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INDEX

VICTIMIZATION.................................................................................................................................................31NC SHELL......................................................................................................................................................................................3

CAPITALISM........................................................................................................................................................51NC SHELL......................................................................................................................................................................................5GENERIC LINK (IDEOLOGY)....................................................................................................................................................8GENERIC LINK..............................................................................................................................................................................9ENERGY POLICY LINK.............................................................................................................................................................11GLOBAL WARMING POLICY LINK.......................................................................................................................................12NATURAL DISASTER LINK......................................................................................................................................................13POSTMODERN AFF LINK.........................................................................................................................................................142NC OR LONG SHELL IMPACT...............................................................................................................................................15GENOCIDE IMPACT...................................................................................................................................................................17AUTOCOLONIZATION IMPACT.............................................................................................................................................19BIOPOWER IMPACT **.............................................................................................................................................................20ANNIHILATION IMPACT..........................................................................................................................................................22AIDS IMPACT...............................................................................................................................................................................23ALT SOLVES ENVIRO CATASTROPHE CASE.....................................................................................................................24AT: HUMAN NATURE = AGGRESSIVE/SELFISH................................................................................................................26MUST BE ECON & POLITICS...................................................................................................................................................27

ANSWERS TO:...................................................................................................................................................28AT: PERM......................................................................................................................................................................................28AT: RELATIVISM DENIES HOLOCAUST..............................................................................................................................31AT: HOLOCAUST TRIVIALIZATION.....................................................................................................................................32AT: MUST ACT / HELP PEOPLE..............................................................................................................................................33

ALTERNATIVES................................................................................................................................................34TRAVERSING THE FANTASY..................................................................................................................................................34REPEAT THE PAST.....................................................................................................................................................................35

REPEATING LENIN......................................................................................................................................36REPEAT LENIN ALTERNATIVE.............................................................................................................................................36MUST REPEAT LENIN...............................................................................................................................................................37“LENIN” KEY...............................................................................................................................................................................38AT: LENIN BAD............................................................................................................................................................................39

THINGS THAT ARE BAD.................................................................................................................................40ROLE-PLAYING BAD.................................................................................................................................................................40FEMINISM KRITIK BAD...........................................................................................................................................................41ELIMINATION / PROHIBITION BAD.....................................................................................................................................42ECO-KRITIKS BAD.....................................................................................................................................................................46PROTEST BAD..............................................................................................................................................................................47KRITIKAL AFF BAD...................................................................................................................................................................49ELIMINATING OPPRESSOR BAD...........................................................................................................................................50ANTI-COLONIALISM BAD........................................................................................................................................................51MULTICULTURALISM BAD.....................................................................................................................................................52POSTMODERNISM BAD............................................................................................................................................................54LEGAL ACTION BAD.................................................................................................................................................................55DEPOLITICIZATION BAD........................................................................................................................................................56PROJECTING BLAME ONTO THE SYSTEM BAD...............................................................................................................57KRISHNA BAD..............................................................................................................................................................................58

THINGS THAT ARE GOOD.............................................................................................................................59UTOPIAN DEBATE ALTERNATIVES ARE GOOD...............................................................................................................59IDEALISM GOOD........................................................................................................................................................................60EXCLUSION IN DEBATE GOOD..............................................................................................................................................61POLITICIZING ECON GOOD - SOLVES ECOLOGY...........................................................................................................62

POLITICS DISAD...............................................................................................................................................63FLIP FLOPS INCREASE POPULARITY..................................................................................................................................63

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AFF - GENERIC KRITIK LINK TURN....................................................................................................................................64AFF = KRITIK ALTERNATIVE................................................................................................................................................65AFF AT: COOPTION...................................................................................................................................................................66AFF - PERM SOLVES – EXCESS RESISTANCE....................................................................................................................68AFF- STICK THE LETTER OF THE LAW..............................................................................................................................69AFF – ZIZEK HOMOGENIZES.................................................................................................................................................71AFF – ZIZEK’S VAGUE ALT CAN’T BE IMPLEMENTED.................................................................................................72AFF – AT: FANTASY...................................................................................................................................................................73AFF – AT: PSYCHOANALYSIS.................................................................................................................................................74AFF – ZIZEK = UNSUPPORTED ASSERTIONS.....................................................................................................................75AFF – ZIZEK HOMOGENIZES.................................................................................................................................................79AFF – ZIZEK WRONGLY UNIVERSALIZES.............................................................................................................................80

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VICTIMIZATION1NC SHELL

Characterizing the Other as a victim depoliticizes by reducing the Other to a subject of stark suffering. As soon as the Other begins to assert autonomy, the fantasy of victimhood disintegrates and it becomes a threat to the logic of capitalism, justifying extermination

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CAPITALISM1NC SHELL

A. The affirmative’s demand for political reform creates a dialectic that sustains the industrialist economic system.Zizek ‘97 [by Slavoj Zizek, “Repeating Lenin.” http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm.]

Today, we already can discern the signs of a kind of general unease - recall the series of events usually listed under the name of "Seattle." The 10 years honeymoon of the triumphant global capitalism is over, the long-overdue "seven years itch" is here - witness the panicky reactions of the big media, which - from the Time magazine to CNN - all of a sudden started to warn about the Marxists manipulating the crowd of the "honest" protesters. The problem is now the strictly Leninist one - how to ACTUALIZE the media's accusations: how to invent the organizational structure which will confer on this unrest the FORM of the universal political demand. Otherwise, the momentum will be lost, and what will remain is the marginal disturbance, perhaps organized as a new Greenpeace, with certain efficiency, but also strictly limited goals, marketing strategy, etc. In other words, the key "Leninist" lesson today is: politics without the organizational FORM of the party is politics without politics, so the answer to those who want just the (quite adequately named) "New SOCIAL Movements" is the same as the answer of the Jacobins to the Girondin compromisers: "You want revolution without a revolution!" Today's blockade is that there are two ways open for the socio-political engagement: either play the game of the system, engage in the "long march through the institutions," or get active in new social movements, from feminism through ecology to anti-racism. And, again, the limit of these movements is that they are not POLITICAL in the sense of the Universal Singular: they are "one issue movements" which lack the dimension of the universality, i.e. they do not relate to the social TOTALITY.

Here, Lenin's reproach to liberals is crucial: they only EXPLOIT the working classes' discontent to strengthen their position vis-a-vis the conservatives, instead of identifying with it to the end. 52 Is this also not the case with today's Left liberals? They like to evoke racism, ecology, workers' grievances, etc., to score points over the conservatives WITHOUT ENDANGERING THE SYSTEM. Recall how, in Seattle, Bill Clinton himself deftly referred to the protesters on the streets outside, reminding the gathered leaders inside the guarded palaces that they should listen to the message of the demonstrators (the message which, of course, Clinton interpreted, depriving it of its subversive sting attributed to the dangerous extremists introducing chaos and violence into the majority of peaceful protesters). It's the same with all New Social Movements, up to the Zapatistas in Chiapas: the systemic politics is always ready to "listen to their demands," depriving them of their proper political sting. The system is by definition ecumenical, open, tolerant, ready to "listen" to all - even if one insist on one's demands, they are deprived of their universal political sting by the very form of negotiation. The true Third Way we have to look for is this third way between the institutionalized parliamentary politics and the new social movements.

The ultimate answer to the reproach that the radical Left proposals are utopian should thus be that, today, the true utopia is the belief that the present liberal-democratic capitalist consensus could go on indefinitely, without radical changes. We are thus back at the old '68 motto "Soyons realistes, demandons l'impossible!": in order to be truly a "realist," one must consider breaking out of the constraints of what appears "possible" (or, as we usually out it, "feasible").

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B. Capitalism commodifies the relationship between people, making genocide and nuclear war inevitable. The outcome of such a process can be seen in the bureaucratic administration of the Final SolutionInternationalist Perspective ‘00 [by Interenationalist Perspective, “Capitalism and Genocide.” Issue #36. Spring 2000.]

The phenomenon of reification, inherent in the commodity-form, and its tendential penetration into the whole of social existence, which Lukács was one of the first to analyze, is a hallmark of the real domination of capital: "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." Reification, the seeming transformation of social relations into relations between things, has as one of its outcomes what the German-Jewish thinker H.G.Adler designated as "the administered man" [Der verwaltete Mensch]. For Adler, when human beings are administered, they are treated as things, thereby clearing the way for their removal or elimination by genocide. The outcome of such a process can be seen in the bureaucractic administration of the Final Solution, in which the organization of genocide was the responsibility of desk killers like Adolf Eichmann who could zealously administer a system of mass murder while displaying no particular hatred for his victims, no great ideological passion for his project, and no sense that those who went to the gas chambers were human beings and not things. The features of the desk killer, in the person of Eichmann, have been clearly delineated by Hannah Arendt. He is the high-level functionary in a vast bureaucratic organization who does his killing from behind a desk, from which he rationally plans and organizes mass murder; treating it as simply a technical task, no different than the problem of transporting scrap metal. The desk killer is the quintessential bureaucrat functioning according to the imperatives of the death-world. As a human type, the desk killer, that embodiment of the triumph of instrumental reason, has become a vital part of the state apparatus of late capitalism.

Here, the Lukácsian concept of reification, the Adlerian concept of the administered man, and the Arendtian portrait of the desk killer, can be joined to Martin Heidegger's concept of das Gestell, enframing, in which everything real, all beings, including humans, are treated as so much Bestand, standing-reserve or raw material, to be manipulated at will. This reduction of humans to a raw material is the antechamber to a world in which they can become so many waste products to be discarded or turned into ashes in the gas chambers of Auschwitz or at ground zero at Hiroshima.

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C. Vote negative to reject capitalism.

In a proper revolutionary breakthrough, the utopian future is neither simply fully realized nor simply evoked as a distant promise – it is a unique suspension of temporality in which we can act AS IF the future utopia is just there to be grabbed.Zizek ‘97 [by Slavoj Zizek, “Repeating Lenin.” http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm.]

Which, then, is the criterion of the political act? Success as such clearly doesn't count, even if we define it in the dialectical way of Merleau-Ponty, as the wager that future will retroactively redeem our present horrible acts (this is how, in his Humanism and Terror, Merleau-Ponty provided one of the more intelligent justifications of the Stalinist terror: retroactively, it will become justified if its final outcome will be true freedom)53; neither does the reference to some abstract-universal ethical norms. The only criteria is the absolutely INHERENT one: that of the ENACTED UTOPIA. In a proper revolutionary breakthrough, the utopian future is neither simply fully realized, present, nor simply evoked as a distant promise which justified present violence - it is rather as if, in a unique suspension of temporality, in the short-circuit between the present and the future, we are - as if by Grace - for a brief time allowed to act AS IF the utopian future is (not yet fully here, but) already at hand, just there to be grabbed. Revolution is not experienced as a present hardship we have to endure for the happiness and freedom of the future generations, but as the present hardship over which this future happiness and freedom already cast their shadow - in it, we ALREADY ARE FREE WHILE FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM, we ALREADY ARE HAPPY WHILE FIGHTING FOR HAPPINESS, no matter how difficult the circumstances. Revolution is not a Merlo-Pontyan wager, an act suspended in the futur anterieur, to be legitimized or delegitimized by the long term outcome of the present acts; it is as it were ITS OWN ONTOLOGICAL PROOF, an immediate index of its own truth.

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GENERIC LINK (IDEOLOGY)

At the center of ideology is impossibility. Because it always needs a reason why the order of Good can’t fulfill its ultimate goal, a spectral object is created to explain away the failure of ideology to realize its goal at a particular time. The harms outlined by the 1AC are nothing more than the spectral object of liberal democratic capitalist order.

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GENERIC LINK

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GENERIC LINK

The plan’s focus on harms outside the class struggle channels the working class away from revolution – this establishes the ideological hegemony of CapitalInternationalist Perspective ‘00 [by Interenationalist Perspective, “Capitalism and Genocide.” Issue #36. Spring 2000.]

One way in which this ideological hegemony of capital is established over broad strata of the population, including sectors of the working class, is by channeling the disatisfaction and discontent of the mass of the population with the monstrous impact of capitalism upon their lives (subjection to the machine, reduction to the status of a "thing", at the point of production, insecurity and poverty as features of daily life, the overall social process of atomization and massification, etc.), away from any struggle to establish a human Gemeinwesen, communism. Capitalist hegemony entails the ability to divert that very disatisfaction into the quest for a "pure community", based on hatred and rage directed not at capital, but at the Other, at alterity itself, at those marginal social groups which are designated a danger to the life of the nation, and its population.

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ENERGY POLICY LINK

Radical action is required to curb environmental exploitation – the plan’s incremental change is merely “business as usual”Doyle & McEachern ’98 [by Timothy Doyle and Doug McEachern. Environmental and Politics. Timothy Doyle is a Senior Lecturer at the Mawson Graduate Centre for Environmental Studies (University of Adelaide). Doug McEachern is Professor of Politics at the University of Adelaide. 1998 pg 36]

There is little radicalism in the position of those who advocate either resistance or accommodation to environmental concern. Their actions combine to promote, at most, a slow pace of environmental reform with a great emphasis on broad policy statements, policy documents and the creation of ‘new’ institutions to look after environmental issues. Very few of these initiatives, with the possible exception of those sponsored by the United Nations Environmental Programme, came from an environmental awareness that was not shaped by a response to a vigorous environmental politics generated by far more radical environmental movements. Environmentalists involved in these movements argue that green incremental change to ‘business as usual’ is not enough. They demand more deep-seated, widespread change in order to attain their environmental objectives. To understand the wide variety of these radical environmental positions, it is useful to consider the following five positions: deep ecology; social ecology; eco-socialism; ecological post-modernism; and eco-feminism. It is not possible, in the space available, to do much more than sketch the main features of these different arguments. There are very good surveys and arguments about green political theory that can be consulted for further details (Dobson 1995; Eckersley 1992; Goodwin 1992; Merchant, 1992).

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GLOBAL WARMING POLICY LINK

Plan gives the illusion that we can manage climate predictably by adjusting a few factors. This neo-colonialist stance ignores global exploitationStott 2003 [by Philip Stott, “Power Poverty and Climate Colonialism” The Scientific Alliance. Philip Stott is Professor Emeritus of Biogeography at University of London. Aug 8, 2003. http://www.scientific-alliance.com/opinions/opinions_members_write/powerpovertyand.htm]

While Europe fails to live up to its rhetoric on controlling climate change, the developing world continues to lack much-needed power.Being politically correct about the environment is warping energy policy. The real issue with sustainable energy is not global warming and climate change. It is eradicating energy poverty, especially in the developing world. The predication of world energy policy on unpredictable environmental concerns relating to so-called greenhouse gas emissions is potentially disastrous, because it could slow economic demand in developed countries and deny much-needed energy expansion in developing countries. The obsession of the rich north with a delusion that we can manage climate predictably, by trying to adjust one or two factors out of the millions involved is arguably a neo-colonialism too far.Energy policy should always be predicated on the provision of an effective energy supply for economic growth for everyone.

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NATURAL DISASTER LINK

Identifying natural threats simply stages a fantasy to mask competitive capitalist societyZizek ‘97 [by Slavoj Zizek, “Repeating Lenin.” http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm.]

The underlying irony is that, in our individualistic competitive society, the most useless advice concerns survival in extreme physical situations - what one effectively needs is the very opposite, the Dale Carnegie type of books which tell us how to win over (manipulate) other people: the situations rendered in The Worst-Case Scenario lack any symbolic dimension, they reduce us to pure survival machines. In short, The Worst-Case Scenario became a best-seller for the very same reason Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm, the story (and the movie) about the struggle for survival of a fishing vessel caught in the "storm of the century" east of the Canadian coast in 1991, became one: they both stage the fantasy of the pure encounter with a natural threat in which the socio-symbolic dimension is suspended. In a way, The Perfect Storm even provides the secret utopian background of The Worst-Case Scenario: it is only in such extreme situations that an authentic intersubjective community, held together by solidarity, can emerge. Let us not forget that The Perfect Storm is ultimately the book about the solidarity of a small working class collective! The humorous appeal of The Worst-Case Scenario can thus be read as bearing witness to our utter alienation from nature, exemplified by the shortage of contact with "real life" dangers.

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POSTMODERN AFF LINK

Critical theory fosters global capitalism because it renders capitalism as a world system unspeakable, deeming such an idea “essentialist.” This ensures that exploitation is here to stayZizek ‘00 [by Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. Pg 217-218.]

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2NC OR LONG SHELL IMPACT

Capitalism shatters the bonds of custom and tradition, and replaces them with the exchange mechanism. This dissociation amongst people creates the psychological desire for a sense of community which is fulfilled by the State capitalist machine. Unfortunately, this false sense of belonging is founded upon exclusion in which annihilation of the Other becomes not only a goal but another process which reifies Capital’s stronghold. This cycle underlies all war and violence.Internationalist Perspective ‘00 [by Interenationalist Perspective, “Capitalism and Genocide.” Issue #36. Spring 2000.]

One of the most dramatic effects of the inexorable penetration of the law of value into every pore of social life, and geographically across the face of the whole planet, has been the destruction of all primitive, organic, and pre-capitalist communities. Capitalism, as Marx and Engels pointed out in the Communist Manifesto, shatters the bonds of immemorial custom and tradition, replacing them with its exchange mechanism and contract. While Marx and Engels stressed the positive features of this development in the Manifesto, we cannot ignore its negative side, particularly in light of the fact that the path to a human Gemeinwesen has so far been successfully blocked by capital, with disastrous consequences for the human species. The negative side of that development includes the relentless process of atomization, leaving in its wake an ever growing mass of rootless individuals, for whom the only human contact is by way of the cash nexus. Those who have been uprooted geographically, economically, politically, and culturally, are frequently left with a powerful longing for their lost communities (even where those communities were hierarchically organized and based on inequality), for the certainties and "truths" of the past, which are idealized the more frustrating, unsatisfying, and insecure, the world of capital becomes. Such longings are most powerfully felt within what Ernst Bloch has termed non-synchronous strata and classes. These are stata and classes whose material or mental conditions of life are linked to a past mode of production, who exist economically or culturally in the past, even as they chronologically dwell in the present. In contrast to the two historic classes in the capitalist mode of production, the bourgeoisie and proletariat, which are synchronous, the products of the capitalist present, these non-synchronous strata include the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie, and -- by virtue of their mental or cultural state -- youth and white-collar workers. In my view, Bloch's understanding of non-synchronicity needs to be extended to segments of the working class, in particular those strata of the blue-collar proletariat which are no longer materially synchronous with the high-tech production process upon which late capitalism rests, and the mass of workers ejected from the production process by the rising organic composition of capital and its comcomitant down-sizing. In addition, the even greater mass of peasants streaming into the shanty towns around the great commercial and industrial metropolitan centers of the world, are also characterized by their non-synchronicity, their inability to be incorporated into the hyper-modern cycle of capital accumulation. Moreover, all of these strata too are subject to a growing nostalgia for the past, a longing for community, including the blue-collar communities and their institutional networks which were one of the features of the social landscape of capitalism earlier in the twentieth century.

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However, no matter how powerful this nostalgia for past community becomes, it cannot be satisfied. The organic communities of the past cannot be recreated; their destruction by capital is irreversible. At the same time, the path to a future Gemeinwesen, to which the cultural material and longings embodied in the non-synchronous classes and strata can make a signal contribution, according to Bloch, remains obstructed by the power of capital. So long as this is the case, the genuine longing for community of masses of people, and especially the nostalgia for past communities especially felt by the non-synchronous strata and classes, including the newly non-synchronous elements which I have just argued must be added to them, leaves them exposed to the lure of a "pure community" ideologically constructed by capital itself. In place of real organic and communal bonds, in such an ideologically constructed pure community, a racial, ethnic, or religious identification is merely superimposed on the existing condition of atomization in which the mass of the population finds itself. In addition to providing some gratification for the longing for community animating broad strata of the population, such a pure community can also provide an ideological bond which ties the bulk of the population to the capitalist state on the basis of a race, ethnicity, or religion which it shares with the ruling class. This latter is extremely important to capital, because the atomization which it has brought about not only leaves the mass of humanity bereft, but also leaves the ruling class itself vulnerable because it lacks any basis upon which it can mobilize the population, physically or ideologically. The basis upon which such a pure community is constituted, race, nationality, religion, even a categorization by "class" in the Stalinist world, necessarily means the exclusion of those categories of the population which do not conform to the criteria for inclusion, the embodiments of alterity, even while they inhabit the same geographical space as the members of the pure community. Those excluded, the "races" on the other side of the biological continuum, to use Foucauldian terminology, the Other, become alien elements within an otherwise homogeneous world of the pure community. As a threat to its very existence, the role of this Other is to become the scapegoat for the inability of the pure community to provide authentic communal bonds between people, for its abject failure to overcome the alienation that is a hallmark of a reified world. The Jew in Nazi Germany, the Kulak in Stalinist Russia, the Tutsi in Rwanda, Muslims in Bosnia, blacks in the US, the Albanian or the Serb in Kosovo, the Arab in France, the Turk in contemporary Germany, the Bahai in Iran, for example, become the embodiment of alterity, and the target against which the hatred of the members of the pure community is directed. The more crisis ridden a society becomes, the greater the need to find an appropriate scapegoat; the more urgent the need for mass mobilization behind the integral state, the more imperious the need to focus rage against the Other. In an extreme situation of social crisis and political turmoil, the demonization and victimization of the Other can lead to his (mass) murder. In the absence of a working class conscious of its historic task and possibilities, this hatred of alterity which permits capital to mobilize the population in defense of the pure community, can become its own impetus to genocide. The immanent tendencies of the capitalist mode of production which propel it towards a catastrophic economic crisis, also drive it towards mass murder and genocide. In that sense, the death-world, and the prospect of an Endzeit cannot be separated from the continued existence of humanity's subordination to the law of value. Reification, the overmanned world, bio-politics, state racism, the constitution of a pure community directed against alterity, each of them features of the economic and ideological topography of the real domination of capital, create the possibility and the need for genocide. We should have no doubt that the survival of capitalism into this new millenium will entail more and more frequent recourse to mass murder.

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GENOCIDE IMPACT

Mass death and genocide is a function of the capitalist mode of productionInternationalist Perspective ‘00 [by Interenationalist Perspective, “Capitalism and Genocide.” Issue #36. Spring 2000.]

Mass death, and genocide, the deliberate and systematic extermination of whole groups of human beings, have become an integral part of the social landscape of capitalism in its phase of decadence. Auschwitz, Kolyma, and Hiroshima are not merely the names of discrete sites where human beings have been subjected to forms of industrialized mass death, but synecdoches for the death-world that is a component of the capitalist mode of production in this epoch. In that sense, I want to argue that the Holocaust, for example, was not a Jewish catastrophe, nor an atavistic reversion to the barbarism of a past epoch, but rather an event produced by the unfolding of the logic of capitalism itself. Moreover, Auschwitz, Kolyma, and Hiroshima are not "past", but rather futural events, objective-real possibilities on the Front of history, to use concepts first articulated by the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch. The ethnic cleansing which has been unleashed in Bosnia and Kosovo, the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, the mass death to which Chechnya has been subjected, the prospect for a nuclear war on the Indian sub-continent, are so many examples of the future which awaits the human species as the capitalist mode of production enters a new millenium. Indeed, it is just such a death-world that constitutes the meaning of one pole of the historic alternative which Rosa Luxemburg first posed in the midst of the slaughter inflicted on masses of conscripts during World War I: socialism or barbarism!

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GENOCIDE IMPACT

Modern capitalism creates the necessity for mass murder, inserting the industrial extermination of whole groups of people into the very logic of CapitalInternationalist Perspective ‘00 [by Interenationalist Perspective, “Capitalism and Genocide.” Issue #36. Spring 2000.]

For Anders, the first industrial revolution introduced the machine with its own source of power as a means of production, while the second industrial revolution saw the extension of commodity production to the whole of society, and the subordination of man to the machine. According to Anders, the third industrial revolution, in the epoch of which humanity now lives, has made humans obsolete, preparing the way for their replacement by machines, and the end of history (Endzeit). For Anders, the Holocaust marked the first attempt at the systematic extermination of a whole group of people by industrial means, opening the way for the extension of the process of extermination to virtually the whole of the human species; a stage which he designates as "post-civilized cannibalism" [postzivilisatorischen Kannibalismus], in which the world is "overmanned", and in which Hiroshima marks the point at which "humanity as a whole is eliminatable"[tötbar]. Anders's philosophy of technology is unabashedly pessimistic, leaving virtually no room for Marxist hope (communist revolution). Nonetheless, his vision of a totally reified world, and technology as the subject of history, culminating in an Endzeit, corresponds to one side of the dialectic of socialism or barbarism which presides over the present epoch. Moreover, Anders's concept of an overmanned world can be fruitfully linked to the immanent tendency of the law of value to generate an ever higher organic composition of capital, culminating in the present stage of automation, robotics, computers, and information technology, on the bases of which ever larger masses of living labor are ejected from the process of production, and, indeed, from the cycle of accumulation as a whole, ceasing to be -- even potentially -- a productive force, a source of exchange-value, in order to become an insuperable burden for capital, a dead weight, which, so long as it lives and breathes, threatens its profitability. This "obsolescence of man" can at the level of total capital thereby create the necessity for mass murder; inserting the industrial extermination of whole groups of people into the very logic of capital: genocide as the apotheosis of instrumental reason! Reason transmogrified into the nihilistic engine of destruction which shapes the late capitalist world.

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AUTOCOLONIZATION IMPACT

The multinational functioning of capitalism exhibits ‘autocolonization’ – the company cuts its umbilical cord with its country of origin and exploits everywhereZizek ‘00 [by Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. Pg 215-216.]

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BIOPOWER IMPACT **

Capitalism encapsulates both conditions of bio-power: the stratification of the biological and the birth of state racism. This makes extinction inevitable.Internationalist Perspective ‘00 [by Interenationalist Perspective, “Capitalism and Genocide.” Issue #36. Spring 2000.]

Michel Foucault's concept of bio-power can also be refunctioned to explicitly link it to the basic tendencies of the development of capitalism, in which case it provides a point of intersection between the triumph of the real domination of capital economically, and the political and ideological transformation of capitalist rule, while at the same time making it possible to grasp those features of capital which propel it in the direction of genocide. The extension of the law of value into every sphere of human existence, the culminating point of the real domination of capital, is marked by the subordination of the biological realm itself to the logic of capital. This stage corresponds to what Foucault designates as bio-politics, which encapsulates both the "statification of the biological", and the "birth of state racism". Bio-politics entails the positive power to administer, manage, and regulate the intimate details of the life -- and death -- of whole populations in the form of technologies of domination: "In concrete terms ... this power over life evolved in two basic forms ... they constituted ... two poles of development linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations. One of these poles ... centered on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls, all this was ensured by the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the human body. The second ... focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a bio-politics of the population." Such a bio-politics represents the subjugation of biological life in its diverse human forms to the imperatives of the law of value. It allows capital to mobilize all the human resources of the nation in the service of its expansion and aggrandizement, economic and military. The other side of bio-politics, of this power over life, for Foucault, is what he terms "thanatopolitics," entailing an awesome power to inflict mass death, both on the population of one's enemy, and on one's own population: "the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual's continued existence. .... If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers ... it is because power is situated at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population." Nuclear, chemical, and biological, weapons make it possible to wield this power to condemn whole populations to death. Bio-politics, for Foucault, also necessarily entails racism, by which he means making a cut in the biological continuum of human life, designating the very existence of a determinate group as a danger to the population, to its health and well-being, and even to its very life. Such a group, I would argue, then, becomes a biological (in the case of Nazism) or class enemy (in the case of Stalinism, though the latter also claimed that biological and hereditary characteristics were linked to one's class origins). And the danger represented by such an enemy race can necessitate its elimination through physical removal (ethnic cleansing) or extermination (genocide).

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BIOPOWER IMPACT

Capitalism places humanity under a system of rational mechanization, internalizing networks of controlInternationalist Perspective ‘00 [by Interenationalist Perspective, “Capitalism and Genocide.” Issue #36. Spring 2000.]

The real domination of capital is characterized by the penetration of the law of value into every segment of social existence. As Georg Lukács put it in his History and Class Consciousness, this means that the commodity ceases to be "one form among many regulating the metabolism of human society," to become its "universal structuring principle." From its original locus at the point of production, in the capitalist factory, which is the hallmark of the formal domination of capital, the law of value has systematically spread its tentacles to incorporate not just the production of commodities, but their circulation and consumption. Moreover, the law of value also penetrates and then comes to preside over the spheres of the political and ideological, including science and technology themselves. This latter occurs not just through the transformation of the fruits of technology and science into commodities, not just through the transformation of technological and scientific research itself (and the institutions in which it takes place) into commodities, but also, and especially, through what Lukács designates as the infiltration of thought itself by the purely technical, the very quantification of rationality, the instrumentalization of reason; and, I would argue, the reduction of all beings (including human beings) to mere objects of manipulation and control. As Lukács could clearly see even in the age of Taylorism, "this rational mechanisation extends right into the worker's `soul'." In short, it affects not only his outward behavior, but her very internal, psychological, makeup.

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ANNIHILATION IMPACT

Capitalism is a self-engendering monster which pursues its path regardless of harm – populations are annihilated by the gigantic parasiteZizek ‘00 [by Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. Pg 276.]

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AIDS IMPACT

Capitalism prevents the production of drugs to counter AIDSInternationalist Perspective ‘00 [by Interenationalist Perspective, “Profit Kills.” Issue #36. Spring 2000.]

The purpose of producing medicine is not to fight disease either. When earlier this year, South-Africa started to make cheap medicine to slow the epidemic of AIDS which had infected millions of South-Africans and killed millions there and in neighboring countries, the entire pharmaceutical industry of the US rose in protest and the Clinton-administration threatened economic sanctions. No matter that people are dying like flies because they can't afford the prices which the pharmaceutical multinationals are charging, intellectual property-rights were infringed! If this became a common practice, so these companies say, they would be greatly discouraged from investing in the development of new medicines, and diseases would spread. Would that be any better?

Similar examples of the crazy dilemmas which capitalism is imposing on society can be found in any sector of economic activity. The purpose of agriculture is certainly not to feed the hungry. Otherwise, how can it be explained that the most productive countries are sitting on mountains of agricultural surpluses, and are paying farmers not to farm, while each year 30 million people die of hunger and hundreds of millions suffer malnutrition?

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ALT SOLVES ENVIRO CATASTROPHE CASE

The alt solves your case…

A. We must recognize that environmental catastrophes, global warming, energy issues… are all tied up in the matrix of the new Risk Society. In this society, the certainty of environmental impacts is unknown but appear too serious to ignoreZizek ‘00 [by Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. Pg 334-335.]

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B. The problem with this risk society is that it masks the concrete nature of the socioeconomic roots of these new environmental impacts. A critical challenge of capitalism is crucial to moving forward in this new eraZizek ‘00 [by Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. Pg 340-341.]

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AT: HUMAN NATURE = AGGRESSIVE/SELFISH

Human nature is not aggressive or selfish – such claims are created to mask the hidden violence of our economic models

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MUST BE ECON & POLITICS

Interventions against capitalism must challenge the liberal democratic order – otherwise capitalism consumes allZizek ‘97 [by Slavoj Zizek, “Repeating Lenin.” http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm.]

Here, Lenin's stance against economism as well as against pure politics is crucial today, apropos of the split attitude towards economy in (what remains of) the radical circles: on the one hand, the above-mentioned pure "politicians" who abandon economy as the site of struggle and intervention; on the other hand, the economists, fascinated by the functioning of today's global economy, who preclude any possibility of a political intervention proper. Today, more than ever, we should here return to Lenin: yes, economy is the key domain, the battle will be decided there, one has to break the spell of the global capitalism - BUT the intervention should be properly POLITICAL, not economic. The battle to be fought is thus a twofold one: first, yes, anticapitalism. However, anticapitalism without problematizing the capitalism's POLITICAL form (liberal parliamentary democracy) is not sufficient, no matter how "radical" it is. Perhaps THE lure today is the belief that one can undermine capitalism without effectively problematizing the liberal-democratic legacy which - as some Leftists claim - although engendered by capitalism, acquired autonomy and can serve to criticize capitalism. This lure is strictly correlative to its apparent opposite, to the pseudo-Deleuzian love-hate fascinating/fascinated poetic depiction of Capital as a rhizomatic monstre/vampire which deterritorializes and swallows all, indomitable, dynamic, ever raising from the dead, each crisis making it stronger, Dionysos-Phoenix reborn... It is in this poetic (anti)capitalist reference to Marx that Marx is really dead: appropriated when deprived of his political sting.

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ANSWERS TO:AT: PERM

The danger of ideology lies in its reliance on the belief that underneath the ritual, we are complete and authentic individuals resisting the blind mechanics of power. The permutation embodies this extra-ideological kernel which ensures complicity.

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AT: PERM

There is no middle path or compromise – you must make an unashamed assertion in the alternativeZizek ‘97 [by Slavoj Zizek, “Repeating Lenin.” http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm.]

This, then, is what gets lost in Singer's "geistige Tierreich": the Thing, something to which we are unconditionally attached irrespective of its positive qualities. In Singer's universe, there is a place for mad cows, but no place for an Indian sacred cow. In, in other words, what gets lost here is simply the dimension of truth - NOT "objective truth" as the notion of reality from a point of view which somehow floats above the multitude of particular narratives, but truth as the Singular Universal." When Lenin said "The theory of Marx is all-powerful, because it is true," everything depends on how we understand "truth" here: is it a neutral "objective knowledge," or the truth of an engaged subject? Lenin's wager - today, in our era of postmodern relativism, more actual than ever - is that universal truth and partisanship, the gesture of taking sides, are not only not mutually exclusive, but condition each other: in a concrete situation, its UNIVERSAL truth can only be articulated from a thoroughly PARTISAN position - truth is by definition one-sided. This, of course, goes against the predominant doxa of compromise, of finding a middle path among the multitude of conflicting interests. If one does not specify the CRITERIA of the different, alternate, narrativization, then this endeavor courts the danger of endorsing, in the Politically Correct mood, ridiculous "narratives" like those about the supremacy of some aboriginal holistic wisdom, of dismissing science as just another narrative on a par with premodern superstitions. The Leninist narrative to the postmodern multiculturalist "right to narrate" should thus be an unashamed assertion of the right to truth. When, in the debacle of 1914, all European Social Democratic parties (with the honorable exception of the Russian Bolsheviks and the Serb Social Democrats) succumbed to the war fervor and voted for the military credits, Lenin's thorough rejection of the "patriotic line," in its very isolation from the predominant mood, designated the singular emergence of the truth of the entire situation.

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AT: PERM

You must have an unconditional stance towards the alternative. The permutation brings along the liberal suspicion of unconditional engagement which allows for co-optionZizek ‘00 [by Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. Pg 139.]

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AT: RELATIVISM DENIES HOLOCAUST

TURN: Relativist claims are NEVER used to deflate the Holocaust – it is precisely the discursive constructivists who elevate the Holocaust into the supreme metaphysical Evil

Zizek ‘97 [by Slavoj Zizek, “Repeating Lenin.” http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm.]

In a closer analysis, one should exhibit how the cultural relativism of the "right-to-narrate" orientation contains its own apparent opposite, the fixation on the Real of some trauma which resists its narrativization. This properly dialectical tension sustains today's the academic "holocaust industry." My own ultimate experience of the holocaust-industry police occurred in 1997 at a round table in the Centre Pompidou in Paris: I was viciously attacked for an intervention in which (among other things) I claimed, against the neoconservatives deploring the decline of faith today, that the basic need of a normal human being is not to believe himself, but to have another subject who will believe for him, at his place - the reaction of one of the distinguished participants was that, by claiming this, I am ultimately endorsing the holocaust revisionism, justifying the claim that, since everything is a discursive construct, this includes also the holocaust, so it is meaningless to search for what really happened there... Apart from displaying a hypocritical paranoia, my critic was doubly wrong: first, the holocaust revisionists (to my knowledge) NEVER argue in the terms of the postmodern discursive constructionism, but in the terms of very empirical factual analysis: their claims range from the "fact" that there is no written document in which Hitler would have ordered the holocaust, to the weird mathematics of "taking into account the number of gas ovens in Auschwitz, it was not possible to burn so many corpses." Furthermore, not only is the postmodern logic of "everything is a discursive construction, there are no direct firm facts" NEVER used to deflate the holocaust; in a paradox worth noting, it is precisely the postmodern discursive constructionists (like Lyotard) who tend to elevate the holocaust into the supreme ineffable metaphysical Evil - the holocaust serves them as the untouchable-sacred Real, as the negative of the contingent language games.26

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AT: HOLOCAUST TRIVIALIZATION

TURN: Fear of comparison leads to suspicion; this actually denies the Holocaust of its uniquenessZizek ‘97 [by Slavoj Zizek, “Repeating Lenin.” http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm.]

The problem with those who perceive every comparison between the holocaust and other concentration camps and mass political crimes as an inadmissible relativization of the holocaust, is that they miss the point and display their own doubt: yes, the holocaust WAS unique, but the only way to establish this uniqueness is to compare it with other similar phenomena and thus demonstrate the limit of this comparison. If one does not risk this comparison, of one prohibits it, one gets caught in the Wittgensteinian paradox of prohibiting to speak about that about which we cannot speak: if we stick to the prohibition of the comparison, the gnawing suspicion emerges that, if we were to be allowed to compare the holocaust with other similar crimes, it would be deprived of its uniqueness...

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AT: MUST ACT / HELP PEOPLE

The primary task is to RESIST the temptation to ACT. Direct intervention inevitably ends in a cul de sac of debilitating impossibility as it embraces a failing order.Zizek ‘97 [by Slavoj Zizek, “Repeating Lenin.” http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm.]

One is therefore tempted to turn around Marx's thesis 11: the first task today is precisely NOT to succumb to the temptation to act , to directly intervene and change things (which then inevitably ends in a cul de sac of debilitating impossibility: "what can one do against the global capital?"), but to question the hegemonic ideological coordinates. If, today, one follows a direct call to act, this act will not be performed in an empty space - it will be an act WITHIN the hegemonic ideological coordinates: those who " really want to do something to help people " get involved in (undoubtedly honorable) exploits like Medecins sans frontiere, Greenpeace , feminist and anti-racist campaigns , which are all not only tolerated, but even supported by the media, even if they seemingly enter the economic territory (say, denouncing and boycotting companies which do not respect ecological conditions or which use child labor) - they are tolerated and supported as long as they do not get too close to a certain limit . This kind of activity provides the perfect example of interpassivity 2 : of doing things n ot to achieve something, but to PREVENT from something really happening , really changing. All the frenetic humanitarian, politically correct, etc., activity fits the formula of "Let's go on changing something all the time so that, globally, things will remain the same !"

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ALTERNATIVESTRAVERSING THE FANTASY

Fantasy presents the subject with a choice that was never really a choice to begin with – an offer meant to be rejected. The illusion of choice is how ideology lulls us into complacency – we are satisfied because we think it was our call to begin with. The alternative is to traverse the fantasy.

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REPEAT THE PAST

Revolution is repetition that realizes the hidden possibility of the past – not as a closed set of facts, but as open and engaging. Repeating the past retroactively redeems all failed past attempts at liberation.Zizek ‘00 [by Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. Pg 19-20.]

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REPEATING LENINREPEAT LENIN ALTERNATIVE

To repeat Lenin is to accept that "Lenin is dead," that his particular solution failed, but that there was a utopian spark in it worth saving. To repeat Lenin means to see what was "in Lenin more than Lenin himself."

Zizek ‘97 [by Slavoj Zizek, “Repeating Lenin.” http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm.]

John Berger recently made a salient point apropos of a French publicity poster of the internet investment brokers' company Selftrade: under the image of a hammer and sickle cast in solid gold and embedded with diamonds, the caption reads "And if the stock market profited everybody?" The strategy of this poster is obvious: today, the stock market fulfills the egalitarian Communist criteria, everybody can participate in it. Berger indulges in a simple mental experiment: "Imagine a communications campaign today using an image of a swastika cast in solid gold and embedded with diamonds! It would of course not work. Why? The Swastika addressed potential victors not the defeated. It invoked domination not justice."65 In contrast to it, the Hammer and Sickle invoked the hope that "history would eventually be on the side of those struggling for fraternal justice."66 The irony is thus that, at the very moment when this hope is officially proclaimed dead by the hegemonic ideology of the "end of ideologies," a paradigmatically "postindustrial" enterprise (is there anything more "postindustrial" than dealing with stocks on the internet?) has to mobilize this dormant hope in order to get its message through. 67 "Repeating Lenin" means giving new life to this hope which continues to still haunt us.

Consequently, to REPEAT Lenin does NOT mean a RETURN to Lenin - to repeat Lenin is to accept that "Lenin is dead," that his particular solution failed, even failed monstrously, but that there was a utopian spark in it worth saving. 68 To repeat Lenin means that one has to distinguish between what Lenin effectively did and the field of possibilities that he opened up, the tension in Lenin between what he effectively did and another dimension, what was "in Lenin more than Lenin himself." To repeat Lenin is to repeat not what Lenin DID, but what he FAILED TO DO, his MISSED opportunities. Today, Lenin appears as a figure from a different time-zone: it's not that his notions of the centralized Party, etc., seem to pose a "totalitarian threat" - it's rather that they seem to belong to a different epoch to which we can no longer properly relate. However, instead of reading this fact as the proof that Lenin is outdated, one should, perhaps, risk the opposite conjecture: what if this impenetrability of Lenin is a sign that there is something wrong with OUR epoch? What if the fact that we experience Lenin as irrelevant, "out of sync" with our postmodern times, impart the much more unsettling message that our time itself is "out of sync," that a certain historical dimension is disappearing from it? 69 If, to some people, such an assertion appears dangerously close to the infamous Hegel's quip, when his deduction why there should be only eight planets circulating around the Sun was proven wrong by the discovery of the ninth planet (Pluto): "So much worse for the facts!", then we should be ready to fully assume this paradox.

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MUST REPEAT LENIN

We must return to Lenin – not a nostalgic reenactment, but a reinvention of the revolutionary project in contemporary conditions. This is the only way that we can begin to think again.

Zizek ‘97 [by Slavoj Zizek, “Repeating Lenin.” http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm.]

"Lenin" is not the nostalgic name for old dogmatic certainty; quite on the contrary, to put it in Kierkegaard's terms, THE Lenin which we want to retrieve is the Lenin-in-becoming, the Lenin whose fundamental experience was that of being thrown into a catastrophic new constellation in which old coordinates proved useless, and who was thus compelled to REINVENT Marxism - recall his acerb remark apropos of some new problem: "About this, Marx and Engels said not a word." The idea is not to return to Lenin, but to REPEAT him in the Kierkegaardian sense: to retrieve the same impulse in today's constellation. The return to Lenin aims neither at nostalgically reenacting the "good old revolutionary times," nor at the opportunistic-pragmatic adjustment of the old program to "new conditions," but at repeating, in the present world-wide conditions, the Leninist gesture of reinventing the revolutionary project in the conditions of imperialism and colonialism, more precisely: after the politico-ideological collapse of the long era of progressism in the catastrophe of 1914. Eric Hobsbawn defined the CONCEPT of the XXth century as the time between 1914, the end of the long peaceful expansion of capitalism, and 1990, the emergence of the new form of global capitalism after the collapse of the Really Existing Socialism. What Lenin did for 1914, we should do for 1990. "Lenin" stands for the compelling FREEDOM to suspend the stale existing (post)ideological coordinates, the debilitating Denkverbot in which we live - it simply means that we are allowed to think again.

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“LENIN” KEY

People ask “why Lenin?”. This resistance to the signifier “Lenin” illustrates its importance – it maintains a subversive edgeZizek ‘97 [by Slavoj Zizek, “Repeating Lenin.” http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm.]

There is an old joke about socialism as the synthesis of the highest achievements of the entire hitherto human history: from the prehistoric societies, it took primitivism, from the Ancient world slavery, from medieval society brutal domination, from capitalism exploitation, and from socialism the name...70 Does something similar not hold about our attempt to repeat Lenin's gesture? From the conservative cultural criticism, it takes the idea that today's democracy is no longer the place where crucial decisions are made; from cyberspace ideologists the idea that the global digital network offers a new space of communal life; etc.etc., and from Lenin more or less just the name itself... However, this very fact could be turned in an argument FOR the "return to Lenin": the extent to which the SIGNIFIER "Lenin" retains its subversive edge is easily demonstrated - say, when one makes the "Leninist" point that today's democracy is exhausted, that the key decisions are not taken there, one is directly accused of "totalitarianism"; when a similar point is made by sociologists or even Vaclav Havel, they are praised for the depth of their insight... THIS resistance is the answer to the question "Why Lenin?": it is the signifier "Lenin" which FORMALIZES this content found elsewhere, transforming a series of common notions into a truly subversive theoretical formation.

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AT: LENIN BAD

Critics of Lenin ignore his drive towards peace – he practiced the universal function of “humanity”Zizek ‘97 [by Slavoj Zizek, “Repeating Lenin.” http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm.]

One of the standard accusations against Lenin is that, insensible for the universal human dimension, he perceived all social events through the lenses of the class struggle, of "us against them." However, are Lenin's appeals against the patriotic fervor during the World War I not an exemplary case of practicing what Alain Badiou 36 calls the universal function of "humanity ," which has nothing whatsoever to do with so-called "humanism." This "humanity" is neither a notional abstraction, nor the pathetic imaginary assertion of the all-encompassing brotherhood, but a universal function which actualizes itself in unique ecstatic experiences, like those of the soldiers from the opposite trenches starting to fraternize. In Jaroslav Hasek's legendary comical novel The Good Soldier Schwejk, the adventures of an ordinary Czech soldier who undermines the ruling order by simply following orders too literally, Schwejk finds himself at the frontline trenches in Galicia, where the Austrian army is confronting the Russians. When Austrian soldiers start to shoot, the desperate Schwejk runs into the no-man's-land in front of their trenches, waving desperately his hands and shouting: "Don't shoot! There are men on the other side!" This is what Lenin was aiming at in his call to the tired peasants and other working masses in the Summer of 1917 to stop fighting, dismissed as part of a ruthless strategy to win popular support and thus gain power, even if it meant the military defeat of one's own country (recall the standard argument that, when, in the Spring of 1917, Lenin was allowed by the German state to pass on a sealed train through Germany on his way from Switzerland to Sweden, Finland and then Russia, he was de facto functioning as a German agent).

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ROLE-PLAYING BAD

Role-playing reduces the subject to the Institution’s mouthpiece. Perceiving oneself as not only an intellectual, but also a policy maker, ensures that there is no subject prior to the Institution. This denies advocacy Zizek ‘00 [by Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. Pg 258-259.]

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FEMINISM KRITIK BAD

Focusing on masculine versus feminine approaches expresses the patriarchal matrix. First, ‘Woman’ is posited as a mere reflection of ‘Man,’ and then ‘Woman’ is provided with a false autonomy. This double disavowal actually reinforces servitude. Our allegedly direct masculine approach is actually more empowering to the feminist causeZizek ‘00 [by Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. Pg 257-258.]

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ELIMINATION / PROHIBITION BAD

The relationship between prohibition and desire is circular – the very prohibitive measures that the 1AC instills effectively generates desire, proliferating harmsZizek ‘00 [by Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. Pg 251-252.]

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ELIMINATION / PROHIBITION BAD

Eliminating the object of oppression misses the boat – the subject produced by disciplinary practices is a soulless subject. Once the object is removed, the subject remains confronted with its void.

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ELIMINATION / PROHIBITION BAD

Desire is generated by the prohibition, which sexualizes obedience to the Law. We thus gain surplus-enjoyment from following the law because we truly believe we wanted what the law prohibits. This effectively keeps the subject within the Law’s grasp.

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ECO-KRITIKS BAD

Deep ecology and similar environmental visions relegate subjectivity to a global cosmic framework – this is the same system as Nazism. And it only gives the illusion of actionZizek ‘00 [by Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. Pg 132-133.]

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PROTEST BAD

The era of effective political protest is over – specific demands are now accepted in order to debilitate the more universal struggle against those in power. Zizek ‘00 [by Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. Pg 203-204.]

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KRITIKAL AFF BAD

The affirmative’s critical challenge occurs against the background of a fundamental prohibition to think. Without first crushing the gridlock of the liberal-democratic order, their project ensures complicity, flipping solvencyZizek ‘97 [by Slavoj Zizek, “Repeating Lenin.” http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm.]

The first public reaction to the idea of reactualizing Lenin is, of course, an outburst of sarcastic laughter: Marx is OK, even on Wall Street, there are people who love him today - Marx the poet of commodities, who provided perfect descriptions of the capitalist dynamics, Marx of the Cultural Studies, who portrayed the alienation and reification of our daily lives -, but Lenin, no, you can't be serious! The working class movement, revolutionary Party, and similar zombie-concepts? Doesn't Lenin stand precisely for the FAILURE to put Marxism into practice, for the big catastrophe which left its mark on the entire XXth century world politics, for the Real Socialist experiment which culminated in an economically inefficient dictatorship? So, in the contemporary academic politics, the idea to deal with Lenin is accompanied by two qualifications: yes, why not, we live in a liberal democracy, there is freedom of thought... however, one should treat Lenin in an "objective critical and scientific way," not in an attitude of nostalgic idolatry, and, furthermore, from the perspective firmly rooted in the democratic political order, within the horizon of human rights - therein resides the lesson painfully learned through the experience of the XXth century totalitarianisms.

What are we to say to this? Again, the problem resides in the implicit qualifications which can be easily discerned by the "concrete analysis of the concrete situation," as Lenin himself would have put it. "Fidelity to the democratic consensus" means the acceptance of the present liberal-parlamentary consensus, which precludes any serious questioning of how this liberal-democratic order is complicit in the phenomena it officially condemns, and, of course, any serious attempt to imagine a society whose socio-political order would be different. In short, it means: say and write whatever you want - on condition that what you do does not effectively question or disturb the predominant political consensus. So everything is allowed, solicited even, as a critical topic : the prospects of a global ecological catastrophe, violations of human rights, sexism, homophobia, antifeminism, the growing violence not only in the far-away countries, but also in our megalopolises, the gap between the First and the Third World, between the rich and the poor, the shattering impact of the digitalization of our daily lives... there is nothing easier today than to get international, state or corporate funds for a multidisciplinary research into how to fight the new forms of ethnic, religious or sexist violence. The problem is that all this occurs against the background of a fundamental Denkverbot , the prohibition to think. Today's liberal-democratic hegemony is sustained by a kind of unwritten Denkverbot similar to the infamous Berufsverbot in Germany of the late 60s - the moment one shows a minimal sign of engaging in political projects that aim to seriously challenge the existing order, the answer is immediately : "Benevolent as it is, this will necessarily end in a new Gulag !" The ideological function of the constant reference to the holocaust, gulag and the more recent Third World catastrophes is thus to serve as the support of this Denkverbot by constantly reminding us how things may have been much worse: "Just look around and see for yourself what will happen if we follow your radical notions!" And it is exactly the same thing that the demand for "scientific objectivity" means: the moment one seriously questions the existing liberal consensus, one is accused of abandoning scientific objectivity for the outdated ideological positions . This is the point on which one cannot and should not concede : today, the actual freedom of thought means the freedom to question the predominant liberal-democratic "post-ideological" consensus - or it means nothing .

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ELIMINATING OPPRESSOR BAD

Imagining a world deprived of the Oppressor is not radical enough – one must recognize how the identity of the oppressed has been constituted by the Oppressor. Only then can one transform the content of one’s own position.

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ANTI-COLONIALISM BAD

Their radical anti-colonial stance is nothing but critical theory imperceptibly translated into the benign universe of Cultural Studies. This environment amounts to nothing but an empty gestureZizek ‘97 [by Slavoj Zizek, “Repeating Lenin.” http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm.]

Let us take two predominant topics of today's American radical academia: postcolonial and queer (gay) studies. The problem of postcolonialism is undoubtedly crucial; however, "postcolonial studies" tend to translate it into the multiculturalist problematic of the colonized minorities' "right to narrate" their victimizing experience, of the power mechanisms which repress "otherness," so that, at the end of the day, we learn that the root of the postcolonial exploitation is our intolerance towards the Other, and, furthermore, that this intolerance itself is rooted in our intolerance towards the "Stranger in Ourselves," in our inability to confront what we repressed in and of ourselves - the politico-economic struggle is thus imperceptibly transformed into a pseudo-psychoanalytic drama of the subject unable to confront its inner traumas... The true corruption of the American academia is not primarily financial, it is not only that they are able to buy many European critical intellectuals (myself included - up to a point), but conceptual: notions of the "European" critical theory are imperceptibly translated into the benign universe of the Cultural Studies chic.

My personal experience is that practically all of the "radical" academics silently count on the long-term stability of the American capitalist model , with the secure tenured position as their ultimate professional goal (a surprising number of them even play on the stock market). If there is a thing they are genuinely horrified of, it is a radical shattering of the (relatively) safe life environment of the "symbolic classes" in the developed Western societies. Their excessive Politically Correct zeal when dealing with sexism, racism, Third World sweatshops, etc., is thus ultimately a defense against their own innermost identification, a kind of compulsive ritual whose hidden logic is: "Let's talk as much as possible about the necessity of a radical change to make it sure that nothing will really change !" Symptomatic is here the journal October: when you ask one of the editors to what the title refers, they will half-confidentially signal that it is, of course, THAT October - in this way, one can indulge in the jargonistic analyses of the modern art, with the hidden assurance that one is somehow retaining the link with the radical revolutionary past... With regard to this radical chic, the first gesture towards the Third Way ideologists and practitioners should be that of praise: they at least play their game in a straight way, and are honest in their acceptance of the global capitalist coordinates, in contrast to the pseudo-radical academic Leftists who adopt towards the Third Way the attitude of utter disdain, while their own radicality ultimately amounts to an empty gesture which obliges no one to anything determinate.

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MULTICULTURALISM BAD

Fighting for the inclusion of multiple groups is the ultimate perpetuation of global capitalism. Multiculturalism brings to light the specific interests of groups, which capitalism is all too ready to accommodate. Meanwhile, capitalism homogenizes the world as the only system

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MULTICULTURALISM BAD

Liberal multiculturalist tolerance is caught in the vicious cycle of simultaneously conceding too much and not enough to the particularity of the Other’s culture – tolerating brutal violence and masking EurocentrismZizek ‘00 [by Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. Pg 218-219.]

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POSTMODERNISM BAD

Postmodernism masks the maintenance of intellectual games – it is time to move into an idea which effectively seizes the massesZizek ‘97 [by Slavoj Zizek, “Repeating Lenin.” http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm.]

How did the ideology of Enlightenment evolve in the 18th century France? First, there was the epoch of salons, in which philosophers where trying to shock their benefactors, the generous Counts and Countesses, even Kings and Emperatrices (Holbach Frederick the Great, Diderot Catherine the Great), with their "radical" ideas on equality, the origin of power, the nature of men, etc. - all of this remaining a kind of intellectual game. At this stage, the idea that someone could take these ideas literally, as the blueprint for a radical socio-political transformation, would probably shock the ideologists themselves who were either part of the entourage of an enlightened nobleman or lone pathetic figures like Rousseau - their reaction would have been that of Ivan Karamazov, disgusted upon learning that his bastard half-brother and servant acted on his nihilistic ruminations, killing his father. This passage from intellectual game to an idea which effectively "seizes the masses" is the moment of truth - in it, the intellectual gets back his own message in its inverted/true form. In France, we pass from the gentle reflections of Rousseau to the Jacobin Terror; within the history of Marxism, it is only with Lenin that this passage occurs, that the games are REALLY over. And it is up to us to repeat this same passage and accomplish the fateful step from the ludic "postmodern" radicalism to the domain in which the games are over.

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LEGAL ACTION BAD

Each legal limit strengthens the hold of its ideology. The closer we come to fantasy, the stronger its hold over us. The short-circuit of their method ensures failure.

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DEPOLITICIZATION BAD

Depoliticization evades what is truly at stake by relegating it to the private sphere where totalitarian ideology operates most efficiently

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PROJECTING BLAME ONTO THE SYSTEM BAD

Projecting blame onto the system is bad – the subject doing evil in the name of the law generates surplus-enjoyment on account of enjoying the law itself. This is the process that lent Nazi ideology its extreme efficiency.

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KRISHNA BAD

Fear of challenging because of the subsequent shattering of Leftist coalitions is a hollow threat; we must take that riskZizek ‘97 [by Slavoj Zizek, “Repeating Lenin.” http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm.]

It is true that, today, it is the radical populist Right which is usually breaking the (still) predominant liberal-democratic consensus, gradually rendering acceptable the hitherto excluded topics (the partial justification of Fascism, the need to constrain abstract citizenship on behalf of ethnic identity, etc.). However, the hegemonic liberal democracy is using this fact to blackmail the Left radicals: "we shouldn't play with fire: against the new Rightist onslaught, one should more than ever insist on the democratic consensus - any criticism of it willingly or unwillingly helps the new Right!" This is the key line of separation: one should reject this blackmail , taking the risk of disturbing the liberal consensus , up to questioning the very notion of democracy.

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THINGS THAT ARE GOODUTOPIAN DEBATE ALTERNATIVES ARE GOOD

Voting negative is the alternative. In a proper revolutionary breakthrough, the utopian future is neither simply fully realized nor simply evoked as a distant promise – it is a unique suspensions of temporality in which we can act AS IF the future utopia is just there to be grabbed.Zizek ‘97 [by Slavoj Zizek, “Repeating Lenin.” http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm.]

Which, then, is the criterion of the political act? Success as such clearly doesn't count, even if we define it in the dialectical way of Merleau-Ponty, as the wager that future will retroactively redeem our present horrible acts (this is how, in his Humanism and Terror, Merleau-Ponty provided one of the more intelligent justifications of the Stalinist terror: retroactively, it will become justified if its final outcome will be true freedom)53; neither does the reference to some abstract-universal ethical norms. The only criteria is the absolutely INHERENT one: that of the ENACTED UTOPIA. In a proper revolutionary breakthrough, the utopian future is neither simply fully realized, present, nor simply evoked as a distant promise which justified present violence - it is rather as if, in a unique suspension of temporality, in the short-circuit between the present and the future, we are - as if by Grace - for a brief time allowed to act AS IF the utopian future is (not yet fully here, but) already at hand, just there to be grabbed. Revolution is not experienced as a present hardship we have to endure for the happiness and freedom of the future generations, but as the present hardship over which this future happiness and freedom already cast their shadow - in it, we ALREADY ARE FREE WHILE FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM, we ALREADY ARE HAPPY WHILE FIGHTING FOR HAPPINESS, no matter how difficult the circumstances. Revolution is not a Merlo-Pontyan wager, an act suspended in the futur anterieur, to be legitimized or delegitimized by the long term outcome of the present acts; it is as it were ITS OWN ONTOLOGICAL PROOF, an immediate index of its own truth.

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IDEALISM GOOD

Idealism is necessary to restructure the framework within which objective representation operates – idealism is what allows for the condensation of knowledge into a coherent whole with transformative potential

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EXCLUSION IN DEBATE GOOD

Some exclusion in debate and decision making is necessary – otherwise the scope becomes too large and decision making is rendered impossible.Zizek ‘00 [by Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. Pg 19.]

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POLITICIZING ECON GOOD - SOLVES ECOLOGY

Politicizing the economy creates the conditions necessary for the effective realization of ecological demandsZizek ‘00 [by Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. Pg 356.]

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POLITICS DISADFLIP FLOPS INCREASE POPULARITY

Signs of weakness illustrate the ‘humanity’ of the President – incidents like flip flops actively boosts popularity [aka the Denissen special]

Zizek ‘00 [by Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. Pg 329.]

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AFFIRMATIVEAFF - GENERIC KRITIK LINK TURN

The plan’s critical challenge is not a momentary outburst – it is an authentic Event which challenges the foundations of the system. Zizek ‘00 [by Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. Pg 134-135.]

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AFF = KRITIK ALTERNATIVE

TURN: Their argument assumes a false dichotomy between working “within” and “outside” the system. So-called “outside” actions are always reforms from within. This means that we are the alternative

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AFF AT: COOPTION

TURN: Only small reforms within the system can challenge; the fear of cooption actually prevents transformationZizek ‘98 [by Slavoj Zizek, Law and the Postmodern Mind. Pg 91-93.]

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AFF - PERM SOLVES – EXCESS RESISTANCE

The part of the permutation that still links is an excess of revolution; the excess is NOT co-opted, rather the very fact that the excess exists sets in motion a process which brings down the entire system. The excess is necessarily grounded in the inherent dynamics of the system.Zizek ‘00 [by Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. Pg 255-256.]

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AFF- STICK THE LETTER OF THE LAW

The truly subversive thing to do is to stick the letter of the Law against its obscene fantasmic underside, suspending the unwritten rules that guarantee the consistency of the Law’s public face, thus forcing it to live up to its old promises

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AFF – ZIZEK HOMOGENIZES

TURN: Zizek ignores diversity and fails to distinguish the beliefs and motives of the government and the people. His kritik is unfoundedHussey, 2002 [by Andrew Hussey, “The Game of War.” New Statesman; 9/9/2002, Vol. 131 Issue 4604, p50, 2p, 1c.Andrew Hussey is the author of The Game of War: the life and death of Guy Debord (Pimlico)]

The thrust of Slavoj Zizek's essay is that 11 September offered the United States "an opportunity to realise what kind of world it was part of" and, he says, jabbing his finger even harder, to feel "responsibility and guilt towards the impoverished third world". That the Americans refused to seize the opportunity to indulge in a festival of self-loathing served merely to confirm their wickedness. This is by now a long-familiar and, in some quarters, even respectable position to hold. The real problem here is that Zizek is unwilling to distinguish between the American government, which may well be bad or at least dim-witted, and the American people, who may not be as familiar as Zizek with the nuances of thought of Giorgio Agamben but who, as a walk down a New York street will reveal, are far more diverse in looks, ideas and opinions than he ever gives them credit for. It does not help matters that the book is written in the irritating and ingratiating jargon of cultural studies textbooks of the 1980s, with its multi-layered and dismal puns and its references to anything from Apocalypse Now Reduxto the Monkees.Zizek seizes the moral high ground and, with all the haughtiness of the clever-dick academic that he is, proceeds to lecture us from it. But this is not scholarship or original thought. It is simple exhibitionism of a particularly nasty sort. Most ignorantly, he accuses the Americans of exploiting their status as victims, without ever seeming to grasp that the ordinary men and women who were killed or maimed that day were, in the most real and terrible sense, victims. If they were later exploited as such, it was as part of a process that was beyond their control.Each of these writers is correct to assume that we need philosophy more than ever in the face of great events, if only to separate real thought and feelings from emotional blackmail and hysteria. But it is also one of the tasks of the philosopher, at least according to Montaigne, to confront morality with compassion. The inability to do this – which exposes the limits of so-called postmodern thought and its avatars -- may yet prove to be one of the most sinister legacies of 11 September.

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AFF – ZIZEK’S VAGUE ALT CAN’T BE IMPLEMENTED

Zizek’s vague alternatives of “action” and “radicality” are ethically different, making it impossible to implementHarpham, 2003 [by Geoffrey Galt Harpham, “Response to Slavoj Zizek.” Critical Inquiry, Spring2003, Vol. 29 Issue3, p506-507 Geoffrey Galt Harpham - Department of English, Tulane University]

The point here is that radical action and right action are not always the same things. Such heroic terms as breakthrough, action, and ruthless radicality are indiscriminate and ethically indifferent; they leave all the important judgments and decisions—the ones that would distinguish mere terror from the forms of force that are sometimes necessary to secure the dignity and well-being of peoples in a peaceable environment—yet to be made.Zˇizˇek may not be in the mood, but he could now do the Western world, and perhaps even its victims and tormenters, a service if he would get off his high horse, stop playing games, and steel his formidable philosophical mind to the task of articulating, with hard examples and rigorous argumentation, the positive principles that he feels ought to guide action in the real world. He can, of course, use any format he wants to, but I think he would be well advised to use one that implied respect for the autonomy of the reader and a willingness to submit to the many indignities that come with being read by people whose minds are not identical to his own.

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AFF – AT: FANTASY

TURN: Zizek’s distinction between real and fantasy is completely wrong. The violence of the world is all TOO realCrosswhite, 2001 [by Jim Crosswhite, “A Response to Slavoj Zizek's "Welcome to the Desert of the Real!"”September 25, 2001. http://www.uoregon.edu/~jcross/response_to_zizek.htm Crosswhite is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Oregon.]

An acknowledgment of the difference between the real and the imaginary is a condition for social criticism that has a real relation to suffering. And critical humility in the face of real suffering is a condition for social criticism that will remain humane. The writer of "Welcome to the Desert of the Real" seems almost to believe that reality has collapsed into a hyperbolic critical parody of itself, as if he can't quite tell the difference between real people and the social powers with which those real people are contending. This approach to real suffering by way of fantastic conflations and exaggerations might be tolerable if it had some purpose, if it led us somewhere, but it does not. Zizek is not alone in this (and he sounds a little like a Baudrillard tape in this piece), but to preach this fantastic sermon in the context of September 11 is to move away from critique and toward the grotesque.But to say that what happened on September 11 is like the scene in the Matrix where Morpheus introduces the Keanu Reeves character to the "desert of the real" is to say something that belongs on a Fox Network talk show. For what Americans is it true that the events of September 11 broke into an "insulated artificial universe" that generated an image of a diabolical outsider? Let's not consider the 5,000 incinerated and dismembered men and women and children who suffered from disease and injury like all people, who cleaned toilets and coughed up phlegm and changed diapers and actually occupied with what was once their real bodies those towers which, for Zizek, stand for virtual capitalism. They can't be the ones whose delusions generated the fantasy of a diabolical outsider. None of them, none of their surviving children, none of their fellow citizens fantasized Bin Laden's ruling that it is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, to kill the Americans, military and civilians. So for whom has the fantastic "outside" broken in and smashed, with "shattering impact," an immaterial world of delusion? For whom does Osama Bin Laden appear as a character from a James Bond film? For whom did the events of September 11 arrive with the painful awareness that we were living in an artificial insulated reality? For whom do the people and events in this massacre of innocents appear solely in the shapes of film and television?Perhaps, perhaps the Americans living in an insulated, artificial reality are the characters in American television shows and in increasingly intertextual American films. Perhaps these are the Americans Zizek is listening to, watching, imagining.But here is the true "shattering impact:" that 5,000 innocent people who lived real lives in real, vulnerable human bodies, who bore real children, suffered real disease and injury and pain, bled real blood; 5,000 real people who helped to sustain a cosmopolitan city of millions and millions of other real people of different ethnic groups and religions and languages, real citizens who had achieved a great measure of peace and hope, who had been slowly and successfully bringing down the New York City crime rate; that 5,000 of these people would have their real bodies and lives erased in a matter of minutes, and that only body parts, the vapors of the incinerated, and the grieving and the sorrowful and the orphans would remain.This is the shock. This is the disbelief. Not the shattering of an illusion but the shattering of those real people and their real bodies. Not the shattering of a virtual reality, but the erasing of what was real. This is why the people of New York wept in the streets, why the tears and grief will continue. And this is why, in their grief, the survivors will struggle to preserve a memory of what was real, and to keep this memory of what was real from evanescing into someone else's symbol, or fantasy, or tool. Were the real lives they led less real for any happiness or peace they achieved? Are the unfathomable sufferings of Rwanda and what happened in Sarajevo to be the measure of what is most real?

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AFF – AT: PSYCHOANALYSIS

TURN: Zizek’s psychoanalysis moves too quickly from overt words to speculations on the underlying meanings. His kritik is suspectBillig, 2002 [by Michael Billig, “A Response to Brown and Frosh.” British Journal of Social Psychology, Jun2002, Vol.41 Issue 2, p199, 4p. Michael Billig - Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, UK ]

Frosh cites with approval the work of Zizek on hatred and fantasy. My problem with Zizek and withother Lacanians is that they move too quickly from the overt words to speculations on the underlyingmeanings. Indeed, Lacan, despite his famous pronouncements on the nature of language and theunconscious, only provides the sketchiest accounts of how language might actually be used. In the caseof the pleasures of bigotry, it will be necessary to examine some difficult and repellent material, such asthe Ku Klux Klan jokes that I have looked at (Billig, 2001a, b). Cognitive psychologists might wish toavoid such material, claiming that there exist no suitably scientific methodologies for the task or thatsocial psychology, if it is to be properly scientific, must deal with universal phenomena. But unlesssocial psychologists examine such material, their theories of bigotry will remain limited, and, indeed,speculative. Psychoanalytic theorists might have other reasons for such avoidance: they will be wantingto search for the pleasures and hatreds behind, and beyond, such jokes.

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AFF – ZIZEK = UNSUPPORTED ASSERTIONS

TURN: Zizek’s kritik isn’t based on any evidence – it’s just a string of unsupported assertions.

Robinson, 2001 [by Andrew Robinson, “Notes on Zizek – ‘Welcome to the Desert of the Real’”. November 2001.http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/iaps/ARNo1.htm Robinson is a Professor at the School of Politics – University of Nottingham..]

This is in many ways a repetition of Zizek's favourite themes, rearticulated around a new subjectmatter.As usual, one has to be able to follow Zizek's more-or-less arbitrary twists and turns, andwilling to endorse a number of heavy metaphysical and psychological postulates, as well as toaccept the validity of a string of unsupported assertions, to buy into Zizek's account.For instance: the theme recurs of how something which has a horrifying effect is always arealisation of a repressed/disavowed fantasy. Behind this is a clumsy conflation of concernmotivated by fear (eg. being aroused by a threatening stimulus) with actual desire (in the sense thatone fantasises about, and secretly wants, what one fears). This is as far as I can tell an exegeticalderivative of Lacanian theory, and I have yet to find a single argument or piece of evidence tosupport such a conflation.

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AFF – ZIZEK = UNSUPPORTED ASSERTIONS

TURN: Zizek’s opposition to the plan is misguided. The all or nothing framework created by Zizek lacks any empirical proof, it’s just an assertion. The kritik should be rejected for this reason alone

Robinson, 2001 [by Andrew Robinson, “Notes on Zizek – ‘Welcome to the Desert of the Real’”. November 2001.http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/iaps/ARNo1.htm Robinson is a Professor at the School of Politics – University of Nottingham..]

Zizek's arguments are a perfect example of what Korzybski denounces as "intensional" thought:they refer solely to other terms within his own linguistic system, and are not related to the evidenceand events they claim to be explaining. The idea that "in this pure Outside, we [sic] shouldrecognize the distilled version of our own essence" is a restatement of his "we are excrement" line,which recurs constantly throughout his writings. The principle that we are basically a Nothingnesswhich misrecognises itself as valuable is pretty much non-testable, and it certainly cannot beinferred from September 11th; indeed, Zizek's purely exegetical appeal to Hegel suggests that herealises that he is imposing an interpretation from outside, rather than deriving one from motivesand phenomena within the situation. Zizek's readers are in effect faced with a dogma which theymay either endorse or reject, which Zizek passionately asserts but cannot provide any substantive case for believing . Without this dogma (and others Zizek raises from time to time), the rest of hisconclusions fall apart , eg. the idea that any actions against a threatening Outside are "a paranoiac acting-out" (i.e. if the roots of September 11th are internal, any act against an Outside is misguided;but if this principle isn't established, Zizek's conclusion is not validly reached either). (This is not tosay that Zizek isn't right in the claim he makes: empirically, the bombing of Afghanistan may welldo little to reduce the likelihood of future attacks, and may motivate such attacks; but Zizek has notestablished this with the claims he makes. He may well have reached the right conclusion by thewrong means).

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AFF – ZIZEK = UNSUPPORTED ASSERTIONS

TURN: Zizek’s arguments aren’t backed by any logic or studyRobinson, 2001 [by Andrew Robinson, “Notes on Zizek – ‘Welcome to the Desert of the Real’”. November 2001.http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/iaps/ARNo1.htm Robinson is a Professor at the School of Politics – University of Nottingham..]

Zizek's seductiveness lies in his attachment of this dogmatic set of metaphysical postulates to a setof broadly progressive political narratives which are often plausible and well-founded. It should berealised in this regard that these narratives themselves are often mere assertions unlikely to win anyconverts: for instance, he appeals to a narrative on the history of Islam and Christianity, butprovides no evidence for it; and he speaks of a growing unfreedom in western societies, butprovides only very general examples. (That the conclusions are empirically founded and valid doesnot detract from this criticism: Zizek may well be reaching the right conclusions, but in the wrongway). Also, the nailing of these narratives to Zizek's general theories is tenuous, selective andunstable. This means Zizek often gives progressive arguments tied to reactionary principles. Forinstance: I agree with Zizek that the present crisis is mainly a product of the west's domination overand exclusion of the rest of the world; but I disagree with his attachment of this to an outlook whereothers are always merely extensions of one's own neuroses.

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AFF – AT: PSYCHOANALYSIS

TURN: Zizek relies on binary logic and scientific rationalismHarpham, 2003 [by Geoffrey Galt Harpham, “Response to Slavoj Zizek.” Critical Inquiry, Spring2003, Vol. 29 Issue3, p506 Geoffrey Galt Harpham - Department of English, Tulane University]

The one moment in Zˇ izˇek’s response where I thought I might actuallybe losing my mind was very near the end, when he says that “in his criticalanalysis of my work, Harpham pretends to rely on this ‘format’ (in spite ofhis final rhetorical distance from it); however, in his actual work of reading,he definitely does not follow it” (p. 502) because he employs narrative aswell as critical analysis (although, as Zˇ izˇek says a moment later, I do “rhetorically[demand]” [p. 503] the standard format anyway). After severalreadings, I am still uncertain what is being imputed to me. But when I considerthat Zˇ izˇek himself seems to be relying on the “binary logic” of madnessversus rationality throughout his response—indeed, when he insists at thevery end that his own project is more “ rational, ” more classically philosophical, more properly “scientific,” and more old-school “theologicodogmatic”thanmy analysis of it (p. 503)—the intoxicating thought suddenlyappears, that with respect to the protocols of the standard format, I may, inmy delirium, actually be closer to a breakthrough than Zˇ izˇek himself!

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AFF – ZIZEK HOMOGENIZES

TURN: Zizek’s theory ignores diversity. – it assumes that all individuals and all social groups behave alike. This takes out the internal links to the kritik

Robinson, 2001 [by Andrew Robinson, “Notes on Zizek – ‘Welcome to the Desert of the Real’”. November 2001.http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/iaps/ARNo1.htm Robinson is a Professor at the School of Politics – University of Nottingham..]

Zizek also refuses to admit any distinction between different individuals and different socialgroups, with the result that he often ends up inferring the actions of one group from the disavoweddesire of an entirely different group. In this case, he implies that the hijackers were realising arepressed fantasy internal to the west, acting out the pre-constructed role of "the real-lifecounterpart of Ernst Stavro Blofeld". Zizek routinely makes such claims without seriouslyexamining the motives of those involved and whether they are in the slightest connected to thepsychological processes he describes. Has bin Laden, hidden in the mountains of a country wherecinema and TV are banned, even heard of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the Matrix or James Bond? Zizekignores such questions, because of a general epistemology which refuses to take empirical issuesseriously and reduces 'truth' to an outgrowth of Zizek's own closed theoretical system. What is themechanism whereby the west produces its repressed other? Westerners may misrecognise thepresent situation by using western cinematic figures and tropes; they may react against the 'enemy'on grounds related as much to deep-rooted fears as to an actual act or threat (as in the case of"moral panics"). In this case, the hijackers' lack of concern for civilian deaths has been (probably)misinterpreted as a deliberate desire to kill as many civilians as possible; the threat of furtherattacks may have been exaggerated; the "exceptional" status of the attack has been exaggerated,probably due to its symbolic rather than actual effects. Take all this away, and one no longer has aBlofeld; but one still has a large massacre, carried out by specific people with specific motives.Zizek's explanatory method hops between different levels of analysis too easily (eg. betweensymbolic significance and motives, and between western interpretations about those involved andtheir actual alignments).

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AFF – ZIZEK WRONGLY UNIVERSALIZES

TURN: Zizek’s theory is flawed. He identifies a single instance where his theory is true and universalizes it, without any explanation why that illogical leap is valid.Robinson, 2001 [by Andrew Robinson, “Notes on Zizek – ‘Welcome to the Desert of the Real’”. November 2001.http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/iaps/ARNo1.htm Robinson is a Professor at the School of Politics – University of Nottingham..]

Zizek's arbitrariness and lack of clear direction, a clear relation to evidence and standards forassessing his own arguments leave him in a position of constant random intuitive assertion. Takethe berumfsverbot issue. Zizek is more-or-less paranoid about this issue, crying "berumfsverbot"whenever others oppose his views on any concerted scale (see especially Contingency, Hegemony,Universality p. 325-6). He is raising a serious issue, but because of the randomness of his approach,he is using it inappropriately and in a way which may, if anything, hold back awareness andstruggle against berumfsverbot as and when it is actually attempted.Similarly on the issue of the Cause: how is one to assess the claim that the perception of suicidebombing as irrational is really a misrecognition of a lack of the dimension of sacrifice in the west?Zizek is clearly saying that there should be an attitude of self-sacrifice to a Cause; but hisarticulation of this claim to descriptive evidence which could as easily prove the opposite does notin the slightest explain why. This is a repetition of Zizek's ethics of the Act, and his attitude to it; indozens of cases, Zizek uses specific instances (from politics, films, novels, etc.) as pedagogical orpropaganidistic examples, which he attaches to assertions of the need for an Act, but which nevercontain any further case for why one should support this assertion.

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