order to provide the subject a way of figuring its missing enjoyment. On its own, nostalgia as a mode of subjectivity seems to have limited political consequences. Groups may use nostalgia as a political weapon, but its political weight is diffused to some extent because it involves the subject's relation to itself rather than to an other. The same cannot be said for paranoia, which is why finding a way to counter paranoia represents an urgent political task. Paranoia is political in its very structure. It views the other as a threat and produces hostility toward the other. The paranoid subject usually adopts one of two possible attitudes toward the other. According to the first, paranoia serves to explain the loss of the privileged object. If I take up a paranoid attitude toward the other, I see her/ his enjoyment coming at the expense of mine. The other enjoys the lost object that is rightfully mine. The other, having stolen my enjoyment, bears responsibility for my existence as a subject of loss. This type of paranoia removes the burden of loss from the subject and places it onto the other, and in addition it functions, like nostalgia, to convince the subject that having the object is a possibility. According to the second attitude, however, paranoia represents an attempt to convince ourselves that we have not lost the privileged object. We are paranoid not that the other has stolen the privileged object but that it plans to do so. The imagined threat that the other poses reassures us that we have the ultimate enjoyment and that this is what the other targets. By imagining a threat, we fantasize the privileged object back into existence despite its status as constitutively lost. At first glance, it is difficult to see how paranoia might function as an attractive attitude for subjects to take up. The paranoid subject must endure a constant menace that has no tangible or definitive presence. Everyone that this subject meets is a potential enemy in disguise threatening to steal or already having stolen the subject's privileged object. In terms of the subject's own identity, paranoia does not provide security or stability. In fact, it uproots all sense of security that the subject has concerning its identity. But its appeal does not lie in how it transforms subjectivity; its appeal stems from its ability to close the gap in the social field of meaning, its ability to be a guarantor that authorizes our social interaction. Paranoia develops in response to the inherent inconsistency of social authority. There are authorities but no Authority, and a decisive Authority would be necessary to provide subjects a sense of foundation, a sense that there is solid ground underneath their feet. Social proclamations and regulations place the subject in an impossible position: one simply cannot believe and obey every edict emanating from social authorities without being torn apart in the effort. These contradictions occur on all levels of social pronouncements. One hears, for instance, about the dangers of eating too much fat, and then one hears about the cancer-preventing power of chocolate. Parents tell their children not to fight and at the same time tell them to stand up for themselves. George W. Bush claimed that the Iraq War was waged to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction and later claimed that its purpose was to liberate the country from a cruel dictator. Such inconsistencies are not merely contingent developments within our particular society but necessarily follow from the ultimate groundlessness of the social order itself. There is no final authority that calls all the shots in society and guarantees the consistency of the social order. It is instead a structure in charge, and this structure functions through its very misfiring. The inconsistency of social authority- the gap in the social field of meaning - provides it with an openness to difference. If social authority was a closed circuit that operated without a hitch, it would have no way of incorporating the subject into its fold. The subject invests itself in social authority precisely because this authority gives the subject contradictory demands. Faced with these incongruous imperatives, the subject cannot readily decipher what the social authority wants from it. Beneath the inconsistency, the desire of the authority remains a mystery. The subject begins to desire in response to this unknown desire of the social Other: the inconsistency of the social authority has the effect of attracting the subject and constituting the desire of the subject as the desire of the Other. A thoroughly consistent social authority, while logically unthinkable, would not draw the desire of the subject in this way. It might force individuals into obedience, but it would not create the investment in the social order that the inconsistent social authority creates. Confronting the inconsistency of social authority is not an easy task for the subject. Many try to sustain a belief in its consistency through an imaginary construction that represses contradictory ideas. The problem with this solution is that these ideas become more powerful through their repression, and the result is some form of neurosis. Another possibility is the paranoid reaction. Rather than trying to wrestle with the problem of the gap in authority, the paranoid subject eliminates it by positing an other existing in this gap, an other behind the scenes pulling the strings. As Slavoj Zizek explains it, "Paranoia is at its most elementary a belief into an 'Other of the Other; into an Other who, hidden behind the Other of the explicit social texture, programs what appears to us as the unforeseen effects of social life and thus guarantees its consistency: beneath the chaos of market, the degradation of morals, and so on, there is the purposeful strategy of the Jewish plot." The comfort that paranoia provides for the subject derives solely from this guarantee. For the paranoid subject, the surface inconsistency of social authority hides an underlying consistency authorized by a real authority whom most subjects never notice. Paranoia simultaneously allows the subject to sense its own superiority in recognizing the conspiracy and to avoid confronting the horror of an inconsistent social authority. As with nostalgia, paranoia is primarily aligned with a right-wing political agenda. Its suspicion of the other nourishes a nationalistic politics and energizes the call for a return to traditional social arrangements. Just as much of the investment in the Cold War struggle derived from paranoia, it fuels the contemporary war on terror. The exemplary right-wing political formation, Fascism, has its basis in paranoia, seeing the Jew or some equivalent as secretly controlling the social order to the detriment of all law-abiding citizens. The idea of an other operating behind the scenes serves to justify restrictions on civil liberties, racism, police violence, and so on. A paranoid populace is a populace ready to embrace a Fascist regime. Despite the inherent link between paranoia and conservatism, leftists employ paranoia to a vast extent, far more than they do nostalgia. Paranoid theories about the secret brokers of power who decide the fate of the capitalist world are widespread on the Left. It is common sense among leftists that big oil companies have suppressed the development of alternative energies, that the CIA assassinated Kennedy, and that major drug companies control the Food and Drug Administration, just to name a few of the more well known conspiracy theories. The truth or falsity of these theories has nothing to do with their function for the subject who accepts them. The paranoid subject is often correct in its various speculations, but paranoia nonetheless provides a way for the subject to avoid confronting the inconsistency of social authority. For the paranoid subject, conspiracy theories don't simply explain a single event; they solve the problem of the social order as such. According to this thought process, all loss stems from the conspiracy, which has derailed the social order and upset its balance. The paranoid subject cannot accept the necessity of loss, and the conspiracy theory works to render loss empirical rather than ontological. This is evident in Oliver Stone's JFK (1991), a film in which Stone posits a vast conspiracy that resulted in the death of Kennedy. Of course, Stone is probably correct that this conspiracy existed, but the film goes astray primarily through its apotheosis of Kennedy, an apotheosis that reveals what's at stake in all paranoia. According to the film, had he remained in power, Kennedy would have prevented the horror of the Vietnam War and thus spared the United States the psychic wound that this war created. With Kennedy, one can imagine an American social order existing without strife and loss. The conspiracy theory allows Stone this image, which testifies to the avoidability of loss." But Stone is not the only leftist to turn to paranoia. Many do so in order to confront forces that they otherwise couldn't identify. Among those who suffer from political oppression, paranoia and conspiracy theory serve as vehicles for thinking through systems of control and even mobilizing action against those systems. As Peter Knight points out, "Conspiracy thinking has played an important role in constituting various forms of African American political and cultural activism."38 When it directly produces activism, the political valence of paranoia seems to tilt more clearly to the left than it does in the case of Stone's film. In Marxist Fredric Jameson focuses on a related aspect of paranoia as he analyzes the paranoid film in The Geopolitical Aesthetic. In this work, Jameson aligns conspiracy theory with what he calls cognitive mapping- the attempt to think the global capitalist system in its totality. The diffuseness of global capitalism prevents the kind of cognitive mapping that was possible in earlier epochs. Today, in order to think the totality at all, subjects must resort to the idea of a conspiracy. As Jameson points out in his analysis of All the Presidents Men, "The map of conspiracy itself .. . suggests the possibility of cognitive mapping as a whole and stands as its substitute and yet its allegory all at once."40 Jameson's statement reflects his ambivalence about conspiracy theory and paranoia - even though it allegorizes cognitive mapping, it also substitutes for it - but he nonetheless sees its usefulness as a strategy for the Left, especially when facing the global capitalist leviathan. The problem is that even when it works to mobilize subjects to fight against an oppressive system, paranoia has the effect of depriving subjects of their agency. By eliminating the gap in social authority and filling in this gap with a real authority who effectively runs the show, paranoia deprives subjects of the space in which they exist as subjects. The subject occupies the position of the gap in social authority; it emerges through and because of internal inconsistency in the social field of meaning. The extent to which paranoia allows the subject to experience social authority as a consistent field is the extent to which it works against the subject itself. Even if it manages tangible political victories, emancipatory politics that relies on paranoia undermines itself by increasing the power of authority in the thinking of subjects and decreasing their freedom. What's more, it doesn't actually work. Like nostalgia, paranoia can never constitute a successful strategy for the subject dealing with its fundamental condition. It will never provide the enjoyment that it promises the subject. Uncovering and eliminating the hidden real authority will bring not the ultimate enjoyment but horrible disappointment. This is why the paranoid mindset cannot admit to itself that the hidden other has been vanquished. The enjoyment that paranoia does provide requires the continuing existence of the threat, even though it imagines an enjoyment that would come with the threat's disappearance. Paranoia runs aground due to its failure to admit the connection between enjoyment and loss. It allows the subject to imagine that loss is the contingent result of a secret malevolent force that we might conquer. By implicitly positing the avoidability of loss, paranoia leaves subjects unable to locate and recognize the nature of their own enjoyment.

This anxiety is the core problem of the psyche. Our inability to come to terms with this void is a fate worse than death. Our anxiety functions as the condition for the possibility of Hiroshima and Auschwitz. In attempts to master this emptiness we project our weakness through conflict. This projection provides us the unrestrained power to bombard the other with pure suffering and destruction in an attempt to control the contingencies that constitute existence.

Davis, 2001Walter A. Davis, professor emeritus at The Ohio State University, Deracinations: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative, Pg. 103-108

We begin with an effort to describe what is the deepest experiencethe one most deeply denied. Catastrophic anxiety is that fear that haunts us from within, the fear that one has already been annihilated; that, like Beckett, one has "never been born properly" and never will be because inner paralysis is the psyche's defining conditiona truth attested each time when, lining to cohere as a subject, one collapses before the tidal wave of an Regression against oneself that rises up from within. An unspeakable dread weds the psyche to terror. All other forms of anxiety are pale after-thoughts. There is a threat worse than extinction. The deepest self-knowledge we harbor, the knowledge that haunts us as perhaps our deepest self-reference is the fear that our inner world is ruled by a force opposed to our being. Death is the icy wind that blows through all we do. This is the anxiety from which other anxieties derive as displacements, delays, and vain attempts to deny or attenuate our terror before a dread that is nameless and must remain so lest despair finalize its hold on us. In catastrophic anxiety the destruction of one's power to be and the ceaseless unraveling of all attempts to surmount this condition is experienced as an event that has already happened. That event forms the first self-reference: the negative judgment of an Other on one's beinginternalized as self-undoing. Postmodern posturing before the phrase "I am an other" here receives the concretization that shatters "free play." There is a wound at the heart of subjectivity, a self-ulceration that incessantly bleeds itself out into the world. The issue of the wound is a soul caked in ice, in a despair that apparently cannot be mediated: the nightmare state of a consciousness utterly awake, alone and arrested, all exits barred, facing inner paralysis as the truth of one's life. We ceaselessly flee this experience because if it ever comes down full upon us an even more terrifying process begins: an implosion in which one's subjective being is resolved into fragments of pure anxiety that leave one incapable of existing as subject except in the howl to which each suffered state descends in a final, chilling recognitionthat everything one has done and suffered is but sound and fury, signifying nothing. One has become a corpse with insomnia. Identity and self-reference thereafter ceaselessly circle about that void. This is the hour of the wolf, where one is arrested before the primary fact: at the deepest register of the psyche one finds a voice of terror. Fear of psychic dissolution is the ground condition of our being as subjects. Subjectivity is founded in anguish before the dread of becoming no more than bits and pieces of pure horror, fleeing in panic a voice that has already overtaken us, resolving our subjective being into traumatic episodes of pure persecution. At the heart of inwardness a malevolent spirit presides. To put it in nuclear metaphors: catastrophic anxiety is the threat of implosion into the other's unlimited destructiveness. To complete the picture we need only add Winnicott's point: people live in dread of this situation, projecting fear of a breakdown into the future, because the breakdown has already occurred. B. Exorcism through Evacuation And so a crypt is built to contain this anguish and repress the experience that is its cause. We organize a "life" of identities and stabilities to give ourselves the illusion of escape. Unable to reverse our condition we take up the only alternative. We try to evacuate the whole thing: to blow it out into the world and invest it in objects that are fitted to receive the full brunt of one's discontent and powerless to reply. Projection, the ego's priest, is founded in identification with an internal aggressor. That is the complex that informs the effort to lodge our disorders and forbidden desires in others so that we can wage an attack on our inner conflicts then watch the ensuing spectacle from a safe distance. Evacuation thus finds in projection a prime agent of human perception and the secure base for the perpetual, mutual defeat that Sartre finds in all "concrete relations with others." We're always on the lookout for a chance to make someone else bear our discontents. But it's never enough. Satisfaction eludes us. We keep erupting, bleeding from within, in a leukemia of soul that rages whenever we see those who have in "their daily lives" "a beauty that makes us ugly."For then the projections return with the force of the furies. Envy and resentment erupt as the assault within our inner world of the truth of our "character"a truth we deny by reinvesting it externally. This grows apace over the years and then we long for a listing deliverance, a final solution in the dim recognition that when projection proceeds from the register of catastrophe it requires and longs for a grand exorcism. What we seek incessantly is a total evacuation of all inner discord, a complete and lasting externalization in an ideal victim, one in whom all that haunts us will stay outside, lodged in the world in what Hegel calls a "standing negation"9. Our need is for a subject who is destroyed and lives on, proof of a sublime aggression sculpted in time. The Bomb provides such an opportunity. The criteria required to exorcize catastrophic anxiety finds in it the conditions for expelling the most primitive anxieties in the perfect objective correlative. The subject voids itself of its core anxietythe inability to reverse inner destructivenessby becoming the power to destroy, unbound, raining judgment down on a mass of subjects who are indifferently bound together as fragments of pure suffering unable, after that action, to ever form any identity except as walking corpses, hibakusha, deadened affect delivered over to the condition of death-in-life.10 Projection here succeeds because in that shattered mirror one sees oneself reflected as the equal of the power within that originally proclaimed one's utter worthlessness. Malign "reversal" has grown to the event. All inner anxiety about one's power to be resolves itself in the power to act free of restraint. We have become the thing we feared. Its destructiveness is now ours and nothing else has being. The Contradiction: The SublimeFrom the Crypt The mediation traced above is driven by a contradiction about which it circles endlessly. That is what the sublime object of the ego-ratio reveals when read from its crypt. Sublime action seeks an absolute reversal of catastrophic anxiety in the absolute affirmation of unshakable guarantees. Catastrophe must be reversed because it is that experience of contingency that underlies the horror of contingency in all its forms, the lone driving the search for the guarantees needed to contain it. In catastrophe contingency is the other's will as unbounded, unlimited destructiveness. The threat of extinction is the "restraint" here placed on subject. This restraint is prior to the dialectic of "desire restrained and checked" on which Hegel grounds his phenomenology. Desire here isn't restrained and checkedit is turned back against itself in torment. The other requires my destruction for their pleasure and assures that end by colonizing the psyche with an aggression that renders impotent every effort to make a beginning, a tentative move toward independence or self-cohesion. There is no exit but one apparently: identification with the aggressor. I become a self by turning someone or something else into an object delivered over to the true golden rule: do onto others what was once done onto you. This logic maintains because catastrophic anxiety internalized is death-work as the self-mediation whereby we enact the command of the Other. The only way out, the only way to finalize this process, is evacuation through a lasting exorcism. It alone confers on the psyche a certitude beyond all cogitos. It is also the mediation that finds it, in flight forward, already, in its primitive imaginary, one with the Bomb. In its inner world, the catastrophic subject experiences itself as full of death, disease, corruption. The Bomb alone has the power to cast all "nuclear waste" outside and beneath oneself in a way that indefinitely extends the temporality of that act. Radiation disease is a death that works inwardinvisibly, yet inexorably. Death thereby breeds itself forth into an indefinite future, omnipresent in a working, a differance that begets delayed effects as further insurance against Nachtraglichkeit. The extension of death's dominion attained in the Bomb serves one grand function: to prevent the return of projections by extending the temporality of the deed into a future that is lived, by its victims, as a judgment that is inevitable, irreversible, the antithesis of Benjamin's messianic time, tickinga plea to delay death that can only be answered by death. The Bomb thus serves as felix culpa to an inner necessity. To do its job a sublime event must exorcize everything within the subject that makes it an object of its own contempt. What better way than Orwell's boot brought down in an act of splitting that magnifies the distance between the terror on the ground and the view from above. Catastrophe is now fully outside oneself located in an other who has become nothing but matter, body become spectacle of pain frozen forever in charred sculptures strewn across a devastated landscape, Laocoon Munched; but with the Howl silenced and deferred until it erupts later from within the survivors in a semiosis that can only be read by the scientists who planted it there and have now come (as biopower/knowledge) to study their handiwork as it blooms and bursts from deep within the body of the hibakusha as further testimony of one's power/jouissance. Evacuation is complete. Death-work has been lodged securely in the Other. In the hibakusha one gets to see one's Thanatos as a narrative principle, a force in history. One gets to see, over time, what it is like to live death. Soul-murder as the innermost reality of the crypt, produces and finds in the hibakusha its dialectical image. As the expressive figura of death incarnate, a terrifying verveilledoch here attains its objective correlative. To purge oneself of catastrophic anxiety, an utterly dehumanized object is not enough. Neither the Sartrean look nor the Nazi act suffice. The disorder of the psyche is deeper, prior to desire (Sartre) and demand (Nazism). The projection of death-work can never rest by simply investing one's self-contempt in another. For evacuation to work, the object must become something one can study, inspect, perform operations upon. Catastrophic anxiety is the a proiri that gives Auschwitz and Hiroshima their necessity in the genocidal imagination. The Bomb constitutes an Event because the psyche reverses its core conditionits cardiac arrest in inner self-loathingthrough a projection that is total and irreversible. If the evacuation of trauma is the abiding motive atop the crypt, there is nothing abstract or Lacanian about the Real that results from its projection. Evacuation is that malevolent reversal that condemns one to endless repetition. One blows one's self-hatred and one's rage over that state fully out into the world but is thereby rendered powerless to do anything but gape in rapt amazement at one's creation. That is perhaps why, for over fifty years now, whenever given the opportunity, Paul Tibbets has proudly repeated the declaration that he has not had a moment's remorse or regret. Death-work externalized leaves one a spent and reified subject, lacking any power other than the endless repetition of one's deed. The wheel thus comes full circle in the only justice granted such subjects. When catastrophic anxiety is only mediated by death-work, the affects that compose subjectivity are rent assunder and scattered in pockets of pure persecution. With each attempt to compose an inner self-cohesion, death-work, as internal saboteur, rises up in a renewed attack on the effort to be. Using the Bomb to reverse this disorder produces as its result a perfect, attic justice. Guilt and remorse are denied the doers of the deed because to feel such things is to renew a process of self-unraveling. What the Bomb was meant to deliver one from has become the guardian of untroubled sleep. With the call of conscience rendered impossible, the subject becomes overtly psychotic and must cling ever more desperately to an untroubled memory of the sublime event. The subject thereby pronounces, without being able to comprehend or mediate it, the truth about itself: in the ravaged landscape of Hiroshima the founding inner world of the psychotic-a world of utter fragmentation and the obliteration of every term of reference-has finally found a home to which it must say "stay thou art so fair," a home in which nothing inhuman is unheimlich.

The moralization of anxiety manifests itself in our inability confront evil. To displace this anxiety, we make ourselves good to protect ourselves from danger. Failure to confront this psychical conflict reifies the original trauma and makes the destruction of the self meaningless.Davis, 2001Walter A. Davis, professor emeritus at The Ohio State University, Deracinations: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative, Pg 86-87

No wonder resistance becomes the key term in the first stage of the unfolding drama. This time, however, Kant cant shift everything onto a plane of conceptual defenses and controls. Affect weighs too heavily. Intermediate moves immanent within that register are required. Opposing affects must be created and marshaled as a first line of defense. For the first time in Kant, rationalistic mediation gives way to dramatic self-mediation. Kant will finally attempt an agon that moves solely within the medium of affect. To resist psychic unraveling he must establish a countervailing force within the order of affect itself. For Kant, however, affective self-mediation is equivalent to bending everything in a moral direction. In doing so the author of the ethic of pure duty gives us the true genealogy of morals. That dubious ascent begins once the force threatening destruction is characterized as evil. Anxiety is thereby transformed into a moralizing fear: that we lack the power to resist evil. Moralizing then structures the subsequent discourse, but without exorcizing the psychological subtext that will undercut it. This contradiction is, in fact, what ethics will here reveal about itself.

In making ourselves good subjects we make ourselves beings unworthy of destruction. That transformation also requires the resources of rhetoric, since we must persuade a tough audience. The true goal in remaking ourselves is to tame the power that threatens us by tapping its conscience. To do so we create, within ourselves, a new agency, one that, recognizing our virtue, promises protection. We thereby create the illusion that the threatening force has been softened and then transformed into a voice that warmly supports the good intentions of the nascent ego. The superego as ego-ideal has been created. So ends the founding self-mediation in the genealogy of an ethical ration. By staging this internal drama, the psyche has taken the action within required to create the space needed to assert control over affect. The necessary act follows the attempt to affect a complete reversal of the psyches initial condition. Kant asserts repeatedly that we can only judge the sublime, and experience its proper pleasure, if we view things from a safe place. But in the psyche, as opposed to mind, the safe place doesnt exist a priori. It has to be invented, and with it the most revealing picture of the genesis of what we now call the ego. It is a difficult birth to a dubious and troubled function. The problem of the ego is one of generating a transformation from impotence to power within affect itself, through an agon immanent to that register. But Kant is unable to sustain such an agon. We get instead a displacement toward concepts through a use of the defensive mechanism known as splitting. Ego and inner world divide in an unbridgeable rift, thus establishing this condition as the true identity of the ego. The ego is the effort to repress the conflicts in the psyche from which it derives. But while displacement and intellectualization offer a handle, the egos work is far from done. The continuing pressure of inner conflicts requires a further battle. In that struggle moralizing interpretations do yeoman service by splitting the psyches original trauma into a longed-for reificationthe opposition of the ego to the drives.

We have become creatures full of instincts. The crucial task of the aff is to open up the unconscious counter narrative to provide a mirror to reflect upon the presupposed American identity.Sucharov, 2005Mira M. Sucharov, assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University, The International Self: Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli Palestinian Peace, Pg 27-28

Just as individuals and groups possess consciousness and an unconscious, I argue that every society maintains not only a dominant (conscious) narrative, but an unconscious counternarrative as well, which the former has in part arisen to conceal. As the counternarrative represents the role that society most fears adopting, it resides in the unconscious, where it will not interfere with the day-to-day transmission and fulfillment of the dominant narratives and the dominant roles. For instance, a "defensive" state's counternarrative would encapsulate the view that 'we are not only defensive, but sometimes we can be aggressive.'35 Narratives and counternarratives can coexist in two ways either with the counternarrative being simply an unactualized fear, or with the counternarrative corresponding to an actual role being enacted alongside the dominant role-identity. Thus, while an actor may consciously be aware of a counterrole that she abhors (e.g., the "good student" who avoids cheating on exams), the unconscious reminds us that the "cheater" is latent in the "self-portfolio" of the good student. In the event that this student cheats, radical change can only come about once the self has been reconciled with its unconscious opposite. Actors will not become aware of the divergence from their dominant identity without the aid of a "mirror," however. Only with the help of outside forces drawing attention to the clash between the two narratives will elites experience a cognitive dissonance necessitating a realignment between actions and role-identity. One of the most salient transmission belts for the creation of state narratives is collective memory. Memoryactive or latent recall of things occurring in the pasthas begun to be understood as not solely a private activity, but as representing a group phenomenon as well.36 On the collective level, memory can be either experience-near-active, one-step removed, or distantly removed. Active memory would be represented by Holocaust survivors in Israel and the Diaspora, for instance; One step removed would be the surrogate memories that their immediate Offspring carry with them,37 and distantly removed would be exemplified by the Rabbinic injunction that Jews experience the annual telling of the Exodus from Egypt as if "they were there." While a case could be made for discounting the importance of actual experiences in favor of the way those experiences arc remembered, both of these are crucial for ascertaining role identity. Just as traumatic events in a person's life may be repressed in memory but still shape that person's identity, the international observer needs to account for actual experiences, yet view these as embedded within a narrative context. Similarly, some historical events undergo a process of memory revision; in these cases the observer must be sensitive to the effect that the new discourse has on the society's perception of these events, whether or not these stories accord with fact. The clinical parallel in psychoanalysis is that while the analysand's relationship with her parents is considered crucial to uncovering the contours of her psychology, the analyst as a rule does not attempt to meet the parents firsthand: rather, the patient's recounting of these experiences is considered to be the most important channel of investigation and hence transformation. Since we are talking about collections of individuals, memory needs to be actively transmitted to the society's members in order for it to influence the citizens' sense of collective identity. One of the ways this can be done is through ritual. Being repetitive while symbolically imbued, ritual gains meaning only through the symbols attributed to it by the group, and is a collective process that serves to link actors to a series of past events for which they may not have been physically present. Moreover, private rituals that are collectively prescribed, such as prayer, serve to bind the individual to the collective, particularly when there is a formalized liturgy. Most collective rituals occur according to the calendar, and therefore can encompass regular ceremonies that come to act as markers for the individual's personal time cycle.38Sometimes particular collective memories that have been sustained over time are ruptured, with citizens contemplating new facts about their country's past. Revisionist history is an example of an attempt to bring forth these sorts of new facts. When history is reinterpreted, the society can either shun the dissenting voices, or else gradually reevaluate the original narratives. When this reevaluation occurs, society is more apt to uncover the hitherto unconscious counternarratives, a discovery that can lead to the realization that the state's behavior might be contradicting the state's role-identity. In other words, revisionist historians and other domestic dissenters can serve as the "mirror" referred to later.

Vote affirmative to give up hope in the face of guarantees - only holding yourself completely open in the face of the promise of a sustainable status quo can open space for self-overcoming that allows us to engage in new forms of praxis

Davis, 2006 Walter A. Davis, professor emeritus at The Ohio State University, Deaths Dream Kingdom, Pg. 63

To know this situation for what it is challenges what is finally the deepest and most fundamental of the guarantees. The principle of Hope. To appropriate Eliot: "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" There is perhaps nothing that can be done to change the situation I've described. But then what is the purpose of knowing such things if they only produce meaningless suffering? Is despair the end result of a life shorn of the guarantees? Or are we finally like the drunks in O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, knowing that in order to sustain the illusions required to go on living they must pronounce Hickey mad and reject everything he revealed to them about their lives as a product of that madness? Perhaps it's time to admit what the need for Hope really signifies. Denial of responsibility for certain situations under the assumption that knowing them correctly would lead to despair. Raising that specter is, of course, the rhetorical ploy invoked to prematurely terminate inquiry lest it impinge on emotional and psychological needs. Despair thus remains an empty concept. We don't know what it is and never will as long as we use the need for hope to prevent discovery of our capacities to endure. Whether despair is what we will find on the other side of hope is something we can't know. For all hope really signifies is a testament to our weakness and our fears. Perhaps we are called to something beyond it. What Shakespeare called tragic readiness. For in opening ourselves to the possibility of despair we also open ourselves to the possibility of self-overcoming and through it the discovery of a praxis that lies on the other side of the conceptual and existential paralyses created by the guarantees. We can't know "what is to be done?" as long as we continue to respond to our situation by invoking ahistorical values and guarantees that are grounded in an essentialistic and ahistorical theory of human nature.

Plan

The United States federal government should substantially curtail its domestic surveillance by ceasing all domestic surveillance.

Contention 2 is FramingAn ethics of existence forecloses the tragic struggle in which we never confront our inner trauma- only our affirmative can open new ways of relating to ourselves that can overcome these limitations- the 1AC is a precondition for any meaning to our lives

Davis, 2006 Walter A.Davis, professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Death's Dream Kingdom pg.238-240)

In her critique of Kantian ethics Alenka Zupancic often refers to the Lacanian idea that there is a loss deeper than one's life. The loss of one's reason for living. The apostle of duty offers a heroic example of how one escapes the threat of that loss. What I'm suggesting here is that ethics actually begins on the other side of it. With the possibility that first exists when one discovers that one has already lost or violated or fatally compromised one's reason for living because the values one thinks one honors and the actual truth of one's life are thoroughly at odds. The traumatic event that brings one to this recognition is the origin of ethics. This is the ethical task it establishes: to see if one can pay the price for having violated oneself by assuming the full burden of the situation one has thereby created.

The ethical situation, accordingly, confronts the subject with the necessity to choose to be in a radically new way or die inside. Nothing less is demanded than a totally new way of relating to oneself, for the guilt one experiences in such a situation is existentializing. One is guilty toward oneself for having failed to honor the duties that one bears to oneself, for having so thoroughly lied to oneself about one's life. As Hamlet learns, it is through that recognition that one first discovers that one has tragic responsibilities toward oneself that can no longer be evaded because one with this situation is the even deeper discovery that there are failures that can be irreversible. That is the possibility defining the situation one is now in. What one does will reveal the truth of who one is. Guilt toward oneself has overtaken all possibilities of displacement and denial. Fail now and one dies within. Most people will, of course, do just about anything to avoid guilt or to get cleansed of it as quickly as possible. That is why so many fail the test when it comes to them, shrinking inside rather than expanding to the demands of our innermost possibility, the one defining our humanity. An ethics of existence begins with the traumatic experience in which everything we've tried to escape about ourselves catches up with us. One then knows that one's prior life has been a flight. And all one's brave ideas and bright ethical claims airy nothingthe indulgence in comforting and self-alienating lies. But now one is finally, like Hamlet, in the situation from which there is no exit. An ethics grounded in the possibility of freedom depends on the actions one performs within oneself when one finds oneself in a crisis that can no longer be denied. This is precisely the kind of situation Kant is unable to consider, which is why he constructs in Duty the principle of choice that renders it impossible. In serving Duty one is delivered from the repressed thought that now can never arise: that one's whole life and all its choices, especially the ethical ones, may be no more than a flight from things in oneself that one flees because one fears that if one is ever forced to face oneself one will suffer a destruction worse than death. Destruction within. An existentializing ethic begins on the other side of all the things we do to delay that event. For it is when the thing one fears happens that one first discovers the truth of one's life, the depth of one's inauthenticity. The trauma that will measure one's humanity has arrived. Nothing else now exists but the lonely struggle of the psyche with itself. Suicide (including the primary form of suicide, inner death) is one term of that situation. Ethics is the other. An ethics of existence is what one does when one finally finds oneself in the traumatic situation that brings one before oneself. There is one lesson in this, a lesson that probably can't be learned. Rather than running from the trauma we should plunge toward it, since it is only through it that we can discover both the truth about ourselves and what we are able to do in the face of that truth. To activate that possibility all that's needed perhaps is to drown out the noise and chatter one keeps running in one's head. Perhaps the truth is that the truth about ourselves is not deeply repressed and unknown. It's closer than we think, available to introspection if we but dared. But that's what makes the kind of impassioned reflection Hamlet engages in so terrifying. It exemplifies everything we know and don't want to know about ourselves.18 Here is an attempt to offer an image that describes in depth the existential-psychoanalytic condition from which the possibility of ethics derives. In George Orwell's 1984 Winston Smith when tortured with the thing he most fears betrays the thing he loves. To save his life he sacrifices what gives it meaning. He capitulates before an inner torment that reduces the psyche to a condition of catastrophic anxiety. (The image of the cage of rats placed over the head they will raven externalizes in a perfect objective correlative the terror that has the power to dissolve the psyche. What is a phobia after all but an inner condition displaced into an external fear?) What I want to suggest here is that Winston Smith's phobia describes the inner condition that defines any subject traumatized by itself. Such a subject lives tortured by the struggle not to betray the thing one loves, the thing that could give one's life meaning. But one saves it only if one is willing to sacrifice everything to the acceptance of the suffering and inner torment that service to it entails. This is the ethical act whereby a subject attains tragic agency. Becoming an existentially autonomous agent is the process of engaging the disorders of one's psyche in the effort of active reversal. The wish to escape that effort, to soften it, or to insist that suffering must always have a happy resolution is the voice of self-betrayal. If one gives in to it one loses, with Winston, the thing one has finally found, the thing one can love more than one's life but only by suffering all that it demands. That thing more precious than life is the tragic struggle that gives life perhaps the only meaning it can have.

The ethic of the aff is key - only an ethical act that confronts our inner trauma with a constant and inner openness can we create the conditions for self-overcoming necessary to open ourselves to a meaningful existence - the only ethical choice is to fully confront contingency

Davis, 2006 Walter A. Davis, professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Death's Dream Kingdom pg.235-238

What follows attempts to distill the ethic of existence in to its fundamental principles. I also try here to present those thesis in a way that will engage the reader's psyche and emotions at precisely the place within us where each of us makes a basic decision about ourselves. That's the only "self" that matters. The others are selfreifying defenses. The argument thus constitutes both an appeal to the reader's freedom and an attempt to impinge on that freedom, to bring each reader before him or herself by challenging defenses with the power that some ideas have to light a fire in the soul. (1) We concur with Kant that if a choice is not free it's not moral. The possibility of freedom depends, however, on an in-depth analysis of one's psyche. Such an analysis leads from the destruction of ego identity to the need to bring about a complete reversal in one's relationship to oneself by deracinating the voice of the other. Thinking is ethical insofar as it engages one thing: the battle of a subject with itself over the meaning of its being. (2) There is no way to abridge that process nor to provide guarantees that will secure a safe outcome. To sustain the psychoanalytic turn, the psyche must continually throw itself into question and root out the emotions that bind it to a pattern of lies. An ethic of the existential subject depends on maximizing what Keats termed negative capability: the ability to be in "uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." Rather than resolving doubts, the purpose of thought and action is to deepen them. An act is ethical insofar as it deepens the conflict of the subject with itself. (3) One acts ethically only when all symbolic and ideological supports have collapsed. Only then can one take on responsibility for oneself because only then is one at issue and at risk. The ethical act must radically open itself to contingency in a situation where one must create values, yet where those values can derive from nothing but the depth of one's engagement in the situation. By the same token, such values cannot be a final solution but must open themselves to later contingencies. Ethics must always allow itself to be measured by contingency because contingency is precisely what calls up ethical responsibility. The primary ethical situation is not one where there is a clear course of duty, but where a subject trembles before its responsibility to create new values in a situation that reduces received values to rubble. (4) Ethics begins when there is a genuine crisis of values, even perhaps the need for a re-valuation of all values. For Kant there was not nor could there be such a crisis. The values were known, immutable, and generally agreed upon. The only question was what kind of principle they would be grounded in; which meant for Kant and the Aufklarung, how could they be grounded in Reason. For us, in contrast, the primary fact is a historicity that bites into the very possibility of the ethical. Every ethical value must be willing to historicize itself. That recognition entails the following considerations. The desert grows. Under the guise of fundamentalist crusades, herd moralities dominate. The extent of inhumanity is appalling. So many values that once seemed so solid have been so thoroughly debunked. The possibility of ethics now begins with a systematic exposure of all superego pathologies, all the ethical ideologies that societies use to introduce a fundamental passivity into subjects while convincing those same subjects that they are good in a goodness that depends on willed ignorance. An existential ethic is radically destructive of received beliefs, radically disruptive of the desires of the normal subject. Refusing and exposing all Symbolic supports, it seeks in the struggle of the psyche with its disorders the source of value. (5) Ethics is a matter of extremity. It begins in the most extreme actthe act of radical individuation in which one opens one's psyche to an interrogation that must be sustained in its extremity. Ethics is about a choice in which a subject risks the value and meaning of its existence, not about those choices that assure it of that meaning. Moreover, it is only when one does this that one experiences for the first time the terror implicit in the oft-quoted Sartrean statement "existence precedes essence." (6) Ethics must engage and derive from the dread that defines choice. Let me illustrate this proposition by contrasting Hamlet's choice with the situation in Styron's Sophie's Choice. The horrifying choice Sophie facesto choose which of her children will be sent to the gas chamberis a forced choice and thus extreme and exceptional in a way that deprives it of the possibility of being normative.17 Hamlet's choice, in contrast, is a free one that issues from nothing but his freedom and the readiness with which he accepts the selftorture that existence entails. Sophie is tortured from without by the madness of the other; and the inhuman logic that madness requires in order to know itself. (Styron calls the officer who forces the choice on Sophie a "genius" of the Reich.) Hamlet is tortured from within by the logic of self-criticism and self-overcoming that informs the existentializing process. We are fortunate if we never face a situation like Sophie's; nor suffer the death-in-life that is the result of such choices. But insofar as we have a psyche Hamlet's situation is the general one that defines us. Or to put it in properly ethical terms, engaging the kind of situation he faces is the act that activates the inherent possibility that defines us. The choice that founds such an ethic must therefore be distinguished both from the a priori choice made by the apostle of duty and Sophie's forced choice. All three refer to extreme choices and situations. In only one, however, is guilt toward oneself both the origin of the choice and its result. That is, only one of the three choices is the ground of its own possibility and thereby the source of an existentialization that issues in values bound to the tragic contingencies of our situatedness.

2ACA2 RealismWe control the internal link to their impacts. The psychoanalysis of the affirmative forces an internal investigation of the ways in which the subjects subconscious desires rationalize what we would consider self-interest. This means that we can only make sense of realism through a lens of psychoanalysis. Sucharov, 2005 (Mira M., assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University, The International Self: Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, pg 17-18)

The psychological turn that international relations took with the rise of behavioralism in the 1960s has begun to expand beyond focusing on cognitionhow individuals thinkto a wider appreciation of the role of emotional determinants of action, one of many factors that were long dismissed as unscientific. Part of the reason for this hesitant courtship is no doubt the long strides that international relations theory has taken toward refining its investigative lenses, such that less easily observable phenomena can be more confidently incorporated into the solid theoretical infrastructure that the discipline has now adopted. A central example of this evolution is the analytical watershed inaugurated by neorealism, which fashioned a conceptual playing field where little had existed before. Neorealism, a theoretical school that views international relations as taking place within an anarchical state system with no overarching authority, in turn spawned the constructivist turn in international relationsthe approach that stresses the importance of social identity in determining international outcomesand subsequent counterarguments that built on yet other social and psychological precepts all of which agree that there is such a thing as an international systemthough they understand the effects of anarchy differently. Introducing psychoanalysis to international relations can therefore be seen as the next logical step for a relatively young discipline that seeks to understand why political actors behave the way they do. While all psychoanalysts draw on Freud's unique contribution, subsequent approaches have altered many of his assumptions. This trend has kept pace with the embracing of new epistemological and ontological perspectives by other scientific and social scientific fields, such as the quantum revolution in physics -a paradigm shift that has since influenced other disciplines. The form of psychoanalytic theory that I use here is the contemporary relational strand, one that analysts have alternately termed "relational-model theorizing," a "dyadic systems perspective," and "intersubjectivity theory." This approach shares an ontology basic to constructivism in international relations: the psychology (identity) of the person (state) is not hard-wired into the unit, but develops in part from the actions of other actors in the social environment (the family; the therapeutic setting; the international system), and in part through the shared assumptions that permeate that system. As an approach centered on the individual mind, contemporary psychoanalysis takes into account the broader social context within which actors act. Psychoanalysis also provides a coherent theory of behavior incorporating three elements that have mostly been invisible in international relations theory, but that provide a fuller understanding of how states and nonstate actors interact: emotion, the unconscious, and the possibility for actors' own cognitive and emotional insight to be a source of behavior change. In drawing on these principles, perhaps the most significant contribution that psychoanalysis can make to international relations is in improving on prevailing theories of identity, which in turn illuminate questions about international action. Within international relations, constructivism has been criticized for neglecting the question of how identity is, in fact, created. Cognitive psychologywhich international relations has begun to draw on liberallyin part helps to fill this gap. Yet with its assumption that the emotional legacy of early interpersonal relationships is essential in shaping personality and subsequent behavior, psychoanalysis offers a more comprehensive model of identity creation than those put forth by cognitive theorists. Recognizing these explanatory benefits, contructivists have recently called for exploring the potential that psychoanalysis holds for understanding international politics. Thus, unlike the prevailing psychoanalytic approaches in international relationsnamely, psychohistories of individual leaders, and the focus-group potential of micro-level conflict resolution, the psychoanalytic approach I use here is meant to coexist happily alongside other streams of systemic theory in international relations.

Forcing the state away from what it considers a core tenet of national defense in the exact opposite way it desires creates the conditions necessary for reflection of the efficacy of the initial policies of surveillance, which changes future policy.Sucharov, 2005 (Mira M., assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University, The International Self: Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, pg 32-)

Like most individuals, states possess a complex arsenal of motivations that are not all palatable to the polity's sense of selfnot least of which is due to the discrepant voices vying for influence in any society. Yet the dominant selfthat overarching group ethos that does not necessarily reflect each single (sub)voiceimplicitly prescribes a set of normatively acceptable behaviors. Should a state adopt a policy course that contradicts the state's role-identity, we can expect some sort of cognitive dissonance to arise, leading to a radical realignment between actions and identity. Just as a man who once struck his wife might offer the apologetic plea that I don't know what got into me!," it is up to the analyst to help the subject come to terms with the aggression that has, evidently, been very much inside of him all along. The policy shift therefore results from the force of the "role-identity" prodding the "self" back into behavioral consistency. However, acting in contradiction to one's role-identity does not necessarily result in a behavior shift. The dissonance between role-identity and behavior must be both unbearable and experienced at an emotional level in order for such a shift to result. If the dissonance remained at a cognitive level, it is likely that the subject would employ one of a number of cognitive biases in order to rationalize the discrepancy.42 The dredging up of the unconscious counternarrative assures that the dissonance is experienced deeply enough to result in the taking of radical action to realign actions with identity.43 This hypothesis of "cognitive-emotional realization" is grounded in the clinical findings of psychoanalytic theory that suggest that, under certain conditions, actors may become consciously aware of previously unconscious processes.44 The classic understanding of cognitive dissonanceas articulated by Leon Festingeris that inconsistency between behavior and belief results in "psychological discomfort" that leads to "activity oriented toward dissonance reduction just as hunger leads to activity oriented toward hunger reduction."45 In line with psychoanalysis, the actual cognitive-emotional realization brings to light what had previously been stored in the unconscious areas of the state's subjective world. In actuality, the assumption here is that the role-challenging behavior (paired with domestic challenges) causes elites to "reflect" on the state's role-identity. Moreover, my use of "cognitive-emotional realization" imbues the concept with a distinctively emotional component as well. Whereas pure "cognitive dissonance" refers to the challenging of an individual's worldview (i.e., the revelation of new "facts"),46 I am introducing the more ontologically powerful notion of challenges to the self.47 When this behavior undermines the very legitimacy buttressing the state's raison d'etat, the dissonance is particularly acute. Catalysts for Realization. Once decision-makers come to realize that the state's foreign-policy actions have contradicted the state's role-identity, a policy shift may result. The important question that remains is: what contributes to this realization? Numerous sources may act as the "mirror" necessary for the state to reflect on its behavior. For clarity, I have divided them into three categories: domestic elements (including the military, the peace movement, revisionist historians, artists and the domestic media), other states (including allies and adversaries, as well as those state's news media), and international structures (including international organizations, norms, and regimes). Domestic Elements: The Military. If the military acts in a way that the populace sees as contradicting the state's self-image (even if the military is merely carrying out governmental policies), society can experience a corresponding cognitive dissonance. In a democracy, the military takes its directives from the government; however, military culture is instrumental in shaping the broader strategic culture encompassing foreign-policy decisionsand role-identitymore generally. Most of the time, the relationship between the civilian and military spheres resembles a symbiosis: commands are given by civilians and implemented by the military, which in turn will advise and reshape subsequent policies. In some cases, ex-military personnel will pursue a career in government on being discharged. However, it is possible for the military to experience a sense of dissonance between a particular policy and its overall defense doctrine, or ethic. Soldiers might articulate discomfort in carrying out a particular mission, or the number of conscientious objectors may rise. In a country in which conscientious objection is previously unheard of, the founding of such a movement will therefore signal an even higher degree of dissonance between behavior and institutional role-identity. In examining foreign-policy shifts, the role of the military is crucial in representing the degree of concordance between national role-identity and foreign policy. In states where the military has particular salience for establishing national identitythose states with mandatory and universal conscription, for instancethat institution will be particularly salient.

Their dependence on pragmatism to justify unrealistic internal link chains and counter psychological methods creates the worst type of moral tunnel vision in which we become incapable of understanding the carnage of our ideology this makes ethics impossible.

Davis, 2006 (Walter A., professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Death's Dream Kingdom pg.47-48)

But it's always a good idea when seeking an explanation of the human motives behind actions to stick with the empirical. With stated intentions and official rationales. Otherwise we give ourselves over to psychobabble. Despite official denial by the Department of Defense that DU is harmful, a series of explanations are now in place to account for the development and use of DU weapons. DU is cost-effective, militarily efficient, and turns to productive use a waste product we'd otherwise have to dispose of at great cost. In a variety of ways for the past two days: "We who leave here in sorrow know that we will one day be reunited with her in joy." My concern here is not with the ontological status of this preposterous belief, but with its psychological function as a guarantee that offers human beings a way to deprive death of its finality. And the terror that prospect entails. The function of guarantees is to enable human beings to bear events and contingencies that would otherwise be too traumatic. There is much that we can face apparently only by denying. Such perhaps is one accurate estimation of what it means lo be a human being, to remain a child of one's needs and desires disguising that fact in the form of beliefs and ideas. The primary purpose of religion, philosophy, and culture has been to provide conceptual, psychological, and emotional guarantees so I hat traumatic events become part of a larger framework that assures the realization of our hopes and dreams. Without such supports, most people supposedly would find life unlivable. Through the ministry of the guarantees we banish those thoughts and feelings that we are convinced would deprive life of meaning, plunging us into despair. Experience, accordingly, becomes the movement from and to the affirmation of the guarantees through their imposition on events. The main line of Western philosophy can most profitably be seen as I series of efforts to provide a ground for the guarantees. That effort achieves one of its culminations in Hegel who defined the purpose of philosophy as the elimination of the contingent. As father of the philosophy of history, he offered that new discipline a single goal: to demonstrate that the rational is real and the real rational; that history is the story of progress, liberty, the realization of a universal humanity Or, to put it in vulgar terms, democracy and civilization are on the march and will soon sweep the entire Middle East. In order to triumph over the contingencies of existencedoubt about oneself, one's place in the world, and one's final endmany guarantees are needed. Moreover, they must form a system of reinforcing beliefs such that if one guarantee is threatened other guarantees come in to fill the breach. Thereby the function of the system as a whole is assured. Within the system of guarantees one guarantee, however, is superordinate. The belief that human nature is basically good. As animal rationale we are endowed with an ahistorical essence that cannot be lost. Evil is an aberration. Consequently, I here's always reason for hope and the belief that no matter how bad things get we'll always find a way to recover everything that I lie guarantees assure. Psyche. It's all a matter of pragmatic efficiency with a little capitalist profit motive thrown in for good measure. There's only one thing wrong with this explanation. It leaves out the basis for the calculus. There's every reason to use DU and no reason not to use it if, and only if, one rationale informs all decisions. How to maximize death, regardless of consequences or alternatives. Introduce any countervailing motives and the entire chain of decisions becomes questionable. Conscious, stated intentions then reveal themselves as functions of something else that has been conveniently rendered unconscious. What looks like a purely pragmatic matter devoid of psychological motives now reveals the opposite: the fact that Thanatos so inhabits the system that the absence of anything opposed to it "goes without saying." Thanatos has become what Wittgenstein called a "form of life,"7 a way of being so deeply rooted that it operates automatically, habitually, and of necessity. It has become a collective unconscious. And as such it is no longer accessible to those whose intentions conceal and reveal it. The reason for sticking with the empirical is now clear. There is something insane in the empirical. That is what the historian must uncover. Before we ask ourselves how this situation came to pass we need to ask another question. For it's easy to claim we don't know about such things because the media refuses to tell us about them. There's another reason for our ignorance, however, and it's the one we need to confront. I refer to the possibility that we choose our ignorance because otherwise we'd lose the system of guarantees we depend on for our identity and our understanding of history. As Barbara Bush put it in telling Diane Sawyer why she doesn't watch the news: "Why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how many, what day it's gonna happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it's, it's not relevant. So, why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"8 It would be easy to deride Mrs. Bush, to congratulate oneself on not sharing her attitude. What I hope to show, however, is that on an essential level, one determinative in the last instance, we are in full agreement with her and delude ourselves as long as we think otherwise.

IR SPECIFIC The method of the affirmative best supplements our understanding of international relations by including elements that are absent in normal policy examinations of international relations.

Sucharov, 2005 (Mira M., assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University, The International Self: Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, pg 18-20)

It has long been argued that even within the confines of rational-choice approaches, the nature of a decision-maker's preferences cannot be assumed a priori, and indeed their distinctiveness derives from factors ranging from emotions to personality to the selective use of historical analogies. Emotion, in short, can be considered the sine qua non of social life, a realization that has recently begun to permeate international relations theory. Moreover, the concept of the unconscious that anchors psychoanalysis can illuminate the question of why an individual experiences a sense of dissonance when her actions do not conform to her identity; the mechanism by which the dissonance between action and identity can become unbearable; and therefore why humans experience the need to match the two. The unconscious is that aspect of the self that remains the most untapped yet potentially the most satisfying determinant of action, coming, as it does, early in the causal chain. At its most basic, the unconscious is simply the repository for those characteristics that an actor fears adopting; in other words, "action fantasies" that the actor despises but can plausibly entertain. This fundamental tension between the feared and the imaginable is what normally keeps these fantasies in check, and is what makes the unconscious so potentially powerful as an explanatory tool. And while the unconscious is an admittedly contested concept, scholars from various fields have issued tentative calls for its exploration, and convincing deductive and empirical research certainly justify its consideration. One theoretical perspective that has been criticized for ignoring the unconscious is sociology's symbolic interactionism, an approach that underpins constructivism in international relations. Part of the reason for the tension between sociology, including symbolic interactionism, and psychoanalysis arguably lies in an antiquated understanding of psychology: the false belief that to employ psychology as an explanatory approach, one must ignore the impact that one's social environment has on one's personality, self-image, and behavior. However, contemporary psychoanalysis presents a view of the self that is more relational than what Freudian drive theory had suggested. A psychoanalytic approach does not have to assume that unconscious or otherwise emotional factors arise from the actor independent of the shared understandings that define the social environment. Admitting an explanatory role for the unconscious therefore does not imply a rejection of intersubjectivity, mutual-constitution, or any of the other organizing principles of sociology and constructivism. Rather, it simply means that ideas held in the unconscious serve as one filter through which actors interpret social interaction. The unconscious, therefore, may be understood either as one element of agency that the actor brings to interpreting his social script, or as itself the product of social forces that interpret and constrain action. The first perspective assumes that agency does not have to be conscious to be meaningful; agency at its most basic can simply imply action, and intentionality can therefore encompass an unconscious component. The second view means that the unconscious does not have to be understood as a pre-wired component of the unit that in turn shapes behavior; rather it can be viewed as an emergent and mediating phenomenon. We can therefore understand cognition as being inherently situated within social processes. This is consistent with a relational view of social life, and yet it is an important theoretical addition to the prevailing wisdom in international relations about how social understandings ultimately shape behavior. A final contribution that psychoanalysis can make to our understanding of international relationsand conflict resolution in particularis its assumption that entrenched behavior patterns can be altered through cognitive and emotional insight. In addition to challenging the static conception of "human nature" that underpinned classical realism (arguably the first theory of international relations) and that provided a rather pessimistic view of human affairs, this assumption is a valuable addition to any theory of international relations in which the prevailing theories of actionmaterial power in the case of states, polarity in the case of state systemsare difficult, if not impossible to manipulate. As a result, many of the most prominent international relations theories have lacked meaningful policy implications. Conversely, psychoanalytic theory suggests tools for ameliorating some of the most pressing global problems, including protracted conflict and war. While some psychoanalytically based conflict-resolution approaches use the focus-group format to simulate the healing function of the therapy setting, this book demonstrates that the gaining of conscious insight into one's role deviationa prerequisite for policy changecan come about through real-life international interaction that requires neither a skilled conflict practitioner nor the willingness of elites to participate in such an exercise. Rather, under certain conditions, role conflict can prompt domestic and international elements to hold a "mirror" to the face of elites, resulting in a collective cognitive dissonance that can lead to policy change. This mirror can take a number of formsacts of protest by domestic groups, media coverage, and actions by allies, adversaries or international structures. These sources will be discussed further.

IR SPECIFIC What their internal links consider to be self-interest for a state doesnt actually exist. States are not sentient. Instead, they are composed by a collection of minds that act in self-interest, which means that psychoanalytic evaluation of the self is a prior question to understanding the interests of the state.

Sucharov, 2005 (Mira M., assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University, The International Self: Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, pg 21-22)

Rather than referring to a notion of collective selfhood that is shared by multiple states- as some constructivist theorists of "collective identity" would maintainthe title of this book, "the international self," is meant to suggest not only that each state possesses a distinctive identity, but that this identity develops out of the state's relationship with other international actors. This concept also implies that decisions emanating from the polity are derived from a process not simply the sum of the state's "parts." Yet while we have already shown that psychoanalysis can accommodate a role for environmental processes in shaping behavior, we still need to be aware of the risks of anthropomorphizing the state, a practice that gets to the heart of the debate between two analytical positions that cut across the social sciences: methodological individualism and holism. While methodological individualism views social life as the product of actions taken by individuals, holism understands the group to be a meaningful unit in and of itself. Yet, to an extent, the debate between the two perspectives is already fixed. While the holists have in their favor a precedent of semantic habitwe tend to anthropomorphize the state in everyday speech more often than not (e.g., "Washington decided to wage war against al-Qaeda")methodological individualism is allied with the rich literature of rational choice, and more prosaically the commonsense discomfort that arises when we ascribe human characteristics to things, including groups. Groups do not have "minds" any more than do other social facts, and group behavior is, after all, the product of individuals acting on the group's behalf. Finally, given the presence of disparate individuals and subgroups constituting any society, it can be misleading to attribute a single group "consciousness" to a political entity. In a foreign-policy context, accordingly, adherents of this view would focus on elite attitudes, bureaucratic politics, and/or interest group activities to tease out the causal relationship between Intentions and outcomes. Yet a strong case can be made for the emergent properties of states and their policy processes: something happens between the point at which citizens articulate preferences and those preferences are translated into policies. Insofar as elite decisions do not always reflect the opinion of the majority, there remains some degree of independent agency that may very well accrue to the state as a whole. Under this reasoning, it would be plausible to assert the existence of an overarching group self, as Alexander Wendt does when he claims that "states are people too." In addition to the views of significant strands of psychoanalytic thought (which would not necessarily be expected to assume that units other than the individual can be psychoanalyzed), the idea of a group self enjoys far-reaching support across the social sciencesinternational relations included. This includes neorealism's assumption that the state is a unitary actor, the Collective self hood implied by social identity theory, the concept of "political culture," early psychoanalytic assumptions about the group, as well as studies on obedience, group-think, and the "crowd" phenomenon. There is a reason why scholars are drawn to the group as a unit of analysiswitness anthropologists' concern with tribes and civilizations, sociologists' focus on street gangs and societies, and political scientists' emphasis on states and transnational actors. Group behavior and individual behavior are not necessarily identical. Nor can an individual be expected to behave the same way in the context of a group as he or she would alone. Moreover, constructivism goes so far as to assume the possibility of shared norms across states, a claim that has enjoyed much empirical support during the first active decade of constructivist research. It is much more defensible to argue the existence of a collective identity within a state, the boundaries of which contain degrees of centralized media, language, and other discursive channels for cultural dissemination, and which prescribe the roles that the group's members are expected to perform within the context of that group. And if different subgroups within the state disseminate disparate narratives, we can assume that the most dominant group within society (as defined by some combination of ethnicity, class, or gender) has custody over a single, consequential 'dominant' narrative. Finally, even if we choose to ascribe a state's national ethos to its elites, we need to remember that state leaders are the product of the society in which they were reared. This view would effectively mitigate the tension between elite- and mass-level phenomena in international relations, since both elites and masses are socialized by the overarching structure of the collective.

A2 DisadvantagesThe internal links dependence on rationality only serves to protect us from the unknown that the future holds. This ultimately reduces all forms of knowledge to something that can be calculated, which ensures vi