Bataille K

UTNIF 2010 Sacrificial Refudiation K
Kirk, Flynn, et al
Sacrificial Refudiation
The Pups of War
Cerberus
Acephale
No head is better than one.
‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’-motto of Hanseatic League 1

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Acephale ..................................................................................... 1
K Summary................................................................................... 3
Shells… Pups of War and Cerberus.................................................6
Essential Dual Purpose Blocks.....................................................22
Pups of War Essential Blocks.......................................................44
Cerberus Essential Blocks............................................................51
Links.......................................................................................... 68
Alternative Solves…..................................................................102
A2 A2....................................................................................... 118

Kirk, Flynn, et al
K Summary
Thanks to all who labored exuberantly: Michael Barclay, Alex Dzeda, Aaaron Feinhandler, Josiah
Garnick, Stephen Harb, Owen Jones, Thomas Kruse, Ryan Malone, David Neustat, Pilz Pillsbury. And of
course to my helpers Flynn and Jake.
This file contains two kritiks that have the same alt/MPX and many of the same blocks. You need to go
through the beginning of the file carefully to figure out which blocks go with which kritik. But if not
otherwise marked, the block is assumed to be for both.
“The Pups of War”

This kritik is designed against kritik-y affs, like Kritikal Turkey TNWs or Bagram.
We kritik strategies that pressure the state, attempt to intervene in the democratic public sphere, deploy
rational discourse, appeal to ethical goods/norms, avoid violence/death, and value knowledge as
production.
Instead, we prefer ecastic communication in the form of theatrical sacrifice. The alternative is “Sacrifice
the 1AC. Severe its head, flay its corpse, and wear its skin.”
Sacrifice enacts useless expenditure, wasting goods rather than accumulating them. It thus exemplifies
human freedom, which Bataille calls “sovereignty.” We cut off their head as a rejection of rational
knowledge and authority. We wear their skin to break down the boundaries separating us from others.
Sacrifice thus severs the bounds of authority, expends the accumulating forces driving us to war, and
shatter wholistic ontologies.
“Cerberus”
This kritk is designed against poliy affs, particularly ones that claim advantages based off the
international system like heg or US/Japan relations.
State sovereignty is necessarily criminal, and even its supposed stability manifests monstrus violence as
insane excess. There is no balancing or stabilizing this sytem, and the discourses that promise security
pave the way for new wars in the name of peace.
The alternative is the same at “TPW”. We claim to expend the excess supposedly stabilizing the system,
wasting the forces accumulating to nuclear war. On the role of the ballot question we emphasize our own
sovereignty in this debate.
-Kirk

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Strategy Sheet
What follows is Dave’s notes on our gripe discussion about the various affs. Some of them are cryptic,
but if you know the aff and neg they should mostly make sense. Thanks Dave!
1. Turkey TNW’s
a. Neg
i. Taboo
1. Taboo demonizes the sacred
2. Taboo promotes violence and use
ii. Root cause of nuclear weapons is surplus production
1. Removing the weapons is for the accumulation of diplomacy and deterrence
2. This leads back to nukes
b. Aff
i. Neg dismiss public discourse, which is key to solvency
ii. Wittner 2AC card
1. Public debate frees us from the soveriengty of the state
iii. Wittner 9
1. Advocating change good
2. Anti-nuclear movements work
iv. Chasudoski
1. Public sphere good
v. Massumi- pre-emption is accumulation- we attack them to save us- leads to state
violence
1. Impact is Goh
2. K needs to think about internal contradictions
a. Ballot
i. Is the sacrifice for the utility of the ballot?
b. Alt solvency
i. Does the K deploy rational discouse? Does its alternative achieve a good?
c. To answer Ballot
i. Reframe meaning of the ballot
1. The ballot is to create the theatre of debate into a sacred thing
2. It needs a winner and a loser
3. The loser is the sacrifice
ii. Sacrifice is a radical challenge to utility, more so then the perm and the plan
1. This opens up ground for the permutation, because you’re saying some utility
is ok
iii. Voting for the text of the alternative
1. That’s not utilitarian
2. Even if the alt ends up solving for goods, its accidental
3. The plan is calculated

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Strategy Sheet
3. Bagram torture aff
a. Neg
i. Exceptionalism K in case neg… relates to second link card in this K
ii. Fetishism- reinforce sacred attraction of torture
iii. Life isn’t precarious (butler) its exuberant
1. Precariousness is the universal condition, and is not a result of state violence,
but should be embraced as exuberant
b. Aff
i. Torture is accumulation, we sacrifice it
ii. Butler- expose dark chambers and win war
iii. King 9- Demands empirically work- Gitmo
1. Neg: Gitmo’s not closed
iv. Ethics of the affirmative- must reject torture- vulnerability
4. Just War theory Burke aff
a. Neg
i. Always questioning war bottles up the military- when it unleashes it will be big and
devastating
ii. Remove an inefficiency (occupation breaking military), allowing more accumulation
of militarism
iii. Kritik the quest for knowledge of why we go to war
1. This rational reflection is futile
2. Violence is a moment of decision, an event, reflection does nothing when its
actually time to decide
3. Read the critical theory link
a. Producing systems of rationality
iv. Criticize rejection of violence
v. Criticize rejection of the war on terror
vi. Criticize totalizing ethics
1. Homogenous system always explaining when war is ok and not
b. Aff
i. Just war theory masks the violence of the state
ii. Aff rejects utilitarian survival
iii. No link- don’t see the state as rational
c. When debating an affirmative like this say that they have a lot of good ideas, but they wrap it
up in state legitimacy and rational goals. This normativity fuels the state.
d. They repeat the logic of just war theory with a new system of legitimacy in the international
system

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Shells… Pups of War and Cerberus
Labor on, Hercules!
“The living organism… receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the
excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g., an organism); if the
system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it
must necessairly be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or
catastrophically… for living matter in general, energy is always in excess; the question is
always posed in terms of extravagance. The choice is limited to how the wealth is to be
squandered.” –Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share v. 1

Kirk, Flynn, et al
The Pups of War… 1NC Shell Link (v K aff)

We offer this debate to ecastic communication, sacrificing certainty to social exuberance.
The 1AC models the political productivity of the state. More peace. More safety. More
reason. More work. More talk. Less communication.
The status quo is tragedy. The 1AC is farce.
Act 1: The Annointing.
The pups of war are yelping, and the 1AC adds their bark of protest to the chorus.
Demands of restrint from the war machine mean nothing, for militarism thrives on the
1AC’s fascinated indignation.
John Hutnyk 2003 [Goldsmith College at University of London; Critique of Anthropology v. 23]
Bataille was clearly a militant against the war, there is no doubting his engagement in this regard: ... we
can express the hope of avoiding a war that already threatens. But in order to do so we must divert
the surplus production, either into rational extension of a difficult industrial growth, or into
unproductive works that will dissipate an energy that cannot be accumulated in any case. (Bataille, 1949/1988: 25) And
even after the war he maintained a theoretical interest in ways to escape restrictions. In the second volume of The Accursed Share, Bataille speculates on alcohol, war and holidays as the
choices for expenditure. He is not so naive as to think that a larger participation in erotic games would help avoid war (nice thought), but he does rethink the ways of avoiding war: ‘we will not
be able to decrease the risk of war before we have reduced, or begun to reduce, the general disparity in standards of living’ (Bataille, 1991: 188). This ‘banality’ is what Bataille sees as the only
chance for an alternative to war, and it is possible even in the midst of the Cold War. The trouble was, faced with war itself, Bataille retreated to the library. Bataille’s contempt for and
fascination with fascist ‘community’ must – Nancy says – be behind his withdrawal (Nancy, 1991: 17). Unlike Marx in the Brumaire, Bataille’s analysis fills him with unease and inevitable
failure in the face of ‘a paradox at which his thinking came to a halt’ (Nancy, 1991: 23). It is this interruption that left Bataille susceptible to the postmodern- ist revision which drained any
sense of a political programme – the fight against fascism – from his work.9He was confined to the library, resigned, introspective, and in the end left passing books on to others with a whis-
Spiralling into the conflagration of the

pered recommendation (the review Critiquewas the last publishing venture he started, and it continues today).
sun, which gives energy without (obvious) return, he later wrote: The planet congested by death and
wealth a scream pierces the clouds Wealth and death close in. No-one hears this scream of a miserable waiting. And then: Knowing that
there is no response. (Bataille, 2001: 221) And, finally, from the ‘Notebook for Pure Happiness’ written towards the end of his life: The only escape is
failure. (Bataille, 2001: 223) Everything that we know is true, but on condition of disappearing in us (we
know better in ceasing to know). (Bataille, 2001: 247) Part IV Have I not led my readers astray? (Bataille, 1991: 430) Bataille cannot be left to rot in the library.
How useful an experiment would it be to try to ‘apply’ Bataille’s notion of expenditure to politics today? Klaus-Peter Köpping asks questions about ‘modernity’
which arise explicitly from his reading of Bataille as a theorist of transgression, addressing political examples such as Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia and Indonesia
A more extravagant general economy framework for such questions might take up the
(Köpping, 2002: 243).
massive accumulation that is the excess of an arms trade promoting regional conflicts as integral to
sales figures on the one side, with the performative futility of massed anti-capitalism rallies and May
Day marches that fall on the nearest Sunday so as not to disrupt the city on the other. Expenditure and squandering today, in
Bataille’s sense, might be seen in both the planned obso- lescence of cars, computers and nearly all merchandise, as well as in the waste production and fast-food service industry cults and
fashionista style wars, tamogochi and Beckham haircuts that currently sweep the planet. No doubt it would be too mechanical to rest with such applications, too utilitarian, but the relevance is
clear. The use-value of Georges Bataille is somewhat eccentric and the deployment of pre-Second World War circumstances as a comparative register for today is of course merely speculative.
No return to the 1930s (colourize films now). Yet, taking account of a long list of circumstantial differences – no Hitler, no Moscow, no Trotskyite opposition, etc. – is also unnecessary since it
is only in the interests of thinking through the current conjuncture so as to understand it, and change it, that any return should ever be contemplated. The importance of French anthropology –
Mauss – as well as psychoanalysis and phenomenology, cannot be underestimated and all are crucial in Bataille’s comprehension of the rise of fascism. Can these matters help us to make
sense of political debates in the midst of a new world war today? That the intellectual currents which shaped Bataille’s analysis were post- Marxist did not, then, replace the importance of Marx.
Today the comprehension of Bush’s planetary terror machine still requires such an analysis, but one that
can also be informed by the reading of Bataille’s thought as shaped by the intellectual currents mentioned above. In a period of capitalist slump, crisis of credit,
overextended market, defaulted debt and threatening collapse, the strategy of war looms large. Even before the events of 11 September 2001 in New York, Bush was
clearly on the warpath with missile defence systems, withdrawal from various international treaties and covenants, and massive appropriations for military and
surveillance systems.
The imperial element is clear and sustained – the aggression against the Palestinians,
the adventure in Afghanistan and the war on Iraq (to defend papa Bush’s legacy) obviously have their
roots in the imperialist mercantile tradition – plunder and war in pursuit of resources, primarily oil,
secondarily armaments sales. If this is potlatch, it is of the destructive kind that Bataille feared. The possibility of a geo-
political solution other than war should be evaluated. But it is a matter of record that, under the Bush family regime, the US–Europe alliance has not been interested
in pursuing any programme of reduction of disparity, a few suspensions of Third World debt and UN summits notwithstanding. When Bataille
searches
for an alternative to war in some ‘vast economic competition’ through which costly sacrifices,

Kirk, Flynn, et al
comparable to war, would yet give the competitor with initiative the advantage Bataille, 1949/1988: 172), he holds out
hope for a kind of gift without return. That he showed some enthusiasm for the Marshall Plan after the Second World War as a possible model for this might need to be ascribed to the
exhausted condition of post-war France, but he soon revised his assessment. The Marshall Plan was not as disinter- ested as Bataille implied; it facilitated circulation and recoupment of surplus
value as profit. The Cold War and nuclear proliferation turned out to be the preferred examples of reckless waste in actuality – as recognized in volume two of The Accursed Share (Bataille,
1991: 188).

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The Pups of War… 1NC Shell Link (v K aff)

Today, redistribution is not considered an option, the threat of Asian capitalism – after the slaughter of millions – can be ignored, and the
(
war on Islam (known variously as the Gulf War, Zionism, and the War on Terror) appears as the
primary strategy (combined with a war on South America, mistakenly named as a war on drugs, and a war on immigration disguised as a security concern). The secondary
strategy is a newly hollowed out version of liberal welfare. In 1933 Bataille had written of the bourgeois tendency to declare ‘equality’ and make it their watchword, all the time showing they
do not share the lot of the workers (Bataille, 1997: 177). In the 21st century, Prime Minister Blair of England has made some gestures towards a similar pseudo- alternative. At a Labour Party
congress in the millennium year he spoke of the need to address poverty and famine in Africa, and no doubt still congratulates himself on his pursuit of this happy agenda; as I write a large
entourage of delegates and diplomats are flying to Johannesburg for another conference junket – the Earth Summit. The party accompanying Blair and Deputy Prescott includes multinational
mining corporation Rio Tinto Executive Director Sir Richard Wilson (The Guardian, 12 August 2002). Rio Tinto is hardly well known for its desire to redistribute the global share of surplus
If there are no gifts, only competitions of expenditure, what then of the effort of
expenditure for the welfare of all.
Bataille to oppose fascism? It is not altruistic, and yet it is the most necessary and urgent aspect of his work that is given to us to read for today. Is fascism
a charity-type trick? A deceit of double dealing which offers the illusion of more while giving less? Something like this psycho-social structure of fascism appears to be enacted in the potlatch
appeasements of the propaganda spinsters surrounding Blair. The New Labour and Third Way public offering is ostentatiously to be about more healthcare, more police, more schools, but Blair
spins and rules over a deception that demands allegiance to a privatization programme that cares only about reducing the costs (fixed capital costs) of providing healthy, orderly, trained
employees for industry, of short-term profit and arms sales to Israel, of racist scare-mongering and scapegoating of asylum seekers, refugees and migrants, of opportunist short-term gain head-
in-the-sand business-as-usual. Similarly, the gestures of multi-millionaires like George Soros and Bill Gates in establishing charity ‘foundations’ to ease their guilt is not just a matter of
philanthropy, it is a necessary gambit of containment (and these two in particular bringing their cyber-evangelism to the markets of Eastern Europe, South and South-East Asia). The
liberal rhetoric of charity and the militant drums of war are the two strategies of the same rampant
restrictive economy. Carrot and stick. Team A and team B of capitalist hegemony – the critique of the gift is clear, a gift is not
a gift but a debt of time – and this is not really generosity or hospitality. The same can be said perhaps of war – it is not war but profit, just as the gift reassures the giver of their superior status,
the war on terror unleashes a terror of its own; war does not produce victories but rather defeat for all. Bataille shows us a world in ruins. September 11 has been made into the kind of event
that transforms an unpopular (even unelected) figure into a leader under whom the nation coheres in a new unity – much as Bataille saw Nuremburg achieve for the National Socialists. Of
course I am not suggesting Bush is a Nazi – he hasn’t got the dress sense – but people were betrayed by the trick of a ‘democracy’ that offers pseudo-
participation once every four years, and this time in a way that has consequences leading inexorably to a massive fight . The kowtowing to big business with a rhetoric of social security has been
heard before – it was called the New Deal (or welfare state) and was a deception almost from the start. Where there was perhaps some contractual obligation of aid in the earlier forms, today
the trick of the buy-off bribery of service provision is contingent and calculated according only to corporate strategic gain. While we lurch towards endless war, governments reassure us with
the watchwords of security that really mean death and despair to those on the wrong side of the wire. The largest prison
population ever (under democracy or any other form of government), mass confinement for minor offences (three strikes), colour overcoded death row (Mumia Abu-Jamal etc.), arrest and
The incarcerated souls in the concentration camps of Sangatte,10
detention without trial or charge, celebratory executionism, etc.
Woomera,11 Kamunting12 or Guantanamo13 are wired in and offered up as sacrificial gifts to the rule of new
judicial-administrative fascism. A new toothy-smiling Christian cult of death and technology, spun carefully via press conferences and TV sitcoms – television has
given up any pretence of journalism in favour of infotainment. Does the US administration dream of a new post-war era where, once again like Marshall, they could come with a plan to
rebuild upon ruins? This would indicate the exhaustion of the current mode of production, which, with ‘information’ promised renewal but quickly stalled. Whatever the case, the enclosure of
the US and Europe behind fortress walls does not – experience now shows – ensure prophylactic protection, and ruin may be visited upon all. It was Bataille who said that perhaps only the
Polite critiques and protest have no purchase – orderly
‘methods of the USSR would ... be equal to a ruined immensity’ (Bataille, 1949/1988: 167–8).
rallies against the aggression in Afghanistan, against asylum and immigration law, against the destruction of Palestine, etc.,
get no ‘airtime’ (instead, ‘political’ soap opera like The West Wing, as the current equivalent in ideological terms to the Cold War’s Bomber Command). Every
leader that accedes to the ‘War on Terror’ programme and its excesses (civilian deaths, curtailment of civil liberty, global bombing) is an appeaser. This is like the
dithering of Chamberlain, only this time the opposition activists are fighting in a ‘post-national’ arena and Stalin’s slumber will not be broken, the Red Army cannot
run inter- ference, there is no Churchill rumbling in the wings,
the fascist empire will prevail without militant mobilization
across the board. This is the appeaser’s gift – betrayal into the ‘ranks assigned to us by generals and
industrial magnates’ (Bataille, 1985: 164). The unravelling of the tricks of social welfare, of ‘asylum’
and ‘aid’ programmes, of ‘interest’ even (the narrowing of news broadcasts to domestic affairs) or
respect, of the demon- ization of others, of tolerance, the hypocrisy of prejudice – all this prepares us
for a war manufactured elsewhere. After the breakdown of the gift’s tricks, fascism is the strategy, the
obverse side of capital’s coin. In this context, the geo-politics that enables, or demands, appeasement
of the imperious corporate/US power is the restricted destruction we should fear, and we should
fight in a struggle that goes beyond national defence, wage claims or solidarity. The discipline of the Soviets and of
Bataille could be our tools. Bataille reads on in his library. We are left speculating with him, rashly charging in with ideas that are less excessive, less exuberant, that modera- tion might
withhold. But there is no more important time to consider the efforts in the arts to fight militarism out of control, and, as Bush drags the world into permanent war, it is worth asking why
Bataille’s surrealistic opposition to Hitler was inadequate. Is it because there are no more thinkers in the Party? Is it that subversion is uninformed and its spirit quiet? Chained to the shelves, it
is not enough to know that appeasement of the military-industrial machine is the obverse side of liberal charity.
Why are we still unable to acknowledge this is the path to war? What would be adequate to move away from appeasement to containment and more? What kind of
sovereign destruction would Bataille enact today? Against
the ‘immense hypocrisy of the world of accumulation’ (Bataille,
1991: 424), the answer is clear: we should ‘condemn this mouldy society to revolutionary
destruction’ (Bataille, 1997: 175). The Bataille of La Critique Sociale might argue for a glorious
expenditure as that which connects people together in the social and recognizes their joint labour to
produce themselves, and this must be redeemed from the restricted economy that insists on expen-

Kirk, Flynn, et al
diture for the maintenance of hierarchy. If he were leaving the library today, the Bataille of anti-war
Surrealism might say it is time for a wake-up knock-down critique of the barking dogs. The
castrating lions of appeasement must be hounded out of town. Back in your kennels, yelping pups
of doom. Fair call, Georges Bataille.

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Shell… Cerberus… 1NC Shell Link (v Policy Aff)

We declare ourselves sovereign, and refuse identification with the excess of the USFG. We
offer this debate to ecastic communication, sacrificing certainty to social exuberance.
Act 1: The Annointing
The attempt to restore balance to the internatonal system denies the excessive violence at
the heart of state sovereignty. The aff re-enacts political theater built upon the
extermination of others.
Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat 2007

[Thomas Blom Hansen is Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, Senior Research Scientist at Yale
University, Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh, and Professor of Anthropology at the University of
Amsterdam where he served as Dean of the International School for Humanities and Social Sciences. Recently, Hansen was
offered a position as full professor at Stanford University where he is to head a new research institute for the anthropological
study of South-East Asia.[1] Finn Stepputat is Senior Researcher at Danish Insitute International Studies,
Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Post-Colonial World
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i7996.html]
The attack on the World Trade Center in September 2001 aimed at what Al-Qaeda saw as the heart of America's global empire. The subsequent reactions in America
and the rest of the world demonstrated that sovereignty and its ultimate expression--the ability and the will to employ overwhelming violence and to decide on life and
death--have been reconfigured in the last decades of the twentieth century. The
"war on terror" and the attacks on Afghanistan
and Iraq demonstrated that underneath the complex structures of power in modern, liberal societies,
territorial sovereignty, and the foundational violence that gave birth to it, still remains the hard kernel
of modern states--an intrinsically violent "truth" of the modern nation-state that remains its raison d'être in periods of crisis. Jus ad bellum, the possibility
of waging war against those one declares as enemies remains a central dimension of how a state performs its "stateness." At the same time, these reactions also
vindicated Hardt and Negri's assertion that "imperial sovereignty" of the twenty-first century differs from earlier forms of imperial power (Hardt and Negri 2000, 161-
204). As opposed to earlier eras, today's empire of global network-power has no outside .
The enemies, or "deviants," within this space of
moral-political-economic domination are all "within," and are often former allies of the U.S.
government. In the simplified view of the Bush administration, these constitute an "axis of evil" that
must be punished and disciplined in preemptive military strikes to secure internal peace in the United
States and among its allies. The sovereign prerogative is to declare who is an internal enemy, and the
"war on terror" is a war on internal enemies--within nation-states now policed under new stringent
security acts, and within the global empire where legality and rights have been suspended for those
declared "illegal combatants" and incarcerated in Afghan prisons, Guantanamo Bay, and other
"spaces of exception." The global transformations of politics, economy, and culture have been explored in various ways by theorists of globalization
and international relations.1 Their obvious merits notwithstanding, these works still maintain an unbroken link between state power, sovereignty, and territory.
Sovereignty resides in the state, or in institutions empowered by states, to exercise sovereign power in supra national institutions and within the nation-state defined by
its territory and the control of its populations. The emphasis in this body of literature remains on sovereignty as a formal, de jure property whose efficacy to a large
extent is derived from being externally recognized by other states as both sovereign and legitimate. This taking effective sovereignty for granted is questioned by
Stephen Krasner (1999) in his influential work, "Sovereignty: Organized Hypocracy." Krasner shows how international sovereignty and the principles of
nonintervention are being breached in numerous ways by imposition as well as agreement, but in his account, sovereignty remains inherently linked to territory and
the state power of states. It seems that sovereignty cannot be imagined independently of the state. This volume questions the obviousness of the state-territory-
sovereignty link. In tune with a line of constructivist scholarship in International Relations theory (e.g., Kratochwill 1986; Ruggie 1993; Biersteker and Weber 1996)
we conceptualize the territorial state and sovereignty as social constructions. Furthermore, we suggest to shift the ground for our understanding of sovereignty from
issues of territory and external recognition by states, toward issues of internal constitution of sovereign power within states through the exercise of violence over
bodies and populations. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel remarks that during "the feudal monarchy of earlier times, the state certainly had external sovereignty, but
internally, neither the monarch nor the state was sovereign" (Hegel [1821] 1991, 315). This "internal sovereignty" of the modern state was only possible under "lawful
and constitutional conditions," in a unitary "Rechtsstaat" whose "ideality" would show itself as "ends and modes of operation determined by, and dependent on, the
end of the whole" (316, emphasis as in original). Hegel makes it clear that this modern "ideality" of sovereignty can only be realized insofar as local and familial
solidarities of "civil society" are sublated to expressions of patriotism through the state, particularly in situations of crisis (316). Even in this, the most systematic
thinker of the modern state, sovereignty is not the bedrock of state power but a precarious effect--and an objective--of state formation. Building on insights from a
previous volume that sought to "denaturalize" the postcolonial state (Hansen and Stepputat 2001), and motivated by global events, we propose in this volume to take a
fresh and ethnographically informed look at the meanings and forms of sovereignty in the same postcolonial zones of the world. Our aims are threefold. First, we
suggest that sovereign power and the violence (or the threat thereof) that always mark it, should be studied as practices dispersed throughout, and across, societies.
The unequivocal linking of sovereign power to the state is a

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Cerberus… 1NC Shell Link (v Policy Aff)

historically contingent and peculiar outcome of the evolution of the modern state system in Europe since the West-phalian peace in 1648. The
discipline of
International Relations has for decades assumed states to be both normal, that is, with de facto
legitimate control of their populations and territory, and identical, that is, with similar interests,
strategies, and expected patterns of action. To become a normal sovereign state with normal citizens continues to be a powerful ideal, releasing considerable
2
creative energy, and even more repressive force, precisely because its realization presupposed the disciplining and subordination of other forms of authority. We
suggest that sovereignty
of the state is an aspiration that seeks to create itself in the face of internally
fragmented, unevenly distributed and unpredictable configurations of political authority that exercise
more or less legitimate violence in a territory. Sovereign power, whether exercised by a state, in the
name of the nation, or by a local despotic power or community court, is always a tentative and unstable
project whose efficacy and legitimacy depend on repeated performances of violence and a "will to
rule." These performances can be spectacular and public, secret and menacing, and also can appear as
scientific/technical rationalities of management and punishment of bodies. Although the meanings and forms of such performances of sovereignty always are
historically specific, they are, however, always constructing their public authority through a capacity for visiting
violence on human bodies.
continued
The "secret" of sovereignty seems, in other words, still to be defined in the tension between the will to arbitrary violence and the existence of bodies that can be killed
but also can resist sovereign power, if nothing else by the mere fact of the simple life force they contain. If
sovereign power originates in
excessive and exceptional violence that wants nothing or sees nothing beyond its own benefit or
pleasure, its object, but also its ultimate resistance, is found in the simple life of bodies that desires
nothing beyond itself and the simple moments of pleasure of everyday life. This fundamental
embeddedness of sovereignty in the body was at the center of Georges Bataille's exploration of the
concept and its meaning in the modern world. To Bataille, sovereignty is not merely an archaic form of
power and subordination but articulated more fundamentally in attitudes, or acts, beyond the realm of
utility and calculation. "Life beyond utility is the domain of sovereignty" (Bataille 1991, 198). 8 Sovereign
enjoyment is excessive and beyond the needs of those enjoying. A sovereign command does not
calculate minutely what it wants, but inadvertently reproduces obedience qua its very gesture of
disregard of danger and death (225-30). Sovereignty resides in every human being and shows itself in the desire to enjoy and
revel in brief moments of careless freedom, in sexual ecstasy, in moments of simple nonanticipatory existence,
when an individual experiences "the miraculous sensation of having the world at his disposal" (199).
This was the original condition of man in "his non-alienated condition [. . .] but what is within him has a destructive violence, for
example the violence of death" (214). A part of Bataille's essay anticipates Foucault's work by arguing that modern bourgeois
society, and communism with even more determination, have striven to eradicate the wastefulness, irrationality
and arbitrariness at the heart of sovereignty: both as a mode of power, as a mode of subordination
driven by the subject's projection of their own desire onto the spectacle of wasteful luxury of the court
and the king, and as a space for arbitrary and spontaneous experiences of freedom and suspension of duties. The
essence of Bataille's proposition is that because the exercise of sovereignty is linked to death, excessive expenditure (depenser) and bodily pleasure can neither be
contained by any discipline, nor be fully "democratized" into an equal dignity of all men. Because sovereignty revolves around death, the ultimate form of expenditure
beyond utility, it constitutes in Mbembe's words an "anti-economy" (Mbembe 2003, 15). To Bataille , sovereignty has no positive existence
but is a miracle intrinsic to human existence and can only be determined through what he calls a
"negative theology" that captures the "miraculous moments" (241) in which sovereignty is
experienced: in the awe of the leader or the king, in the disregard of death, of timidity, of prohibitions. Because sovereignty flows from the assertion of a basic life force that
foregrounds the body and the senses rather than the intellect, it is ultimately connected with the will to take life, and to give up one's life but not in a calculated and rational fashion. Sovereignty
is the opposite of "faintheartedness" and Bataille writes: "Killing is not the only way to regain sovereign life, but sovereignty is always linked to a denial of the sentiments that death controls"
(221). In Bataille's view, the divine is the ultimate sovereign phenomenon, organized around an unknowable but indivisible void, a "deep unity of NOTHING" (234), that only can be known
through its effects, the enchantment it generates, the imagination it fires and the objects it sacralizes. 9 To Bataille, the mystery of sovereignty has an irrevocably archaic quality, an "animality that
we perceive in sovereignty" whose reappearance as various forms of irrational excess upsets and disturbs the ideals of equality and reciprocity forged in modern bourgeois societies (and those
under communism). Echoing Mauss's notion of gift-giving as an inherently unequal form of reciprocity because the giver always retains more than he/she gives, Bataille argues that "the universal
aspiration of the sovereignty of the gift giver" (347), that is, the desire to impress, assert and dominate through excessive expenditure inevitably presents a problem for the bourgeois sense of
"proportionality" (348). Bataille tried to understand sovereignty as a common denominator for what we may call the "gift of power"--the mystery of the will to power of certain individuals, the
charisma that violence, selfishness, and ruthlessness generate--and he identified its origins in elementary life force that expresses itself in extraordinary actions and moments. For all its subtle
insights, it is not surprising that Bataille's work has been accused of rearticulating themes in the philosophical "vitalism"--from Nietzsche's ideas of the willpower of a future superior being,
Bergson's biological ideas of the elan vital as an irrepressible life force, to Heidegger's much deeper ontological reflections, and even Merleau Ponty's writings on emotional and embodied
intensities. But, unlike these writers, Bataille shifted the emphasis from searching for the sources of the will to understanding will as an effect that is deducted from violence and other sovereign
acts. However, on the whole, vitalist thinking had a troubled and ambiguous relationship with rightwing politics and critiques of modernity throughout the twentieth century. 10 The crux of this
problem lies in Bataille's somewhat impoverished analysis of modern bourgeois society as governed by lifeless, disciplinary and commercial logics, and his view of sovereignty, the sacred, and
the elementary forces of life as residues of an archaic age. The positing of sovereignty as a mark of something originary, of a will that is self-born and unaccountable and yet vitalizes the dull
procedures of modernity, was even more pronounced in Carl Schmitt's earlier and controversial work on "political theology" from 1920. Written in the context of the

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upheavals following World War I, Schmitt's work on "the political" as an agonistic relation between friends and foes (Schmitt [1932] 1976) was deeply skeptical of parliamentary democracy and
of rationalist or idealist notions of justice that in his view basically relied on only superficially secularised Christian ideas of mercy and salvation. Instead, Schmitt proposed the Hobbesian
"decisionist" argument that law does not reflect the norms of a society but rather the will, the fortitude and authority of those who decide what is law. "For a legal order to make sense, a normal
situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitely decides whether this normal situation actually exists" (Schmitt 1985, 13). The key concept for Schmitt was here the notion of the
"exception" (Ausnahme), which encapsulates what Bataille calls the "sovereign moment" in that it is a conceptual and normative void from where the law can be given but also where the vitality
of the decision shows itself: "In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition" (15). In Schmitt's view, sovereignty does not
have the form of law; it lies behind, and makes possible the authority of the law. The specificity of the legal form lies not in content or style but in a certain excess, a surplus content that precisely
is the trace of a decision: "That constitutive, specific element of a decision is, from the perspective of the content of the underlying norm, new and alien. Looked at normatively, the decision
emanates from nothingness" (33). Although Schmitt's decisionism on the surface may appear as hard-nosed realism, it is crucially dependent on a vitalist conception of modernity and democracy
modern society remains
as weak, formalistic, and dull social forms. In the view of Schmitt and his many contemporaries who were sympathetic to Nazism,
dependent on the passion and intensity derived from archaic and premodern phenomena such as
religion, war, the magicality of the decision, and the sovereign power of the leader. Although sovereignty and state
power is implicitly equated throughout Schmitt's work, his idea of the decision has a wider application and resonates in many ways with Bataille's idea of sovereignty
as the sensual and embodied antithesis of the normative and customary. Both agree that sovereignty and its traces are ubiquitous and important in modern societies,
sovereignty is
always appearing under the sign of something excessive, or exceptional. Yet, for all the power attributed to the sovereign decision or moment,
beyond definition, it is a "nothingness," a force or will that only can be known in the moment of its
appearance. In the recent work of Giorgio Agamben, one finds a highly creative attempt to combine the insights of Schmitt, Bataille, Kantorowicz, and
others, and yet, through a Foucauldian optic, to get beyond the unmistakably metaphysical and vitalist tenor of their expositions. Agamben rejects Foucault's notion of
sovereignty as an archaic form of power superseded by modern biopolitics and suggests that,
"the production of a biopolitical body is the
original activity of sovereign power. In this sense biopolitics is at least as old as the sovereign exception" (Agamben 1998, 6). Instead of
beginning with Hobbes, the absolutist state and the origins of sovereign power in Christian theology, Agamben argues that "bare life," or simple biological life, "has
the peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusion founds the city of men" in the Western political tradition (7). In antiquity, the city and community proper
consisted of free men and citizens--whereas women, slaves, outcasts, and other forms of life, that is, the majority of human beings, were excluded from the political
community, and yet remained internal and crucial to society and economy. This
"inclusive exclusion" is captured in the Roman
concept of homo sacer, the sacred man who is expelled and banished from the community and who may be
killed by members of the community--but not sacrificed as he is not worthy of this gesture of honor before the divine. This figure, the outlaw, the Friedlos, or the
convict, was historically the symbol of the outside upon whose body and life the boundaries of the political community could be built. The expulsion of someone who
used to have rights as a citizen, or simply to categorize some individuals in a society as a form of life that is beyond the reach of dignity and full humanity and thus not
even a subject of a benevolent power, is the most elementary operation of sovereign power--be it as a government in a nation-state, a local authority, a community, a
warlord, or a local militia. At the same time, Agamben shows the figure of the sovereign to be ambiguous--a figure whose status and corporeality appears as fragile
and ambivalent but also exempted from the rules of ordinary life as that of his double, the homo sacer, the figure symbolizing simple, mute and bare life (Agamben
1998, 49-103). This logic of sovereign
violence that founds the political community by excluding various forms of
"bare life" has not disappeared with the emergence of modern biopolitical forms of governance. On the
contrary. The essential operation of totalitarian power was to reduce the population to pliable bodies
that could be improved, shaped, and regimented, but also exterminated if deemed unnecessary or
dangerous.
CONTINUED….
Modern states seek not only to produce citizens who are responsible and amenable to rational self-
governance. They also seek to make these citizens bearers of the sovereignty of the nation and the
state and thus, in a sense, produce their own ideal cause: the eighteenth-century idea, that the sovereignty of the state is the sum of, and expression of, the aggregate of each individual
citizen. Thus, beneath the governance through reason and norms, lies the imperative of obedience to the
rules, and further yet, the performance of violence and the armed protection of the community--Home Guards, civil patrols, the armed forces, and so
on. The assertion in Western states after September 11 of the "hard kernel" of sovereignty is, among many other things, manifested in substantial expansions of these forms of domestic defense
forces, or the huge Homeland Security program in the United States, many of which are based on voluntary commitments from citizens. These institutions--the armed heart of the sovereign
The
nations--are both the instrument of national integration (as in the United States and Israel) and simultaneously closed to anyone considered culturally or religiously "alien."
production of sovereignty through the nation and the state are, in other words, often exclusive projects
that inadvertently presuppose and produce large numbers of poor, marginalized, or ethnic others as outsiders,
people who are not yet ready to become citizens or included in the true political-cultural community. The state finds itself in constant competition with other centers of
sovereignty that dispense violence as well as justice with impunity--criminal gangs, political movements or quasi-autonomous police forces that each try to assert their
claims to sovereignty. In such situations ,
the state is not the natural and self-evident center and origin of sovereignty,
but one among several sovereign bodies that tries to assert itself upon the bodies of asylum seekers,
"terrorists," or mere criminals.

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Act 2. The Cutting.
“Sacrifice the 1AC. Severe its head, flay its corpse, and wear its skin.”
Sacrificial theater offers a moment of transfiguration. Risk this intimate encounter with
death to give your life meaning beyond mere existence and duration.
Liran Razinsky 2009

[The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, SubStance #119, Vol. 38, no. 2, 2009]
Thus we see that the stakes are high. What is at stake is the attempt of the subject to grasp itself in totality. This attempt necessitates bringing death into the account,
but death itself hampers this very attempt. One never dies in the first person. Returning to Bataille, why does he believe sacrifice to be a solution to Hegel’s
fundamental paradox? For him, it answers the requirements of the human, for Man meets death face to face in the sacrifice, he sojourns with it, and yet, at the same
time, he preserves his life. In sacrifice, says Bataille, man destroys the animal within him and establishes his human truth as a “being unto death” (he uses
Heidegger’s term). Sacrifice provides a clear manifestation of man’s fundamental negativity, in the form of death (Bataille, “Hegel” 335-36; 286). The
sacrificer both destroys and survives. Moreover, in the sacrifice, death is approached voluntarily by
Man. In this way the paradox is overcome, and yet remains open. We can approach death and yet
remain alive, but, one might ask, is it really death that we encountered, or did we merely fabricate a
simulacrum? Bataille insists elsewhere, however, that sacrifice is not a simulacrum, not a mere
subterfuge. In the sacrificial ritual, a real impression of horror is cast upon the spectators. Sacrifice
burns like a sun, spreading radiation our eyes can hardly bear, and calls for the negation of
individuals as such (“The Festival” 313; 215). We did not fool death; we are burned in its fire.
Bataille’s idea of the sacrifice also addresses Freud’s paradox. It might be impossible to imagine our own death directly, but it is possible to
imagine it with the aid of some mediator, to meet death through an other’s death. Yet on some level this other’s death must be our own as well
for it to be effective, and indeed this is the case, says Bataille. He stresses the element of identification: “In the sacrifice, the sacrificer identifies
himself with the animal that is struck down dead. And so he dies in seeing himself die” (“Hegel” 336; 287).
“There is no sacrifice,”
writes Denis Hollier, “unless the one performing it identifies, in the end, with the victim” (166). Thus
it is through identification, through otherness that is partly sameness, that a solution is achieved. If it were us, we would die in the
act. If it were a complete other, it would not, in any way, be our death. Also noteworthy is Bataille’s stress on the involvement of sight: “and so he dies in seeing himself die” (“Hegel” 336;
287), which brings him close to Freud’s view of the nature of the problem, for Freud insists on the visual, recasting the problem as one of spectatorship, imagining, perceiving. Bataille’s
,
description recapitulates that of Freud, but renders it positive. Yes, we remain as a spectator, but it is essential that we do so. Without it, we cannot be said to have met death. Significantly
meeting death is a need, not uncalled-for. We must meet death, and we must remain as spectators.
Thus it is through identification and through visual participation in the dying that a solution is achieved,
accompanied by the critical revaluation of values, which renders the meeting with death crucial for
“humanness.” Note that both possibilities of meeting death—in the sacrificial-ritual we have just
explored, and in theatre or art, to which we now turn—are social.
Continued…
Thus Freud’s text, although it insists on the irrepresentability of death, actually offers, unintentionally perhaps, a possible way out of the paradox through turning to
the other.
Death perhaps cannot be looked at directly, but it can be grasped sideways, indirectly,
vicariously through a mirror, to use Perseus’s ancient trick against Medusa. The introduction of the
other, both similar to and different from oneself, into the equation of death helps break out of the
Cartesian circle with both its incontestable truth and its solipsism and affirmation of oneself. The safety
that theater provides, of essentially knowing that we will remain alive, emerges as a kind of
requirement for our ability to really identify with the other. In that, it paradoxically enables us to really
get a taste of death. Bataille radicalizes that possibility. Although Freud deems the estrangement of death from psychic life a problem, as we have seen
and shall see, theater is not a solution for him. With Bataille however, theater emerges as a much more compelling alternative. Again, it is a matter of a delicate
nuance, but a nuance that makes all the difference. The idea common to both authors—that we can meet death through the other and yet remain alive—is ambiguous.
One can lay stress on that encounter or on the fact of remaining alive. 11 Freud SubStance #119, Vol. 38, no. 2, 2009 75 Looking Death in the Eyes: Freud and
Bataille tends to opt for the second possibility, but his text can also be read as supporting the first. The benefit in bringing Freud and Bataille together is that it

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invites us to that second reading. An Encounter with Death Death in Freud is often the death of the other. Both the fear of death and the death wish are often focused
on the other as their object. But

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almost always it is as though through the discussion of the other Freud were trying to keep death at bay. But along with Bataille, we can take this other more
seriously. Imagining our own death might be impossible, yet we can still get a glimpse of death when it is an other that dies. In one passage in his text, the death of
the other seems more explicitly a crucial point for Freud as well—one passage where death does not seem so distant. Freud comments on the attitude of primeval
Man to death, as described above—namely that he wishes it in others but ignores it in himself. “But there was for him one case in which the two opposite attitudes
towards death collided,” he continues. It occurred when primeval man saw someone who belonged to him die—his wife, his child, his friend […]. Then, in his pain,
he was forced to learn that one can die, too, oneself, and his whole being revolted against the admission. (“Thoughts” 293) Freud goes on to explain that the loved
one was at once part of himself, and a stranger whose death pleased primeval man. It is from this point, Freud continues, that philosophy, psychology and religion
sprang. 12 I have described elsewhere (Razinsky, “A Struggle”) how Freud’s reluctance to admit the importance of death quickly undermines this juncture of the
existential encounter with death by focusing on the emotional ambivalence of primeval man rather than on death itself. However, the description is there and is very
telling. Primeval man witnessed death, and “his whole being revolted against the admission.” ”Man could no longer keep death at a distance, for he had tasted it in
his pain about the dead” (Freud, “Thoughts” 294). Once again, it is through the death of the other that man comes to grasp death. Once again, we have that special
admixture of the other being both an other and oneself that facilitates the encounter with death. Something of myself must be in the other in order for me to see his
death as relevant to myself. Yet his or her otherness, which means my reassurance of my survival, is no less crucial, for if it were not present, there would be no
acknowledgement of death, one’s own death always being, says Freud, one’s blind spot. 13 Liran Razinsky SubStance #119, Vol. 38, no. 2, 2009 76 I
mentioned before Heidegger’s grappling with a problem similar to Bataille’s paradox. It is part of Heidegger’s claim, which he shares with Freud, that one’s death is
unimaginable. In a famous section Heidegger mentions the possibility of coming to grasp death through the death of the other but dismisses it, essentially since the
other in that case would retain its otherness: the other’s death is necessarily the other’s and not mine (47:221-24). Thus we return to the problem we started with—
that of the necessary subject-object duality in the process of the representation of death. Watching the dead object will no more satisfy me than imagining myself as
an object, for the radical difference of both from me as a subject will remain intact. But the possibility that seems to emerge from the discussion of Freud and Bataille
is that in-between position of the person both close and distant, both self and other, which renders true apprehension of death possible, through real identification. 14
As Bataille says, regarding the Irish Wake custom where the relatives drink and dance before the body of the deceased: “It is the death of an other, but in such
instances, the death of the other is always the image of one’s own death” (“Hegel” 341; 291). Bataille speaks of the dissolution of the subject-object boundaries in
sacrifice, of the “fusion of beings” in these moments of intensity (“The Festival” 307-11; 210-13; La Littérature 215; 70). Possibly, that is what happens to primeval
man when the loved one dies and why his “whole being” is affected. He himself is no longer sure of his identity. Before, it was clear—there is the other, the object,
whom one wants dead, and there is oneself, a subject. The show and the spectators. Possibly what man realized before the cadaver of his loved one was that he
himself is also an object, taking part in the world of objects, and not only a subject. When he understood this, it seems to me, he understood death. For in a sense a
subject subjectively never dies. Psychologically nothing limits him, 15 while an object implies limited existence: limited by other objects that interact with it,
limited in space, limited in being the thought-content of someone else. Moreover, primeval man understood that he is the same for other subjects as other subjects are
for him—that is, they can wish him dead or, which is pretty much the same, be indifferent to his existence. The encounter made primeval man step out of the
psychological position of a center, transparent to itself, and understand that he is not only a spirit but also a thing, an object, not only a spectator; this is what really
shakes him. 16 The Highest Stake in the Game of Living Thus far we have mainly discussed our first two questions: the limitation in imagining death and the
possible solution through a form SubStance #119, Vol. 38, no. 2, 2009 77 Looking Death in the Eyes: Freud and Bataille of praxis, in either a channeled, ritualized
or a spontaneous encounter with the death of an other, overcoming the paradox of the impossibility of representation by involving oneself through deep
identification. We shall now turn to our third question, of the value of integrating death into our thoughts. We have seen that Bataille’s perspective continuously
brings up the issue of the value of approaching death. The questions of whether we can grasp death and, if we can, how, are not merely abstract or neutral ones. The
encounter with death, that we now see is possible, seems more and more to emerge as possessing a positive value, indeed as fundamental. What we shall now
examine is Freud’s attempt to address that positive aspect directly, an attempt that betrays, however, a deep ambivalence. As mentioned, Freud’s text is very
confused, due to true hesitation between worldviews (see Razinsky, “A Struggle”). One manifestation of this confusion is Freud’s position regarding this cultural-
conventional attitude: on the one hand he condemns it, yet on the other hand he accepts it as natural and inevitable. For him, it results to some extent from death’s
exclusion from unconscious thought (“Thoughts” 289, 296-97). Death cannot be represented and is therefore destined to remain foreign to our life. 17 But then
Freud suddenly recognizes an opposite necessity: not to reject death but to insert it into life. Not to distance ourselves from it, but to familiarize ourselves with it:
But this attitude [the cultural-conventional one] of ours towards death has a powerful effect on our lives.
Life is impoverished, it loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may
not be risked. It becomes as shallow and empty as, let us say, an American flirtation, in which it is
understood from the first that nothing is to happen, as contrasted with a Continental love-affair in which
both partners must constantly bear its serious consequences in mind. Our emotional ties, the unbearable
intensity of our grief, make us disinclined to court danger for ourselves and for those who belong to us.
We dare not contemplate a great many undertakings which are dangerous but in fact
indispensable, such as attempts at artificial flight, expeditions to distant countries or experiments with
explosive substances. We are paralyzed by the thought of who is to take the son’s place with his
mother, the husband’s with his wife, the father’s with his children, if a disaster should occur. Thus the
tendency to exclude death from our calculations in life brings in its train many other renunciations
and exclusions. Yet the motto of the Hanseatic League ran: ‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’
(“It is necessary to sail the seas, it is not necessary to live.”) (“Thoughts” 290-91) Readers unfamiliar with Freud’s paper are
probably shaking their heads in disbelief. Is it Freud who utters these words? Indeed, the oddity of this citation cannot be over-estimated. It seems not to belong to
Freud’s Liran Razinsky SubStance #119, Vol. 38, no. 2, 2009 78 thought. One can hardly find any other places where he speaks of such an intensification of
life and fascination with death, and praises uncompromising risk-taking and the neglect of realistic considerations. In addition to being unusual, the passage itself is
somewhat unclear. 18 The examples—not experimenting with explosive substances—seem irrelevant and unconvincing. The meaning seems to slide. It is not quite
clear if the problem is that we do not bring death into our calculations, as the beginning seems to imply, or that, rather, we actually bring it into our calculations too
much, as is suggested at the end But what I wish to stress here is that the passage actually opposes what Freud says in the preceding passages, where he describes the
cultural-conventional attitude and speaks of our inability to make death part of our thoughts. In both the current passage and later passages he advocates including
death in life, but insists, elsewhere in the text, that embracing death is impossible. In a way, he is telling us that we cannot accept the situation where death is
constantly evaded. Here again Bataille can be useful in rendering Freud’s position more intelligible. He seems to articulate better than Freud the delicate balance,
concerning the place of death in psychic life, between the need to walk on the edge, and the flight into normalcy and safety. As I asserted above, where in Freud there
are contradictory elements, in Bataille there is a dialectic. Bataille, as we have seen, presents the following picture: It might be that, guided by our instincts, we tend
to avoid death. But we also seem to have a need to intersperse this flight with occasional peeps into the domain of death. When we invest all of our effort in

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surviving, something of the true nature of life evades us. It is only when the finite human being goes beyond the limitations “necessary for his preservation,” that he
“asserts the nature of his being” (La Littérature 214; 68). The approaches of both Bataille and Freud are descriptive as well as normative. Bataille describes a
tendency to distance ourselves from death and a tendency to get

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close to it. But he also describes Man’s need to approach death from a normative point of view, in order to establish his humanity: a life that is only fleeing death has
less value. Freud carefully describes our tendency to evade death and, in the paragraph under discussion, calls for the contrary approach. This is stressed at the end of
the article, where he encourages us to “give death the place in reality and in our thoughts which is its due” (“Thoughts” 299). Paradoxically, it might be what will
make life “more tolerable for us once again” (299). But since Freud also insists not only on a tendency within us to evade death, but also on the impossibility of
doing otherwise, and on how death simply cannot be the content of our thought, his sayings in favor of bringing death close are confusing and confused. Freud does
not give us a reason for the need to approach death. He says that life loses in interest, but surely this cannot be the result of abstaining from carrying out “experiments
with explosive substances.” In addition, his ideas on the shallowness of a life without death do not seem to evolve from anything in his approach. It is along the lines
Sacrifice, Bataille says, brings together life in its fullness
offered by Bataille’s worldview that I wish to interpret them here.
and the annihilation of life. We are not mere spectators in the sacrificial ritual. Our participation is
much more involved. Sacrificial ritual creates a temporary, exceptionally heightened state of living. “The
sacred horror,” he calls the emotion experienced in sacrifice: “the richest and most agonizing
experience.” It “opens itself, like a theater curtain, on to a realm beyond this world” and every limited
meaning is transfigured in it (“Hegel” 338; 288). Bataille lays stress on vitality. Death is not
humanizing only on the philosophical level, as it is for Hegel or Kojève. Bataille gives it an emotional
twist. The presence of death, which he interprets in a more earthly manner, is stimulating, vivifying,
intense. Death and other related elements (violence) bring life closer to a state where individuality
melts, the mediation of the intellect between us and the world lessens, and life is felt at its fullest.
Bataille calls this state, or aspect of the world, immanence or intimacy: “immanence between man and
the world, between the subject and the object” (“The Festival” 307-311; 210-213). Moments of intensity
are moments of excess and of fusion of beings (La Littérature 215; 70). They are a demand of life itself, even though they sometimes
seem to contradict it. Death is problematic for us, but it opens up for us something in life. This line of thought seems to accord very well with the passage in Freud’s
text with which we are dealing here, and to extend it. Life without death is life lacking in intensity, an impoverished, shallow and empty life. Moreover, the
repression of death is generalized and extended: “the tendency to exclude death from our calculations in life brings in its train many other renunciations and
exclusions.” Freud simply does not seem to have the conceptual tools to discuss these ideas. The intuition is even stronger in the passage that follows, where Freud
discusses war (note that the paper is written in 1915): When war breaks out, he says, this cowardly, conservative, risk-rejecting attitude is broken at once. War
eliminates this conventional attitude to death. “Death could no longer be Liran Razinsky SubStance #119, Vol. 38, no. 2, 2009 80 denied. We are forced to
believe in it. People really die. . . . Life has, indeed, become interesting again; it has recovered its full content” (“Thoughts” 291). Thus what is needed is more than
the mere accounting of consequences, taking death into consideration as a future possibility. What is needed is exposure to death, a sanguineous imprinting of death
directly on our minds, through the “accumulation of deaths” of others. Life can only become vivid, fresh, and interesting when death is witnessed directly. Both
authors speak of a valorization of death, and in both there is a certain snobbery around it. While the masses follow the natural human tendency to avoid death, like
the American couple or those who are busy with the thought of “who is to take our place,” the individualists do not go with the herd, and by allowing themselves to
approach death, achieve a fuller sense of life, neither shallow nor empty. 19 Yet again, Freud’s claims hover in the air, lacking any theoretical background. Bataille
supplies us with such background. He contests, as we have seen, the sole focus on survival. Survival, he tells us, has a price. It limits
our life. As if there were an inherent tension between preserving life and living it. Freud poses the same tension here. Either we are totally absorbed by the wish
to survive, to keep life intact, and therefore limit our existence to the bare minimum, or else we are willing to risk it to some extent in order to make it more
interesting, more vital and valuable. Our usual world, according to Bataille, is characterized by the duration of things, by the “future” function, rather than by the
present. Things are constituted as separate objects in view of future time. This is one reason for the
threat of death: it ruins value where
value is only assured through duration. It also exposes the intimate order of life that is continuously hidden from us in the order of things
where life runs its normal course. Man “is afraid of death as soon as he enters the system of projects that is the order of things” (“The Festival” 312; 214).
Sacrifice is the opposite of production and accumulation. Death is not so much a negation of life, as
it is an affirmation of the intimate order of life, which is opposed to the normal order of things and is
therefore rejected. “The power of death signifies that this real world can only have a neutral image of life […]. Death reveals life in its
plenitude” (309; 212). Bataille’s “neutral image of life” is the equivalent of Freud’s “shallow and empty” life. What Freud denounces is a life
the economy of value and future-oriented
trapped within the cowardly economical system of considerations. It is precisely
calculations that stand in opposition to the insertion of death into life. “Who is to take the son’s place with his mother,
the husband’s with his wife, the father’s with his children.” Of course there is an emotional side to the story, but it is this insistence on replacement that leaves us on
the side of survival and stops us sometimes from living the present. “The
need for duration,” in the words of Bataille, “conceals
life from us” (“The Festival” 309; 212). For both authors, when death is left out, life “as it is” is false
and superficial. Another Look at Speculation Both authors, then, maintain that if elements associated
with death invade our life anyway, we might as well succumb and give them an ordered place in our
thoughts. The necessity to meet death is not due to the fact that we do not have a choice. Rather,
familiarization with death is necessary if life is to have its full value, and is part of what makes us
human. But the tension between the tendencies—to flee death or to embrace it—is not easily resolved, and the evasive tendency always
tries to assert itself. As seen above, Bataille maintains that in sacrifice, we are exposed through death to other dimensions of life. But the

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exposure, he adds, is limited, for next comes another phase, performed post-hoc, after the event: the ensuing horror and the intensity are too high
to maintain, and must be countered. Bataille speaks of the justifications of the sacrifice given by cultures, which inscribe it in the general order
of things.

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Cerberus /Yelping Pup 1NC Shell Alt/MPX…

Act 3 The Feast
Sacrificing the goods of the 1AC enacts liberation, challenging the utilitarian logic that
culminates in extinction.
Jesse Goldhammer 2005 [Lecturer/Instructor, Institute of Government Studies, U.C. Berkeley, The Headless
Republic: Sacrificial Violence in Modern French Thought p. 10-14]
violence. Although Bataille
In chapter 4,1 examine how the renegade surrealist Georges Bataille used the sacrificial ideas developed by his predecessors to challenge the basic premise of the French discourse on sacrificial
agrees with Maistre, Sor,el, and the French revolutionaries that sacrificial violence can be adapted to modern political settings, Bataille disputes the historical association of sacrifice with political
foundation and authority. Maistre, Sorel, and the French revolutionaries sought to place sacrifice in the service of moral revolutions in order to ground new forms of politics and legitimate power.
For Bataille, however, human liberation requires not better politics, achieved through violent political foundation, but
rather the sacrificial dismantling of the constitutive elements of modern political activity. Taking aim at liberalism
and utilitarianism in particular, Bataille pursues an idea of revolutionary sacrifice that liberates human beings
from all forms of servility, including morality authority, identity, community-the whole modern political enterprise. Bataille argues that revolutionary liberation requires the
retrieval of sacrificial activities that subvert rational, useful, and productive modes of thought and action-anything that
transforms human beings into things. Rather than producing something that the sacrificer can use, such as
power rendered sacred, Bataillian sacrifice generates an ecstatic experience of self-loss. In Bataille's vie sacrifice
must free humanity from politics, not support, establish, or reestablish it. Bataffle thus envisions that unproductive sacrificial activities will give birth to a
metapoitical community paradoxically defined by its permanent lack of foundation. In this way Bataille uses the works of Maistre and Sorel to repudiate the basic assumptions of the French
discourse on sacrificial violence. Batalile's radical reformulating of political sacrifice reveals what is at stake in using sacrificial violence to found politics. During the t93os, Bataille increasingly
distanced sacrificial practices from the realm of politics because he was fearful that founding violence would generate fascism rather than freedom. On the eve of World War II, Bataille extended
this logic as far as it would go, imagining that sacrificial violence would achieve ecstatic liberation if it were practiced in the bedroom or on and through the text. Although Bataille never evinces
any reticence about violence or cruelty I argue that he ultimately realized that sacrifice practiced in either a French revolutionary, Maistrian, or Sorelian fashion led to tyranny. Batallle's
contribution to the French discourse on sacrificial violence is thus ironical. On one hand, he pushes the idea of sacrificial violence to its logical conclusion by arguing that the sacrifice of another
being for the sake of political change cannot generate anything useful or productive. On the other hand, the legendary sacrificial crime-to borrow again from Machiavelli-permanently alters the
sacrificers as well as the basis upon which they can form a community with others. Thus, Bataille recognized that seeking political change through sacrifice permanently destabilizes the basic
elements of modern Western politics. Although Bataille lays bare the risk of using sacrificial violence to found politics, he also succumbs to the same temptation as his predecessors who
condemned the use of sacrifice by others, but wished to harness it for themselves. Bataille criticizes the French revolutionaries, Maistre, and Sorel for placing sacrifice in the service of
authoritarian structures of power. Like the other members of the discourse on sacrificial violence, however, Bataille never abandons the idea that sacrificial violence is a sacred, spectacular form
of bloodshed that plays a vital role in the formation of human communality. During the Cold War, Bataille uncharacteristically developed this position into a quasi-scientific, general theory of
sacrificial loss that
political economy Representing a systematic critique of utilitarianism, this postwar theoretical work illustrates Bataille's effort to find contemporary examples of
will save the modern world from the dangers of political sclerosis and the possibility of nuclear annihilation. In
setting sacrifice to work, Bataille contradicts his prewar claims about the absolute uselessness of sacrifice. At the same time, he also demonstrates the sublime appeal-the attraction and danger-of
adapting ancient ideas about violence and loss to modern political conditions. It was precisely this particular quality of sacrificial violence that originally attracted the French
revolutionaries,.leading them to inaugurate the discourse on sacrificial violence. Defining sacrifice is difficult because of the ambiguity inherent in violence. Violence is generally defined in
terms of physical injury or harm to subjects and objects. Violence directed against humans involves injury to or constraint of the body and mind. Against objects, violence entails damage or
destruction. Metaphoric violence, the broadest aspect of the definition, includes innumerable symbolic, culturally specific notions of harm. The modern meaning of violence is limited and,
unfortunately, confused by the fact that it is distinguished from "force," which today is often used to mean legitimate violence. Because there are various, irreconcilable concepts of right, there is
also irresolvable debate about the difference between force and violence. In the ancient world, however, the concept of violence retained the ambiguity eschewed by the modern world, Vi
"force," is the root of the Latin vi/coda, "violence," collapsing the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate bloodshed. I/jo lentus denotes "acting with (unreasonable) force towards others,
violent, savage, aggressive."' In this case, "unreasonable" describes not the illicitness or illegality of a violent act, but rather its disproportionate, extraordinary; or distinctive quality: This
definition of plo/cows is negative and thus departs from the more ambiguous meaning of vLs, which retains a positive quality. In addition to signifying the use of physical strength to compel or
constrain vigorously as well as the unlawful use of force, pbs also implies binding force or authority.' J/ls thus encompasses the essential uncertainty of violence, the fact that it can be "good" or
"bad," depending on the context. A subcategory of violence, sacrifice is etymologically an act that renders holy or sacred. If rendering sacred entails a process of setting apart from the quotidian
or profane, then sacrificial violence is a paradoxical practice: it is a form of violence capable of breaking and forming distinctions or erasing and drawing boundaries. This definition is
counterintuitive because the modern view of violence exclusively associates it with the breaking down of social distinctions, chaos, mayhem, disruption, anarchy, loss of control, and the like. In
contrast, sacrificial violence involves a double movement; it transgresses limits in order to inscribe or reinscribe them. 'What is more, this is not necessarily a conservative operation. The
purpose of sacrifice is not limited to the restoration of a particular order, limit, boundary, or status quo. The function
of sacrifice is contingent upon how it "makes sacred." Some sacred things are pure, elevated, divine, majestic, and absolute; others are impure, debased, demonic, abject, and inassimilable. When
violentia denotes the capacity to transgress, pollute, or profane things that are pure or sacred, it captures only the negative aspect of the violent dou-ble movement of sacrifice.Viewed from the
, sacrifice holds the potential to generate a positive sacredness, which mimics the
standpoint of force or legitimate violence
legitimacy of political power. In this respect, sacrifice describes a variety of practices that transform the negativity of violence into something socioculturally
acceptable. Like any other social phenomenon, violence has normal and exceptional manifestations. Socially acceptable violence does not call attention to itself or to its author; it is woven into
the fabric of everyday life. Exceptional, spectacular; or transgressive violence creates a tear in that fabric and, in so doing, sets its authors and their victims apart from their fellow human
beings.This separation by dint of violence is the essence of the sacrificial mechanism and the reason why such bloodshed is considered sacred. A process of collective destruction, sacrificial
violence is often ritualized or culturally prefigured. Although this book is concerned with the meanings of human sacrifice in a modern political context, sacrifice has, more often than not,
involved animal, vegetable, and inanimate objects. Ritual sacrificial practices and their meanings are typically inherited from the past and are usually invoked only in particular circumstances. As
the very term implies, ritual sacrifice is anticipated, orchestrated, and socially acceptable; like Mass or potlatch, it is a symbolic form of violence that conforms to a regularized set of
expectations. The participants in the ritual know what kind of violence will take place; they know how that violence will be conducted, and by whom; most important, they know whit category of
victim (pridner ofwar, woman, racial or religious minority, etc.) will be selected. Although the actual function ofritual sacrifice may remain a mystery to those who practice it, its total meaning is
predetermined. Thus, ritual sacrifice can be compared to a game of chance: the rules may not be written down, but they are fixed. These rules govern the selection ofthe victim, even though the
specific victim and the actual outcome remain unknown. Finajly, like games of chance, sacrificial rites can have various outcomes, a reflection of their "success" or "failure?' Sacrifice is not
always ritually prescribed. Two factors separate spontaneous sacrificial violence from its ritual cousin: the absence of agreement about sacrificial legitimacy and procedure. Without ritual
prescription-knowing whom, when, and how to kill-communities that spontaneously sacrifice inevitably find themselves deeply divided about the reasons for and methods of killing. Indeed, in
such cases, sacrifice may simply heighten communal conflict. Whifr ritual sacrifice expresses the rigidity and hierarchy of the social order that it serves, spontaneous sacrifice has no specific
allegiance to any set of cultural symbols or social distinctions. Spontaneous sacrificial violence is potentially revolutionary when it symbolically manifests' ociocuIrural meanings and symbols
sacrifice can, through violence, open a
that compete with dominant, traditional ones. Disconnected from an orchestrated and authorized set of practices, spontaneous
space of contestation that serves to challenge status quo views and practices. It is a telltale sign that a

Kirk, Flynn, et al
community in crisis is pregnant with a new political order.

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Essential Dual Purpose Blocks

2NC OV… Pups of War
The Aff is all bark and no no bite, chasing militarism like a dog running after a car. They
have prouced a terrible yelping, but even if they caught the state it is doubtful they would
no what to do. The 1AC’s activism mirrors the productivity the state, and its indignation
at militarism reinforces its awful fascination.
Reject the role of the ballot as aligning yourself with the proper political discourse, and
instead vote negative to theatrically dismember the aff. Offer this debate to useless
sacrifice rather than political productvity, giving up the false security provided by the
liberal discoruses of appeasement. Homo sacer is not here to be saved in this debate, but
voting negative allows a moment of the sacred communication that is the prerequisite to the
value of both life and debate.
2NC OV… Cerberus
The affirmative promises peace and security through reigning in the destabilizing excesses
of American power. But the state is violent excess, and the guarantee of stability is just
another form of permanent war. The affirmative role-plays the state, simulating its
sovereignty and even promises you survival as the cost of joining in their servility.
But you are sovereign in this debate, and you should use your ballot to theatrically
dismember the aff. This sacrifice releases us from utilitarian logic of good accumulation
,and cutting off the head of the 1AC fractures the lines of authority binding us in terror to
the state. Vote negative as an act of sovereign exuberance, embraced the sacred
communication that is the prerequisite to the value of both life and debate.

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Perm 2nc (Both)
Cross apply the link debate, which proves why their servility to the state means they can’t
solve our alt.
Our alternative severes the head of the 1AC, which makes the perm severance. The
alternatve’s sacrificing of the goods of the 1AC is mutually exclusive with embracing the
aff. This is a voting issue because it skews the sacrificial game debate by making all
criticism of the aff impossible.
The aff can’t severe discourse, that is crucial to kritik ground.
The aff claims to guarante survival, which means the perm is still trapped in utility.
Extend Goldhammer and Razinski.
Even if the perm is legitimate, it becomes just another rational discourse of the good.
Sacrifice requires an intimate encounter with death, and the perm renounces the
dangerous passions of existence which are necessary for the alt to solve.

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Perm 2nc (Both)
The perm links to all of their offense and doesn’t solve our alt.
Sacrifice combined with the program of the 1AC is the worst of both worlds, producing a
politics of mass murder and annihilaton.
Jesse Goldhammer 2005

[Lecturer/Instructor, Institute of Government Studies, U.C. Berkeley, The Headless Republic: Sacrificial Violence in
Modern French Thought p. 189-191]
It is true that The Accursed Share revisits eroticism and sovereignty, topics that led Bataille away from politics in the 193os. After the war, however, Bataille treated
these concepts politically. For instance, in the epilogue of The History of Eroticism, Bataille speculates that human
beings will be driven to a
"catastrophic war" unless they find outlets, such as eroticism, for their excess energy. Similarly, in
"Sovereignty" Bataille argues that "sovereignty is no longer alive except in the perspectives of
communism."" In the case of both eroticism and sovereignty Bataille is expressly looking for instances of
unproductive expenditure or sacrifice, which may save human beings from their dangerously
compulsive, modern need to engage in economic accumulation without loss. 'What sets The Accursed Share apart
from Bataille's prewar work is also what implicates Bataille in his own critique of the French discourse on sacrificial violence. Like his predecessors, Bataille
ultimately puts sacrifice to work, a theoretically problematic endeavor that finds its strangest outlet in his consideration of the Marshall Plan. At the conclusion of
World War II,
Bataille was fearful that:competition and excessive economic production in the United States
and the Soviet Union would precipitate a devastating third world war. This Cold War pessimism was alleviated only by
the appearance of the Marshall Plan, which Bataille interpreted as a form of unproductive expenditure. Here he de-. scribes the Marshall Plan in terms of the general
economy: "Mankind will move peacefully toward a general resolution of its problems only ([this threat causes the U.S. to assign a large share of the
excess-deliberately and without return-to raising the global standard of living, economic activity thus giving the surplus energy produced an outle,t other than war."
94 By associating the Marshall Plan with unproductive expenditure, Bataille falls into the same theoretical trap as Sorel, Maistre, and the French revolutionaries.
Bataille's argument for economic sacrifice may be less pernicious than the French revolutionaries' conviction that human sacrifice would help them to found a
republic, but they nonetheless share an expectation that sacrifice will produce specific, ideal, and peaceful political outcomes. The belief that sacrifice will generate an
ideal politics of any sort directly contradicts Bataille's fascism essay, where he argues that any
attempt to use sacrifice for the sake of
traditional (elevated) sovereignty risks a violent, authoritarian politics. That essay illustrates, above
all, that one cannot use fascist techniques to achieve antifascist ends without complicity in fascism's
imperiousness. Similarly, the Marshall Plan may have provided humanity with an outlet for surplus energy, but it also "wasted" wealth productively, served
utilitarian-minded liberals, and elevated American international interests, none of which was even remotely akin to the apolitical intentional communities originally
desired by Bataille. His postwar work notwithstanding, Bataille fundamentally rejects the basic premise of the discourse on sacrificial violence that sacrifice founds
new political regimes. By the end of the 1930s, Bataille declares politics an impossible task, rendering irrelevant the issue of foundation. If a
wholly
unproductive sacrifice were to create anything, it would be metapolitical communities without
conventional notions of authority and identity. As Bataille pushes the concept of sacrifice to its limit, shifting its locus from the street to
the bedroom and text, he reveals the difficulty experienced by Maistre, Sorel, and the French revolutionaries in assigning a political role to sacrifice. They put
sacrificial violence to work in the establishment of politically significant fictions such as citizenship, authority, morality, and representation. In each case, there was an
expectation that the sacrificial crime would lay the groundwork for a new era ofjustice. Following the Marquis de Sade, Bataille comes to appreciate the political
absurdity of founding sacrifice: "An already old and corrupt nation, courageously shaking off the yoke of its monarchical government in order to adopt a republican
one, can only maintain itse4'thongh many crimes,-for it is already a crime, and f it wants to move from crime to virtue, in other words from a violent state to a
peaceful one, it would fall into an inertia, of which its certain ruin would soon be the result, "95 Sade observes that the regicidal crime, which inaugurated the French
Republic as well as the French discourse on sacrificial violence, is a sacrifice destined to repeat itself because it strips away the possibility of distinguishing right from
wrong. In other words, violent political foundation undermines its own possibility. Sade's admonishment applies to the Terror, when the French revolutionaries
tragically repeated the regicide thousands of times. It anticipates Maistre, who imagines a world in which the unending sacrifice of the innocent redeems the sins of
the guilty. It foresees the work of Sorel, whose myth of the general strike depends upon the working class's martyred repetition of Jesus' crucifixion. And, finally, it
highlights the absurdity of Bataille's postwar search for unproductive expenditure in quotidian politics. In each of these cases, sacrifice works to produce virtue and
redemption. Sade's argument is straightforward: violent sacrifice never founds politics without also giving rise to an endless repetition of the original crime. Bataille
ultimately develops this insight into a• notion of violent
waste, which he hopes will demolish the modern fictions that leave
human beings powerless and servile. Bataille's sacrificial community does not repair, restore, or
regenerate. It is incapable of establishing, founding, and inaugurating. It "begins" with the violation of
the limits that make politics possible, and, tragically, it must exist in a permanent state of violation.

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Perm 2nc (Both)

The perm’s net benefit makes their sacrifice ridiculous. Sacred ecastasy requires us to
gamble everything, identifying with waste beyond recuperation.
Jason Winfree, Assoc Prof Philosophy at California State University, 2009

[The Obssessions of George Bataille: Community and Communication ed. Mitchell/Winfree p. 42-44]
With respect to the lover, we desire like a gambler wagers. "Like the winnings of a gambler;' writes Bataille, "sexual, possession
prolongs desire-or extinguishes it" (OC 6: 106/ON 86).The sheer momentum of the movement requires that its strength be squandered. Desire is unsatisfied not
because it fails, but because it exceeds the search for satisfaction, because it is also raw expenditure. For this reason, desire is misunderstood if it is represented as the
infinite tragic movement toward an inaccessible object, as though desire not only is prohibited by its very structure from attaining its aim, but as though its structure is
fundamentally teleological. The obsession with this logic is always mournful (psychoanalysis) or moral (transcendental philosophy) and in both cases remains
theological insofar as the concern is governed by or measured against an imaginary sense of propriety or ownership or end. The desire that binds lovers is not so much
directed toward an unattainable sumnut, however, as it is itself the summit, the point "where life is impossibly at the limit."' Desire and summit can no more be
separated than lightning and its flash. In this respect Bataille is unequivocal: "The
summit isn't what we 'ought to reach,' " (OC 6:
57/ON 39; tni)). Rather, "It's what is. Never what should be" (OC 6: 111/ON 91). If desire is unsatisfied, that is because it
exceeds the conservative search for satisfaction, because it is not teleological, because we are driven beyond the need of satisfaction without being driven to anything,
because our unfinished character is in this very way excessive, [p. 42] not impoverished. If love is unsatisfied it is because it has perished, leaving us wasted and
ruined. The lovers' love is sacred. It does not belong to the profane order of work and its accumulated labor, the profane and banal order of capital. For Bataille, the
The sacrifices
sacred designates an object that is beyond all others in value, but the sacred character of our carnal love has nothing to do with divine love.
brought about by the love of lovers require expenditure without recuperation; we give up our careers
as dancers, we speak on the phone for hours on end, we waste the day in bed, and we give ourselves over
entirely to that waste and identify ourselves with it. These sacrifices have nothing to do with the
sacrifice of theology. As Bataille puts it, "in divine love, the limit is given in perfection," and this limit
necessarily excludes play and its risk. Certainly, one risks nothing by loving God, whose infinite
perfection is expressed through an infinite and undiscriminating love, just as one risks nothing by
loving the flag. And that is as good as to say that in neither case does one really love, even if there remains operative a libidinal bind that
does not fail to risk those others who refuse the religious-nationalistic sublimation of carnal desire, of the lovers touch or its absence . God
and nation stand before us as the ugly symptoms of efficiency that guarantee that desire not only
leaves the lover intact but also yields a profit. By contrast, carnal love and the love of lovers concerns
the excess of suffering, and Bataille insists that "without this excess we could not play" (OC 6 86/ON
71).That is, it is by way of the excesses of suffering carnal desire that we are ourselves put into play,
thrown like dice. And finitude is unbounded just in the sense that dice in their inevitable free fall carry
an unpredictable combination that proves exhilarating or devastating, and in any case leads to ruin, even as it leads to the affirmation of what we
are in love. The oscillation expressed above in terms of the acceleration leading to summit or decline, the ecstasy of insufficiency, is not only a thematically explicit
object in Bataille's writings, privileged and important because of the manner in which it bears upon and articulates the ontological task. Rather, Batailles work itself is
characterized by the very movement it describes, constantly fluctuating between decline and glory in its expression. This is not to say Bataille's writing is motivated by
the task of adequation between form and content, Sache and expression, but to insist that the ontological task is born from and gives expression to fundamental
conditions of human life, conditions that enter into that expression and call it forth. Insufficiency is not, therefore, a category or concept to which the world must
measure up, by which it would be rendered intelligible, but is rather the condition out of which Bataille writes. The work is ontological, then, not only because of its
explicitly thematic ontological concerns, but because it exhibits in its very structure, expression, and aim, the ontological conditions it also diagnoses, the [p. 43]
reciprocity of chance and insufficiency, isolation and contact. Thus, the same insufficiency thematized in the Sonirne athéologique at once tears that work apart,
rendering it désoeuurée-inoperative, unworking, fragmentary-and in this way it accounts for the alternately depressed and ecstatic articulations of naked existence
exposed to chance, the violent and sometimes incoherent shifts of focus, mood, and intention. The work itself is an open wound communicating with those who read
and those who are read, the elective community of Bataille's readership. Perhaps no part of the Somme exhibits the elective communities involved in this work and its
unworking (désoeuureinent as clearly as does On Nietzsche, which denies its readers any systematic or historical or critical exposition of Nietzsche, which is not even
about Nietzsche at all, contrary to the most basic initial assumptions elicited by the title, but which offers instead articulations that have more to do with coffee shops,
toothaches, and pretty girls than the academically overburdened and overdetermined will to power. Throughout the violent and radically unstable terrain of the works
comprising the Sonune, Nietzsche is present neither as thematic object nor authoritative voice, but as part of an elective community, as participant in the bond of
attraction and inclination to the community of chance and risk that requires of Bataille that he write. In Inner Experience, Bataffle announces, thereby placing the
production of his own work squarely within the ontological claims it makes: "It is from a feeling of

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Perm 2nc (Both)

community binding me to Nietzsche that the desire to communicate arises in me, not from an isolated originality" (OC 5: 39/IF 26-27). And similarly from Guilty:
"My life with Nietzsche as a companion is a community. My book is this community" (OC 6: 33/ON 9). Not a dialogical community of interpretation (Auslegung),
but an affective community bound by chance, attracted to one another and the luck that configures that attraction-"Chance, it turned out, corresponded to Nietzsche's
intentions more accurately than power could" (OC 6: 17/ON xxv). Bataille's books and those that read them are bound like lovers or suspended like a crowd before a
dead-heat horse race entering the chute, one momentum configuring another and holding it together while luck falls. "Thus we are nothing, neither you nor I, beside
burning words which could pass from me to you, imprinted on a page: for I would only have lived in order to write them, and, f it is true that they are addressed to
you, you will bye from having had the strength to hear them" (OC 5: 111/IE 94; em). Not a community of like minds struggling to give shape to a Sache, but beings
bound by the passion of chance, suffering their luck as their lot. When Nietzsche proclaims in On the Genealogy qf Morals, "atheism and a second innocence go
together,""' he at once condemns the theological interpretation of the world as guilty. Nothing devalues our insufficiency like the attempt to lie meaning into the
world, denying chance, personalizing [p. 44] luck, thus writing it off. But a
being subject to chance is acéphalic, a headless being,
a being not ordered theologically, and that is to say, not ordered at all, but shot through with desire and
cast into the world as one particle among others. To the same extent that Acéphale is not and cannot become a program, atheism is not a
belief or a position. It concerns rather, as Nietzsche puts it, "the meaning of the earth,"" that is, the sense of life without transcendence, the immanence of falling luck,
the exposure to love and death, ecstatic and finite existence. Bataille's community with Nietzsche is the community of those attracted by that luck, bound to one
another by the passion of chance, the lucky suffering that need not make of itself a meaning, the risk and play of ecstatic insufficiency that is effortless in its beauty
and cruelty and momentum. The community with Nietzsche, the ecstasy of acéphalic atheism, is the affirmation of desire and its risk, the incomprehensibility of the
chance that constitutes our being: "Only when our response to desire remains incomprehensible is that response true .... ....We are to the degree that we
risk
ourselves. If the risk ceases, if I withdraw some aspect to keep it from changing, the resulting
regularity will be misleading: I'll pass from the tragic to the ridiculous" (OC 6: 87/ON 72; em).
Nothing is more ridiculous, therefore, than theology and its guilt, nothing more absurd than the façade
of our most serious understanding, which serves the social order and de facto community as its
justification. Atheism is a matter of play, a matter of chance, a name for the way we are played by our
luck. The community with Nietzsche, the community of lovers, the tragic community, elective
community-never a matter of fact, but only value, the force of attraction that makes us crazy and
feverish and delivers us over to one another in tears, laughter, and orgasm. Elective community is the
point of acéphalic contact.

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Perm 2nc (Both)
Perm instrumentalizes sacrifice for the good of the plan’s future, ruining the sovereign
ecastasy of sacrifice.
David Allison, Prof Philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook, 2009
The breach in the psychophysical integrity of another and of oneself is not a means for a higher
good, which would be communication. Corntnunication through these breaches in our and the other's
psychophysical integrity turns in a vertigo, a solar explosion, independent of the consequences.
Communication excludes concern for our interests, excludes concern for the time to come.
Communication is not the good that we ensure or acquire through an action, which therefore requires
us to coordinate, discipline, focus and narrow down, and subordinate our forces. It is itself not a future
with which we are concerned: "the debauchee has a chance to reach the summit only if he has no
intention to do so. The ultimate moment of the senses requires real innocence and the absence of moral
pretensions and consequently even of the consciousness of evil" (OC 6: 57/ON 38; tm). Communication
is not an enduring state; exhaustion comes quickly. It is not a good which requires conservation and
preservation.
When our strength begins to fail, when we feel ourselves declining, we become preoccupied with
acquiring and accumulating goods of all sorts, with enriching ourselves in view of the difficulties to
come. We act.
Communication is disconnected from the concern for the future, but the relation between the
summit and decline can be reversed in an effort to establish a relationship of utility between them. When
sovereignty declines, communication is viewed and recuperated from the point of view of servile
existence, of utility. Sacrifice and orgy will be viewed as actions achieving some good. They were
seen to be expenditures useful for achieving victory in war. The victorious survivors knew the benefits of
victory, acquired the women, booty, and territory. Sacrifice, which involves sacrifice of oneself with the
victim, will be interpreted as a means to achieve personal salvation in another life. Sacrificing oneself was
also seen as a means to achieve equality and justice for the community on earth. Throughout history,
reasons were developed for one to head for the summit, releasing and risking all one's forces. Indeed,
these reasons produced history.

Kirk, Flynn, et al
A2 Aff challenges militarism (Both)
Freedom requires the sacrifice of knowledge, even that which supposedly challenges
American domination. The 1AC labors to produce global knowledge, enacting servility to
the roguery of state violence.
Malik 2006
[Suhail, teaches in the Department of Visual Arts, Goldsmiths College
Theory Culture Society v.23 2-3]
. It follows that sovereignty is rogue in democracy – and democracy is therefore guaranteed and harnessed by a power that is itself ‘rogue’. If there is to be global
democracy, there must be global sovereignty and so a global voyoucracy, a rogue state that is beyond the terms of that democracy. The
sovereign state
that orders legitimacy, which is the de facto condition of order, is necessarily voyou, rogue, counter-
ordering; an identity of opposing categories whose condensation can here be marked (beyond the terms Derrida sets up) by the terms sovoyoureign or soverogue, a
power that establishes only a quasi-order. Today, Derrida continues, such states are only the USA and whatever (always subsidiary) allies it picks up in the course
of undertaking such actions in implementing its sovereignty. But the USA is exceptional in this quasi-order in that it is the primary rogue state – the only truly rogue
state (as Chomsky also says for different reasons) – because of its outstanding international sovereign powers.
US international domination –
in the name of a common, global democracy – is that of a global sovereignty (though this is not to say
world sovereignty); it is, as is often declared, a global abuse of power – necessarily so. This global sovereignty
of the USA is sometimes exercised through the UN but must also take place in terms of other outstanding manifestations of power if it is to be ‘supersovereign’,
including that of its military (quaforce), its economics (quaconsumption), its cultural production (quaentertainment) and its politics (quademocracy). Such
sovoyoureign or soverogue power(s) are not occasioned across or outside of democratic organization or polities at whatever level: it happens through and in
democracy, insistently so. Soveroguery is the condition for the production of global knowledge and it is that by which
knowledge in its globality has to be comprehended. But how is sovereignty to be understood in its identity with countersovereignty? We have seen that, for Derrida,
Bataille’s ‘counterconcept’ of sovereignty speaks to the counter-order of voyoucracy. We shall now take up this account in order to more exactly determine the
sovereignty of American global dominance. Doing so will return us directly to the question of knowledge in the actual conditions of globalization. Bataille’s
interest in sovereignty is in a ‘general aspect that is opposed to the servile and the subordinate’ (1993: 197); it is general because it can belong to anyone. Such
generality means that the determination of sovereignty cannot be restricted to its traditional identification with the power of either the State or law as it has been from
Plato to Hobbes, Schmitt and, in a more complicated manner, Agamben. It can be the sovereignty of the voyou, for example. Bataille draws up an initial distinction
between the general aspect of sovereignty and what the term means as regards a legally constituted and recognized state or individual (that is therefore subordinate to
law). However, as Derrida proposes, in its sovoyoureignty or soveroguery, it is today the USA alone that sidesteps this distinction: yes, the USA is of course a
sovereign state in the legally constituted sense and so is subject to international law; yet it is in a position to countermand the obeisance to any such law or consensus
of a general will, since it alonehas the power to dominate and authorize non-legal actions in outright and blatant defiance of international convention and
expectations. In this it exemplifies at a supernational level the general aspect of sovereignty beyond law of which Bataille speaks. The problem of the constitution of
global knowledge can now be taken up since, for Bataille, sovereignty opposes and falls outside of servility, work and use, and knowledge is constituted in a
temporal binding through just these actions. Sovereignty is external to knowledge for Bataille because, taking the stabilized modality of knowledge production known
as science as example, ‘to do science is to disregard the present time with a view to subsequent results’ (1993: 201–2). Relatively uncontroversial as this
characterization may be, several significant consequences follow from it: first, that the knowledge constituted in and by science, that is the present activity of science,
is directed by a futural determination, a future organized in terms of use; second, knowledge unfolds in time; third, any knowledge that results from such an activity
is itself subject to the same condition, that is, the knowledge that results from science is itself organized in terms of future results – which is to say, fourth, that
‘to know is always to
through the prospect of its use knowledge is constituted by the workof its future determinations. Hence Bataille’s part conclusion:
strive, to work; it is always a servile operation, indefinitely resumed, indefinitely repeated’ (1993:
202). Knowledge as it is constituted by science (as an exemplar) is organized with a view to use –
whether that use is practical (technics) or theoretical (science) is a secondary concern. Knowledge, then,
is not sovereign – at least, insofar as it is understood in terms of science or, more generally, a futural
mobiliz-

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A2 Aff challenges militarism (Both)

ation. Put the other way, as Bataille affirms again and again, sovereignty cannot be known. Accepting
this characterization of sovereignty, the co-determination of American domination and global knowledge
is not then just a historical and political concern but also a theoretical and conceptual one. More
specifically, as much as the fate and problems of American domination(however it is characterized)
is tied to the fate and problems of any attempt to construct a theoretical or practical case for a global
knowledge, so the question of American sovereign domination of international and global politics in
however complicated a sense is also a question as to the conditions and possibility of global knowledge.
With Bataille, sovereignty is an experience that cannot be comprehended in science, not even
political science, and certainly not with regard to law in its primarily futural determination of the
present. It cannot be regulated or experienced with view to any known future. Rather, sovereignty
‘would have to occur in a moment’ which ‘remains outside, short of or beyond, all knowledge’ (Bataille,
1993: 201). Such a moment cannot be known but is experienced; as Bataille puts it, ‘consciousness of
the moment is not truly such, is not sovereign, except in unknowing. Only by cancelling, or at least
neutralizing, every operation of knowledge within ourselves are we in the moment, without fleeing it’
(1993: 203). It is the moment that is sovereign in how it seizes the mind and abjures from its own futural
determination, refuting any conversion into work or use. The interruption or blocking of this futural
aspect of experience is not a voluntaristic action or a programmable intervention but is for Bataille ‘possible in
the grip of strong emotions that shut off, interrupt or override the flow of thought. This is the case if we weep, if we sob, if we laugh till we gasp’ (1993: 203). It is
not the epiphenomena of ‘strong emotions’ such as ‘the burst of laughter or tears’ that stops thought; rather, the blocking of thought and knowledge are occasioned
by the ‘object of the laughter, or the object of the tears’, that is, by the moments which occasion that laughter and those tears, ‘as if we were trying to arrest the
moment and freeze it in the constantly renewed gasps of our laughter or our sobs’ (Bataille, 1993: 203). It is the absolute momentousness and
momentaryness of strong emotions, an experience that is always particular, that therefore apprehend
what is involved in sovereignty, even as the latter defies knowledge or other attempts to determine it that
can be futurally organized. This momentary experience without knowledge is risk.

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A2 Policy-Making/Fiat Framework (Both Ks)
Sacrifice mimics the political function of the state without relinquishing our sovereignty to
its tendrils of control
This debate is theater, and the theatrical sacririce of the alt is preferable to simulating the
good of the 1AC. Vote neg to claim debate as a space of ecastic communication.
If Cerberus…
Role-playing assumes the sovereign violence of the state.
Extend the Hansen and Stepputat 2007:
The debate method of the 1AC trains us to become mini-states, actors whose ultimate sovereignty
must go back to the fountainhead of the USFG. This trainsus to internalize the goods of peace and
justice that enable endless wars of extermination.
They turn debate into a ritual of mastery disconnected from the realities of politics violence
Stephen Chan 2000

[Professor IR Dean Ethics at Notingham Trent University, Millennium Vol. 29, No. 3, pp. 565-589]
There are also more Lucifer-like dangers, ho wever. When you understand that a man believes he can change the
world as a result of meditation and specific rituals, and when you try to find out wh y he is so certain that, after
performing that ritual, he really will become master of the world or at least of his village—well, there again is
the temp tation of absolute liberty; in other words, the suppression of the human condition. Man is a limited, conditioned being. But the freedo m o f a god, or a mythic
ancestor, or a spirit no longer trammelled by a mortal body! Those are temptatio ns.25
Continued
the paradigm now of the person of IR? He or she goes to the Internatio
. First, however, there are so me questions to ask about IR. For what is
nal Studies Association conferences and performs his or her knowledge to other performers. He or she reads
(translations and summaries of) the texts of the moment, and seeks a reflexivity within those texts; locates a
critical practice within the conference hall and classroo m; believes that discourse, and his or her participation
in discourse, constructs the world. This is a professionalism pure and proper, and it is hermetically sealed fro
m the world, rather than in hermeneutic dialogue with it. It is a conceit to justify comfort. And I guess it is a certain
coming of age: having finally spoken and written a constructivism that says it is our purpose to speak and write,
that the world that suffers is merely the victim of discourse, and that therefore, the purpose of the person of IR is
to engage with discourse rather than engage with suffering. It is ingenious and disingenuous, and causes regret
that Buddhism has no sense of actual purgatory. We have come to resemble those ‘higher men’ and ‘sublime men’
who so ught to distract Zarathustra from his eternal joy, and caused him to give in to what Eliade called the temp
tation of the eternal return. Within IR, of course, we have the temptations of eternal return: ever a new
paradigm, new debate, or merely new fashion, anything, to prevent us from confronting the fact that, since
IR’s inventio n, suffering, and IR’s inaccessibility to it, have been constant.

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A2 Policy-Making/Fiat Framework (Both Ks)…

A2 Rational Discourse key to politics
Debate as rational discourse dissolves the sacred, destroying the interpretive context that
makes communication possible.
Victor Li 2005
[teaches in the English Department at the University of Toronto.
parallax, 2005, vol. 11, no. 3, 72–86]
Though aided by the life-world’s intuitively known and unquestioned background convictions,
communicative participants nonetheless still have to work to achieve mutual understanding or
agreement when they are faced with an action situation or interpretive problem that emerges in the
everyday world. They can reach agreement only through a conscious yes or no position they take on
three differentiated ‘validity claims’ that are raised respectively in the objective, social and subjective
domains of their world: the claims are to truth, rightness or justice and expressive truthfulness or sincerity.19 Up to this
point, the life-world has been described as a stabilizing and conservative factor in the process of reaching understanding. Habermas in fact sees the life-world as ‘the
conservative counterweight to the risk of disagreement that arises with every actual process of reaching understanding; for communicative actors can achieve an
understanding only by way of taking yes/no positions on criticizable validity claims’.20 However, as Habermas points out, italicizing his statement for emphasis,
‘The relation between these weights changes with the decentration of worldviews’.21 The decentration of worldviews becomes possible through the growing
reflexivity achieved in ontogenetic learning processes that act as pacemakers for the socio-cultural development of modernity. Thus as we become more and more
reflexively modern, our worldview also becomes increasingly decentred. Correspondingly, the more our worldview is decentred, the harder it is to achieve
consensual understanding since we can no longer rely on a pre-interpreted, critique-proof life-world, but have to turn instead to rational procedures for reaching
understanding. Habermas characterizes this transition as ‘the rationalization of the life-world’ and sees it as a switch from ‘normatively ascribed agreement’ to
‘communicatively achieved understanding’.22 The rationalization of the life-world thus appears to follow a developmental trajectory much like that of the socio-
cultural evolution from pre-modern mythic to modern decentred worldviews. Habermas puts it this way: ‘A directional dynamics is built into the communicatively
structured life-world in the form of the polarity between a state of pre-established pre-understanding and a consensus to be achieved: in the course of time, the
reproductive achievements switch from one pole to the other’.23 This ‘directional dynamics’ as shown in the rationalization of the life-world resembles the larger
scale rationalization of society which Habermas, following thinkers like Durkheim and Weber, describes as the transition from primitive tribal groups with their pre-
reflective, ‘collectively shared, homogeneous life-world’ to the reflexive, differentiated, and communicatively achieved life-world of modern politics.24 Recognizing
the similarity between pre-modern societies and the life-world in its original, concrete, pre-rationalized state, Habermas writes: ‘The life-world concept of society
finds its strongest empirical footing in archaic societies […] [which in their ideal state are] almost homogeneous, and nearly ultrastable’.25 Just as the
‘nearly
ultrastable’, normative authority of the sacred and the mythic in pre-modern societies is ‘linguistified’,
that is, dissolved by reflexive communicative action oriented to understanding, so too the rationalization of the life-
world involves a process in which the pre-established agreements and prelinguistically guaranteed norms of the everyday concrete life-world are opened up to
reflexive forms of discourse or argumentation with their yes/no stance on validity claims raised in the course of communicative interactions. ‘By the
rationalization of the life-world’, Seyla Benhabib notes, ‘is meant nothing other than the increase in
argumentative practices within the everyday world’.26 Modern societies thus undergo a process of
rationalization that Habermas also calls ‘the linguistification of the sacred’. The modern rationalized
life-world is no longer beholden to the authority of the sacred, but depends solely on rationally
motivated forms of understanding that lead to a consensus based on the authority of the better
argument.27 In the idealized or fully rationalized life-world, we have a ‘constant revision of fluidized traditions, i.e. traditions which have become reflexive;
[…] a state in which legitimate orders depend on discursive procedures for positing and justifying norms’.28 It should be noted, however, that the critical reflexivity,
the constant sceptical revision of all pre-established traditions and norms we find in the rationalization process lands the life-world in an aporetic situation. On the
one hand,
the life-world is the ever- present, intuitively understood background within which all
communicative action and forms of understanding occur; it also provides a store of pre-interpreted
knowledge which enables cultural understanding, forms group solidarity and shapes the
competences of socialized individuals.29 On the other hand, the life-world’s rationalization gains it the
critical reflexivity and autonomy that threaten to devalue, if not destroy, the very context in which it

Kirk, Flynn, et al
stands and the resources on which it draws. To his credit, Habermas recognizes this problem, though, as
we shall see, his attempts at resolving it result in what Stephen Crook has

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A2 Policy-Making/Fiat Framework (Both Ks)…

A2 Rational Discourse key to politics
described as an example of his ‘having the honesty to make his own problem worse’.30 The
rationalization of the life-world thus involves a rather destructive hermeneutics of suspicion that calls into
question customary forms of life. As Habermas puts it: ‘[T]he transition to argumentation has something unnatural about it: it marks a break with the ingenuous
straightforwardness with which people have raised the claims to validity on whose intersubjective recognition the communicative practice of everyday life depends.
This unnaturalness is like an echo of the developmental catastrophe that historically once devalued the world of traditions and thereby provoked efforts to rebuild it
at a higher level’.31 Words like ‘unnatural’ and ‘catastrophe’ attest to the radical change visited on all past claims and traditions by modern rationalization processes.
J. M. Bernstein argues that the
distrust shown to all conventions established by tradition should cause alarm
since it appears to suggest that ‘up to the moment of modernity the forms of recognition that
traditional practices permitted were illusory through and through’.32 Such a sweeping skepticism
is, however, central to Habermas’s view of rationalization as the progress towards a postconventional
modernity: ‘No normative validity claim raised in the life-world is immune to challenge; everything
counts as a hypothesis until it has regained its validity through the authority of good reasons’.33
Loss and Compensation If nothing in the life-world is immune to challenge and everything in it counts
as a hypothesis, and if the life-world’s background knowledge ‘is submitted to an ongoing test across its
entire breadth’,34 then a difficult question arises for Habermas: can the life-world still be an inescapable
horizon or context of understanding and the source of cultural knowledge and normative values, if, at the
same time, it is constantly challenged or tested across its entire breadth? Even though Habermas might
respond that the life-world’s rationalization through moral argumentation (or discourse ethics) can be
seen as a correction and transcendence of its conventional limits, doesn’t the unmerciful gaze of
rationalization threaten, at least in theory, to dissolve the very ground of the life-world from which
the corrective gaze emanates? And wouldn’t such a rational dissolution of ‘normatively ascribed
agreement’ for a risk-laden, counter- factual ‘communicatively achieved understanding’ place us ‘within
the impossible space of an unlivable scepticism and undischargeable rationalism’?35 In her perceptive
study of Habermas’s work, Maeve Cooke worries, for example, that the life-world’s ‘fabric could be
worn away through constant critical examination and rejection of its traditions, practices, and fixed
patterns of personality development’.36

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Politics is war, and we refuse to make peace with the state. Heeding the Siren’s Song of the
USFG ensures a politics of extermination.
Nick Mansfield, Prof Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, 2008

[Theorizing War: From Hobbes to Badiou p. 120-125]
In Clausewitz, war emerges easily when society opens its hand. Peace is not ashamed of war and uses it.
Policy extends itself into war, drawing the whole of the society with it. The argument is even stronger than this, because
policy does not represent the cynical manipulation of the social, seducing or tricking it into war. The impulse of the social is controlled by policy, without which the
drive to violence for its own sake, a violence of annihilation of the other, would be even stronger, even wilder. We have here two very different versions of the social
and its relationship with war. Yet both reveal how the alternation of war and the social (war as the social's other, war as the execution of collective social intention)
leads to a collapse of the foreign-ness between the two. This foreign-ness is assumed, then elaborately disproved, even if from opposite directions. In Hobbes, society
moves away from war, but always drags it with it, as its compelling and unshakeable underside. War
accompanies every flexing of the
social, every moment, and threatens to overwhelm what is determined to suppress or conceal it. In
Clausewitz, society stoops, through policy, to the war that would seem to contradict it, but that is in fact the fullest activation of its energies. In Michel Foucault's
account of the social war, we see something similar, when Foucault cheekily, cleverly, reverses Clausewitz's statement. At the outset of the series of lectures that
comprise Society Must be Defended, he announces his hypothesis: "[plower is war," he writes, "the continuation of war by other means" (Foucault, 2003, p. 15). What
this claim implies is that the relations of power in a society do not quell or disable war, but continue it, because they were founded in a real war that really happened
and that can be specified. It also means that the establishment of supposedly peaceful social relations by the institution of formal putatively legitimate power is not
intended to end or preclude the inequality in relations established in the violent struggle for power. Indeed, the purpose of the establishment of formal power as peace
is to reinvigorate war throughout the social, "in institutions, economic inequalities, language, and even the bodies of individuals" [p. 121] (Foucault, 2003, p. 16).
What this means, according to Foucault, is that within all social practices war
is continuing in displaced, disguised or re-represented
form, undiminished if translated into a wholly other language of articulation. " We are always writing the history of the
same war, even when we are writing the history of peace and its institutions" (p. 16). Foucault sets two ways of analysing power against one another, On the one
hand, we have a theory of power in terms of its legitimacy. Sovereignty claims a legal authority underwritten by a civil
contractual logic, in which the natural "primal" (Foucault, 2003, p. 16) right of the individual is surrendered. When this legal authority exceeds itself, the
result is tyranny or oppression. On the other hand is another theory of power altogether, one in which the excess of power is not an abuse, but merely the inevitable
extension of the logic of dominance that defines social relations, because it is its ancestry. The former is a model of order and hierarchy, where a legally constituted
governing power has its limits strictly defined. It may overstep these limits and brutalise, but this violence
is always seen as a transgression
of its proper power, perhaps one that can be explained in terms of the psychology or incompetence of the
historical players periodically entrusted with that power. Beneath the excess, however, the legitimacy of
the contract endures, embarrassed by violence and ostensibly separate from it. Violence in the contract
system is a mistake. In the alternative model, social power merely translates the divisions and
antagonisms of war into another form. Social institutions merely continue the war already well
underway-perhaps so long underway, it is rarely recognised as war, even taken for granted. In what
Foucault calls here the "war-repression" schema (Foucault, 2003, p. 17), what is at stake is not
legitimacy but merely "dominance and submission" (p. 17). An account of society seen from the point of view of relations of
domination, rather than from the evaluation of legitimacy, will reveal a wholly other social logic. Foucanit outlines systematically the difference between the two.
Foucault claims that European political thought since the Middle Ages has been preoccupied with the issue of the legitimacy of royal power, at the behest of that
power. He quotes approvingly Petrarch's complaint "Is there nothing more to history than the praise of Rome?" (Foucault, 2003, p. 74), The sovereign progress of
sovereignty as the ostensible clarification and consolidation of the good leads discourse to twin emphases: the legal elaboration of the right of the sovereign and the
concomitant explanation of the duties of the subject. In this discourse, the duty to justify legitimacy leads to the assumed obligation to cleanse power[p. 122] of what
might seem to compromise it: its reliance on violent domination. Domination is made to disappear and is not seen as intrinsically part of the sovereign power that
accompanies it. Foucault produces here an inversion of the relationship between sovereignty and domination. Instead of adopting the more conventional line that
dominance is a mere instrument of a sovereign power that pretends to be legitimate but is simply the rationalisation of the centralisation of power in the hands of the
few, Foucault locates sovereignty within a larger unfolding of dominance. His recent work, he says, has been given over to stress the fact of domination in all its
brutality and its secrecy, and then to show not only that right is an instrument of that domination... but also how, to what extent, and in what form right... serves as a
vehicle for and implements relations that are not relations of sovereignty, but relations of domination. (Foucault, 2003, p. 27) It is not that dominance merely serves
an established regime by arguing its legitimacy and disguising its violence by formulations of sovereign order. The doctrine of right is merely one aspect of a larger
technique of dominance, and is subsequent, subordinate and junior to it. It is this elaborate and widespread mechanics of domination that needs to be revealed.
Subordination is not the duty of those subject to legitimate power, but the fate of the dominated, not the acceptance of an authority necessary to save us from
ourselves, but the continuation of a brutal violence in which many must forever be kept in check. The mode of analysis most appropriate to this situation must be
unconventional. First, it must look at power not in terms of how its most petty manifestations can be justified from the logic of legitimacy at the putative centre. It
must look at power in its most local and peripheral manifestations, at its extremities (Foucault, 2003, p. 27). Secondly, it must not see what is going on at these
extremities as explained or reducible to what is

Kirk, Flynn, et al

intendedby sovereignty. To continue to reduce what happens at the periphery to what is intended at the centre ends by obscuring the detailed and particular forms of
the operation of power produced as the mariner by which we live: "rather than asking ourselves what the sovereign looks like from on high, we should be trying to
discover how multiple bodies, forces, energies, matters, desires, thoughts and so on are gradually, progressively, actually and materially constituted as subjects, or as
the subject" (p. 28). It is here that Foucault stresses the difference between what he is trying to do and the Hobbesian schema, whereby the particularities of the
operation of [p. 123] power in specific local contexts are made sense of by the construction of a single magnificent if monstrous body, where the localisation,
plurality, incommensurability and fragmentation of social relations are denied, and where everything is seen as subordinate to a single logic of necessary legitimacy, a
legitimacy to which all local grievances and desires are to be subject. As we have seen, this legitimacy is partly justified by its claim to be the only way in which our
desires can in fact be satisfied. If we were left to our desires, our desires would not be fulfilled. Only by denying our desire can we have it. If, as in Foucault's view,
the Leviathan is the "central soul" (p. 29) which obscures the detailed operation of power in its peripheral effects, then its complex logic of desire can be explained in
another way: the desire of the individual subject is always and forever wrong, an illegitimate desire to be measured against the desire legitimated by the imagined
social centre. The Leviathan thus produces an apparently "natural" desire whose function is to be contradicted by the correct desire sovereignty makes acceptable.
Following the logic of Foucault's argument, therefore, sovereignty's imagined centralisation is really just itself something that operates to pressure what happens at the
peripheral and local. The centre is just an image deployed at the periphery. The choice of terms like "centre" and "periphery" therefore is merely a way of disputing a
political fiction on its own terms, not a reversal of priorities. Foucault is not arguing that we must suppress the centre and pay attention to the under-privileged
periphery: there is only a periphery, where the centre functions merely as an image of an absent and unreachable ideal, one whose only function is to influence what
happens locally. This is because power operates in endlessly mobile and fluid networks, where individual localities are constantly reinventing their relationship with
one another, not as regions of a hierarchical system that makes sense from the top down. The local both operates and receives these flows of power. In sum, then,
Foucault sees political analysis that concentrates on the issue of legitimacy imagined by Hobbes as the Leviathan as overlooking the more compelling and pragmatic
Sovereignty is a seductive issue, a "trap" (Foucault,
issue of the techniques of the operation of dominance within which we live.
2003, p. 34). Each side of the social struggle has used sovereignty for its own purposes, ignoring the new
modality of power that has risen alongside sovereignty, producing its own prolix discourses, not of the
legitimacy of sovereign right, but of the standards of normalising truth. This new style of power that Foucault calls
"disciplinary power" (p. 36) is "absolutely incompatible" (p. 35) with sovereignty. Yet, it is between these two styles of power that since the nineteenth century,
modern political life has unfolded [p. 124] in a tortuous negotiation between overt and tactical discourses of right and hall-concealed but insistent routines of
discipline. The two cannot be reduced to one another and are radically disjunctive but they "necessarily go together" (p. 37). The saturation of the social body by
petty relations of domination reveals a political organisation whose tendency is not towards the clarification and refinement of right, but towards an endless struggle.
This struggle, Foucault argues, lies behind the structures of law. Law, he says, was "not born of nature- but but of real battles, victories, massacres and conquests" (p.
50). These wars are not abstract or hypothetical. They can be precisely identified. He writes, Law is not pacification, for beneath the law, war continues to rage in all
the mechanisms of power, even in the most regular. War is the motor behind institutions and order. In the smallest of its cogs, peace is waging a secret war... we have
to interpret the war that is going on beneath peace; peace itself is a coded war. We are therefore at war with one another; a battlefront runs through the whole of
society, continuously and permanently, and it Is this battlefront that puts us all on one side or the other. There is no such thing as a neutral subject. We are all
inevitably someone's adversary. (Foucault, pp. 50-1) This perpetual struggle, which will be decided not by an adjudication of right, but by someone's victory and
someone else's defeat, is immanent to all social relations. The discourse of sovereignty, which has done so much to distract us from this unfolding struggle, is merely a
tactic in this battle, producing seductive and mystifying discourses of law and right. Beneath the condescension of universalising right, struggle goes on without
let-up, the real struggle, the social war, the persistence of a war, explained away or supposedly overcome by right. Foucault's own writing then sees itself as both
commemorating and activating an alternative concealed tradition of historico-political writing, the first legitimate one, he claims, since medieval times (Foucault,
2003, p. 52). This legitimacy derives from the discourse's awareness that it is itself taking sides and is a weapon in a struggle. The
discourse of
sovereignty denies its implication in, even subordination to, this struggle, setting up the chimera of
legitimacy as worse than a ruse. The discourse of struggle has its own logic of right, but not of a universal transcendental right, or particular and
partisan rights, once owned, then lost, now to be recovered. This discourse is unashamedly "perpectival" (p. 52). [p. 125] When it gives a complete account of the
social struggle, arguing its own truth, presenting its own map of others' positions and motives, it does so tendentiously, using the truth as a weapon in its own
campaigns, resisting the claim to universal, eternal and impersonal truthfulness. Truth as a tactic, then, not as an identity. The "pacified universality" (p. 53) of
juridico-political discourse ascendant since Ancient Greece is challenged, under threat. This discourse
does not descend from the abstract and totalising domain of the super-human metaphysical. It rises from
the below of society (p. 54), from the chaos, confusion and dim perceptions that are all available within
the bitter and desperate grounds of the struggle itself. The partisanship is on the ground of the fight. It
is deflected into dim disproportions, refracted by particular angularities. It is in and of the struggle, it is the struggle itself. It is praised and activated by Foucault, even
in its dark and poisonous hatred, and in its cruel and desperate luxury, he half-identifies his own hard discourse with it. We see here the cool
historian-jurist--philosopher revealing what lies behind his own tropes of violence and war, of deployments, tactics, of occupation and regimen. The sound of
politics may seem to be vociferous debate, but that is merely misheard gunfire . It is that double sound with which
Foucault wants to compare his own writing. This writing of history as struggle must remain bitter. It cannot be allowed to make sense. The risk of dialectical thinking
as an alternative model of social struggle is that it ends by subordinating itself to a logic of order, resolution and identification, the redemption of the cruelty of
struggle in the piety of sensible progress (Foucault, 2003, p. 58).

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A2 Public Sphere/Demands on State Good (Both Ks)

The quest for political productivity empowers the public-private divide that is
exterminating dissent. Only the kritik’s social revolt solves.
Harney and Martin 2007

[Stefano, Chair in Strategy Culture and Society at University of London & Randy theory & event 10:2 ]
Whatever the cornucopia offered by finance, something prevents access to the immanent luxury of the
social, something 'destines life's exuberance to revolt,' to rebel against new forms of 'military
exploitation, religious mystification, and capitalist misappropriation,' to seek out a more luxuriate
mode of excess, a mode of discretion and difference lived by all. (Bataille 1993: 77) A mean and
indifferent mode of excess burns off all this self-activity, if not all this revolt, and leaves behind an
effect, a state effect. Bataille asks us in his studies to seek out the effects of the accursed share, the state effects that come to trace the state-form. We
mean by the state-form something more than the state as it is used as a category by political scientists. We mean something Bataille provokes us to consider. We
mean that which becomes visible in the struggle over excess as an economy of excess, that which stands in for the mode of excess itself. So to ask what state-form
corresponds to this mean and indifferent mode of excess is to take these state effects as clues, effects produced by a public capacity itself forged in the struggle today
to produce capital's division of risk and at risk populations. To produce both the embracing of risk and the sorting of at risk populations that animate both
financialization and the war on terror a certain kind of struggle, a certain kind of privatization must be at work. And this work of privatization can be read in the work
left to the state-form. The contemporary state-form operates to criminal effect. Its crime is not simply violation of law it is charged to
enshrine, or to legitimate private property as public theft. At its most comprehensive and constitutive , criminality issues from the state-form
positioning against society as such--an anti-social opposition to the expansive sociality that is
irrecuperable to narrow protocols of accumulation. This effect hints at what is new about the
contemporary mode of excess. From the state we hear scarcely a word about the social. Rather, it
positions itself on the meridian that delimits public and private. The effect of publicity in the state-form today is a
contradictory one, one that hates the public, fears the social, courts the criminal, and cannot help itself. Let us use the terms publicity and privatization here to mean
something terminologically specific, and historically specific to capitalism. Privatization here assumes that the sociality called forth by capital must be reduced and
converted into private property if it is to be a recognizable form for capital of what Jean-Paul Sartre called the practico-inert. Privatization is also the struggle that
produces publicity, what Jacques Ranciere calls the 'distribution of the public and the private' (Ranciere 2006, 55) and therefore what can count as common.
Publicity is the subsequent state economy dedicated to
Privatization here comes first, not after some vulnerable public sector.
privatizing excess sociality. By naming itself as public, publicity continues the work of privatization
that brought publicity into being, and ensures that collective action taken up in the name of publicity
not only fetishes the public (Bratsis 2005), but leaves the real struggle of privatization as it is
understood here, untouched. Understanding the state-form historically as the evidence of economy brought to bear on excess leaves room for
what goes unmarked by conventional notions of public and private, even when those notions are employed in a Marxist framework as founding terms, and instead
allows us see the excess of sociality as founding both public and private. Or as Jacques Derrida puts it: 'At its height of hyperbole, the absolute opening, the
uneconomic expenditure, is always reembraced by an economy and is overcome by economy.' (Derrida 1980: 75) The
economy of public and
private (here an at risk effect and a risk effect), signs of the mode of excess, emerge from the struggle
against excessive sociality, and under capitalism, this privatization aims most vitally at the means of production. The publicity produced in the
period when the tendency to industrial capitalism predominated seems capacious today. The struggle over property and machinery, scientific patents and natural
resources, produced a publicity that opened onto the commonality of social reproduction. The welfare state and wars against fascism, civil rights and anti-colonialism,
all operated in the space produced by what was relinquished in the struggle in fields, factories, and offices. Of course publicity produces its own unruliness, much as
the struggle of privatization itself. Exactly because publicity must be reproduced by a labour both internal and external to it, publicity sometimes does not know its
own limits. In civil rights, in the popular front, and most seriously in anti-colonialism, the space of publicity was ab-used as Gayatri Spivak would say, and there was
an attempt to move past the confrontation with the private to the struggle of privatization itself. (Spivak 2006) There was a feel for excess, and a prophecy of a new
mode. But all the while finance and science was preparing an interdependency, a general intellect, that would shatter this publicity by altering the means of
production and with it the stakes of the struggle for privatization. This new interdependency and its privatization is oddly foreshadowed by Bataille in his chapter
on the Soviet Union where a new mode of excess takes shape in the drive for productivity and the building up of the means of production .
'In the end, all
of one's waking hours are dedicated to the fever of work,' he writes. (Bataille 1993: 160) Here
publicity takes the form of the means of production itself, produced by a privatization of all other aspects
of life. Only productivity becomes a matter of commonality. All else, distinguished as social
reproduction, is vulnerable to the violence of privacy. Of course this not the privacy of the conventional
private, but of a privatization drive to destroy excess sociality and produce a state economy, a proper
publicity of total work. One feels that this feverish work is with us today, but without even the vague hope of the publicity of the Soviet Union.
What is being privatized to permit such a fever to take hold, and what kind of publicity stokes this fire, and as ever, is threatened by the flames? The risk and at risk
populations that reach publicity as private and public matters and are its objects of attention suggest a new tendency in privatization. This tendency turns on social

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reproduction but again not directly through what is conventionally understood by privatization, but at its roots, at its moment of production in the struggle over a new
means of production.

Kirk, Flynn, et al
A2 Public Sphere/Demands on State Good (Both Ks)

It is only a symptom because today the
Conventional privatization is only a symptom of this struggle at the root, and one of an already advanced disease.
struggle over privatization occurs at the level of life itself, and especially at the level of the cognitive
and affective capacities of the body. The General Intellect that Marx identified with science, and undoubtedly with machinery, is recast by
autonomist thinkers as a mass intellectuality residing in brains and bodies of labour. A history of production across these bodies takes on all the difference of these
bodies and becomes legible only in this context. The biopolitics identified in contemporary scholarship is often understood as the site of politics but might also be
marked as the residue of politics, as what is left to publicity after a new means of production is privatized, taking off the table the politics of privatization and leaving
only the politics of public and private as it is currently constituted, as biopolitics. So today it might be necessary as Patricia Clough recently put it in articulating the
technoscience that underlies a subindividual ontology, to move 'beyond biopolitics.'iii For instance, in the work of Lauren Berlant there is an anticipation of this
privatization of the reproductive realm. She notes the way that in the Reagan era what was the private sphere comes forward into the public sphere, but as a matter of
immorality. (Berlant 1997) This was an early symptom of the consequences of privatizing social reproductive capacities, putting them to work, and leaving only the
anti-reproductive moment to the public, a moment that begins in immorality and will end in just a few years in wholesale criminality. When social reproduction itself,
when sociality itself, becomes the target of privatization, when not machinery but brains and souls are to be rendered into dead
labour, into private property, biopolitics may be one word for what is left to publicity. But even this term might be too generous, too sociable. Because when
the social itself is privatized, only the anti-social, only the criminal remains for publicity. A state economy emerges that is not just concerned with the anti-social, but
takes the anti-social as its modus operandi, takes indifference to qualities of society as its public face. In short, the couple risk/at risk in the public sphere of a criminal
state-form. It must be quickly added that this criminal state-form is not criminal in the liberal sense of deviating from a societal norm, nor criminal in the traditional
Marxist sense of supporting the theft of wealth through labour- time.
It is a state against society. The war on terror mixes risk-
embracing populations like soldiers and at risk populations like Arab civilians and seeks out a criminal
path, and an anti-social outcome. But who can blame it for being in a true sense, and not in the sense used by economists, path
dependent? All visible sociality is fast being criminalized, marked as having been unsuccessfully privatized. Such sociality becomes a threat
to productivity, to the basis of the state-form, to its criminality and thus the criminality of the state stands against sociality at every turn.
Productivity is the metric by which privatization appears as self-rationalizing. But at the same time, this stance marks criminality as the last site
The fever of work is interrupted, risk is suspended, at the moment the criminal
of the un-privatized social.
becomes its opposite, not anti-sociality but sociality. And of course this moment comes all the time as
capital's dream of living only on dead souls is interrupted by the waking hunger for social genius, for
mass intellectuality, for living labour. Suddenly the siege must be lifted, prisoners released, raids
called off, risky deals bailed out, at risk populations made into relative surplus ones. The question of who is
attributed with the capacity to self-manage and who is deemed unmanageable brings us to governance. The ubiquitous term of comparison making formal equality of things more universal than
ever, governance can be applied to hospitals, universities, countries, and corporations. But more importantly in can be applied to populations. Populations that embrace risk, that manifest the
privatization of the General Intellect, embrace governance as the governmentality of indifference. Governance oversees the hedging of interest against interest. But more than that governance
tests for a population's ability to produce interests, to risk those interests in the name of speculative accumulation. Governance is here a form of bioprospecting in the veins of mass intellectuality
for collective cognitive capacities that can be applied to accumulation strategies. And governance is the mouth of the criminal state-form, calling out to the social, in order to privatize or
criminalize it. Those who call back and identify their interests are the lucky ones, these newly identified interests and their bearers are made productive, made to take risks, and led into the fever
of work. Those who do not answer, or cannot be heard, are said to be those without interests, the at-risk, the criminal. With interests rising out of populations and returning to private hands
for example in corporate multiculturalism or fair trade or green consumption, the state is left only with those at risk, those feared to be without interest. And of course the figure today who is
most without interest is a certain criminal character, the terrorist. And as Angela Y. Davis notes 'racism played a critical role in the ideological production of the communist, the criminal, and the
terrorist.' (Davis 2005: 121-2) The roving racism of the at risk category is the business that is left to the state, but this is also the business that is left of the state. And this is why governance must
also fail, why it must remain contradictory in the corporation, the nation, the NGO. If it were to work it would suggest a totality of structured in difference, to use an older phrase, that would be
deadly to the anti-social character of the contemporary state-form. If governance were to do more than merely strip mine the general intellect and leave it scarred, it would become sociable, and
would quickly become the enemy of the state. This is the condition of the war on terror, a flailing limb of the criminal state which constantly flings itself toward the very criminality, the very
condition of being without interest, that it sees in the object of its violence. It works against proper environments of risk, against the extraction of new interests, and instead piles up at risk
populations and smashes constitutions and remakes them in a Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde act that belies its criminal inheritance in the face of the privatization of all that is healthy for the
reproduction of society. The state attacks itself here too. Clearly this is part of a wretched history that Marx identifies as Bonapartism in his account of the crisis of class representation in the
18th Brumaire. Within a century the notorious burning of the Reichstag will signal the mass mobilization of the state against itself that brings us fascism. Now the state is engaged in mass
shedding, war is demobilizing even as its profiteering is part of the executive's curriculum vitae (including the notable intimacies with Enron and Halliburton). The self-destructiveness of today's
politics is brought on by the incessant relinquishing of excess sociality, including that initiated by the state, to privatization. And what cannot be returned to the private must be criminalized and
this is why in the end George W. Bush must criminalize himself. No matter how much he seeks out laws, in the end he is driven to move beyond them, to turn against himself as an instance of
society. His wars, his camps, his dismissals of those charged with upholding the law, belie the impatience behind their own pleas for permanence. Unable to uphold the legality of his policy, he
incriminates himself and uses this sentence to stay the course of execution. Bush delegates decision to maintain authority over those who would judge. But it is worse, because as much as the
state is at risk in this publicity, poison to itself no matter how many wars it launches or jails it builds, it has not even the possibility of criminality. It is criminal, but it will never revolt. It can be
anti-social, but it cannot abide any un-privatized sociality in its midst, no welfare state, no war on poverty. And yet this mode of excess is premised on un-privatized sociality, which is to say not
on the criminal, the anti-social, but on criminality, the possibility that a population is not anti-social, not consumed by the fever of work, not smothered in risk. This criminality is itself the
possibility of a structure of feeling beneath this fever, within this embrace, of a luxuriant excess privatized to make this work and speculation possible, but always escaping it. The fate of those at
the state
risk, those immersed in criminality, the fugitive social-private, is to live, but the fate of the contemporary state-form, the criminal state, the anti-social public, is to die. It is
today that is left to die. There is no difference between its typical operation and its normalizing
exception. Only such indifference has been left to it. Nicos Poulantzas wrote in his late work that 'the state itself bathes in the struggles that constantly
submerge it.'(Poulantzas 1980: 151) When those struggles have at their heart the excess produced by the social capacities carried in the brains and souls of living
labour, privatization leaves nothing to the imagination. To look for some suspension of law when the ability to legislate is itself given over to capital in the form of
governance, is to miss the residual character of the contemporary state-form. And yet Poulantzas also noted more than once 'the class enemy was always present
within the state.' (Poulantzas 1980: 151) That the contemporary state-form is the effect of living labour coming into contact with the anti-social edifice of its deeds, the
ruins of every social project, suggests that criminality remains present in the criminal state.
This criminality at the heart of the state
economy destines revolt from the depths of the mode of excess.

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Impact Calculus versus Extinction (Both Kritiks)
We control probability, for the aff ensures the survival of a political order that guarantee
extinction.
Extend Goldhammer.
The politics of survival ensures catastrophic expenditure. The risks our society faces come
from over-accumulation. We have too much wealth, too much poverty, too much
militarism, and too much utility. Trying to maximize the good of life just adds further fuel
to this bonfire of accumulation, guaranteeing an explosive release of nuclear annihilaiton.
Only the alternative has a chance of breaking this murderous cycle of accumulation.
We’re impact turning time-frame.

Extend Razinski.
Extending survival for the sake of survival turning existence duration, like a bad movie
that will never end. But you are sovereign, and you should shoud walk out of the theater
rather than sit still out of pure inertia. Face the blinding radiance of sacrifice, and quake in
awe of the moments of exuberance that define the true value of existence.
This means we control magnitude, for renoucning sacrifice for the the sake of survival
empties life of joy. It is better to risk extinction than live in a world dominated by fear of
future consequences. That’s Razinski and Goldhammer.
Turn-Their extinction impact calculus purges life of the exuberance that makes it worth
living. Consequentialism’s over-accumulation ensures nuclear extinction as the final
sacrifice .
Alan Stoekl, Professor of Comparative Lit at Penn State University, 2006

[Reading Bataille Now ed. Winnubst p. 258-261]
Bataille's theory, at first, at least, would seem to posit just such a harmony, albeit one that involves the
violence of sacrifice rather than the contentment of the lotus-eater. Man in his primitive state was in
harmony, not with the supposed peace of Eden, but with the violence of the universe, with the solar
force of blinding energy: The naïve man was not a stranger in the universe. Even with the dread it confronted him with, he saw its spectacle as a
festival to which he had been invited. He perceived its glory, and believed himself to he responsible for his own glory as well. (Bataifle 1976a, 192) While LeBlanc's
theory of sacrifice is functional-he is concerned mainly with how people use sacrifice, in conjunction with warfare, to maximize their own, or their group's,
success-Baraille's theory is religious in that he is concerned with the ways in which people commune with a larger, unlimited, transcendent reality. But in order to do
so, they must enjoy an unlimited carrying capacity. And yet, if we think a bit more deeply about these two approaches to human expenditure (both LeBlanc and
Bataille are, ultimately, theorists of human violence), we start to see notable points in common. Despite appearing to be a theorist of human and ecological scarcity,
LeBlanc nevertheless presupposes one basic fact: there is always a tendency for there to be too many humans in a given population. Certainly populations grow at
different rates for different reasons, but they always seem to outstrip their environments: there is, in essence, always an excess of humans that has to be burned off.
Conversely, Bataille is a thinker of limits to growth, precisely because he always presupposes a limit-if there were no limit, after all, there could be no excess of
anything (yet the limit would be meaningless if there were not always already an excess, for the excess opens the possibility of the limit). As we know, for Bataille
coo there is never a steady state: energy (wealth) can he reinvested, which results in growth; when growth is no longer possible, when the limits to growth have been
reached, the excess must be destroyed. If it is not, it will only return to cause us to destroy ourselves: war. For if
we aren't strong enough to
destroy, on our own, excessive energy, it cannot be used; and, like a healthy animal that cannot be
trained, it will [p. 260] come back to destroy us, and we will be the ones who pay the costs of the inevitable explosion. (Bataille 1976a,
31; 1988, 24) In fact, Bataille sounds a lot like LeBlanc when he notes, in The Accursed Share, that the peoples of the "barbarian plateaus" of central Asia, mired in
poverty and technologically inferior, could no longer move outward and conquer other adjacent, richer areas. They were, in effect, trapped; their only solution was the
one that LeBlanc notes in similar cases: radical infertility. This, in effect, was the solution of the Tibetans, who supported an enormous population of infertile and

Kirk, Flynn, et al
unproductive monks (1976a, 106; 1988, 108). Bataille does, then, implicitly face the question of carrying capacity. Perhaps the ultimate example of
this is nuclear war. The

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modern economy, according to Bataille, does not recognize the possibility of excess-and therefore limits;
the Protestant, and then Marxist, ideal is to reinvest all excess hack into the productive process, always
augmenting output in this way. "Utility," in this model, ends up being perfectly impractical: only so
much output, finally, can be reabsorbed into the ever-more-efficient productive process. As in the case
with Tibet, ultimately the excess will have to be burned off. This can happen either peacefully, through
various posrcapitalist as the Marshall Plan, which will shift growth to other parts of the world, or
violently and apocalyptically, through the ultimate in war: nuclear holocaust. One can see that, ultimately, the world
itself will been become vast chaos, fully developed, with no place for the excess to go. The bad alternative-nuclear holocaust-will result in the ultimate reduction in
carrying capacity: a burned-out, depopulated earth. Humanity is, at the same time, through industry, which uses energy for the development of the forces of
production, both a multiple opening of the possibilities of growth, and the infinite faculty for burnoff in pure waste I/acl/ire in,fine de consumation en pureperte].
(Bataille 1976a, 170; 1988, 181) Modern war is first of all a renunciation: one produces and amasses wealth in order to overcome a foe. War is an adjunct to
economic expansion; it is a practical use of excessive forces. And this perhaps is the ultimate danger of the present-day (1949) buildup of nuclear arms: armament,
seemingly a practical way of defending one's own country or spreading one's own values, of growing, in other words, ultimately leads to the risk of a "pure
destruction" of excess-and even of carrying capacity. In the case of warfare, destructiveness is masked, made unrecognizable, by the appearance of an ultimate utility:
in this case the spread of the American economy, and the American way of life, around the globe. Paradoxically, there is a kind of self [p. 261] consciousness
concerning excess, déjbense, in the "naïve" society--which recognizes waste for what it is (in the form of unproductive "glory")-and a
thorough
ignorance in the modern one, which would always attempt to put waste to work, even at the cost of
apocalypse. Bataile, then, like Lefllanc, can be characterized as a thinker of society who situates his
theory in the context of ecological limits. From Bataille's perspective, however, there is always too
much rather than too little, given the existence of ecological ("natural") and social ("cultural") limits.
The "end" of humankind, its ultimate goal, is thus the destruction of this surplus. While LeBlanc stresses war
and sacrifice as means of obtaining or maintaining what is essential to human (personal, social) survival, Bataille emphasizes the maintenance of limits, and survival,
as mere preconditions for engaging in the glorious destruction of excess. By seeing warfare as a mere (group) survival mechanism, LeBlanc makes the same mistake
as that made by the supporters of a nuclear buildup; he, like they, sees warfare as practical, serving a purpose. If, however, our most fundamental gesture is the
burning off of a sur plus, the production of that surplus must be seen as subsidiary. Once we recognize that everything cannot be saved and reinvested, the ultimate
end (and most crucial problem) of our existence becomes the disposal of a surplus. All other activity "leads" to something else, is a means to some other end; the only
end that leads nowhere is the act of destruction by which we may-or may not-assure our (personal) survival (there is nothing to guarantee that radical
destruction-consumation-does not turn on its author).
We work in order to spend, in other words. Survival and
reproduction alone are not the ultimate ends of human existence. We could characterize Bataille, for
this reason, as a thinker of ecology who nevertheless emphasizes the primacy of an ecstatic social act
(destruction). By characterizing survival as a means, not an end (the most fundamental idea in "general
economy,” expenditure for Bataille becomes a limitless insubordinate act-a real end (that which does not
lead outside itself). I follow Bataille in this primacy of the delirium of expenditure over the simple
exigency of Personal or even social survival (which we can associate with LeBlanc). This does not
preclude, however, a kind of ethical aftereffect of Bataille's expenditure: survival for this reason can be
read as the fundamentally unintentional consequence of expenditure, rather than its purpose. Seeing
a nuclear buildup as the wrong kind of waste-because it is seen as a means, not an end-can lead, in
Bataille's view, to a rethinking of the role of expenditure in the modern world, and hence, perhaps, to the
world's (but not modernity's) preservation.

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We control probability because war is motivated by irrationality. We must severe the head
of the king to avert the ecastic extinction made inevitable by consequentialist reason.
Wendy C. Hamblet 2005

[Canadian philosopher with a specialization in ethics and violence. She teaches
Ethics and Morality, and Political and Social Philosophy at Adelphi University
Peace Review 17:39-45] “mono-cephalic” means “one-headed”
But, at this evolutionary apex, a problem arises in paradise. As the monocephalic state increasingly
closes itself off, it stifles social existence , smothers creative energies, chokes the passion from its
citizen-devotees, suffocates their spiritual urges, and reduces all sacrifices to mundane utility. When
the perfect eternality of the structure is complete and the nation duly deified, all labors have become co-
opted in utter servitude. Bataille names this culminating stage of development, the peaceful, stable end
sought by all states, in its most excessive extrapolation—fascism. Ultimately, however, life and time
must break free and move forward into futures. This most solid state holds firm for a short while only;
then there begins a condensation of forces. Life rises up and explodes the suffocating stasis,
disintegrating the solid, erect whole. Existence and liberty flow forth in rage, blood, tears, and passion.
The death of God is complete. For Bataille, these endless cycles describe the movement of history: the
erection of unitary gods of knowledge and power that ultimately ossify into totalities, and then explode
in hysterical, raging catastrophes, releasing the explosive liberty of life from mundane servitude. The acephalic chaos will eventually
recompose, slowly heaving up an ugly divine head once again. Life turns back on its chaotic freedom and develops what Bataille calls an aversion to the initial
decomposition. The chaotic structure moves from the ek-stasis bliss of wanton pleasures and pains toward the stasis of the deity once again. Time, states, and human
individuals, for Bataille, move between the two contradictory forms: stasis and ek-stasis. Time demands both forms in the world—the eternal return of an imperative
object, and the explosive, creative, destructive rage of the liberty of life. Bataille’s analysis of state evolution offers resolution to the mystery of the frequency of
wars in the modern civilized era: It suggests that war composes a “potlatch”—a manic ecstasy of useless self-expenditure that permits a breakout from mundane
servitude. W e may not readily recognize, in our states, the extreme forms that Bataille describes—fascist stasis or chaotic ecstasy. We believe that, although chaos
is unquestionably undesirable, fascism is promoted only by madmen—Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. We may be convinced that fascist urges fade with global
democracy where all people will, eventually, know the order and security of the first world. Modern Western states, we may object, compose a golden mean
between Bataille’s two economies, aspiring neither to fascism nor to a manic primitivism, but to the reasonable metron of golden rules. But the
roots of
the Western world are well planted in the fascist drive for hyper-order and changeless eternality.
Hesiod and the PreSocratics, as much as Jewish and Christian myth, cite a common arche of the universe
in the good works of a god that renders order (cosmos) out of chaos (kaos). For the ancients, one head
(cephalus) is far superior to many; simplicity is beauty, whereas the many compose hoi poloi, an
embarrassment of riches. The foundational logic that posits monocephalic order as ontologically and
morally superior to acephalic multivocity remains an unquestioned assumption embedded in the
Western lifeworld. A single well-ordered edifice, stretching high into the sky—erect, rigid, unyielding—
is preferable, in the Western mind, to the broadest playing field studded with incongruous heroics.
Bataille’s meditations on the dark underside of reason’s projects and triumphs, on such prohibited
subjects as monstrous tortures, illicit sexual excesses, and the colorful anuses of apes, provide a theater
of cruelty and death that is designed to challenge the polite threshold of civilized culture, to shock and
interrupt the philosophical tradition it invades, and to subvert the pretenses of refined sophistication
thought definitive of civilized society. Bataille shows that people are torn by conflicting drives, by
lofty ideals, and by the dark concealed forces they suppress and deny. Lorenz states that Bataille’s
treatment of the dark, concealed urges in human nature offer resolution to the paradox of the
simultaneous lofty goals of modern states and the frequency of brutal aggressions by those very states
naming themselves the most civilized. Perhaps the popularity and frequency of war even in the civilized
modern era represents the release of suppressed subterranean drives within industrialized, rationalist,
rigidly hierarchically ordered populations enslaved to reason and utility. T he

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violence that floods the globe in modernity, that claims to be serving reasonable projects of global freedom and democracy, may represent new forms expressing old
desires, the projects of monocephalic statehood aspiring to deification. Bataille recognizes chthonic forces as instrumental in the modern world: “The economic
history of modern times is dominated by the epic but disappointing effort of fierce men to plunder the riches of the Earth [and turn its fire and metal into weapons]
. . . . [M]an [lives] an existence at the mercy of the merchandise he produces, the largest part of which is devoted to death.” The fierce men of modernity—gods,
kings, and their modern sequels (presidents, popes, corporate rulers)—extend their control to the ends of the planet. Fierce men disembowel the Earth and turn on
their own kind the products of molten metal torn from her bowels to ensure the permanence of their nations. War, states Bataille, “represents the desperate obstinacy
of man opposing the exuberant power of time and finding security in an immobile and almost somnolent erection.” Bataille believes that primitive urges are still at
work in the projects of modernity. Human beings, as much as superstructures of power, must satisfy their dark urges for the good of their communities. They must
release their death drives if they are to gather together in heartfelt communities. Human beings crave mystical, passionate, frenzied escape from the rigorous projects
of their ordered systems. If Bataille is correct, people must ultimately break free from the mundane enterprises of their everyday lives. Their inner
demons
will beckon them from their ordered worlds to revel in orgiastic festival. Surely Bataille’s claim—
that life’s erotic drives will out and fulfill themselves in deathly destructiveness and wanton joy—should
trouble us greatly, given the leveling effects of modern industrial society, its will to mediocrity, utility,
and conformity. But is Bataille correct in his attribution of a measureless and rending character to
modern war? Is modern warfare the aimless catastrophe that Bataille claims it to be? If so, then modern
wars can be explained, according to Bataille, as ecstatic release from the fascist orientation of
modern ordered states and from people’s imprisonment within the merchandise they produce. Modern
war, with its Shock and Awe techno-theatrics, should provide a wondrous release from mundane
servitude. War could be said to satisfy collective fantasies of manic omnipotence and the drive for self-
sacrifice for sacred values. Perhaps the wars of modernity occur with such rabid frequency because
people must satisfy their suppressed lust for a sexualized release from the cold reality of state
projects, the utilitarian reasons of state. This resonates with Clausewitz’s claim that people’s martial
enthusiasm must find release in politically restrained wars or fulfill itself in the maximum exertion of
self-expenditure, that is, self-annihilation. For Clausewitz, modernity represents that unfettered stage
when war has escaped all political bounds and reasonable restraint. Although ostensibly a world driven
by the lofty goals, modernity—for Clausewitz—composes an era of absolute war. The democratic revolution may
have embraced other goals—citizen welfare and the grandeur of their rulers—but democracy, for Clausewitz, composes merely one of a number of crucial forces (the scientific revolution that
provides the technology, the industrial revolution that provides mass production of weaponry, and the imperialism that draws the entire globe into the war system) that have been successfully
harnessed to the power- projects of the mightiest nations. The goods of the modern West, including the good of democracy, exist to extend Western hegemony globally in the marketplace of
military power. But Bataille claims that war is useless expenditure—a release of the primal urges of a community toward excessive overflow. He states: “Military existence is based on a brutal
negation of any profound meaning of death and, if it uses cadavers, it is only to make the living march in a straighter line.” But, if war is to be posited as an ecstatic release, it must compose
orgiastic overflow, an entirely useless and pointless expenditure of the nation’s finest goods. Excessive expenditure is defeated the moment the violent explosion of forces serves mundane
projects of servitude and utility. When war serves the purposes of the state, it loses its manic and ecstatic character and ceases to fulfill the people’s deepest needs for release from servitude and
instrumentality. B ut Bataille is mistaken; the apparent uselessness of modern warfare is a deception, an illusion. War is one of the oldest traditions of our species. It has become a timeworn
vehicle precisely because it serves a great many functions in states. Clausewitz names the institution of war a form of communication between nations. Franco Fornari states: “War is a multi-
functional institution. . . . It is extremely difficult to find a substitute that would perform all of its functions.” One of the most crucial functions that war provides in service of the state is the
crystallization of its monopoly on violence. War is a crucial aspect of the centralizing, evolutionary process that culminates, ultimately, in fascist stability. The establishment of a massive and
robust military is THE MANIC ECSTASY OF WAR 43 utterly necessary to the deification of the structure and the raising of a sturdy cephalus, because, along with the creation of strong
policing and military forces, war serves to alienate the private violence of the citizens and place their collective aggressive energies into the hands of the cephalus. War serves the collective
illusion of eternality. War serves other crucial functions in the state: it confirms the values, virtues, and meanings of one’s own cultural group. Sacred symbols—flags, national anthems, tales of
past heroes, fallen ancestors—are put to work in luring the best of the nation—its strong and courageous youths—to the extreme patriotism required to maintain order in fascist regimes. The
seduction of the nation’s best to its wars includes their provision of an international stage to display the collective prowess of the nation, a point of pride for all citizens, even the most
oppressed of the society, and it allows for the individual display of the soldiers’ manly character—the valor, the sel fless- ness, the loyalty. The wars of modern super-states continue in the
tradition of imperialist projects of old. Posited as serving the most selfless values—the advancement of freedom, democracy, and the spread of civilization—today’s wars clearly bring too
massive a booty to be named selfless expenditures. In fact, for the past fifty years, wars have increasingly become shameless lootings of helpless peoples—the projects of economists and
accountants and big busi- nessmen purified by political propaganda and backed by an arsenal of modern techno-weaponry. War serves the needs of the cephalus; it serves the personal narcis-
sism of the leaders, and the collective narcissism of the combatants and civilians. Above all, modern wars serve economic goals; their booty is prodigious. They may cost the sacred love-object
(the nation) massive capital, human and monetary, but the generals, the political leaders, and their corporate cronies profit handsomely from the hostilities. War also serves the fantasy that the
sacred love-object is the savior and benefactor of the globe; war serves the paranoid collective delusion that the cephalus is infallible and indestructible, unlimited as the god in its strength and
in its moral substance. Killing the enemies, propagandized as evil, the collective illusion is fed that evil is overthrown: thus the sanctity of the love- object is preserved. Sacred values are
recomposed; the cephalus stands taller, more erect, more firm than ever in the wake of a good war. B ut for all the benefits served by the institution of war, modern wars are deeply tragic; they
do waste millions of innocent lives; they tear apart societies and disburse homeless families across the globe. One in nine of the earth’s seven billion now lives a miserable, wandering, hopeless
existence on parched lands where even the earth mother is barren. WENDY C. HAMBLET 44 Ultimately the greatest tragedy of modern war lies in its stark utility to the few at the extreme
expenditure of its many. The utility of war defeats the purposes of war by frustrating the deepest needs of the society—the people’s need to build heartfelt communities, a need that can only be
served by expressing the collective aggressive energies of the society beyond utility. Bataille states that: “Since [war] is essentially constituted by armed force, it can give to those who submit to
its force of attraction nothing that satisfies the great human hungers, because it subordinates everything to a particular utility . . . it must force its half-seduced lovers to enter the inhuman and
totally alienated world of barracks, military prisons, and military administrations.” In fact, it may well be the non-release of ecstatic urges that explains a state’s return, year after year and
decade after decade, to that old institution. It may be that the deepest paradox of modern war is that, in its usefulness to the cephalus and in its service to the fascist drives of the state, war proves
utterly useless in dispensing its most fundamental function; it ceases to discharge the most vicious and cruel needs of the people, their deepest primitive motivations, whose collective release
makes possible the formation of a heartfelt community. Bataille counts this failure as the most tragic of the multiple tragedies of modern war. The sacred values of community—life, freedom,
festival, and the joy of communal fraternity—are rendered meaningful only in juxta- position to their opposites. Bataille states: “The emotional element that gives an obsessive value to
communal life is death.” But, ultimately, insists Bataille, the sacrifice will be celebrated beyond the reasonable purposes of the cephalus. If Bataille is correct, then we can be certain that , for
those states whose wars are utterly utilitarian, self-annihilation is imminent.

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Pups of War Essential Blocks

Pups of War… Link v Link Turn Debate
Even if they win they link turn, we’ll still win that sacrifice is still the best way to solve our
aff. That’s the alternative and impact debate.
Political discourse against the abuses of American militarism is appeasement.

Extend Hutnyk, which makes two arguments.
First, the state thrives on political discourse, for it reinforces the values of rationality and
consent that enable its awful violence. The aff protest is careful not to oversep the bounds
of democratic legitimacy, like the anti-war protestors who get a permit to make sure they
don’t disrupt the traffic.
Second, the state is criminal, and demanding restraint only allows it to play the part of
benevolent giver of peace. The democratic norms to which they appeal are a ruse, keeping
us in line for more wars are prepared in the name of peace.

Kirk, Flynn, et al
The affirmative play-acts the rejection of war. Their repugnance sustains state violence.

The general revulsion at war therefore is not necessarily incompatible with a generalisation of war in
practice. Indeed, my aim has been to show the opposite: that the general deployment and the general rejection of war are part of a single complex. It is much too
simple, however, to see this complex as part of a willing blindness on the part of the bulk of humanity, wherein moral comfort and self-regard would be assured by
we
rejection of war even though affluent lifestyles may depend on war for their continued opportunity. It is too easy to see the war problem simply morally, that
play at rejecting wars from which we are actually happy to profit. Our rejection of war, like our
purported commitment to democracy and human rights, is not merely hypocritical. It must be understood
as part of a complex in which war and its other emerge together in a double relationship in which they
both encourage and refuse one another: we reject war because it ruins social relations, shatters bodies
and savages our human rights. Yet, we [p. 164] also look to war to preserve the social, protect threatened
lives and enlarge rights. War kills and saves simultaneously. It destroys the things in the name of which
it is implemented. To see a loss of difference between war and its other is to overlook the complex
situations in which war emerges and which keep it alive despite our moral repugnance and endless
official lamentations for those of us whom it has annihilated. To say that war is double and that it is implicated conceptually in other values that we
want to preserve is not to simply say that we should be resigned to war enduring. It is an attempt to provide a new and useful way by which war can be understood,
and argues, as all analysis does, that material situations like war cannot be dealt with if they are not understood, and that new ways must continually be sought to
rethink them. Theory is not an enduring ideal truth to be applied to practical situations, but the invention of new conceptual forms that may help us represent and
explain hitherto obscure or enigmatic phenomena. Thinking of war in terms of the war/other complex means always seeing the emergence of war as the deployment of
something else with it. The two must always appear in relationship with one another even if they are considered to be antagonistic or mutually destructive. So war and
whatever its other might be in a particular context, facilitate the emergence of one another, even in their defiance of one another. It is this inseparability of war and its
other that makes it possible to see war and its other as co-ordinated. What was Nazi war but a tribute, in its most organised and exultant murderousness, to life? What
was Communist insurgency but the most regimented and anonymous embrace of the possibilities of freedom? And what are democracy's post-1989 wars but the most
brutal and oppressive attempt to spread human rights? These complex situations can and should not be disguised by an eternal but vacuous resort to morality. The
logic that attributes the doubleness of war to hypocrisy is a singularly unenlightening example of the ascendancy of moral discourse in discussions of war. Of course,
our attitude to war must be moral: we could not protect ourselves from the cult of official violence if it were not, nor could we begin to see war as a problem and
something to be surpassed, something I have assumed as relatively uncontentious from the outset. Yet, because war is politically, economically, and above all,
Since the Vietnam War, resistance to war
conceptually situated, it must be recognised not as primarily a moral, but a political problem.
has been fundamentally based on revulsion at its violence and destructiveness and the popular culture
that naturalise it. This resistance has been primarily rhetorical and gestural, as it befits its interest in
the aesthetics of war and in tune with the [p. 165] general aestheticisation of politics of the time. It has
rested on general humanist clichés about community, fraternity and an ideal social future. In other
words, it has relied on a banal and unsustainable understanding of the mutual alienation of the human
and war. This conception is not wrong in any simple sense, but it is too uncomplicated to deal with the dynamics of the war/other complex, in which the human
can be as much a justification for war as reason for scepticism towards it, and is indeed probably both. To engage with war properly, we have to realise that this kind
Humanist sentimentality often attempts to
of opposition is not enough. When war is in play, so is something else, war's various others.
present what we have identified as war's others as unquestionable or non-negotiable: How can we
possibly contest the value implicit in love, or sociality or human rights? Is not this the worst kind of
post-modern relativism, in which we allow what should be absolute values to be held up for debate? Yet
it is these various "values" that accompany and facilitate the emergence of war, and that always wrong-toot us
when we attempt to reject it. Do we not want dictators to be removed, women's rights restored and ethnic cleansing resisted? If we are in favour of these goals, how
The refusal to debate
can we resist the wars that aim to achieve them? Does not this make the rejection of war merely automatic and adolescent?
these values results in both an impotent and unworldly rejection of war, on the one hand, and a
mindless acquiescence to it, on the other. The argument of this book has been that it is necessary to
understand the complexity of the implication of such values in war.

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Demanding restraint from the state legitimates endless wars waged in the name of peace.
Nick Mansfield 2006
[Asociate Professor in Critical and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney
theory & event 9:4]
Discussing what is new about the "new wars," Herfried Munkler argues that in the wars that have developed in the
decolonised world: "military force and organised crime go increasingly together."2He goes on: "The new wars know
no distinction between combatants and non-combatants, nor are they fought for any definite goals or purposes; they
involve no temporal or spatial limits on the use of violence."3In the low intensity, asymmetrical conflicts Munkler
sees as typical of contemporary war, war is without limits, and has no identifiable outside, either in space or time.
The inverse of this argument is Martin Shaw's identification of one of the key attributes of "the new Western
way of war": "The key understanding, therefore, is that warfighting must be carried on simultaneously with 'normal'
economics, politics and social life in the West. It is imperative it doesnot impact negatively on these."4Western
publics only tolerate a war that can be co-ordinated seamlessly with peace. This is not an alienation of war from
social life, but its absolute co-ordination with it. It is not here a question of war being kept hidden behind a
screen of peaceful social advancement from one day to the next. Instead, war under this dispensation becomes
completely compatible with what we conventionally understand as peace. In the end, this is what allows the
complete saturation of society by war: the ability to represent the normal unfolding of social life as relatively
undisturbed. In their discussion of the paradoxes of global political governance, Dillon and Reid present a
more complex account of the inter-relationship between war and peace. Here liberal governance both provokes
and repudiates war. They write: "It . . . seems obvious that the radical and continuous transformation of societies
that global liberal governance so assiduously seeks must constitute a significant contribution to the very violence
that it equally also deplores."5Here, global political institutions which have charged themselves with the task of
drawing fragile states into the contemporary world of transparent and open (especially financial) administration
which makes them accessible to the flow of international capital, unsettle societies enough that warfare is risked,
while equally bemoaning war as a sign of institutional failure. The pressure put, for example, on the small states of
the Western Pacific by local powers like Australia both aggravates communal tensions by destabilising inherited
power structures, while bemoaning the subsequent unrest as symptomatic of cultures seen as ill-equipped for
contemporary global modernity. Each of these accounts presents a different insight into the various ways in
which war and peace co-exist in the contemporary. War totally infiltrates peace, yet war is only allowed when it
confirms the apparent inviolability of peace. The governance that insists on the rationalisation and stabilisation of
civic society stokes instability and war. War is consistently incited in peace while being simultaneously alienated
from it. Peace is administered in such a way that war presses to return, always and everywhere. But how are
we to theorise this possibly epoch-making development? How do our philosophies of war and peace allow us to
represent and consider this development and its consequences for the future global polity and for the identity of civil
society, which, since Hobbes at least has always relied on the institution of social peace through the containment of
war as its touchstone? The aim of this paper is to present a strand of thinking in modern and postmodern cultural
theory that essays a formulation of the war/peace complex that history now so clearly proposes to us. It is in the long
acknowledged but under-investigated connection between Georges Bataille and Jacques Derrida that one version of
the reformulation of the war/peace complex becomes articulable.

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Pups of War Alternative 2NC
Liberation requires sacrifice, not a better political program.

Extend Goldhammer 05.
The ecastic experience of sacrifice frees us from utilitarian concern for the good, forming a
sovereign existence not subjugated to the needs of survival. This forms of a space of
political contestation that is the prerequisite to a sovereign community that is not just
endless domination.
Sacrifice enacts a theater of liberation.

Extend Razinsky 09.
Cutting off the head of the USFG challenges its political authority, while wearing their
skins breaks down the wall separating us from others. Sacrifice’s radiation burns like the
radiation of the sun, allowing an intimate encounter with death. The encounter with risk
not subordinated to productivity or survival is the only way to access the exuberance that
gives life meaning.

Kirk, Flynn, et al

Politics is theater, and it usually ends in tragedy.
Only our sacred ecstasy can confront the dark drives pulling us to destruction. The rational
political proposal of the aff brought a knife to a gun-fight.

The character of this psychological structure requires analysis the Left cannot provide, beholden as it is to this side of production. And along with
the emotive force that binds the energies of fascism, the analysis must extend to the "emotions that give
the masses the surge of power that tear them away from the domination of those who only know
how to lead them on to poverty and to the slaughterhouse" (OC 1: 409/VE 166), and more generally
still, to "what holds us firmly together, what links our origins to the emotions that constitute it" (OC 1:
404/VE 163). Such is the only way to remain true to the struggle against capitalism and the various closed
systems its instability provokes-restoration, fascism, nazism, communism. In short, both the political
failures and the structural limitations of the Left require a new understanding, one directed toward
what Bataille calls the "ocean of men in revolt," which alone "can save the world from the nightmare
of impotence and carnage in which it sinks!" (OC 1: 412/yE 168). The ontological direction of research undertaken by the College has
palpable, practical motivations. Walter Benjamin, who attended the College of Sociology regularly, reportedly worried that it, along with the program of Acéphale,
lent itself all too readily to fascist and nazi appropriation.' Certainly the "ocean of revolt" that Bataille suggests might "save the world" is a disquieting response to
threats immediately facing human life at the time, threats that clearly drew upon the very emotional bond that so interests the College. And Bataille himself identifies
Mussolini and Hitler as heterogeneous elements initially recalcitrant to homogenous society. Certainly, heterogeneity does not guarantee desirable historical-political
outcomes. But Bataille is also clear that the condensation of power in such figures of authority, "[t]he imperative presence of the leader, amounts to a negation of the
fundamental effervescence that he taps; the revolution, affirmed as a foundation, is, at the same time, fundamentally negated from the moment that internal domination
is militarily exerted on the militia" (OC 1: 362-63/yE 153). The dangers posed by affective emotion and its military constellation, far from requiring a retreat from the
College's position, therefore, calls it forth. Even Benjamin's analysis of the aestheticization of politics---which he evidently began to level against the College-could
not be proffered without this basis of attraction. This is no doubt the sense in which Bataile writes, what the College aims at, and what it oust critique
is "not
merely the ground of an intellectual debate but rather ... precisely the theatre where the political
tragedy is playing" (CS 159/83). [p. 37] The third crisis that marks the emergence of the College is,
therefore, a crisis of the political itself, the fact that the most impending problems, in spite of their
political shape, do not admit political solutions. Their miminence makes of the College an exigency.
To address the unfathomable suffering wrought by the violence of limited political life and the
established social order, it is necessary to develop a new, more comprehensive approach. Sacred
sociology thus takes as its topos the "entire conimunifying movement of society" (CS 140/74), aiming at an understanding of the universal community affirmed
in the "Programme (Relative to Acéphale)?' The task, in other words, is "to apply intelligence less to so-called political situations and to the logical deductions that
ensue, than to the immediate comprehension of life" (OC 1: 409-10/yE 166). This explicitly ontological task occupies Bataille for the rest of his life, finding mature
theoretical expression in The Accursed Share and Erotisni. During the period of the College, however, this task is developed in particular through the distinction
between elective and traditional communities, and the interest of the College lay almost exclusively with the former. The College thus determines the ontological
direction of its work in terms of an understanding of the relation of the individual and the social order, whose de facto ties are loosened in proportion to the formation
of elective bonds. During the inaugural session of the College, llataille and Caillois east the scope of elective communities in terms of religious orders and secret
societies (and no doubt this is what bothers Benjamin, as though the College abandons the problems of the day and seeks solutions in secret brotherhoods!). Yet
Bataille's development of the notion of elective community tends almost entirely in the direction of the break with de facto community, on the one hand, and the
community of lovers, 4n the other. To the extent that secret societies exemplify the field of research undertaken by the College, Bataille is more interested in the secret
than he is the societies and religious orders that would provide for that research a more accessible and determinate object. Obsessed by the "secret" at the heart of our
contact with one another, Bataille's interest has little or nothing to do with that which could be held or shared or protected by a secret organization. In relation to the
two determinations of community set forth by the College-traditional and elective-the tragic human being and the lover, respectively, therefore, bear more and more
the burden of Bataille's revolution. The contestation of community becomes less and less programmatic and at the same
time, more fateful, its possibility belonging to the ontology of social life at the very point where action, will, and understanding discover their limits, and where this
discovery is devoid of transcendence and the possibility of recuperative accumulation. Thematically explicit in the title
of a lecture Caillois was unable to deliver-"

Kirk, Flynn, et al

Brotherhoods, Orders, Secret Societies, Churches"-it is therefore [p. 38] remarkable and telling that Bataille's introduction to the event focuses on concerns altogether
three types of
different from those Caillois intended to address. Rather than speak about the character of clandestine organizations, Bataille describes instead
human being, three types of relation to de facto or traditional community, which at the same time
successively correspond to the three crises described above. The first type, the "armed lout,” aims at
expelling everything foreign, forcing it to the outside, and he dominates the war, sustains it, as it
were, and in doing so no doubt motivates the formation of the College. Like the "armed lout," the "man
of law and discourse:' the second type, is also motivated by the threat of impotence, but his action is
itself impotent and inevitably serves the inertia of arms. Because he perpetuates that against which
he fights, the "man of law and discourse" is for Bataille a comic figure, like the fool who impotently
wipes the shit from his shoe on his own carpet, ineptly spreading what repulses him, like leftist
revolutionaries carrying the value of production into the revolution, or carrying the revolution into
the state-sponsored halls of negotiation. Bataille writes, "Deep down 1 think there is something
wretched, something obnoxious, about opposing a reality, such as the one threatening human existence
today, with discourses alone, assertions of law, a whole blaring discord and the armies belonging to this
discourse and this discord. I do not believe it is possible to oppose the rule of arms with anything except
some other rule: and, other than the rule of arms, only that of tragedy exists" (CS 271/147). The third
type, tragedy, is thus born from the impotence of human life in the face of blind and indifferent forces
of nature, politics, or history. Both the structure of an event and a comportment in relation to the event,
tragedy opposes the world of work and production and will as the necessary exposure to a recalcitrant
and unworkable chance, what Bataille calls the "sovereignty of existence laid bare.” Tragedy exposes
the impotence of action, the fact that action always serves ends other than its own, that even its
accomplishments are impoverished. "The neophyte learns that [even] the will to efficacious action is
one that limits itself to dismal dreams," says Bataille (OC 1: 528/VE 226).

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Pups of War… A2 Coalitional Politics/Strategic Essentialism Good
They can’t perm because we have delcared war. At best their “strategic alliance”
instrumentalizes the glories of sacrifice, betraying the flows of rage and hope that makes
politics possible.

"WE ARE FEROCIOUSLY RELIGIOUS and, to the extent that our existence is the condemnation of everything that is recognized today, an inner exigency demands
that we be equally imperious. What we are starting is a war. It is time to abandon the world of the civilized and its light. It is too late to be
reasonable and educated-which has led to a life without appeal. Secretly or not, it is necessary to
become completely different, or to cease being" (OC 1: 443/VE 179). Because it is explicitly mentioned, it is tempting to take the
religiosity of the statement as self-evident. However, nothing is further from the truth. For what alone is unmistakable here is the ferocity of the articulation-fierce not
because it is designated so, but because of its mood, urgency, and pronounced combative character. It is the
force of contestation [p. 33] that
is unmistakable in these lines, and it requires and effects a radical abandonment of that category of
value that defines and justifies both religious and political discourse: education. Bataille's concern here is not for the
sake of a common good, already determined in advance and without question in the direction of upbuilding and formation, the good of the social order and the
fulfillment of individual talent in its service. His concern here is rather a question of life and death. And there is a profound sense that life
has been dulled,
deadened, and muted by the social bonds common to and developed through the communal or social
forces of religion and politics alike, forces of normalization, security, and the accumulation of wealth.
Bataille's call to form a community is at once and unequivocally a call for the destruction of community in any traditional sense, It is a call to do away with the bonds
we most readily and thoughtlessly define as communal. Item 7 of the "Programme" reads: "Fight
for the decomposition and exclusion
of all communities, national, socialist, communist or churchly-other than universal community" (OC
2: 275/BR 121). It is a call for revolution. From the vantage point of apologists for capital or bourgeois democracy (and is there really a
difference?), there could be no distinction between these demands and those of militant revolutionaries, be they conunuuist, socialist, or anarchistic. For Bataille,
however, the need to become completely different, or cease being, requires a break from the formative
dimension of revolutionary activity, its participation in congresses and talks, its displacement of
debate from the space of the streets to the hallways of negotiation. The entire force of revolutionary
creativity rests for Bataille in the emotional bond that wells up within the masses as refusal, the
atmosphere of hope and rage that swells like an uncontainable wave. The need to become completely
different requires the abandonment of political process--defined as it necessarily and inevitably is by
those who already have a voice but not political practice. It is a refusal to concede that political thought and action must occur
within the sphere of established discourse, which begins with distrust, "a complete lack of confidence in the spontaneous
reactions of the masses," and which in this way, at just this point, unites militant revolutionaries and
bourgeois intellectuals alike. Thus, Bataille can say at once, "it is necessary to produce and to eat: many things are necessary that are still nothing, and
so it is with political agitation" (OC 1: 403/VE I 62).And at the same time: "When we speak to those who want to hear us, we do
not essentially address their political finesse. The reactions we hope for from them are not
calculations of positions, nor are they new political alliances. What we hope for is of a different nature.' What Bataille hopes
for is an affirmation of the bond that does not belong to discourse, production, or accumulation; a confrontation with the impotence perpetuated by traditional social
structures of nationality, religion, party, and the like; a mobilization of hope and rage incomprehensible [p. 34] and irresponsible to everyone who tethers the question
of the political to the axis of security. It is a contestation of the "morally empty and materially miserable life" perpetuated and sustained by institutional structures of
power and their widespread internalization (OC 1: 402/VP 161). Undoubtedly, the "Programme" is destined to fail, if it really is a program at all. [tens 3 highlights
this difficulty, stating, "Assume the function of destruction and decomposition, but as accomplishment and not as the negation of being" (OC 2: 275/BR 121). The
demand not only poses insurmountable structural difficulties of understanding: how destruction could be deprived of its negative work, how it could be taken as an
achievement in any positive sense. It also articulates a real political problem. Contributing nothing worthy or capable of
appropriation by the established order-that of discourse, the accumulation of wealth, the value of
security, and so on-it beckons its own destruction. For it addresses itself solely to the raw violent drives
society either represses or sublimates. What is more, not only does the "Programme" addresse itself to those drives, but it also gives them expression,
and it deploys them in its very call. Its call to affirm crime is itself criminal.5 Its refusal to calmly suffer for a placid future, its
rejection of all political projects that sacrifice the present for an indefinite and impossible end, its demand to "[c]onsider the
world to come in the sense of reality contained as of now, and not in the sense of a permanent happiness which is not only inaccessible, but hateful"-in each of these
affirmations, this project tears itself apart as project. What looks like a program is in fact a heterological operation, one that deploys
the form of
program to effect a cut with everything every program supposes. Community is not an idea or
concept, an aim or goal, nor is it an extant dimension of social reality. It is a declaration of war.

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Cerberus Essential Blocks
Cerberus … Link versus Case Debate 2nc

Even if they withdrawal troops, they do so to stabilize the international system.
Extend across the Hansen and Stepputat 2007
First, international stability is endless war, meaning at best they provide the system that
enables accumulation for new rounds of extermination. Their turns assumes that the state
is rational and restrained, building a façade or reasonable discourse that better enables it
to enact its sovereign violence.
Second, even if they win the turn, they still challenge militarism in the name of survival,
which is a relinquishing of your own inner sovereignty to the state. That’s impacted with
the Razinski and Goldhammer evidence—they destroy the value to life.
Cross apply the impact debate, which proves that the logic of utilitarianism collapses in on
itself, guaranteeing that the outcome of the plan is catastrophic war.
Kritik turns the case. The knowledge behind the 1AC excess thrown off by the
international system, ensuring plan becomes a way to wage new wars in the name of peace.
Suhail Malik 2006
[teaches in the Department of Visual Arts, Goldsmiths College Theory Culture Society v.23 2-3]
Abstract Taking globalization to be in large part a consequence of American domination,
we follow Derrida’s characterization of this domination as being a mode of sovereignty of world-scale
institutions and force. Such sovereignty, which is also a roguery, is the primary actual condition for a
global knowledge. Bataille’s characterization of rogue sovereignty, however, proposes that knowledge is
eclipsed under such a condition by an experience that is irreducibly an unknowing. Knowledge is thus
corroded by – or, at best, in a critical relation to – the manifestation of a global experience generated by
the actual conditions of globalization. It is relatively uncontroversial to propose that ‘global knowledge’ – as a project, as a fact – is
consequent to the process of globalization that has taken place under this name since the 1980s or thereabouts. But this obvious remark immediately indexes a
question as to what knowledge could in fact be if it is subject to this process. There are two aspects to this question. The first, which we do not address here, concerns
the very great difficulties that ‘the global’ as a name or modality of ultimate extension poses for a rational tradition in which knowledge is (or has) a universal or
absolute foundation. The second is what the current actuality of the term global, its historical constitution, means for anything that could be called global
specifics or content of knowledge are extended and
knowledge. This will be our primary concern. It is self-evident that the
transformed by globalization, as a maximum world-limit of any knowledge-base, -distribution, or

-contestation. The question is whether what knowledge is also transforms in this process. It is
proposed here that it does since ‘global knowledge’ relies on the historical conditions of globalization for
its realization and reconfiguration of knowledge, and these conditions are in turn primarily (which is
not to say exclusively) occasioned and promulgated by America’s global dominance which, in a complex
manner, is sovereignly constituted. The following paragraphs attempt to schematize in the most rudimentary fashion this determination of what globalization qua
America’s sovereign domination means for the possibility of global knowledge. The brevity of this contribution permits only the signalling of several hypotheses
regarding ‘global knowledge’ as it is thus occasioned. These hypotheses are consequent to the central issue that arises in the course of the following pages: whether
in fact there can be knowledge at all in the condition of the global, or if the experience of that condition leads to the eclipse of knowledge. Accepting for the sake of
speed the commonplace that political-economic globalization has been and continues to be secured and mobilized enormously by and for American interests,
sometimes under the name of neo-liberalism, the
question remains as to what America’s dominance is in this
relatively new inter- and trans-national configuration of economic, political and cultural interests – in
short, how does the USA globally dominate? There is of course an enormous literature on this, some of whose proposals can be signalled
by terms such as Empire, hegemony, security, and, of course, globalization itself. However, in order to address the specific characterization of American sovereignty
as primary condition for globalization, we take up the less familiar account of US dominance as a voyoucracy proposed by Jacques Derrida. Derrida takes up the
term on the basis of the French translation for the phrase ‘rogue state’ as État voyou and from the French mid-19th-century bourgeois use of the term in order to

Kirk, Flynn, et al
denounce ‘an illegal and outlaw power that brings together . .. all those who represent a principle of disorder – a principle not of anarchic chaos but of structured
disorder, so to speak, of plotting and conspiracy, of primordial offensiveness and offences against public order’ (Derrida, 2005: 66). The phrase ‘rogue state’ is also
used to denounce states

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that also represented a ‘principle of disorder’ or of terrorism in the eyes of the USA and other ‘supposedly legitimate states’, as Derrida calls them, whose own
legitimacy is founded in respect [of] an international law that they have the power to control – for example, in the modern and complex formation of a heterogeneous
but oftentimes closely knit and tightly bound group like the United States, the United Nations, and the Security Council, even NATO (to which one might add for
good measure alliances and coalitions like the G8, the IMF, and so on). (Derrida, 2005: 68) The denunciation of rogue states is thus ‘structurally homologous’ to the
bourgeois denunciation of a voyoucracy in order to secure their own legitimacy (to legitimate, if it can be put this way). What is critical here is that the phrase
‘rogue states’ came to have prominence exactly as the term and strategic policy of ‘globalization’
was being affirmed and instigated by
the Clinton administration in its early years through national and international institutions. That is, rogue
states are an indispensable designation for the securing of the claim to international legitimacy for
globalization, by which is therefore meant a certain global order (for which terrorism is a central
rhetorical and factual operation, as Derrida mentions, 2005: 66). Of the many ramifications of this (de)legitimation strategy only two will be
taken up here: first the characterization of a voyoucracy and second what purchase on legitimacy is retroac- tively granted by the term on the powers that mobilize it.
First, then, it is to be noted that a voyoucracy is not an outright abandonment of order but is (presented as) the power or force (a kratos) of an illegitimate and quasi-
criminal (voyou) counter-order. Voyoucracy signals a sovereignty exorbitant to the legitimate sovereignty of the State and law in the national or international
domain. The denunciation of rogue states is thus a matter of one kind of sovereignty against another, of legitimate against so-designated illegitimate sovereignties.
To this end Derrida remarks in passing that ‘if the voyou-cracy represents a power, a challenge to the power of the State, a criminal and transgressive
countersovereignty, we have here all the makings of a counterconcept of sovereignty such as we might find in Bataille’ (2005: 67–8). We will return in due course to
this particular characterization of a voyoucracy since it will bring us directly to the problem of whether a global knowledge can be established. Second,
international and national legitimacy and illegitimacy as it is proclaimed and insti- tutionalized by
dominant powers relies on a discourse and politics of democracy and freedom or, in so-said contrary rogue political
formation, their deprivation. This is evident in the charters and ambitions of international institutions such as the UN, NATO, the G8, the IMF, the EU and also,
a legitimation of international power, the democracy-globalization
notably, for the USA too. Democracy is in this way
coupling serving to secure international political and economic dominance by already powerful states
(which is why China’s economic might and limited democratic polity presents a more vexed problem for globalization under this aegis than, say, India or Brazil).

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The aff stokes the fires of war. At best their so-called peace will seethe with limitless
violence.
Nick Mansfield 2006

theory & event 9:4]
. Dealing with the enemy becomes a mere extension of police work. In return, the domestic street is
notionally militarized. This slippage allows both war and policing to be justified as mere analogies to one
another: how can you contest the war against terror when it is really just a version of the police work
that makes you feel safe in your home? And inversely, how can you possibly doubt the legitimacy of
policing when it is really a version of the war fought against those who despise liberty and threaten
innocence? It is a truism to say that each war redefines the nature of war itself, due to changes in
arms technology, military organisation or geo-strategic history. The long war of terror is no exception,
but what is most new about it, and what makes it most fit its age, is that it promises the erasure of the
difference between war and peace, and concomitantly between war and civil society: terrorists and criminals swap identity, emerge anywhere
at any time and are imputed to share a hostility to the whole Western way of life. This rhetorical slippage, however, confirms what many theorists of war have been
proposing in different ways for a long time. We will no longer have war and peace in the future, but ever more complex entanglements of one in the other, where
social policy, diplomatic manipulation and military strategy exchange characteristics, contriving
enemies at home, representing political antagonists abroad as criminals, and abolishing not only the
idea of a military frontier, but of warfare itself as simply a matter of literal or possible armed conflict.
In the future, the question will be not "Why did we choose war instead of peace?" but "What
configuration of the peace-war complex embroils us now? " Discussing what is new about the "new wars," Herfried
Munkler argues that in the wars that have developed in the decolonised world: "military force and organised crime go increasingly together."2He goes on: "The new
wars know no distinction between combatants and non-combatants, nor are they fought for any definite goals or purposes; they involve no temporal or spatial limits
on the use of violence."3In the low intensity, asymmetrical conflicts Munkler sees as typical of contemporary war, war is without limits, and has
no identifiable outside, either in space or time. The inverse of this argument is Martin Shaw's identification of one of the key attributes of "the
new Western way of war": "The key understanding, therefore, is that warfighting must be carried on simultaneously with 'normal' economics, politics and social life in
the West. It is imperative it doesnot impact negatively on these."4Western publics only tolerate a war that can be co-ordinated seamlessly with peace. This is not an
alienation of war from social life, but its absolute co-ordination with it. It is not here a question of war being kept hidden behind a screen of peaceful social
advancement from one day to the next. Instead, war under this dispensation becomes completely compatible with what we conventionally understand as peace. In the
end, this is what allows the complete saturation of society by war: the ability to represent the normal unfolding of social life as relatively undisturbed. In their
discussion of the paradoxes of global political governance, Dillon and Reid present a more complex account of the inter-relationship between war and peace. Here
liberal governance both provokes and repudiates war. They write: "It . . . seems obvious that the
radical and continuous transformation of societies that global liberal governance so assiduously seeks
must constitute a significant contribution to the very violence that it equally also deplores."5Here, global
political institutions which have charged themselves with the task of drawing fragile states into the
contemporary world of transparent and open (especially financial) administration which makes them
accessible to the flow of international capital, unsettle societies enough that warfare is risked, while
equally bemoaning war as a sign of institutional failure. The pressure put, for example, on the small states of the Western Pacific by local powers like
Australia both aggravates communal tensions by destabilising inherited power structures, while bemoaning the subsequent unrest as symptomatic of cultures seen as
ill-equipped for contemporary global modernity. Each of these accounts presents a different insight into the various ways in which war and peace co-exist in the
contemporary. War
totally infiltrates peace, yet war is only allowed when it confirms the apparent
inviolability of peace. The governance that insists on the rationalisation and stabilisation of civic
society stokes instability and war. War is consistently incited in peace while being simultaneously
alienated from it. Peace is administered in such a way that war presses to return, always and
everywhere. But how are we to theorise this possibly epoch-making development?

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Cerberus Alternative 2NC
Liberation requires sacrifice, not a better political program.

Extend Goldhammer 05.
The ecastic experience of sacrifice frees us from utilitarian concern for the good, forming a
sovereign existence not subjugated to the needs of survival. This forms of a space of
political contestation that is the prerequisite to a sovereign community that is not just
endless domination.
Sacrifice enacts a theater of liberation.

Extend Razinsky 09.
Cutting off the head of the USFG challenges its political authority, while wearing their
skins breaks down the wall separating us from others. Sacrifice’s radiation burns like the
radiation of the sun, allowing an intimate encounter with death. The encounter with risk
not subordinated to productivity or survival is the only way to access the exuberance that
gives life meaning.
No one knows what is coming.

History throws off ecastic revolutions, sacred moments of transformation that disprove the
cynicism of bitter realism.
Edgar Morin 2006

[Morin founded and directed the magazine Arguments (1954-1962). In 1959 his book Autocritique was published. In 1969,
Morin spent a year at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. In 1983, he published De la nature de
l’URSS, which deepened his analysis of Soviet communism and anticipated the Perestroika of Mikhail Gorbachev. Morin was
married to Johanne Harrelle, with whom he lived for 15 years. In 2002, Morin participated in the creation of the International
Ethical, Scientific and Political Collegium.
“Realism and Utopia” Diogenes 2006 v 53 p. 135-144]
As the idea of a determinist order of the world and of History has completely
collapsed, you are obliged to confront uncertainty on all sides; as the limits of the reductive and
compartmentalized mode of thinking are revealed more and more, you have to try to grasp the complex
in the literal sense of the word complexus– meaning that which is woven together. Blaise Pascal, in the
17th century, was already expressing what ought to be self-evident: ‘All things, even the most sepa-
rated from one another, are imperceptibly linked one to the other, all things assist and are assisted,
cause and are caused’ – an idea which already introduces the sense of reciprocity. Pascal goes on: ‘I
consider it impossible to know the parts if I do not know the whole, as it is impossible to know the whole if I do
not know each part individually.’ Pascal understood that knowledge was a shuttle passing from the whole to the parts and from the parts to the
whole; it was the link element, that is, the capacity to contextualize, to situate an item of knowledge and an item of information within a
context such that they might take on meaning. Why is it becoming more and more difficult for us to make use of our cognitive aptitudes which
always function through contextualization and fitting things into wholes? Because, in effect, we are now living in a global era; the problems are
ever more linked one with another and are more and more vast. But it is especially because we are more and more under the influence of
disjunctive, reductive and linear thought. We have retained not the words of Pascal but those of Descartes, that is, that you have to break down
things into their component parts in order to know them. As soon as you have elements which pose problems within a system, you have to
separate out the problems; you solve the different problems individually and then you have the solution for the whole. You have to separate
science and philosophy, you have to keep disciplines apart . . . yes, but on condition that they can link together again; whereas, today, there is a

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separation and

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Cerberus Alternative 2NC

compartmentalization that is hermetic. There is a disjunction between the humanist culture – that of the humanities, that which makes us reflect
and think and so enriches us – and the compartmentalized scientific culture. And it is a fact that this disjunction has spread everywhere, even
into politics. It is this fragmentary mode of thought which dominates, and which encloses the fragments within the world, whereas the other
form of thought will dissect the world longitudinally, in slices related to economics, technology and so on. This techno-scientific
thought which takes no account of creatures, people and cultures is clearly incapable of understanding
the problems of these socio-centric human groupings; in the same way as such socio-centric
groupings are incapable of realizing the problems associated with technicity . All of which today
puts us in a very serious situation. From this point of view, the imperative is to create connections.
Creating connections is what complex thought strives to do. In the sphere of politics and human activity, my diagnosis is that we are witnessing a struggle between
the forces of association and the forces of dislocation. Solidarity or barbarity . We are going to burst asunder from a want of
solidarity; we will burst asunder from a failure to reform our way of thinking. To what extent is it a
problem of thought? To the extent that the classic alternatives block our thought. Realism and utopia
are two antinomies that are mutually exclusive according to our received way of thinking. If you are
realists, you can’t be utopians. If you are utopians, you are excluded from realism. It is the same thing for
unicity and multiplicity. The proponents of the former can but homogenize everything and unify the
world in the abstract. Those arguing for the latter certainly perceive the world’s diversity, but they see it
as compartmentalized. The problem lies in the impossibility of escaping these self-destructive
alternatives, in the impossibility of thinking complexity. But this is the great challenge that faces us. Towards an anthropolitics Solidarity or barbarity is an alternative which
derives its sense not just from the sphere of the immediate, the concrete, the local, the experienced, but also from the European and global spheres. Wherever this debate is taking place, it
obliges us to line up on the side of the forces of association and solidarity in the hope that they will prove stronger than the opposing forces of rupture, dislocation and wilful con- cealment. It
impels us to be part of a movement which, if it is not broken, perhaps will no longer lead us to the best of all possible worlds, but may usher in the hope of a better world. Though we must set
aside the messianic illusion of a radiant future, we can nevertheless nourish the hope of such a better world, even while recognizing that this hope may never be entirely fulfilled. For me, the
terrestrial homeland takes shape in the realization that all of us human beings are derived from the same trunk, born of the same matrix – the earth – through our biological evolution. It is the
awareness that we share the same identity and that, across our cultural diversities, made even more apparent since we have entered the global age, all human beings share the one destiny in
relation to the great problems of life and death. It was this type of awareness that elicited the consciousness of belonging to a homeland. Otto Bauer,6 at the end of the 19th century, defined the
‘homeland’ as a community of destiny, but which encapsulated the idea of a common identity across a culture, sharing a common, mythological, origin, tracing back to a common mythic
ancestor. But in my terrestrial homeland, the ancestor is not at all mythical, he is a little bipedal creature. In him we find the grandfather of all. This idea of a common humanity and of a
homeland co-extensive with the earth is both very realist, since it is based on an anthropological identity, but also very rational, given the challenges of life and death which confront us all. It
could even be called religious – in the sense that picks up the etymological origin of this term (Lat. religio = a binding together) – by binding all humankind into a fraternity. Within our nation,
as within Europe and throughout the whole world, we are having to confront immense problems. Socialism believed that the ills that afflicted humanity were the work of a single monster,
capitalism: suppress capitalism and all these ills would also be suppressed. But we have seen that that did not suppress wars, nor did it suppress exploitation. We have come to realize that there
is not just one monster, but a number of them. And they are not mini-monsters, they are more and more enormous in size: the technobureaucratic monster, the monster of the uncontrolled
spread of technoscience . . . all these reverberate within daily life and create deep-seated ills. Our well-being is becoming a situation of ill-being. We should not forget to diagnose the weakness
of political thought of the Left which, after the organic collapse of Marxism, found itself incapable of rethinking the historical problem of mankind in society and of envisaging a positive
politics of history. When socialism was formulated in the 19th century, it grew out of an historical perspective. Today, such an historical perspective is once again necessary. I am afraid that, in
the absence of a single unifying concept, if a sudden and violent crisis occurred, we would have to suffer catastrophic consequences. If a very great crisis were to come, we would not be
sheltered from its terror. When the great crisis of 1929 struck, and Germany was frightfully smitten with conditions not only more severe than elsewhere but also exacerbated by the context of
national humiliation in which they occurred, the world witnessed the rise of Nazism within an environment of complete legality. It must also be recognized, however, that the same period
saw Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ providing an alternative democratic solution. Why the New Dealworked was perhaps because the United States was a country of immigrants. We are urged to be
vigilant, without opening the door to the improbable. Even recently we have had great expectations. But of what? There were the expectations of the general spread of democracy, of the
emergence from an economy of constraint and poverty. There was hope that the United Nations could perhaps function properly. Such hopes arose not only in relation to the demise of the
USSR, but also in Africa and Latin America where dictatorships were falling. But the springtime of the peoples in 1848 was followed by a terrible repression. That of the last century has seen a
terrible regression. We can no longer continue to nourish disproportionate hopes, like those crazy hopes we in France had at the Liberation. We were coming out from under the yoke of
. So, does that mean that we are always likely to be disenchanted,

Nazism, but our great aspirations were rapidly disappointed
seeing our hopes reduced to despair? In a word, no. I believe that we must live to the full the ecstatic
moments of history; they are the consolation of so many years of mediocrity. I experienced the
Liberation of Paris. May 1968 was a little moment of historical delight that I also enjoyed. I was
fortunate to be in Lisbon at the time of the Carnation Revolution. As for the fall of the Berlin Wall,
unfortunately I was only able to experience it by proxy, not being present, but I was happy to see
Rostropovitch playing in front of the Wall. Life is bearable only if one can introduce into it not a
utopia but poetry, that is, an intensity, a sense of festival, of joy, communion, happiness and love.
There is an ecstasy of history which is a collective ecstasy of love. Francesco Alberoni, in Falling in Love7 – whose wonderfully untranslatable
Italian title is Innamoramento e amore – describing that marvellous, ecstatic moment when love comes upon one, wrote: ‘Nascent revolutions are moments of falling
in love.’ It’s a phrase I like quoting. But such revolutions are not ‘the final struggle’, they are ‘the initial struggle’. I might even say ‘the struggle before the initial
struggle’. They are the curtain-raiser, even, to the initial struggle. Why? Because what is needed is a formidable effort of intellectual reconstruction, a whole new
way of thinking, even; we must show ourselves fit and able to confront the challenge of the uncertain, and there are two ways by which it may be confronted. The
we have a clear idea of what we want, what we aspire after, and so we wager on its
first is by way of a wager:
realization even though we may fear that our ideas will be defeated. The second is through application of strategy: in
other words, the ability, in terms of information received and chances met, to modify our manner of advancing. Resistance is not something purely negative. It does
not consist simply in opposing oppressive forces, but it looks ahead to liberations. It is the Polish example, it’s the example of the Soviet people, it’s the example of
occupied France. Resistance has an inherent virtue.
We are condemned to resist. What I call ‘living life’ is not just living
poetically, it is also knowing how to resist in life. Heraclitus said: ‘If you do not expect the

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unexpected, you will not find it.’ We come back to the idea of the possible impossible, which we must explore in depth.

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Cerberus… Realism 2nc
Their realism is not realistic enough. We acknowledge the inevitability of violence, and they
are the ones being naïve about the rationality and restraint of the state. International
relations is war, not the well-organized machine presented by the 1AC.
The collapse of communism proves the futility of realism’s predictions. Its false
inevitability admits defeat in advance, blind to the ecastic possibilities of the present.
Edgar Morin 2006

[Morin founded and directed the magazine Arguments (1954-1962). In 1959 his book Autocritique was published. In 1960,
Morin travelled extensively in Latin America, visiting Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Peru and Mexico.He returned to France where he
published L'Esprit du Temps. That same year, French sociologist Georges Friedmann brought him and Roland Barthes together to
create a Centre for the Study of Mass Communication that, after several name-changes, became the Edgar Morin Centre of
the EHESS, Paris[2]. Beginning in 1965, Morin became involved in a large multidisciplinary project, financed by the Délégation
Générale à la Recherche Scientifique et Technologique in Plozévet. In 1968, Morin replaced Henri Lefebvre at the University of
Nanterre. He became involved in the student revolts that began to emerge in France. In May 1968, he wrote a series of articles
for Le Monde that tried to understand what he called "The Student Commune." He followed the student revolt closely and wrote
a second series of articles in Le Monde called "The Revolution without a Face," as well as co-authoring Mai 68: La
brèche with Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort[3]. In 1969, Morin spent a year at the Salk Institute for Biological
Studies in La Jolla, California. In 1983, he published De la nature de l’URSS, which deepened his analysis of Soviet communism
and anticipated the Perestroika of Mikhail Gorbachev. Morin was married to Johanne Harrelle, with whom he lived for 15
years. In 2002, Morin participated in the creation of the International Ethical, Scientific and Political Collegium.
“Realism and Utopia” Diogenes 2006 v 53 p. 135-144]
So what can we do to avoid being deceived by such pseudo-realists – whose attitudes are in fact totally
utopian? How can we stop ourselves from simply saying: ‘Well, yes, if something cannot be made real
it must be purely utopian . . .’, and not thus become mired in a realism which cannot see beyond itself?
The very present itself has an enigmatic and uncertain face. This is detectable even in the West.
Everything that seems solid and functional is yet capable of falling apart. The present remains
unknowable. We are living in a sort of cyclonic low-pressure zone. We get the feeling that the storm is
about to burst at any moment, but then no, it doesn’t, it seems to move away. And then, wait on, it hasn’t
really moved away at all. We don’t really know what is going to happen. The present is the realm of
uncertainty. Regarding the post-communist period, it is interesting to see just how surprising, or
unsurprising, things turn out to be. The Russian historian Yuri Afanasev’s3 analysis brings to light that
once that gigantic apparatus that was the Soviet State became fragmented into a thousand pieces,
each of the pieces changed into a little capitalist entity.
Continued…

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Continued…
Real-politikand the politics of the ideal

To paraphrase Rimbaud: I have made the magic study Of happiness . . . one might say: I have made the
interminable study Of the real. To be able to diagnose what the real consists of today, other sources of
illumination would be necessary. But the subject is inexhaustible. The first thing is to reject trivial
realism, which insists that we must adapt to the immediate, to the established order, to the fait
accompli and admit the victory of the victorious. But beyond such trivial realism, what remains? We
need to recognize that the real is swarming with possibilities and we have no way of knowing what
may emerge from it, nor how to choose one’s own purposive direction or situate oneself in relation
to it. Within the sphere of human reality, the imaginary, the mythological and of course the affective
all cohabit together, something that the compartmentalization of the social and human sciences does
not sufficiently take into account. As for economics, it is much too refined a science. Why? Because its
object is expressed in figures and quantities. But from such perfection, flesh, blood, passion,
suffering, happiness and cultural expression have all been abstracted away. Therein lies the problem
of today’s reality, where politics, the art of the polis, has been made entirely subservient to economics,
the art of the œkosor household. To rediscover ‘true reality’, we have to be restored to a state of
responsibility as subjects. It may be a commonplace to say so, but it must be constantly repeated: any
knowledge – be it of an object or a crowd-filled lecture theatre – is a translation and a reconstruction.
Of course, one can be deceived by hallucinations, one can be in error, but there is no knowledge which
is a photographic reflection of what is real. Admittedly, knowledge in the form of ideas and theories is a
translation/reconstruction of the real in a refined form, but this also can carry with it enormous illusion
and error. Such illusions are the stuff of the whole of human history. Marx and Engels said that the
history of humanity was that of the errors and illusions that human beings had made about themselves
and about what they had achieved. But in so saying, they also committed the same types of errors and
had the same illusions. So is it not worthwhile saying to oneself: ‘Can’t we at least try to react?’ Quite
clearly, all knowledge is interpretation. The illusion lies in saying: ‘I will call real what I think is real’;
that is to say: ‘I label as realism that which derives from my personal conception of the real.’ Reality,
even at its most objective, always has a cognitive and subjective element to it. To truly know reality,
what is required is a subject capable of thinking critically within his/her own limited personal mental
space, and then, through that ability, being capable of questioning the truths which present as self-
evident within the doctrinal system into which they are incorporated. It might be added that the
discrediting of all individually autonomous moralities and all autonomous assertions of responsibility
is the common feature of all belligerent nationalisms and all totalitarian systems, from stalinism to
nazism.
Even if realism has validity, that doesn’t prove the 1AC is claims are right. It does NOT
prove that the aff doesn’t reproduce the violent excesses leading to our destruction.

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Even if realism possesses truth, it is fragmentary and willfully ignorant about its own
limits. Only a sacred methodology has a chance of understanding the international.
Stephen Chan 2000

[Professor IR Dean Ethics at Notingham Trent University, Millennium Vol. 29, No. 3, pp. 565-589]
Preconditions For Writing a Sacral IR

The difficulty of writing an essay such as this is that it feels like the writing of fragments, only because the
fragments are, within a particular discipline, unknown. That the discipline o stensibly concerns itself with the
international makes the writing of such fragments tragic, or perhaps pathetic. Yet, it is IR that is a borrowing
discipline. It cannot claim its borrowing of Kant and Hegel—never mind Nietzsche—is for instance more than
fragmentary. The tragedy lies in its circumscribed choice of fragments, and this circumscription is a
repudiation of the international, and finally a repudiation of knowledge. The compound tragedy is that the
fragmentary borrowing, the circumscription, and the repudiation are advertised as an unending and recurring
quest for truth; but this truth can only ever, under such co nditions, be fragmentary and circumscribed. Truth
as monolith—even if it fades and recurs—and truth-seeking as aristocratic, are conceits. I have tried to illustrate in
this essay both the subjectivity and self- reflexive subjectivity o f any search for truth, and to o ffset the oriental
stories with kno wled ge fro m Western disciplines and thinkers o utside IR. More to the point, I have tried to
illustrate the desirability of various truths, and ho w the multiplicity of them sho uld be contextualised within a
quest for good. Not only that, but the telling of truths, and the quest for good, establish an intersubjectivity
which is amenable to a hermeneutics, as Ricoeur suggested, mo st plausibly established in art and stories. Thus,
if the reader has an aversion to Tibetan devotional statuary, he or she still has the injunctions of IR’s Roland
Bleiker, which are injunctions towards the freely co mpositional.48 But it is not enough merely to tell stories. I am
saying here that, in its rush to secularity, IR has forgotten the need to tell stories that are sacral—that are
compositions towards the sacred—and which are reflectivities upon long and different histories of establishing the
conditions of goodness and, yes, o f truth/s. It is the methodologies o f reflection that, I propose, exist in the world
’s cultures as sacral devices. Nietzsche was right about the divided cogito, but did not infuse his Zarathustra
sufficiently with it. Zarathustra’s exposure to the world are exposures only to provide him with to uchstones that
reassert his o wn rightness. There is none of the irony of a Subcomandante Marcos, and his sense of co mp assion to
all those who are imperfect before it is less than developed. Nietzsche’s creation is, finally, an assertion in the face
o f the world, and not a Tibetan Boddhisattva who chooses very deliberately to remain within it. He has, in
Ricoeur’s terms, no intersubjectivity; in Küng’s terms, no ethic for the world which disgusts him; and, in Eliade’s
terms, departs the moral depredations of the world by giving in to his o wn temptation of Superhumanity as
constant recurrence. He does not constantly recur in the world, but is engaged in continually approaching a truth
that is beyond the world ’s detritus. This is not nihilistic, but only in the sense that it is beyond the context of
nihilism: the world of struggle and the world of the international. To be in good, rather than becoming in truth,
is the distinction drawn here between Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and Tibet’s Avalokitsvara. These are choices of
stories, yes? And both are written sacrally, debating the methodologies towards transcending the material and
secular. Only one of them, having the capacity to complete transcendence, draws back to live within the inco
mplete: to attain not sacredness, but a conditio n of perpetual sacrality. This perpetual state draws from and
prosecutes the cause of good, and this good is not the subject or object of discourse: it is kno wn by simple
intersubjective experience. Finally, in his completed ethic, Küng got it right. There is nothing co mplicated about
this. Good is simply so mething done. The trick, beyo nd IR, is simply that it can be done in one thousand truthful
ways.

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Realism is mythology, blind to its reliance on untestable stories to make sense of vast array
of empirical evidence… The K solves best for IR methodology and education.
Cynthia Weber 2005

[Professor IR at Lancaster University, International Relations Theory: A Critical Introduction p. xvi-xvii]
What, for example makes realism's story about sovereign nation-states locked into a battle for
survival or idealism's story about the possibilities of international cooperation so compelling? In this
book I suggest that what makes these IR stories appear to be true are the IR myths upon which they are
based. IR myths are apparent truths, usually expressed as slogans, that IR traditions rely upon in
order to appear to be true. The 'truth' or the 'falsity' of an IR myth is beside the point. Examining how
an IR myth functions to make an IR tradition appear to be true is the point. So, for example, the IR myth
'international anarchy is the permissive cause of war' is the apparent truth that realism and these days
neorealism depend upon. Similarly, 'there is an international society' is the IR myth that makes the stories
told by idealism and neoidealism appear to be true. None of this should come as a surprise to IR
theorists. We know that different IR traditions rely upon very different IR myths in order to appear to be
true. So how do we make sense of these contradictory ways of seeing the world for our students? The
usual strategy is to ‘test' the validity of the IR myths against the 'facts' of inter national politics to
determine which IR myth (and therefore which IR tradition) offers the most accurate description of international politics. Proving that an IR myth, tradition, or
theory is wrong so that it can be replaced by another one which is 'true' is usually what we mean by doing 'critical IR theory'. But what if we push our analysis just a
bit further? What if we unpack not just IR traditions but the IR myths upon which they are based? What if we ask of IR myths (as we do of IR traditions), what makes
the story they tell about international politics appear to be true? What makes international anarchy appear to he the permissive cause of war, or why does there appear
to be an international society? If we pursue these questions, then we not only push our analysis of IR traditions further. We push what it means to do 'critical JR
theory'. Why is this the case? Because the alternative way of doing critical JR theory proposed in this book allows us to examine not only how one 'truth' replaces
another 'truth' but also how 'truths' get constructed. This is beyond the scope of most traditional critical IR theory which concerns itself only with evaluating which
'truth' appears to be most 'true'. By declaring one theory 'true' and another one 'false', traditional critical IR theory cannot then go back and examine what makes the
'true' theory appear to be true. For example, realism
critiques idealism by 'proving' that its IR myth, 'international
anarchy is the permissive cause of war', is 'more true' than idealism's myth, 'there is an international
society'. But, in so doing, realism cannot ask what makes its IR myth about international anarchy
appear to be true. And. without critically analysing its own IR myth, realism ultimately proves
nothing. Asserting the 'truth' of one IR myth over another in no way guarantees the 'truth' of an IR
myth, no matter how much empirical evidence is amassed to support the 'truth' of the myth. This is the
case because the 'truth' of an IR myth depends as much upon how empirical evidence is organized
into a coherent story about international politics as it does on the evidence alone. This is a central problem with
how critical theory is usually practised in the discipline of international relations. International Relations Theory takes this problem seriously. How it takes
it seriously is by shifting its analytical emphasis away from looking for 'empirical evidence' to support the 'truth' of an IR myth towards an investigation of the
organization of the 'facts' that make an IR story about international politics appear to be true. Doing critical IR theory in this way means we have to suspend our usual
preoccupation with getting to the 'real truth' about an IR myth, tradition, or theory and ask instead, what makes a particular story about international politics appear to
be true? Or. to put it somewhat differently, how does the 'truth' function in a particular IR myth? It is not accidental that this book as my answer to how to teach IR
theory better should locus on stories and how they are told.
If the world is made up of 'facts' and stories that organize those
'facts'. then there is no more important skill to pass on to students than to make them better readers
and writers of stories, better interpreters of not just the 'facts but of the organization of the 'facts'. With this in mind, international
Relations Theory does not try to be a comprehensive textbook crammed with every 'fact' about international life or even international theory. By
focusing on the major IR traditions of realism, idealism, historical materialism, constructivism, postmodernism, gender, and globalization, it
attempts to help students to read and write their world better by arming them with the ability to critically ask, how does the 'truth' get told?

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Humans might be violent, but NOT because of the inevitability of realism. States no longer
pursue war as strategy, but instead as senselessly murderous excess.
Adriana Cavarero, Prof Political Philosophy at Università degli studi di Verona, 2009
[Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence trans. McCuaig p. 60-65]
. During the early years of the present century, the area of greatest suffering has been Iraq, where from 2003 through the first half of 2006 the estimated total
number of deaths among the population comes close to six hundred thousand.' This list is obviously arbitrary and incomplete. Nor is it a question of numbers, even if a focus on quantities is inevitable when we are dealing with mass
butchery and carnage are now directed-in the bulk of cases, although not exclusively-at the
homicide.9 The numbers serve merely to emphasize how
civilian population. In an epoch of "mass death unprecedented in history, 10 to continue to discuss war in terms of
regulated conflict between states, in line with the classical and "symmetrical" model of a clash between men in uniform, is,
in this sense, misleading. The kind of war that matured in the twentieth century and looms over the new millennium is not
only asymmetric, as were and are all colonial wars, but, like them, consists predominantly of the homicide, unilateral and
sometimes planned, of the defenseless. Nor does the rhetorical expedient, typical of military language, of 'collateral damage" do any good: on the factual plane, it does not
succeed in masking the existence of "the blown-off limbs, the punctured eardrums, the shrapnel wounds, and the psychological horror that are caused by heavy bombardment:"' Struck one by
one, in the singularity of their vulnerable bodies, the helpless ones stand at the center of modern destruction and highlight its drift into horrorism. This places them in a position of perspective on
Often execrated as a tremendous evil and as the maximal expression of human violence,
horror that, in speaking of war, no discussion ought any longer ignore.
war has been regarded as inevitable for millennia. But the modern age especially has been able to make use of theories that,
variously articulated and cutting across different disciplinary levels, have succeeded in endowing this inevitability with a natural
foundation. I refer to theories, originating in the early twentieth century and not untouched by the eroticization of horror already
discussed, that trace violence back to "aggressiveness, defined as an instinctual drive, [that] is said to play the same functional role in the household of nature
as the nutritive and sexual instincts in the life process of the individual and the species."2 This is Arendt's characterization, in an essay from the 196os in which she imputes this naturalistic acceptation of violence primarily to the
modern social sciences. As the author implies, the term "social sciences" is not to be taken in a narrow sense. It is meant simply as a comprehensive label for the various fields of knowledge that emphasize the pulsional origin of the
, Hobbes was already speaking of war as part of human nature, in his celebrated
phenomenon of vio [p. 63] lance. At the dawn of the modern era, for that matter
description of the state of nature as a state of war. The modern social sciences, to stay with Arendt's thesis, go a step further,
however; they ascribe war, like violence, not just to "an irrepressible instinct of aggression" but also to "a secret death wish of the human
species. 1113 Thus Freud and psychoanalysis inevitably come to the foreground. The Freudian idea of a death wish is well known: "a death instinct, the task of which is to lead organic life back
into the inanimate state."4 He describes it as a drive that, albeit originally directed inward in the form of self-destructiveness, also projects outward, "against the external world and other
organisms. `5 In other words, and to adopt the technical imprecision Of Arendtian terminology; it is a desire for death that is at the same time an instinct of aggression. As is equally well known,
Freud developed this theme during the final phase of the writings in which, from 1914 to 1922, he described the functioning of psychic activity. The background is the period during and shortly
after the First World War, an epoch in which death and destruction were operative on a vast scale. It should also be noted that, as proof of the plausibility of the intrinsic linkage between the
death wish and the impulse of destruction, he resorts to an argument taken from the field of biology; to be precise, he describes the passage from single-cell organisms to multicellular ones in
terms of a death wish that, instead of directing its destructive impulse inward toward the single cell, is redirected outward. So when Arendt denounces the naturalistic conception of violence
derived from the "modern social sciences:' she hits the mark: the incursion into the field of the natural sciences is a salient trait of psychoanalytic theory in its formative phase. Rather than at
Freud, though, the denunciation ought to be directed at the immense success of certain Freudian categories in the second half of the twentieth century, especially at the way they have been
absorbed and reworked, if not hypostasized, by the various disciplines that have intersected with psychoanalysis, one way or another, over the course of the century. The phenomenon is, to put it
mildly, conspicuous. Especially on the plane of media popularization, the century saw the expansion of a horizon of meaning within which the death wish along with the destructive impulses, and
not seldom their horrorist side a la Bataille, acquired the status of established, unquestionable, and evident principles. Any reflection on violence in general and war in particular was virtually
obliged to take them into account. At the start of the third millennium, in other words in the era of socalled global war, a prime example of this is a book published in the United States by James
Hillman in 2004. It is entitled A Terrible Love of War and is [p. 64] based on the Jungian theory of archetypes. But the book stands out not because of the reference to Jung, or to psychoanalysis
in general, but because of the nonchalance with which Hillman recuperates and mixes together the main strands of twentieth-century naturalistic thought on violence to corroborate his thesis. He
maintains that war "belongs to our souls as an archetypal truth of the cosmos"16 and that this archetypal truth is, as the title oF his second chapter puts it, "normal]' He proceeds with an analysis
of the theme of a horror that remains human even in its atrocious inhumanity, adding that war is sublime and belongs to the sphere of religion .17 "If war is sublime, we must acknowledge its
liberating transcendence and yield to the holiness of its call "18 This does not mean, obviously, that Hillman wishes for a perpetual state of war. His aim is rather to get rid of the "pacifist
rhetoric'' that, in denying the natural-psychic-root of the phenomenon, impedes comprehension of it. As the reader will easily intuit, while the authors cited (often inappropriately) are highly
disparate, it is principally categories deriving from psychoanalysis, the sociology of the sacred, and the anthropology of sacrifice that underpin the articulation of Hillman's discourse, The
theoretical density, as well as the internal problematics of these categories, which in his text are forced to undergo drastic simplification, are transformed into banal clichés. In order to justify war
as an uorenounceable and vital experience, Hillman often appeals not just to the authority of his authors but to a so-called common opinion that by now constitutes the vulgate, in the form of the
stereotypical and the obvious, of those same authors. An example is the facility with which he takes for granted 'bur fascination with war films, with weapons of mass destruction, with pictures of
blasted bodies and bombs bursting in the air."" To this Hillman adds, on a confessional note, "the fascination, the delight in recounting the dreadful details of butchery and cruelty. Not
sublimation, the sublime."" Typical as well in the way it casts a shadow of abnormality-if not pathological stupidity or obtuseness-over those who do not share the fascination with butchery,
Hillman's thesis
has its own stringent logic. Once violence is rooted in the natural realm of the impulses or, if one prefers, in the
archetypical order of the cosmos, the horror of war cannot fail to transmit its fascination both to everyone's visual experience and to the literary
practice of some. And, even more logically, it is combatants with firsthand experience in the field who savor the full fascination. The words of the soldiers that Hillman diligently reports in his
text for the purpose of documenting his theory prove it. Among them, the words of a cinematographic version of General Patton stand out, when, faced with the devastation of battle and kissing a
dying officer, he exclaims, "I love it. God help me, I do love it so. I love it more than my life." Then there is the authen [p. 65] tic declaration of a marine who confesses, "The thing I wish I'd
seen-I wish could have seen a grenade go into someone's body and blow it up:' No one else, though, rivals the laudable capacity to synthesize of the anonymous American soldier who, in
In the name of a realism grounded in the power of
describing a bayonet charge, defines it as "awful, horrible, deadly, yet somehow thrilling, exhilarating.'
cliché, the entire repertory of war's horror is thus reduced by Hillman to the realm of enjoyment. "The savage fury of the group, all of
whose members are out for one another's blood:' which the celebrated work of René Girard inscribes in the phenomenology of ritual," becomes the trivial wage of the warrior. For that matter the
stereotype of the soldier excited by killing has a long and prestigious history. A certain arousal by violence was already characteristic of Homer's warriors, and the warmongering rhetoric of
every age, ennobled by writers and poets, is full of soldiers made happy by death. The events of the twentieth century, and even more those occurring right now, might suggest to the singers and
scholars of massacre that they change register. Today it is particularly senseless that the meaning of war and its horror-as well, obviously, as its terror-should still be entrusted to the perspective
of the warrior. If it is true, as the historian Giovanni Dc Luna laments, that "wars,
with the violence and cruelty they unleash, appear to have a common
ground (killing and getting killed), always the same and impervious to chronology,"" it is also true that only warriors, after
all fit this paradigm. The civilian victims, of whom the numbers of dead have soared from the Second World War on, do not
share the desire to kill, much less the desire to get killed. Nor does the pleasure of butchery, on which Hillman insists, appear
to constitute a possible common ground in this case. You would have to ask the victims of the bombing, cooked by incendiary
bombs in the shelters of Dresden, or those whose skin was peeled off by phosphorous bombs in the Vietnamese villages, where
the pleasure and excitement was for them. .

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Cerberus… A2 Extinction Predictions Good
Their predictions mobilize a crowd of babies seeking security from the teat of the state.
Democratic discourse cannot account for the its own fascination with violence, meaning
only sacrifice can break with the status quo.
Bülent Diken 2006

[Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, Alternatives 31 (2006), 431–452
The evil is us. The war against the evil is not a matter of opposing others but of confronting ourselves, our
own desire. In this sense, Lord of the Flies is a story of fascism in us all. Thus in the famous preface he wrote for a
“book of ethics,” Michel Foucault claimed that the “major enemy, the strategic adversary is fascism. . . . And not
only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mus- solini . . . but also the fascism in us that causes us to love
power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.”46Which is also the reason why Simon hears the
following from the “Lord of the Flies”:
continued…
. Democracy is great, so the film tells us, but it is also impotent. It lacks mobiliz- ing power and the
capacity for radical acts. Both Piggy, the intellectual, and Ralph, the democrat, lack this ability—except in this incident, where Ralph dares to look
evil in the eye. The moment for a radical act is however surpassed: after Ralph has become the new enemy, no one needs the totem animal any more. Thus, Ralph’s
act does not amount to more than an empty gesture. But still we should not exclude the possibility of such acts; they have a time and a moment. And radical they are
in aiming for the destruction of our most cherished object. If
evil is “in us,” then an ethical act must be an act of “self
destruction,” an act that undermines what make us a “we.” Significantly in this respect, Benjamin was the first to divide
Schmitt’s concept of exception, producing a remainder of it. For Schmitt, exception is a limit concept that presupposes a “normal” situation as its background. The
state of exception aims at the preservation of this normality with extraordinary means. In other words, Schmitt’s project is to legitimize the state of exception, or to
normalize what is exceptional. Along similar lines, we could argue that the state of exception on the island is reactionary, or, to phrase it differently, that violence is
rational. The generalized exception, the festival, is Jack’s way of strengthening his power. In this, everything is made fluid; all hierarchies are reversed. But one
thing remains constant: Jack, the leader. To be sure, Benjamin was in many ways inspired by Schmitt’s methodological extremism, even though his own project was
opposed to Schmitt’s. Whereas Schmitt wanted to legitimize Nazi power, Benjamin criticized it. Schmitt was conservative, Benjamin revolutionary. Indeed, this
tension found its best expression in their understanding of sovereignty. Hence to Schmitt’s exception Benjamin opposed the suspension of suspension, a “real”
exception, or, better, an exception to exception itself. What is decisive here is the notion that, when generalized, exception loses its status as a limit of normality.
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history
that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the
struggle against Fascism.57 Whereas in Schmitt exception is the political kernel of the law, it becomes divine justice in Benjamin. And then we are confronted with
the difference between two exceptions: Schmitt’s exception is nothing else than an attempt at avoiding the “real” exception, the revolution, or divine justice.
Benjamin’s exception, in stark contrast, suspends the relationality between the law and its suspension in “a zone of anomy dominated by pure violence with no
legal cover.”58The question of this real exception is the one that cannot be posed today without immediately facing the accusation of being a nihilist or a
fundamentalist. And why is it so? To end with an answer to this question, let us focus on the final scene. Speechless The whole jungle is on fire. Ralph is being
hunted. He is hopeless, without being able to find a shelter from violence. Running fre- netically, he makes his way to the beach, but collapses there. Worn out,
breathless, he is about to surrender to his predators, who are not far behind him. But miraculously at this point, he notices a naval officer looking at him. Obviously a
ship has seen the fire. He is saved by the fire, which was intended to destroy him. Shortly after, the other boys arrive with their painted bodies and sharp- ened
spears. They are startled when they see the officer. The officer, in turn, looks puzzled. With this scene, the film ends. But, unforgivably in our view, it omits an
essential dialogue from the book. In the book, when the naval officer sees the naked boys with masks and weapons, he thinks they are playing, having “fun and
games,” and crucially (mis)interprets the situation as a “Jolly good show. Like the Coral Island.”59 Coral Islandis R. M. Ballantyne’s children’s novel from the
nineteenth century in which three British boys on a tropical island successfully “defend” civilization against pirates, cannibals, and wild animals. In other words, it is
a naïve version of Lord of the Flies. Which makes the dialogue essential, also because it is here that the first living “adult” figure appears. Crucially, however, this
figure turns out to be an infantilized adult, for whom war is a game, “like Bülent Diken and Carsten Bagge Laustsen 447 the Coral Island.” Further, the boys in the
film are “rescued” by soldiers only to move to another war, to a more general state of exception. In a sense, therefore, the world the film depicts is a world with
no outside. The “outside” is as violent, and as infantilized, as the boys’ island. Indeed, by omitting this crucial point, the film creates the illusion that outside the
island things are “normal”—that outside there is civilization. The irony, however, is that the boys are, in the first place, on the island because of a war. They are, so
to speak, waging a war within a bigger war. This “official” war of the “adults” is not less but—with more technology, bigger crowds, and more powerful sadists—
more violent than everything that happens on the island. The two worlds are continuous.60 Herein lies the significance of the fact that the film is about boys. Why
boys? Perhaps because Golding thought that boys, as half-formed beings, could be perfect symbols of the central conflict between civilization and barbarism. Thus
the boys in the film occupy a grey zone of indistinction between society and nature. But still, why does the only man in the film appear like a boy? Indeed, Lord of
the “childhood” of society is the state of nature. And the “nature” that
the Flies is an allegory of infantilization. After all,
comes after “society” is the state of exception, a condition in which the “citizen” is reduced to a
member of a crowd. At a first approximation, therefore, infantilization is about regressive evolution: a
movement not from the child to the adult but from the adult to the child, from the human to the
orangutan, from society, bios, to the nature, zoe. The state of exception is a world in which orangutan

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Cerberus… A2 Extinction Predictions Good
beings. And, in a sense, the becoming orangutan of man is what explains the increasing
infantilization of the contemporary culture, especially in the context of consumption and the war
against terror. It is well known that in premodern times the “child” did not exist; that is, did not constitute a different being. Hence in paint- ings, for
example, the children were depicted as grown-ups, only smaller in size, as child-men.61First in modernity childhood took the form of an exceptional period in
individual chronology, and the child emerged as a subject to be normalized and disciplined: the child-man is, per definition, desocialized. Therefore, some of the
most significant panoptic institutions of modernity, the nursery and the school, for instance, mark the difference between the child and the man. To be a proper
“man” one should first be a proper “child”; that is, disciplined and normalized in a site of confinement. And then one could move forward to other institutions, to
factories, universities, marriages, and finally to the elderly care, 448 From War to War living a life on the move “from one closed site to another, each with its own
laws,” each marked by an inside-outside divide.62This is, however, changing in today’s “control societies,” whose main symptom is the breaking down of panoptic
boundaries: In disciplinary societies you were always starting all over again (as you went from school to barracks, from barracks to factory), while in control
societies you never finish anything—business, training, and military service being coexisting metastable states of a single modulation, a sort of universal
transmutation.63 Perhaps today the discipline specific to the nursery is also mov- ing beyond the panoptic walls with the result that the man-child is, again,
everywhere, in every domain. That one’s childhood “never finishes” means that the nursery extends itself to the whole society—that, in a sense, the exception
becomes the rule. In this sense, infantilization is the “end of the outside,” of the divide between the child and the adult. In the “smooth” biographic space that
emerges, the distinction between the child and the adult can be created only at a fantasy level, hiding the fact that the outside of the nursery is also a nursery: the
infantilized world of the man-child. Otherwise, outside this fantasy frame, the child (the exception) and the adult (the rule) are indistinguishable, and thus the
imperatives that govern adult life are the same as those that govern the nursery: play, learning, protection. In the “new spirit of capitalism” it is imperative to play;
that is, to be nomadic, experimenting, and inspired.64Ours is a society in which play is consumption, consumption is play. Ideally, the consumer is a child, who
shops impulsively, whose desire is to be aroused, channeled, and manipulated. Second, we live in a knowledge-based society—one in which we “never finish”
learning. “Continuous assessment” is thus indispensable to it.65And finally, ours is a society of fear, of scaremon- gering, in which we are continually told that we
need to be protected. For security, we are advised to sacrifice even democracy. After all, in-fant means speechless. The children need no agora; if they had one,
they would destroy it anyway, as they did the conch in Lord of the Flies. If the young human feels intense grief, anger, or other emotion, he is not able to contain it,
and he is forced into “acting out.” A frustrated child is unable to internalize the discomfort or to release it by verbal expression. He rids himself of this unbearable
tension by an act, like kicking against the floor. . . . Crying, head- banging, screaming, or other forms of temper tantrums are a child’s way of obtaining a denied
wish.66 Bülent Diken and Carsten Bagge Laustsen 449 It is no wonder that political
infantilization today comes with a rigid
polarization between good and bad (“you are either with us or against us”), which reduces reality to
fairy stories, or, rather, to a “comedy of (t)errors”: no weapons of mass destruction are found; Bin
Laden is not caught; Afghanistan seems to be more deserted than ever; democracy has not arrived in Iraq,
and so on. But everything goes on and on. In this, the “audience” is treated like an infantilized
crowd. It is striking, in this respect, to observe the parallel between the infantilized subject of security
and the frightened subject of terror, the hostage. The hostage is an anonymous figure, a naked, formless
body, which is absolutely convertible: anybody and everybody can be a hostage.67 Likewise, the
politics of security redefines the citizen as a fearful subject, like a child, to be protected . Any- body
and everybody must be protected. Consequently, both the enemy and the friend are desubjectified;
while the “enemy” is reduced to an illegal combatant or a fundamentalist, the “friend,” the subject of
security, becomes infantilized. It is against this background that Lord of the Flies is an allegory of a
biopolitical, or, better, a postpolitical society that elevates “security” to its most sacred principle of
organization in the form of a permanent state of exception and tries to combine it with consumerism (so that we need security to
be able to consume and need to consume to be able to feel secure). After all, violence in Lord of the Flies was just an exceptional circumstance: The boys were “just
playing!” The crucial question is whether this is a valid answer in today’s society: Is the exception just an exception or is it generalized? Who then today counts as
evil, as the Lord of the Flies? And how is evil to be fought? Control society is a society in which fear/terror and businesses, like unidentical twins, work together
through a disjunctive synthesis to form a single dispositif. It is, therefore, no coincidence that spite as a postpolitical strategy reemerges in today’s society. Hence,
with reference to the recent protests/fires in the French suburbs, Slavoj Zizek asks: Where is the celebrated freedom of choice, when the only choice is
the one between playing by the rules and (self-)destructive violence, a violence which is almost
exclusively directed against one’s own—the cars burned and the schools torched were not from rich
neighborhoods, but were part of the hard-won acquisi- tions of the very strata from which protestors
originate.68 In the contemporary, postpolitical society, the “agora” is not functioning as it is
supposed to be: Violence cannot be translated into a political language and, thus, it can only assume
the form of an obscene, irrational outburst. Such impotent violence is self- sacrificial, and loudly so.
It is spite: Lord of the Flies as savior.

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Links
(Human) Rights Links
Human rights are about as radical as a David Matthews album. The aff’s activism is a
buzzard flying around the corpses of war, and that dependence ensures the continuation of
international violence.
Whenever the West is attacked it always believes that it is the Enlightenment that is the target. The
Enlightenment legacy is still clung to as if it is novel and threatening to other societies, still insurgent,
fragile, ever uncompromised and futuristic. Soldiers are sent out to defend or expand this legacy, or simply just to demonstrate
that it cannot be intimidated, and will be defended. These soldiers execute saturation bombings, high-tech sweeps of civilian neighbourhoods and
brutal displays of the range of their materiel. They believe in the enlightened righteousness of the massive show of force. Soon, they will disrupt
social networks, disable economic life, ridicule culture and perhaps even torture detainees and rape children. The havoc they wreak will be far
more destructive than the regimes they have replaced. But this will not really matter or it will be dismissed as accidental, because they are agents
of the Enlightenment, whose eventual triumph will justify everything. In conquered territory, political institutions will probably only be
established via weak coalitions of communal groups or through the co-operation of warlords. In this way, a country can settle into a loose if
pessimistic quiet, and you may even be able to pretend that the most sensational or publicised of your enemies, the Viet Cong or Al-Qaida, for
example, have been defeated. At home, in pursuit of this defence of the Enlightenment, police powers will be increased, the courts will be
restrained and the media either seduced or intimidated. Yet this war
will provoke ever greater activism on behalf of
human rights [p. 168] and the Enlightenment legacy. Lawyers, judges, politicians, journalists, Internet
bloggers, new political movements and even the leader writers of broadsheet newspapers will reassert
their commitment to freedom and democracy.
The relationship between war and human rights has never been any less complicated than this. Human
rights achieved their present prominence not through ideological deliberation, but as the principles which
victors, hoping for a new international covenant, held up as what they had been fighting for in the Second
World War. Delivered by war, clear commitments to human rights would help both to prevent wars and
also, ironically, to decide which ones to fight. Derrida said famously that there is no law without force
(Derrida, 2002). There is no law without at least the possibility of it needing, one day, to be enforced.
Analogously, there are no human rights without the possibility that they might one day have to be
fought for. The history and politics of human rights in our era are thoroughly caught up in war. Human
rights are simultaneously what wars have produced, what wars are for and how we can resist them. There
are no human rights without the possibility of war and vice versa.
In post-modern society, a commitment to human rights became a substitute for political engagement.
Politics was so compromised, it seemed useless and immovable, Yet, the fact that the historical function
of doctrines of human rights is implicated inextricably in warfare shows that there can be no separation
of human rights activism from the most brutal execution of physical power. This is not to say that the two are
identical. Nor is it to reduce the importance of the clash between them: human rights and violence may be historically connected but they remain
in fierce tension, even in contradiction with one another. This is the exact problem that we need to confront: we have an almost automatic ethical
obligation to reduce violence, yet we cannot ignore the fact that simple goodwill cannot ensure rights. On the other hand, violence implicitly
violates: mutilating bodies, casting lives adrift, ruining social networks, obliterating cultures and compromising the freedom of civic identities.
There is no outside of the relationship between human rights and power, because there is no war simply and resolutely separable from its other.
Human rights are a political and not a moral issue therefore, and our hopes of advancing them requires a renewal of, and
commitment to, the political relationship.

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Rights discourse backfires, obscuring the excessive violence at the heart of sovereignty.
Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat 2007
[Thomas Blom Hansen (born 22 January 1958) is a Danish anthropologist and leading contemporary commentator on religious
and political violence in India. He has worked on religious identities, local political organization and informal networks in
Bombay and pursued an interest in the anthropology of politics, thepostcolonial state and sovereignty. More recently he has done
research on religious revival and the everyday meanings of freedom and belonging in post-apartheid South Africa. Hansen is part
of an international research network entitled “The Religious Lives of Migrants,” funded by the Ford Foundation and the Social
Science Research Council in New York, which explores religious meanings and institutions among international migrants in a
global and comparative perspective.
He is currently Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, Senior Research Scientist at Yale University,
Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh, and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam where he
served as Dean of the International School for Humanities and Social Sciences. Recently, Hansen was offered a position as full
professor at Stanford University where he is to head a new research institute for the anthropological study of South-East Asia.[1]
Finn Stepputat is Senior Researcher at Danish Insitute International Studies,
Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Post-Colonial World
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i7996.html]
In this "age of rights" (Bobbio 1996), it seemed possible, until very recently, to claim that the exercise of
sovereignty in its arcane and violent forms was becoming a thing of the past, that sovereignty now finally rested
with the citizens, at least in liberal democracies. The world order after September 11, 2001, seems to belie this
optimistic assumption, and it may be useful to revise the standard history of what Foucault somewhat reluctantly
called "democratization of sovereignty." The languages of legality have, he argued, "allowed a system of rights to
be superimposed upon the mechanisms of discipline in such a way as to conceal its actual procedures--the
element of domination inherent in its techniques--and to guarantee to everyone, by virtue of the sovereignty of the
state, the exercise of his proper sovereign rights" (Foucault 1994, 219). The crucial point is that, today, sovereignty
as embodied in citizens sharing territory and culture, and sharing the right to exclude and punish "strangers," has
become a political common sense, or what Derrida calls "ontotopology" (Derrida 1994), that defines the political
frontlines on immigration in Europe, on autochthony and belonging in Africa, on majoritarianism and nation in
South Asia and so on. In order to assess and understand the nature and effects of sovereign power in our
contemporary world, one needs to disentangle the notion of sovereign power from the state and to take a closer
look at its constituent parts: on the one hand, the elusive "secret" of sovereignty as a self-born, excessive, and
violent will to rule; on the other hand, the human body and the irrepressible fact of "bare life" as the site upon
which sovereign violence always inscribes itself but also encounters the most stubborn resistance.
Continued…
A part of Bataille's essay anticipates Foucault's work by arguing that modern bourgeois society, and communism
with even more determination, have striven to eradicate the wastefulness, irrationality and arbitrariness at the heart
of sovereignty: both as a mode of power, as a mode of subordination driven by the subject's projection of their own
desire onto the spectacle of wasteful luxury of the court and the king, and as a space for arbitrary and spontaneous
experiences of freedom and suspension of duties. The essence of Bataille's proposition is that because the exercise of
sovereignty is linked to death, excessive expenditure (depenser) and bodily pleasure can neither be contained by
any discipline, nor be fully "democratized" into an equal dignity of all men. Because sovereignty revolves
around death, the ultimate form of expenditure beyond utility, it constitutes in Mbembe's words an "anti-
economy" (Mbembe 2003, 15).

Kirk, Flynn, et al
International Stability Link
What the aff calls “stability” is perpetual war waged in the name of order.
Wendy C. Hamblet 2005
[Canadian philosopher with a specialization in ethics and violence. She teaches
Ethics and Morality, and Political and Social Philosophy at Adelphi University
Peace Review 17:39-45] Mono-cephalic means “one-headed”
Because of war’s great functionality to the state, there remains little mystery to the long-term success of
war as a state institution over the formative millennia of civilization. The continuing popularity of war
among modern states ostensibly dedicated to democracy, freedom, and the dignity of human beings,
remains baffling to violence scholars. K arl von Clausewitz’s On War, considered by many scholars to
be the canonical treatment of the war philosophy, attributes to war a logic all its own: war composes a
compulsion, a dynamic that aims at excessive overflow, absolute expenditure of the energies of the
state. War seeks abso- lutization as it feeds and fires the population’s martial enthusiasm; if unchecked
by political goals, war will fulfill itself in the maximum exertion of self-expenditure—self-annihilation.
War composes a potlatch of state resources, a useless splurge of the nation’s human and economic
wealth for no better reason than wanton celebration of state power. The language of absolute
expenditure resonates with the philosophy of Georges Bataille. His philosophy explains two principles of
expenditure— the principle of classical utility defined by utilitarian goals serving current power
relations, and that of nonproductive expenditure—that is, orgiastic outflow or ek-stasis that escapes
mundane servitude to reason and utility. Political implications of the two economies are exposed in
Bataille’s “Propositions on Fascism.” There, the two dialectical opposites represent extreme
possibilities for the state structures. The first model aspires to perfect order, like the timeless realm of the
gods, a frozen homogeneous perfection that is monocephalic (single-headed). Like the god, the
monocephalic state becomes self-identified as a sacred entity—changeless, eternal, and perfect, its
laws and customs fixed and imperative. At the other end of the structural spectrum resides the second
form of state—the acephalic state—disordered, anarchic, and volatile. This state is seen by ordered
states as a terrifying, heterogeneous primitive lifeform where uncivilized tribes practice mystical
thinking, incommensurable truths, and mad affective experience. Unreasonable. Useless. Mad. People
within the acephalic social structure enjoy abundant ritual lives that offer escape from the mundane in
orgiastic festivals involving drunken- ness, dancing, blood rites, wanton tortures, self-mutilation, and
even murder in the name of dark monster gods. The monocephalic state, on the other hand, has
overcome all death. The civilized state boasts an enlightened stable form that promotes reason, life, and
progress, whereas the primitive society is referred to chaos, madness, and death.

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Biodiversity Link
We cannot kill nature, for nature is destruction. Even the current mass extinction event
expresses a sovereignty that exceeds all human understanding.
Allan Stoekl, Prof French and comparative literature at Penn State University, 2007
[Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Sustainability p. 197]
If for a moment we assume that the global world of commerce, replete with electronic media, the
Internet, virtual television, and whatnot, is the replacement for and the simulacrum of the nonunivcrsal21
city, we can only conclude that it can be so only as long as "nature no longer exists." But the fact that
nature no longer exists, or at least seems no longer to exist, depends, ironically, on a natural given: the
presence of fossil fuels in the earth-oil and coal, primarily. Labor power discovered these fuels, put them
to work, "harnessed" them, transformed their energy into something useful. But labor power did not put
the fuels in the earth. And perhaps more important from our perspective, it will be hard-pressed to replace
them when they are gone. Nature-produced energy-the "homogeneous" energy that lends itself to work
and the other, "heterogeneous" energy that is sovereign, not servile.22 If the very term "nature" is
contestable, one thing that cannot be contested is that the primary sources of energy come from natural
sources: millions of years of algae accumulating in certain ecosystems, for example.23 Thus pollution,
dependent on this energy from natural sources, is ultimately natural; so too is global warming. So too
is the incomprehensible unharnessed energy of the universe, which our labor and knowledge can only
betray. So too will be massive die-off of humans and other organisms at the point of depletion. Man
as the author of his own creation-homo faber-is opened by the radical exteriorityi the finitude, the
heterogeneity, but also the infinite richness of"nature."Man, as Sade would remind us, can never hope to
have his reason domesticate a nature that "threatens the adequacy of rational systematicity"24 or
that defies the seeming necessity of all human activity. Nature deals death, and there is no way,
finally, to grasp it by simply exploiting it ("knowing" it) as a resource or analyzing away its threat as
sublime difference.

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Economy Link
At best the aff feeds the economy’s addiction to excess. Constant exposure to catastrophic
collapse is the permanent state of late capitalism.
Marcus A Doel 2009

[Centre for Urban Theory, School of the Environment and Society, Swansea University,
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2009, volume 27, pages 1054 ^ 1073]
By strange coincidence, I find myself revising this paper amid a financial crisis
that foregrounds the question: what, if anything, is happening? The credit crunch that began in the summer of 2007 precipitated in September
and October 2008 the spectacular failure of bedrock financial institutions (eg AIG, Fannie May, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill
Lynch), the paralysis of money markets and interbank lending, the mark-to-market write-down of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of `toxic
assets' linked to securities and derivatives, and a palpable sense of panic and disbelief as market participants, politicians, and media
commentators teetered on the edge of the abyss. Exorbitant asset bubbles burst, incalculable off-balance-sheet
originate- to-distribute risks overwhelmed the banking system, counterparty trust evaporated, and
1068 M A Doel financial markets froze. At this juncture, financial capitalism was neither an
ideological formation nor a self- correcting mechanism. It was a broken apparatus on the cusp of
implosion. The habitual discourse of dissimulation ö credit squeeze, distressed and impaired assets, market corrections, write-downs, and negative growth ö
was more or less completely supplanted by a frank discourse of crisis: systemic failure, banking collapse, financial meltdown, and economic depression. Some even
mooted that the end of capitalism was nigh, at least in the guise of structured finance (Blackburn, 2008; Wade, 2008), while others argued for a resurgence of the
Real (Badiou, 2008b; Haldane, 2009). In a desperate attempt to avert calamity, states across the world committed over $2 trillion dollars to recapitalize ö and, in
some cases, nationalize ö the banking system, acquire a vast array of toxic assets, guarantee interbank lending, and stimulate liquid- ity. Even with this level of
sovereign risk, however,
the financial system remains vulnerable to widespread credit defaults, rapid
deleveraging, rampant debt deflation, and illiquidity, all of which would be exacerbated by a sharp global recession. Given the
severity of the global financial crisis, miserly thinking has reimposed itself with a vengeance. Financial institutions and regulators have been accused of almost
criminal recklessness and negligence, risk management has been found want- ing, and financial capitalism stands accused of sacrificing the Real of servicing
production and distribution on the altar of wanton speculation. Hedge funds, short sellers, credit-ratings agencies, mark-to-market accountancy, and the bonus culture
amongst bankers have borne the brunt of the witch hunt. The quest for a new financial architecture, tighter regulation, and countercyclical capital requirements is
excessive risk taking, excessive leverage, excessive
already on the agenda. The aim is to rein in the excesses of financial capitalism:
exposure, excessive short selling, excessive speculation, excessive off-balance-sheet transactions,
etc. The fundamental difficulty, however, is that none of these activities is an epiphenomenon. Each is
an essential aspect of financial capitalism. All that miserly thinking can deliver is a recalibration that
cannot but fail to thwart the crisis tendencies of financial capitalism. Whether it is cast as probable or
improbable, exposure to systemic risk and catastrophic failure is always the fate of the system. The
financial crisis has dramatized the system's perilous exposure to the catastrophic risks of exorbitant asset
bubbles and the products of structured finance. It has also dramatized the fact that the financial architecture of the world economy holds together only insofar as it is
held together (Langley, 2008). The scope and scale of state intervention have underscored the fact that fragility is distributed throughout the entire constellation of
associations. And, for all of the talk of a distinction between the financial system and the Real Economy, the
crisis has highlighted the
baselessness of value. For when market participants, politicians, and media commentators teetered on the edge of the abyss, what they sensed was the
palpable absence of a `floor' to value. State intervention was not simply an attempt to relieve the banking system of its exposure to catastrophic risks, toxic assets,
and incalculable loses; it was first and foremost an attempt to put a `floor' under the baselessness of value. For at the heart of the financial crisis is the void, and this
void has a very precise location. This location is a cornerstone of financial capitalism: off-balance-sheet entities (OBSEs), especially asset-backed securities and
credit derivatives such as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), constant proportion debt obligations, and credit default swaps. By 2007, while
the world's
gross domestic product was a mere $54 trillion, the total asset value of developed economies had been
inflated to circa $300 trillion and the total value of derivatives contracts exceeded $500 trillion. Little
wonder, then, that state-backed fiscal stimulus packages and quantitative easing are unlikely to have
much effect.
From restricted economy to global financial crisis 1069

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Hegemony/Rogue State Link

The USA is the only rogue state. It exemplifies the violent excess of destabilizing
sovereignty.
Suhail Malik 2006

[teaches in the Department of Visual Arts, Goldsmiths College
Theory Culture Society v.23 2-3]
The denunciation of rogue states is thus ‘structurally homologous’ to the bourgeois denunciation of a voyoucracy in order to
secure their own legitimacy (to legitimate, if it can be put this way). What is critical here is that the phrase ‘rogue
states’
came to have prominence exactly as the term and strategic policy of ‘globalization’ was being
affirmed and instigated by the Clinton administration in its early years through national and international institutions. That is, rogue states are an
indispensable designation for the securing of the claim to international legitimacy for globalization, by which is therefore meant a certain
global order (for which terrorism is a central rhetorical and factual operation, as Derrida mentions,
2005: 66). Of the many ramifications of this (de)legitimation strategy only two will be taken up here: first the characterization of a voyoucracy and second what
purchase on legitimacy is retroac- tively granted by the term on the powers that mobilize it. First, then, it is to be noted that a voyoucracy is not an outright
abandonment of order but is (presented as) the power or force (a kratos) of an illegitimate and quasi-criminal (voyou) counter-order. Voyoucracy signals a
sovereignty exorbitant to the legitimate sovereignty of the State and law in the national or international domain. The denunciation of rogue states is thus a matter of
one kind of sovereignty against another, of legitimate against so-designated illegitimate sovereignties. To this end Derrida remarks in passing that ‘if the voyou-
cracy represents a power, a challenge to the power of the State, a criminal and transgressive countersovereignty, we have here all the makings of a counterconcept of
sovereignty such as we might find in Bataille’ (2005: 67–8). We will return in due course to this particular characterization of a voyoucracy since it will bring us
directly to the problem of whether a global knowledge can be established. Second, international and national legitimacy and illegitimacy as it is proclaimed and insti- tutionalized
by dominant powers relies on a discourse and politics of democracy and freedom or, in so-said contrary rogue political formation, their deprivation. This is evident in the charters and ambitions
, the
of international institutions such as the UN, NATO, the G8, the IMF, the EU and also, notably, for the USA too. Democracy is in this way a legitimation of international power
democracy-globalization coupling serving to secure international political and economic

dominance by already powerful states (which is why China’s economic might and limited democratic polity presents a more vexed
problem for globalization under this aegis than, say, India or Brazil). Drawing on the example of the UN, Derrida notes that the ordering authority over the
international domain which promotes and acts as a supposed guarantor for democracy must in fact be the strongest power in that putatively democratic institution and
polity. As such it ‘organises and implements for use by the United Nations – precisely so that it itself may then use the United Nations – all the concepts, ideas
(constitutive or regulative), and requisite political theorems, beginning with democracyand sovereignty’ (Derrida, 2005: 100, emphasis in original). An immediate
contradiction or aporia comes then to be demonstrated in the claim to legitimacy, to setting the terms of legitimacy in and of democracy, by the currently dominant
state power(s): that ‘if the constitution of this force is, in principle, supposed to represent and protect this world democracy, it in fact betrays and threatens it from the
outset in an auto- immune fashion’ (Derrida, 2005: 100). Put starkly, the contradiction is this: ‘universal democracy, beyond the nation-state and beyond
citizenship, in fact calls for a supersovereignty that cannot but betray it’ (Derrida, 2005: 101). The contradiction between democracy and sovereignty is rendered here
at a supernational level but this is only a particular version of what takes place at all dimensions of democratic organization: that sovereignty is the condition of
democracy even as it prohibits a fully oper- ational democracy. And, as is well known from the protest of anti-globalization movements, this non-democratic, even
anti-democratic, sovereignty that guarantees and legitimizes democracy is in democratic terms only ever an abuse of power; an abuse that is, as Derrida puts it,
‘constitutive of sovereignty itself’ and so constitutive of democracy. It follows that sovereignty is rogue in democracy – and democracy is therefore guaranteed and
harnessed by a power that is itself ‘rogue’. If there is to be global democracy, there must be global sovereignty and so a global voyoucracy, a rogue state that is
beyond the terms of that democracy. The sovereign state that orders legitimacy, which is the de factocondition of order, is necessarily voyou, rogue, counter-
ordering; an identity of opposing categories whose condensation can here be marked (beyond the terms Derrida sets up) by the terms sovoyoureign or soverogue, a
power that establishes only a quasi-order. Today, Derrida continues, such states are only the USA and whatever (always subsidiary) allies it picks up in the course
of undertaking such actions in implementing its sovereignty. But the USA is exceptional in this quasi-order in that it is
the primary rogue state – the only truly rogue state (as Chomsky also says for different
reasons) – because of its outstanding international sovereign powers. US international
domination – in the name of a common, global democracy – is that of a global sovereignty
(though this is not to say world sovereignty); it is, as is often declared, a global abuse of power – necessarily so. This global sovereignty of the USA is sometimes
exercised through the UN but must also take place in terms of other outstanding manifestations of power if it is to be ‘supersovereign’, including that of its military
(quaforce), its economics (quaconsumption), its cultural production (quaentertainment) and its politics (quademocracy). Such sovoyoureign or soverogue power(s)
are not occasioned across or outside of democratic organization or polities at whatever level: it happens through and in democracy, insistently so. Soveroguery is the
condition for the production of global knowledge and it is that by which knowledge in its globality has to be comprehended. But how is sovereignty to be under-
stood in its identity with countersovereignty? We have seen that, for Derrida, Bataille’s ‘counterconcept’ of sovereignty speaks to the counter-order of voyoucracy.
We shall now take up this account in order to more exactly determine the sovereignty of American global dominance. Doing so will return us directly to the
question of knowledge in the actual conditions of globalization. Bataille’s interest in sovereignty is in a ‘general aspect that is opposed to the servile and the
subordinate’ (1993: 197); it is general because it can belong to anyone. Such generality means that the determination of sovereignty cannot be restricted to its
traditional identification with the power of either the State or law as it has been from Plato to Hobbes, Schmitt and, in a more complicated manner, Agamben. It can
be the sovereignty of the voyou, for example. Bataille draws up an initial distinction between the general aspect of sovereignty and what the term means as regards a
legally constituted and recognized state or individual (that is therefore subordinate to law). However, as Derrida proposes, in its sovoyoureignty or soveroguery, it is
today the USA alone that sidesteps this distinction: yes, the USA is of course a sovereign state in the legally constituted sense and so is subject to international law; yet it is in a
position to countermand the obeisance to any such law or consensus of a general will, since it alonehas the power to dominate and authorize non-legal actions in outright and blatant defiance of

Kirk, Flynn, et al
exemplifies at a supernational level the general aspect of sovereignty

international convention and expectations. In this it
beyond law of which Bataille speaks.

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Ethics Link
Their “ethical stance” allows the aff to think of themselves as good, creating a distance
from their own violence that makes annihilaiton inevitable.
Kenneth Irzkowitz 1999

[Assoc Prof Philosophy at Marietta College, College Literature 26.1]
Bataille rejects the notion of a unified good. When he criticizes the moral good, this is because by assuming such unity, morality
has
blinded us to the importance of disutility, to the praiseworthiness of nonproductive usages serving no
end beyond themselves. We generally assume that there are no such praiseworthy usages, but Bataille
insists that there are. Indeed, there is a whole realm of them, he contends, as well as the need for an
ethics corresponding to them, one able to take their violence into account.
Continued…
The purpose of offering a series of such strong, disturbing characterizations is not to dismiss ordinary moral values but to supplement them, to say that such values
are not enough for us. At the same time that we outlaw and condemn all of these ruinous squanderings, our sovereign aspirations demand them. The list includes
brutality, murder, prostitution, swearing, sex, infamy, ruin, degradation, and finally treason. These are
activities we must prohibit, activities we cannot allow ourselves to participate in, but which at the
same time identify who we are. Hypermorality instructs that while we cannot take up such behaviors,
we cannot not take them up either. We cannot not squander ourselves in these and other ways, many of which are
offensive of mention to ordinary morality. To help emphasize just how offensive, there is a passage near the beginning of Death and Sensuality depicting the
spectacle of primitive ritual human sacrifice, the communal production of a wasteful expenditure witnessed in common. Bataille uses the word "sacred" to describe the
experience of the witnesses, underlining just how fundamental and revelatory to us he thinks such events were. Disturbing as it must be to us, he holds that the event
of the spectacle of ritual sacrifice has power of conveying a profound meaning, This sacredness is the revelation of continuity through the death of a discontinuous
being to those who watch it as a solemn rite. A violent death disrupts the creature's discontinuity; what remains, what the tense onlookers experience in the succeeding
silence, is the continuity of all existence with which the victim is now one. Only a spectacular killing, carried out as the solemn and collective nature of religion
dictates, has the power to reveal what normally escapes notice. (Bataille 1962, 16) It is a disturbing thought that only a spectacular killing, that only events of this
kind, can satisfy the human desire for the experience of sacred meaning. Along with a fear of our own immoral excess comes the question of whether hypermorality
invites unleashing this destructive excess. Would Bataille like to see us unleashed, perhaps in the style of Charles Manson, to produce our own spectacles of ritual
sacrifice? Certainly Bataille describes irrational violence as having an undeniable meaning, one that is revelatory of the sacred continuity alluded to in the previous
citation. Soon after that citation he similarly asserts that we seek "the power to look death in the face and to perceive in death the pathway into unknowable and
incomprehensible continuity" (1962, 18). Where do we find this power? We find it in transformative experiences akin to the sacrifice described above. In other
words, to acquire the power to know the unknowable, the production of transformative violence is the key. In the name of this power, the production of violence is not
an accident but a goal. This production is the key to the transformative experiences that give our lives a sense of intensity, depth, and meaning. Hence, we always have
violence
ample motive to seek such experiences, to seek to bear witness to transformative violence. Given such ample motive, violence and spectacles of such
will be produced. Moreover, no morality will ever be able to put an end to these productions. No
morality has the power to stop the persistence of the sacred violence in our lives, since this violcnce
is the only key we have to the experience of the miraculous, of the sacred. As for Charles Manson,
Bataille would certainly try to understand Manson's and our own violence in this context of the sacred, of
our need for depth and meaning. The production of transformative violence is fundamental to our
being, whether we are conscious of it in this way or not. He, then, would not regard Manson's production as an anomaly, as unlike
what he himself would be driven to produce. Yet in our lives there are also limits. It is unlikely that Bataile would applaud Manson for the same reason he ultimately
rejects Sade. They are both indiscriminate; they both go too far. "Continuity is what we are after,' Bataille confirms, but generally only if that continuity which the
death of discontinuous beings can alone establish is not the victor in the long run. What we desire is to bring into a world founded on discontinuity all the continuity
such a world can sustain. De Sade's aberration exceeds that limit. (Bataille 1962, 13) In other words, our wasteful consumption must also have limits. To
actually approve of our own self-destruction goes too far. Later on in Death and Sen suality, Bataille continues, Short of a paradoxical capacity to defend the
indefensible, no one would suggest that the cruelty of the heroes of Justine and Jullette should not be wholeheartedly abominated. It is a denial of the principles on
which humanity is founded. We are hound to reject something that would end in the ruin of all our works. If instinct urges us to destroy the very thing we are building
we must condemn those instincts and defend ourselves from them. (Bataile 1962, 179-80) This passage is crucial for understanding Bataille's ethics. Usually Bataille
writes on behalf of the violence that remains unaffected by absolute prohibitions. Prohibitions cannot obviate this transformative violence. There is always ample
motive to produce the experiences of sacred transformation, i.e., to transgress the prohibitions. Yet self-preservation is also a fundamental value for BatailIe there is
also ample motive to resist the violence that denies the value of the well being of life itself. As he says in the second of the above passages, we must condemn what
threatens to destroy us; our sovereign aspirations can be taken too far. In another passage he speaks of our need "to become aware of... [ourselves] and to know clearly
what... [our] sovereign aspirations are in order to limit their possibly disastrous consequences" (1962, 181). It is when we are ignorant of these aspirations that we are
most vulnerable to them, enacting them anyway, albeit inattentively. In the end, hypermorality asks us to encounter our aspirations to evil, to join in what Bataille
calls "complicity in the knowledge of Evil" in order to construct what he calls a "rigorous morality" (1973, unpaginated Preface). What does it mean to encounter such
aspirations, to join in such complicity? Bataille's hypermorality requires that, as a culture, we appreciate the value of becoming more active in our productions of
violence. From his earliest writings to his latest, Bataille always bemoaned the decline of the practice of sacrifice in the modem world, beginning in the West, and he
always believed that such a decline only obscures our productions of violence, rather than doing away with them or the needs from which they stem. Two closely
related discussions of this appear in his early essays "The Jesuve" and "Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh," where Bataille suggests that
the decline of the practice of sacrifice has been far less than a blessing for us. He argues that the production of violence continues, the danger of this production
continues, although in the most unrecognizable forms. The examples given in the essay "Sacrificial Mutilation" emphasize both how easy it is to distance ourselves
from this danger as well as how

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Ethics Link
terrible such a danger could be. They include a man twisting off his own finger and a woman tearing out her own eye, both terrible examples of our strange, cruel, and
uncontrollable needs for expenditure. Along similar lines, as a commentary on events of this kind, Bataile argues, The practice of sacrifice has today fallen into disuse
and yet it has been, due to its universality, a human action more significant than any other. Independently of each other, different peoples invented different forms of
sacrifice, with the goal of answering a need as inevitable as hunger. It is therefore not astonishing that the necessity of satisfying such a need, under the conditions of
present-day life, leads an isolated man into disconnected and even stupid behavior. (Bataille 1985, 73) Here as throughout his writings, Bataile emphasizes two key
aspects of the decline of sacrifice that we ignore at our own peril. In the first place, he contends that the violent need that ritual sacrifice was once able to address
remains with us despite all optimism to the contrary. We don't put violence on display in the same ritualized fashion, but the need remains constant. We've only
become less aware of it in ourselves, and less aware of ourselves as those who have need of such violence. Thus Bataille's first point is that the need for
nonproductive usages does not diminish when it is denied. His second point is that this denial in which the need persists represents a decline in self-awareness, one
with obviously dangerous consequences. No longer do we congregate as a community to witness the violence we desire to bring into this world and to affirm our lack
of control over this violence, our lack of control over this desire. We no longer congregate to produce the sacrificial spectacle, to produce thereby a community of
mutual complicity in the knowledge of the sacred continuity of being. We no longer allow ourselves to organize spectacles in the name of the sacred that enact that
which exceeds the good. Such spectacles would have to violate every stricture of human rights known to us today. Yet we have not changed, according to Bataile,
except for becoming less known to ourselves than ever. We
are now more than ever the condemned on the way to becoming
the destroyed by way of imagining ourselves as the good. Even an utter catastrophe like the
Holocaust does little to alter our naive self-image. In his short piece on David Rousset's book The
Universe of the Concentration Camp, Bataille refuses to side with the moralists because moralistic
self-delusion here is our problem, not our solution, There exists in a certain form of moral condemnation
an escapist denial. One says, basically, this abjection would not have been, had there not been
monsters .... And it is possible, insofar as this language appeals to the masses, that this infantile negation
may seem effective; but in the end it changes nothing. It would be as vain to deny the incessant danger of
cruelty as it would be to deny the danger of physical pain. One hardly obviates its effects flatly attributing
it to parties or to races which one imagines to he inhuman. (Bataille 1991, 19) Based on what we have
already seen in this paper, Bataille can never accept the moralist's claim, distancing us from the
purveyors of evil, no matter how attractive it is to join hands at a particular moment of victory over
an oppressive enemy. It would be inconsistent for him to specify a particular set of disagreeable
behaviors and state that they aren't human, that they aren't ours. Even at this point, standing in the ruins,
the main point would be to obstruct our all-too-ready inclination to find ways of denying the cruelty
at the heart of us all; to interfere with our desire to attribute all cruelties to the monstrous one or the
aberrant few. For hypermorality, this cruelty is precisely what we need to take into account of
ourselves, rather than to deny it as the evil of others.
. How is this to be done? Bataille faces a serious dilemma that a contrast between his hypermorality and Aristotle's morality helps to show. The goal of morality is to
take virtuous behaviors into account, to make them part of our lives by learning through habituation to enjoy right behaviors with respect to our pleasures and pains.
Aristotle says that it is the job of "legislators [to] make the citizens good by forming habits in them .... and it is in this that a good constitution differs from a bad one"
(1941, 952, 1103b). He continues saying that "the whole concern both of virtue and of political science is with pleasures and pains; for the man who uses these well
will be good, he who uses them badly bad" (1941, 955, 1105a). As he puts it, "We assume ... that excellence tends to do what is best with regard to pleasures and
pains, and vice does the contrary" (1941, 955, lIlO4b). How do we become excellent? We begin with instruction by role models, who demonstrate the praiseworthy
behaviors and the rule to follow in practice until we follow it automatically, internalized as part of our second nature of moral character. Such learning is by imitation
of those who delight in shunning the wrong pleasures, who delight in withstanding the right pains. Such imitation is difficult but noble and good, making us excellent.
In contrast to these virtuous displays serving Aristotle's purposes of moral instruction, what about the kinds of spectacles or displays Bataille proposes with his
hypermorality? Whereas Aristotle's are displays of virtue, Bataile's would be closer to displays of vice. Whereas the former invite imitation of the right relations to
pleasure and pain, the latter would invite imitation of morally wrong relations. In the former case we have a heroic role model. In the latter case ,
the role
model would be closer to the opposite, to the traitor, the practitioner of vice; the role model would be
closer to Sade

Kirk, Flynn, et al
“Violence is Bad” Link
The rejection of violence is the rejection of our humanity, ensuring explosing excess
culminating in extinction

It would be pointless to deny that most illegal violence is abhorrent or immoral. At the same time,
however, given the violence of the life of our culture, we need to understand immoral violence more
deeply than any blanket condemnation of it will allow. Beyond our condemnations, we need to
recognize that the acts we most prohibit are paradoxically also the very ones we most celebrate. A
foremost proponent of this need is the French philosopher and writer Georges Bataille. Relying on a
notion of excess energy and the problem of its expenditure, Bataille argues that the transgression of law is
what he calls an accursed yet ineluctable part of our lives. We make laws in the name of prohibiting acts
of violence, yet the problem of the expenditure of an excess of energy requires behaviors that violate
the very same rules we cherish and intend to uphold. The commentator Jean Piel took note of how Bataille managed "to view the world as if it were
animated by a turmoil in accord with the one that never ceased to dominate his personal life" (1995, 99). Here, the fact of an individualin-turmoil reflects the surplus
of energy disturbing life in general, rather than a moral deficiency for which an individual can be held accountable. For Bataille, an individual's wasteful behaviors are
ultimately reflections of the problem of the surplus of solar energy. Piel put it this way: "The whole problem is to know how, at the heart of this general economy, the
surplus is used" (1995, 103). How should the surplus of solar energy be used? Bataile contends that this surplus is never extinguished and that its expenditure always
leads towards the commission of violence. The surplus of energy is accursed and finally cannot serve us productively. The accursed excess confronts us with the
problem of how to expend energy when this results in usages that cannot made be useful. Thus the production of violence has a value for us as those condemned to the
realm of non-productive expenditures. We undoubtedly deny this value, as Bataille notes, when "Under present conditions, everything conspires to obscure the basic
movement that tends to restore wealth to its function, to giftgiving, to squandering without reciprocations" (1988, 38). Nonetheless, as Bataille puts it, "the
impossibility of continuing growth makes way for squander" (1988, 29). When this impossibility of useful expenditure is ignored, then we fail to recognize ourselves
on the deepest level, as who we most fundamentally are. Against this failure and in the name of a kind of inverted Hegelian selfrecognition, Bataille calls for the
transgression of our prohibitionist moral values. We need an ethics of squandering goods, of squandering what is good, in recognition of an overabundance over and
beyond all others, i.e. an overabundance that can only, at best, be squandered. He writes, life suffocates within limits that are too close: it aspires in manifold ways
to an impossible growth; it releases a steady flow of excess resources, possibly involving large squandenngs of energy. The limit of growth being reached, life enters
into ebullition: Without exploding, its extreme exuberance pours out in a movement always bordering on explosion. Bataille 1988. 30) As living lives that must enter
into ebullition, we find ourselves fundamentally committed no more to moral righteousness than to immoral out pourings of energy, to sudden and violent outbursts
The protests of moralism are secondary and never responsive to Bataille's
exceeding all rational considerations.
questioning of morality: "Supposing there is no longer any growth possible, what is to be done with the
seething energy that remains?" (1988, 31). We are told by reason and morality to do what is best, which is
to prohibit behaviors that are nonproductive or harmful. Our morality identifies the right with the useful
and productive, with whatever makes us better. Bataille, however, argues against this morality and for
the requirement of useless, nonproductive, violent outpourings of energy-a requirement for what he
calls "a draining-away, a pure and simple loss, which occurs in any case" (1988, 31). These violent,
nonproductive outpourings, according to Bataille, are required of us all as living beings regardless of
whether or not we take the responsibility to manage and arrange their occurrence in our lives. At issue,
for Bataille, is energy in excess, energy as an excess. As an excess, such energy must be discharged
explosively in outpourings that, in the end, are inevitable. Does it make a difference how an excess of energy is squandered if, in
the end, the results will have to be violent, if we cannot avoid taking actions that must be acknowledged as wrong? Bataille proposes that we face up to the value of
the choices that remain, rather than continue to shrink from the available options, especially those moral prohibitionism would regard as either dirty or simply
unacceptable. All expenditures, even acts of squandering, cannot be equally unacceptable; our available options lie with respect to the contrasting degrees of
unacceptability of various acts and the various amounts of waste each entails. He states that "in no way can [an] ... inevitable loss be accounted useful . . . but there
remains] a matter of an acceptable loss, preferable to another that is regarded as unacceptable (1988, 31). The key to the possibility of an ethics for Bataille is that
beyond the naïve hopes of our prohibitionist morality, we can see that some acts of violence are preferable to others. He contends in this vein that we need something
counterintuitive, a kind of morality of evil, a morality able to face up to what he refers to as "a question of acceptability, not utility" (1988, 31). This distinction
between the acceptable and the useful transforms the idea of a moral project to where it becomes right to enact those wrongs that would constitute the best (i.e., least
damaging) uses of energy given the requirements of expenditure in situations of limited growth. For Bataille, it is "right" to "constructively" suspend moral
prohibitionist morality is an inevitable failure
prohibitions in order to substitute less damaging acts for the more violent alternatives. Our
in even imagining how a surplus of energy may best be discharged. By default, this morality results
in more violent discharges of energy, in lives that are, as a consequence, made worse. Like Nietzsche, Bataille proposes a revaluation of
moral values, a transformation of what Nietzsche calls "herd" morality. For both Bataille and Nietzsche, ordinary morality is too constricted with respect to the biggest
picture, to conducting the totality of our lives. The value of the "herd" morality breaks down when taking human life as a whole into account. To recognize ourselves
for all that we are means having to change the outlooks that now constrain us. In recognizing ourselves we alter our values and behaviors in the name of living the
fullest lives possible. A system of moral values, under construction, may be regarded as analogous to any system of valuation. For example, we may also construct a
system of

Kirk, Flynn, et al
“Violence is Bad” Link

trading equities on the stock exchanges. This latter value-system will select some equities as preferable to others, and makes trades accordingly. Good trades acquire
better equities while bad trades acquire worse ones. Moreover, the value-system as a whole is better to the extent it maximizes good trades. The best value-system
makes the greatest number of good trades, thereby maximizing profits, and minimizing what is lost. Analogous to this kind of value-system, a morality may be
regarded as a system of exchanges with the aim of maximizing excellence in living. As such, a morality values actions and intentions as better or worse in the name of
right and wrong. We ordinarily assume that an action is wrong simply if it violates the system of moral rules (the Ten Commandments, for example) and right if the
rules are upheld. Given this assumption, to do the right thing is analogous to using the stockpicking system correctly. On this level, when morality tells us what to do,
we are either right or wrong, depending simply on whether or not the rules are obeyed. But Bataille's Nietzschean morality demands that we evaluate the value of the
moral value-system itself, the success or failure of the system generating the rules. Those who trade equities know not to stand by a set of rules that loses money. A
value-system may sometimes have to be abandoned. For Bataille, the same is true for a dysfunctional set of moral values. Yet our moral system that sets the standard
of value for our behaviors has been subjected to no standards of evaluation. We need to abandon the assumption that the rules of morality are absolute, productive in
all contexts, and beyond dispute. We need to make it possible to employ so-called 'immoral" values when these have life affirming effects, and to suspend or
transgress 'moral" values when these serve a sufficient life-affirming purpose. The key is to recognize ourselves as the extreme beings we are. Bataille sees human life
as beyond the limits set by morality, as desiring nothing less than the wild, destructive, celebratory excesses by means of which we are granted ecstatic gifts. We
produce acts of violence in part because they have a supreme value for us, even though the thought of such acts as having supreme value is always laughable and
almost always denied. A typical day betrays little in the way of a lust for outrageous excess. However, for Bataile, a typical day reveals only a part of our being.
According to Literature and Evil, just as certain insects, in given conditions, flock towards a ray of light, so we all flock to an area at the opposite end of the scale
from death. The mainspring of human activity is generally the desire to reach the point farthest from the funereal domain, which is rotten, dirty and impure. We make
every effort to efface the traces, signs and symbols of death. Then, if we can, we efface the traces and signs of these efforts. (Bataille 1973, 48). In other words, there
is a radical duality at work in our lives, although traces of this duality are ordinarily effaced. For Bataille, there is first the fundamental value of the unacceptable and
second the unacceptability of this first fundamental value, i.e., the overwhelming need to efface the value of the unacceptable along with every trace of it as a value in
our lives. He contends that both the left and right poles of this duality are mainsprings of human selfrecognition. With the right pole of effacement, we suppress the
awareness of the left pole, of the presence of our own destructive desires. He acknowledges that the resulting self-conception does fit us to the extent that "the being
which we are is primarily a finite being (a mortal individual)... [with] limitations [that] are no doubt necessary" (1973, 50). Yet, at the same time, Bataille's own
writings never fail to emphasize the primacy of what is harmful to us, of what is neither useful nor good, of what is beyond our mere finitude. Throughout Literature
and Evil, for example, he repeatedly affirms the destructive behaviors and dark values that must come at the expense of survival needs. Mere survival is the necessary
but insufficient condition of striving to live a full life. To live fully actually means to live at the expense of future survival, to completely waste ourselves, blind to all
consequences. Along these lines, Literature and Evil argues that to live life really means nothing less than that we don't "flee wisely from the elements of death [but
instead] enter the regions that wisdom tells us to avoid" (Bataille 1973, 50). To live fully we must shun wisdom; in living fully we laugh even at death itself, in the
awareness that "When we enter the regions that wisdom tells us to avoid... we really live" (1973, 50). When we achieve "a heightened consciousness of being," we
burn, because only "by going beyond ... these limitations which are necessary for... preservation... [are we able to] assert. the nature of... [our] being" (1973, 50). The
first chapter of Literature and Evil similarly contends that "Death alone-or, at least, the ruin of the isolated individual in search of happiness in time-introduces that
break without which nothing reaches the state of ecstasy" (Bataille 1973, 13). This is because for every individual, "an irreducible, sovereign part of himself is free
from the limitations and the necessity which he acknowledges" (1973, 16). Indeed, in the same chapter, Bataille celebrates the desire for self-ruin as a divine or
sovereign inspiration, as one taught to us by religion, Greek tragedy, and the great books. In his words, The lesson of Wuthering Heights, of Greek tragedy and,
ultimately, of all reli gions, is that there is an instinctive tendency towards divine intoxication which the rational world of calculation cannot bear. This tendency is the
opposite of Good. Good is based on common interest which entails consid eration of the future. Divine intoxication . . . is entirely in the present. (Bataille 1973,
the dark forces that drive us towards ruining ourselves cannot be
9) The main point, for Bataille, is that
dismissed-these forces are a crucial part of who we are. Concomitantly, we suffer from a problem of
self-recognition, of not knowing ourselves for who we are. This failure to know ourselves does not limit
our dissoluteness and ruinousness, only our self-knowledge as such. The selfimage of ourselves as good
prevents our acknowledging the problem of the surplus of energy that must be squandered, as the
problem of who we ourselves are beneath and beyond that of the irrational atrocities that particular
individuals commit. Our prohibitionist morality deals with evil only after the fact, without taking into
account the prior, fundamental value disruption has for our lives. The epigraph to this article from
Literature and Evil says that we won't recognize ourselves for who we are until we see ourselves as
condemned, which Bataille considers his main point (1973, 25). But the failure to recognize ourselves
has an alarming implication, that we may be headed in the direction of self-destruction, and that we are
actually driven in this direction by our need to produce our own final condemnation. Bataille gives us
reason to pause to wonder whether we are blundering towards self-annihilation beneath the amazingly
resilient image we have of ourselves as good. Do we have sufficient motive to avoid proceeding
violently and negligently, to the very moment of our own demise? To not have to go all the way to
self-destruction, we need to show and know ourselves outside of the house of the good, to recognize
ourselves for who we are also as evil, as condemned. But when we remain complacently within this
house or realm, Bataille's dialectic of self recognition remains for the most part unknown. From within
the house of the good, it makes little sense to alter the image of the human to include the necessity of evil.
Indeed it seems like an irrational or frivolous act to do so, as stated in The Accursed Share,

Kirk, Flynn, et al
“System > Genocide” Link
Labeling genocide a systematic product of modernity allowing us to ignore the violence

within ourselves.
Dan Stone, Professor of Modern History at University of London, 2006

[History, Memory and Mass Atrocity p. 4-12]
In the light of research findings about 'ordinary men' it might at first seem inappropriate to talk of the
'sacrificial' nature of the Holocaust. There is, however, an equally large body of literature which
reveals the antisemitic context in which the 'ordinary men' operated.' In the case of the Einsatzgruppen,
these apparently contradictory characteristics of order and purity and sacrifice and violence - coexist in
equal measure. What this reveals is neither the 'underside of modernity' nor a 'relapse into
barbarism'; rather, it simply means that the Nazi project of order and beauty was to be attained by
unleashing an untrammelled violence.
CONTINUED…
Does this fact mean that violence was eliminated from the latter stages of the Holocaust? Even excluding the hundreds of thousands who perished miserably in ghettos
and mass-shootings, those [p. 10] subjected to the Nazi machinery of destruction - the most singlemindedly bureaucratic murder process yet devised - were not free
from the exercise of violence. Violence need not involve the relation of individuals; the state is just as capable of treating the 'object of violence' as one 'potentially
worthy of bodily harm, or even annihilation'. With or without the element of pleasure to the perpetrators of violence," the Holocaust was no clinical
operation devoid of emotional input. There are many recorded acts of sadism and brutality in the death camps, acts which are often dismissed as the personal
proclivities of individual guards in a situation where they were free to act out their fantasies, but which do not typify the death procedure. This is simply not true ; every survivor
account of the camps is suffused with an atmosphere of terror which only a power relationship built on total inequality can
produce. It is not even necessary to provide explicit details; listen, for example, to Elie Wiesel's description of arriving at Auschwitz: It was night. There were
thousands, at least it seemed to me that there were thousands and thousands of Jews, who came here from everywhere and went into the fire. And I was afraid, I asked
myself whether this meant the end of the Jewish people.28 This simple depiction positively reeks of fear, its undertone of violence inescapable. Those who talk of
'industrial death' have not reflected on what it might be like to arrive at a death-camp, a terrifying experience which is one of the key moments in many testimonies.
But apart from the violence experienced at every moment in the camps,29 it is possible to see the death process as a whole as an outburst of violence, one which
mobilised itself through channels of industrial technique. This brings us to the heart of the confusion. Is it the role of technique in itself that
marks out the Holocaust as so horrific, because it was so devoid of the passions associated with murder?
Arendt thought so: the seemingly irresistible proliferation of techniques and machines, far from only
threatening certain classes with unemployment, menaces the existence of whole nations and conceivably
of all mankind. [17] This is a way of thinking which leads to thoroughgoing indictments of
modernity. Gianni Vattimo, for example, writes of: the discovery that the rationalisation of the world turns against reason and its ends of perfection and emancipation, and does so not
by error, accident, or a chance distortion, but precisely to the extent that it is more and more perfectly accomplished.30 [p. 11] This is probably convincing enough to mean that thinkers who
. Nevertheless, although enticing, Vattimo's

today call for a completion of the 'project of modernity or who appeal to universal reason are being naive
argument is too simple to be entirely convincing. It fails to acknowledge that not all modemities end in
catastrophe, and that not all bureaucracies are inherently genocidal (though they may become so). One of the good things
to emerge out of the Goidhagen debate was proof of a widespread reluctance to admit that the killers could enjoy their violence, or at least to admit that the endless
catalogue of atrocities found in survivor testimonies amounts to more than anecdotes of unusual, isolated incidents. Taking photographs seriously as historical
evidence has also helped demonstrate that everyday violence was part of the experience of genocide. Nevertheless, it is clear that the
dominance of the
'modernity' critique means that there is a certain perverse comfort to be derived from believing that
it was the procedures of a disciplinary, medicalised, rationalised society which led inexorably to the
death world of Auschwitz. The indictment of rational society helps blind us (willingly, if
unconsciously) to the extreme violence and, worse, the desire for violence, which characterised the Holocaust experience.
It is an indictment which perpetuates a process of not listening to the victims, of concentrating on the 'objective' documents of the perpetrators. Yet this concentration
on the perpetrators paradoxically replicates a rationalised thought process in order to condemn rationalised society per se. It therefore becomes all the more difficult to
face the fact that violence
deriving from the desire to break free of a rationalised world was a defining
characteristic of the Holocaust.

Kirk, Flynn, et al

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Opposition to Torture Link

Their moralistic outrage to torture is a vampire, sucking outrage from the state
Avital Ronell 2008

[Diacritics Volume 38, Numbers 1-2, Spring-Summer 2008]
Not to remain stuck to a fatherland—not even if it suffers most and needs help most—it is less difficult to
sever one’s heart from a victorious fatherland. Not to remain stuck to some pity—not even for higher
men (höheren Menschen) into whose rare torture and helplessness some accident allowed us to look.
Not to remain stuck to a science—even if it should lure us with the most precious finds that seem to have been saved up precisely for us. Not to remain stuck to one’s
own detachment, to that voluptuous remoteness and strangeness of the bird who [End Page 165] flies ever higher to see ever more below him—the danger of the flies.
Not to remain stuck to our own virtues and become as a whole the victim of some detail in us, such as our hospitality, which is the danger of dangers for superior and
rich souls who spend themselves lavishly, almost indifferently, and exaggerate the virtue of generosity into a vice. [52] The inventory prescribes extreme forms of
detachment, even to the extent of urging the detachment from detachment, so that independence and the ability to command are properly tested. The problem with
testing one’s independence—the test for Nietzsche is bound up with the possibility of independence—is that it copies the word that tries to describe the freeing
perspective for us: in-dependence, Un-abhängigkeit. In other words, independence depends on dependence, and can only come about by the negation of dependency.
But dependence comes first and always squats in any declaration of independence; so-called independence can never shake loose its origin in dependent states. The un
or in of what depends and hangs onto has to undo the core dependency and produce a nonaddictive prospect. This way of skating on the rim of negativity is typical
enough of the Nietzschean maneuver that, keeping up its stamina, endeavors not to trigger a dialectical takeover. The test site circumscribed by this text occupies a
zone between negation and projected reconciliation; it carves a hole in any possible synthesis. Independence can never be stabilized or depended upon, which is why it
has to submit punctually to the test of its own intention and possibility. The “nots” that Nietzsche enters into the decathlon of testing are also a way of signing his own
name by courting and swerving around the nihilistic threat: Nicht/Nietzsche. This is the text, remember, in which Nietzsche says that every philosophical work installs
a biographical register; he makes it clear that he has strapped himself into this text and also that its articulation should not be limited to the disseminated indications of
this or that biographeme. Nonetheless the test run that he proposes bears the weight of his history, including his never-ending break-up with Richard Wagner. Thus the
first self-testing command says: “Not to remain stuck (hängenbleiben) to a person—not even the most loved—every person is a prison, also a nook” [52].
Beginning with the necessity of wrenching oneself loose from a beloved person, whether a prison or
shelter, the inventory goes on to name the urgency of breaking with one’s country, even in times of war
or need, even when the patriotic introject wants and calls you. A superpower nation-state should be the
easiest to sever with. If the inventory is set up in terms of serial “nots” this is no doubt because
Nietzsche needs to enact the complicity of the Versuch with its linguistic appointees: the tester or
attempter must desist from adhering to the temptation that calls. The act, if such it is, of desistence is
not as such a negative one, as Derrida has argued in his reading of Lacoue-Labarthe: “Without being
negative, or being subject to a dialectic, it both organizes and disorganizes what it appears to determine”
[“Desistance” 41]. Being tested, which brings together attempter with the tempting, does not fall purely
into the zone of action or its purported other—passivity—but engages both at once. Already the locution
“being tested,” always awkward and slightly wrenching, invites the intervention of the passive where action or at least some activity is indicated. The test takes one
through the magnetizing sites to which one is spontaneously, nearly naturally, attracted. This could be a resting place, a shelter and solace overseen by the friendly
protectors of the pleasure principle. But Nietzsche, like the other guy, takes the test beyond the pleasure principle. Elsewhere Nietzsche states that pity toppled the
gods; pity, the most dangerous affect, counts for the one to which we are most prone. We are tempted
and tested by pity, roped in by its grim allure, and even if we are not gods, pity can make us
crumble and christianize. (This does not mean that Nietzsche advocates the vulgarity of some forms of indifference. Only that action and intervention should not
eventuate from pity, as do “benevolent racism” [End Page 166] and the like. Liberal pity policies would be nauseating to
Nietzsche; they are not radical, strong, or loving enough. Of course nowadays, I would even take liberal pity.) Science belongs to
the list of the desisted—“resistance” would come off as too strong a term, too repressive and dependent on what presents itself. The inclusion of science in the subtle
athletics of the “not” may reflect the way Nietzsche had to break away from his scientific niche of philology, but there is more to it. It is not just a matter of releasing
oneself from a scientific commitment in order to pass the Nietzschean test. As the other term in the partnership, science itself stands to lose from too tight a grip and
needs eventually to loosen the bond. A true temptress, science fascinates, perhaps seduces and lulls. It captivates and often enough gives one a high, an intoxicating
sense of one’s own capacity for mastery. Yet science itself is implicated in the relation thus structured. For science not only curates the test from a place of superiority,
but is itself subject to the rigors and renewals of testing. So even if it invites the blindness of fascination and the sum of addictive returns, science needs to be released
if only to go under, to dissolve its substantial mask and be turned over to fresh scientific probes. The movement of dislocation and disappropriation continues even to
the point of disallowing sheer detachment. Increasing the dosage of desistance to the level of turning on itself, Nietzsche proposes that one should not remain
dependent on one’s experience of voluptuous detachment. He keeps the tested being in the vehicle of the dis-, and rigorously refuses to issue a permit for sticking to
any moment or structure of being that would seem welcoming or appropriate. (It is appropriate only to disappropriate, to trace one’s own expropriation from a site that
persistently beguiles with the proper.) Thus one must desist even from becoming attached to one’s own virtues, such as hospitality. Virtue itself, no matter how
generous or exemplary, can trip up the one being tested. Virtue
can enlarge itself, take over; it is vulnerable to imperial acts
of expansion. One can become enslaved to one’s virtue, attend to it immoderately, and turn oneself
into a hospital for the vampirizing other. In this ward, as in other Nietzschean wings, strong and superior beings encounter the danger of
infection, a weakening. They give too much and spend themselves as if they were infinitely capable of the offerings for which they are solicited. The offerings turn
into sacrifice; the superior soul gives itself away, finding that it is spent, exhausted. Thus the virtue of generosity, coextensive with hospitality, is turned into a vice.
Virtue tips into its other, and generosity soon becomes a depleting burden.

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Opposition to Torture Link
The aff presents torture as a deviation from the norm, ignoring the exuberant cruelty
inherent to modern war. Only the alt can address the dark motivations that make the
theatrics of torture inevitable. .
Adriana Cavarero, Prof Political Philosophy at Università degli studi di Verona, 2009
[Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence trans. McCuaig p. 76-77]
The official investigations and judicial proceedings following the scandal of the Abu Ghraib
photographs have tried, as everyone knows, to promote the thesis that the essence of the misdeed lay
in the sadistic and deviant behavior of a few of the soldiers involved, a handful of "bad apples:"22 Corroborating the classic connection
between politics and lying, this has not only confirmed a deeply rooted tendency of the U.S. authorities to engage in dissembling behavior but has obviously helped to
supply new matter for modern reflection on torture, 2,3 compelling the critical literature on the matter to bring its own arguments up to date. Special emphasis has thus
been placed on "interrogational torture,"" that is, on the difference that supposedly separates harsh but legal interrogation techniques from the degeneration of these
techniques into torture. The task of extracting information from the victims, or, if one prefers, making them confess the truth, belongs for that matter to the traditional
paradigm of torture illustrated by Foucault. Obviously though, for analyzing the facts of Abu Ghraib today, things are more complicated: once you allow legal
practices intended to make the prisoner suffer in mind and body, perhaps even listing them in detail in dedicated manuals and thus recommending them, to distinguish
between harsh interrogation and interrogational torture often amounts to no more than abstruse and ghastly quibbling.25 Nor do things become any simpler when it
comes to the second type of torture discussed in the literature on the subject, terroristic torture, by which is meant a technology of pain intended to frighten and
the
intimidate both the victims who actually undergo it and their accomplices and supporters. Cutting loose from the pretended legality of the interrogational model,
discourse here passes over not only into therealm of intimidation but into that of revenge and humiliation,
which allude symptomatically to the supplice. And yet we are always, even in terms of frank horrorism,
within the domain of rational, or at any rate strategic, behavior, in the domain of violent acts that
appear to select their own ends or rather pretend to do so. 26 As though to torture rather than simply
kill served some useful purpose. As though a certain utility-information in the case of interrogational
torture; intimidation, humiliation, or revenge in the case of terroristic torture-were the upshot.
That utility played any fundamental part in the atrocious theater of Abu Ghraib is, however, doubtful.
Most of them bit players, 90 percent of the detainees in the Iraqi prison "were of no intelligence value"27
according to the assessment of the American authorities themselves, in other words were of no utility
when it came to supplying information. As for intimidation, revenge, and humiliation, the torture
certainly included them among its goals and drew nourishment from them for its own cruelty, yet not in
such a way as to assign these objectives a decisive role and make them the pivot of a strategic economy.
As the photographs demonstrate, what prevailed was the pleasure of farce, the entertainment of a
horror transformed into caricature, a license to dehumanize on the part of willing actors in an
atrocious pantomime. In this sense, in the contemporary era and in the global spotlight of history, the
viewpoint of the regular fighter-in regulation uniform and endowed with regular horrorist
"appetites"achieved its most expressive portrait at Abu Ghraib. In an age in which the traditional
figure of the enemy has been definitively replaced by the defenseless as casual victim, the traditional
figure of the warrior has also promptly adapted to the general festival of violence against the
defenseless by making way for an obscene caricature of itself.
To compare the incomparable, you could even say that, after the images from Abu Ghraib, what has emerged is a contrast between the actors of a violence against the
helpless who show that they accompany their crime with a certain trivial enjoyment and the actors on the other side who reveal a propensity for the grim and the
lugubrious, even though they sometimes hymn the joys of paradise as the reward for slaughter. But in this respect, the phenomenology of contemporary horrorism is
so complex in the array of its modes, attitudes, and tones as to discourage any reductive contrast. The very disconcerting fact remains that Abu
Ghraib
presented horror in the imbecile and idiotic form of the leer. As though, having lost even the howl
that freezes in her throat, all that remained of Medusa today were a dull repugnance.

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Opposition to War on Terror Link
The war on terror will not bow to the rational kritik provided by the 1AC. Their stance of
transgressive innocence bolsters the war machine
Nick Mansfield 2006

theory & event 9:4]
An example Bataille gives of this is Aztec human sacrifice. The Aztecs, according to Bataille, captured and then feted a particular human individual, on whom they
lavished the greatest wealth and luxury, art and adornment. At the end of a specified period of time, this individual would be brutally and ostentatiously slaughtered.
The aim of this festival was to open a channel through the otherwise sealed world of logical order, and allow humans to connect with the flows of continuity that
represented the truth of being, and from which in daily life, people needed to struggle to exempt themselves. This process was what Bataille understood as
transgression. Because they involved a wilful destruction of all that had been painstakingly accrued through disciplined practices of husbandry and production,
Bataille named these transgressive practices "consumption." War
is one of these transgressive rituals. Rather than seeing war
as an emotional explosion of primitivism, or the result of calculating strategy, Bataille saw war as one of
the processes whereby human societies broke out of the constraint of purpose and order to encounter the
truth they could not always live. Several things need to be said about this process. Firstly, to
summarise the complex logic here. Transgression expresses a society's engagement with the irrational and
excessive flows of energy that have made all its systems and logics possible, but which also exceed and
threaten them. Engagement with these flows is a fulfilment of our nature, but it must be felt as a
contradiction of our normal, rational, life, that it simultaneously confirms. War opens up possibilities of
ecstasy, intensity and violence, while retrospectively constructing before and to endure beside and
beyond them, an imagined culture of reason, innocence and meaning. Dissociation and excess require
this zone as the antecedent of transgression, in fact, what is to be transgressed. Reason, morality and
purpose then are constructed as the necessary counterpart and context of excessive violence and
disarray. Following this logic, war then cannot be simply something executed by "the social" nor can it
be a simple version of it. It defines the social as the locus of an innocence that violence is to transgress, a
rightness that needs to be defied by a brutality that confirms and consolidates it. Innocence thus needs
war as that which both confirms and justifies it as innocence. Secondly, this process of transgression requires a re-
thinking of subjectivity. The subjectivity of normal social life is an artificial construct made available by the flows of energy, but perched precariously upon them.
Such specific, individual or localised subjectivities are mere fictions, chimera. Bataille wasn't afraid to say that the truth of subjectivity was available, but only through
the process of transgression, the drive to radical exteriority. Only the subject that could instantiate the flows of the cosmic energy field was authentic to Bataille, and
humans recognized and tried to live this subjectivity. The figure that incarnated or represented this asymptotic subject, Bataille called the sovereign 11. The sovereign
embodied a subjectivity that lived the intense basic truth of cosmic force. Individual identity was only ever a pathetic degradation of this heroic possibility. The
subject of war, then, is radical exteriority imagined as livable, and is in defiance of any of the constraints and order that define conventional subjectivity. This
sovereignty is both the same as and different to the one Agamben derives from Benjamin and Carl Schmitt. It is a logic of exception from historical accountability.
However, in Bataille crucially, it is less a hardened singular authority than a dream of the instantiation of radical chaos, one that subjectivity aims to emulate in its
truth. As Derrida argues in "Force of Law"12and most recently in Rogues, this sovereignty must be seen in its dangerous doubleness, as both the risk of the worst and
the only promise of justice. Thirdly, Bataille thought that rituals of sacrifice proposed a question. Rituals dramatised the human need to make contact with the
forces of the cosmos, but why did they have to take this form: the slaughter of a human being? What was specific about this process that made it sensible as an
engagement with cosmic truth? Sacrifice, he postulated, annihilated its object. It took something we might recognize as a version of ourselves, another human subject
more or less equivalent to us, and it turned this subject into an object and then destroyed it. Bataille argued that this process of annihilation of the object defined what
consumption was all about. It was simply the human act of denial of our own objectivity .
By thoroughly destroying the object, human
beings separated themselves from the possibility of considering themselves to be objects, and thus showed that
they could not be reduced to the level of the merely calculable that defined the rational practices of daily life. The human approach to objects in general involves,
firstly, this insistence on their reduction to pure objectivity, and secondly, on their being used up, being annihilated as a display of control over and contempt for the
objects that we believe we are showing are ontologically different from ourselves.
War then, turns what is not an object into an
object, and then annihilates it in order to show that we are not like it. It does this by first annihilating any impression or
trace of alternative subjectivity in the object, and then consuming it as an object, by physically destroying it in order to show the triumph of its own claim to not only
exclusive subjectivity, but a subjectivity projected backwards to us from the radical exteriority in which our truth resides. It would be possible to use this insight
to speculate in subjective-cultural terms on the US government's response to the terrorist attacks of September 11.
Horrified at being objectified,
being turned into a passive target by Al-Qaida, the US mounted a massive attempt to reclaim the
prerogatives of subjectivity. It needed to turn itself from object to subject, by insisting on the objectivity
of others, at first in Afghanistan and then Iraq. These others must have their subjectivity minimised -- by in the case of Iraq, the
ontology of the nation being reduced from millions of people to one demonised name ("Saddam Hussein"), by the obscuring of the casualty rates of the Iraqi people,
and by having their political aspirations reduced to being identical with the middle of any Western democracy. This objectification of subjectivity licenses violence
and restores subjectivity to the US. More than vengeance, more than strategy or oil, the original political popularity of the Iraq venture could be seen as an attempt to
reclaim a subjectivity lost by the mystery, the abject confusion of

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Opposition to War on Terror Link

In sum, then, war allows us access to a triumphal and exterior subjectivity we feel
having been objectified.
is our truth, by annihilating the other first as subject and then as object. Although this project fulfils us, we always
represent and understand it as a transgression, a contradiction of our normal rational innocence. This latter point helps us to a provisional answer to one of the
questions we have been pursuing: how a war-like culture with a history of relentless conquest and genocide is able to believe itself so peace-loving and innocent. The
logic of war is understood as an adventure beyond innocence and reason and its conventional liberal interiorities out into an exteriority that provides a subjectivity
beyond constraint. An innocent domain then is perpetually retrospectively reinvented by the wars it requires as the thing that war leaves behind. Similarly, defining a
social rift, or even a policy, as a war -- war on crime, war on drugs, a culture war -- retrospectively identifies the social as a transgressed innocence, a site of authentic
self-identity and normality threatened by the poor, drugs, liberal dissent, and so on. According to Bataille's double logic, then, war unfolds as a transgression of
radical innocence and of reason. Innocence and war would be part of one complex, necessary to one another, but they would be understood to be and represented as
fundamentally separate, and notionally opposite to one another. How does this complex relationship play itself out? Beside its transgressive nature, we have identified
two other things about war: the radical exteriority of its understanding of subjectivity and its will to annihilation of its object. It achieves this by first erasing any trace
of subjectivity in the object, and then destroying it as object. The aim here, according to Bataille's theory of consumption, is to arrogate subjectivity to oneself, by
rendering any notion of the subjectivity and consequently the being of the other impossible. One's own subjectivity emerges only as an uber-subjectivity, as the
supersession of subjectivity in an act of destruction. The destruction of the subjectivity of the war-object also then involves the destruction or at least the surpassing of
the warrior's own subjectivity. In destroying the subjectivity of the other, it imagines itself out in the stream of larger entropic energy that Bataille saw as the meaning
of the cosmos. The logic of the annihilation of the other and the exteriority of subjectivity are the same
logic therefore. The war/society complex can be seen then as the exteriorization of the subject by pursuing the will-to-annihilation of the object. This
defines the war/society in its radical disloyalty to itself. The war/society produces this logic in both its peaceful and aggressive phases: in military force, police tactic,
media campaign or social policy, but also in its economics, its consumption and its consumerism, yet the war/society is able to insist on the radical disjunction
between its different phases, a disjunction it cannot even really produce let alone stabilize. (Where exactly would the dividing line fall?) This common ground, even
when disguised by a refuge in the logic of transgression, indicates the dominant mode of the globalizing West, on its mission as the ultra-violent bestower, even
incarnation, of peace. By constructing its own subjectivity as the supersession of subjectivity through the annihilation of all alternative subjectivities, the
subjectivity of the war/society is at work in war, but not at stake. Not only does war provide an image of innocence by representing its violent self as other to society,
but the exteriorising subject never has content enough to be in any way answerable. Because its logic requires the annihilation of its object, it can refuse to
acknowledge the position from which it could be interrogated or accused. Hence the refusal of the United States to imagine being answerable to the International
Criminal Court. The
war/society is protected from accusation, until it is defeated, and becomes an object
again. The west will not suffer interrogation of its innocence while it remains triumphant. What this
means is that the war/society will not amend itself, will not become responsible or fair or self-
reflexive as long as it continues to believe that its historic mission has been a success. This cannot be
summarily dismissed as a commitment to the doctrine of "might is right," though the continuity between
the ancient faith in providence's manifestation of its truth through trial-by-violence and contemporary
belief in military victory as implicit vindication would repay investigation. What we can say with some
certainty is that what has been unwittingly chosen is a radical commitment to defeat as the only impetus
towards self-knowledge. Thus, as we have seen with the Vietnam War, only the indefinite postponement
of the acknowledgement of defeat can allow faith in war to endure.

Kirk, Flynn, et al
TNWs Link
The affirmative’s rational appeal against nukes reinforces the drive to nuclear destruciton
Ira Chernus, Assoc Prof Religion at the University of Colorado, Boulder, 1985
[Journal of the American Academy of Religion]
The relationships between war and myth illuminate at least part of that mysterious human nature
which apparently baffled Thomas Powers when he sought the irrational motives of war. They also help
explain the relative futility of four decades of persuasively logical arguments for nuclear
disarmament. While all wars are compounded of both pragmatic purposes and mythic dimensions, the nuclear age has reduced pragmatic purposes to
virtual insignificance. War between super-powers, whether cold or hot, is now almost entirely mythic enactment. When rational motives dwindle to irrelevance, it is
not only superfluous but actually dangerous to keep decrying the irrationality of war. We could go on debating the possibility of finding rational purposes for
nuclear weapons until they begin falling from the sky. That would be the ultimate—and ultimately
pyrrhic—victory for the "defense intellectuals." Would it not be wiser to shift the grounds of the
debate and bring the deeper motivations of the nuclear arms race into the light of public
understanding? The first step in such a shift is to look at the mythic paradigms that have shaped our
perceptions of weapons and war in the nuclear age.
Continued…
The persuasiveness of this mythic framework is enhanced by the media that disseminate it. Most people learn whatever they know about the
nuclear issue from "the news;" "the news" disseminates and legitimizes all our reigning mythologies. But the average person sees no connection
at all between "the news" and myth, because myth is taken to mean a lie (or at best a fantasy) while "the news" is assumed to be a literal record
of real happenings in the real world. So nuclear myth passes for literal truth. In a culture that defines literal truth as the only form of truth, any
mythology must pass as literally true to be credited. But the myth of rational nuclear balance rests especially heavily
on literal acceptance, for the faith in technical reason enshrined in the paradigm depends on an equally
firm faith in literalism. Indeed, the two faiths are two mutually reinforcing sides of a single coin.
Literal truth confines us to the realm of abstract reason which can only calculate causes and effects,
means and ends. It is essential to our fantasy of a world wholly comprehended and wholly controlled,
and thus to our dream of humanly-constructed global balance. Our passion for literalism fueled the similar dreams and fantasies that led to a world dominated by
technology—the technology whose ultimate product and most fitting emblem is the Bomb. Seeing only means and ends, however, literalism blinds us to the mythic
dimension. A myth which depends on literal acceptance therefore has a blindness to its own mythic nature built into it. It prevents us from understanding our own
Literal truth also fosters the nuclear contest because it is necessarily single-minded
deepest motivations.
truth, insisting on absolute oppositions between true and false, right and wrong, and (by extension) good
and evil. Our passion for literalism reinforces our vision of nuclear armament as an apocalyptic crusade
against the twin evils of the Soviet Union and irrationality itself. At the same time it creates a one-
dimensional world in which the given reality is the only possible reality. It stifles the capacity of myth
to stimulate imagination, discover new possibilities for the future, and show us the multiple dimensions
of truth. Robert J. Lifton has written at length on this aspect of nuclear age psychology. His theory of
psychic numbing rests largely on the insight that the "mythic zone" of our minds, in which new images
arise to reflect changing realities, has been frozen by the terror of nuclear annihilation. But this new
terror only intensified a process that began long before Hiroshima. Western civilization had been
learning for several centuries to see the world as a collection of inert objects, totally amenable to
human manipulation. Inevitably, we began to see other human beings as equally inert objects, and
then finally our own selves as inert and therefore dead. Literalism was as much a source as a sign of
this process. When taken literally, as it inevitably must be, the myth of rational nuclear balance is a myth
of and for "death in life." If our pervasive psychological deadness continues its triumphant march, it will
some day culminate in a universal physical deadness. Since there will be no retrospect afterwards, we must observe now in
prospect that the paradigm of rational balance will be a fundamental contributing factor to nuclear annihilation. So the danger of debating about the rational uses of
nuclear weapons is not confined to the futility of a debate that misses the essential point.
There is perhaps even greater danger in
continuing the debate because its terms and assumptions all lie in the realm of literal technical
reasoning. It reinforces the potentially lethal paradigm we have been describing, regardless of the
conclusions it attains.

Kirk, Flynn, et al
TNWs Link
The affirmative’s crusade against the deadly irrationality or nuclear weapons plays the
enemy’s game. Only the alternative’s theatrical war can challenge nuclear violence.
Rather than trying to score more points in a game it cannot win, the disarmament movement would
be well advised to reject the game and its premises altogether. What would this mean in practical terms?
It would mean a new focus on the mythic dimensions of the issue and a concerted effort to apprise the public that all it stands to gain from
nuclear armament is the mythic satisfaction of re-enacting the dominant vision of nomos. Assuming that everyone knows what there is to lose, the public (this
being a democracy) could then make informed decisions about nuclear policy. At the very least, discussion of the mythic aspects could get us off the merry-go-round
of endlessly recycling the same old arguments. It is difficult to predict what new topics might come to the fore. I can only offer here a few tentative possibilities.
The absurdities of nuclear policy have led us to recognize the preponderant element of mythic play
in the nuclear contest, and in war as a whole. The next step might well be to notice a similar element in many of the institutions of
society, and then go on to see the large majority of human life as mythic enactment repeated for its own intrinsic satisfactions. When we speak of "the human drama"
(or "the human comedy") we voice an age-old intuition that life
may be best understood as an immense play—or, more
precisely, an infinite number of little plays, interwoven in immensely complex ways. Indeed, the
human species might be defined as a living theater in which this endless play of plays is played out.
War is one scene in which the drama reaches heightened levels of intensity; but the same mythic dynamics we have
uncovered in war are constantly working (though most often unconsciously) throughout our lives. This is a rather large claim to make in a small paragraph. And I do not intend here to begin
unravelling its tangled complexities. I want only to suggest that there would be some important practical, as well as theoretical, implications to such a view of life. One implication is a new
understanding of the uniqueness of nuclear weapons. They are qualitatively different from all previous weapons because they are the first weapons that can destroy the theater in which the
human drama unfolds. From this perspective war between super-powers is indeed obsolete—not because it lacks any rational purpose or practical gain, but because the human drama will end if
the theater is demolished. The nuclear disarmament movement's most compelling cry is not "No more war!" but "The show must go on!" In fact, it seems unlikely that the human drama will
ever dispense entirely with its war scenes . The appeals of war that we have outlined are probably too deeply alluring to
be relinquished. But the many links between war and myth suggest a new approach to this issue too. Generally, when the question of the abolition of war
is raised, the answer is said to hinge on the issue of violence; those who believe that violence is innate in human beings hold that war is forever, while those who
disagree see a hope of eliminating war. The analysis offered here suggests that violence is not the crucial element in understanding war. Certainly the power and
intensity of war are related to its physical violence, but they are not identical with nor reducible to that violence. And the appeals of war go significantly beyond its
although some form of warfare may be inevitable, it is not clear that warfare need
intensity and power. Therefore,
involve killing. It may be possible to find other mythic scenarios that will offer the same fulfillments
as traditional war without demanding loss of life or even physical violence (Brown: 180-183). It is naive, of course,
to avoid the issue of violence altogether. There may be something in human nature that makes the abolition of violent war a futile dream. Even if this were the case,
War approached as play is likely to be less
we could still learn to see "conventional" war as a form of deadly serious play.
destructive than war seen as a crusade against absolute evil. Its goal is not so much destruction of
the enemy as re-enactment of the intertwining of life and death in the human theater. In the nuclear age, its
message takes on particularly potent meaning. While all "conventional" wars destroy life and nurture death, nuclear war would destroy death as well as life; it would
bring the cycle of life-and-death—the very lifeblood of the human drama, as it is of war—to a dead stop. Those who hope to abolish all warfare generally fail to see
this dimension of war. With their
moral commitment to maximize life and minimize death, they see the two
only as logical opposites and argue logically on behalf of life. Here, as in their logical arguments
against the Bomb, they may be defeating their own cause by accepting their opponents* premises.
The "defense intellectuals" and other devotees of unlimited human control have an equally
passionate belief in the rational conquest of death, though their path to conquest leads dangerously
close to the abyss. The nuclear peril is a sign that the denial of death, however well-meaning its
motives, is a questionable course. Rather than declaring war obsolete in order to stave off death, it
may be wiser to declare that the show, with its ever-turning wheel, must go on. Yet there is certainly a valid moral
imperative to seek peaceful solutions to every conflict. Philosophical speculations should not give us license to accept violence passively and stop searching for meaningful alternatives. The
overriding imperative of the present, however, is to find forms of war that do not threaten to destroy the theater in which war dramas and all other dramas are enacted. The most valuable form of
war today may be the war of human beings against weapons of omnicide. Many disarmament activists are loathe to see themselves as engaged in a war. Yet unconsciously the traditional war
paradigm holds sway over all of us, no matter how committed we are to peace. I suspect that a large majority of disarmament activists do unconsciously feel themselves in a war—indeed a
war to the death—against the weapons that could destroy nomos forever. As the anti-nuclear movement grows, it will attract increasing numbers of people who feel comfortable with the war
The image of a nonviolent war against weapons may be
paradigm and many who positively enjoy the idea of a good fight in a good cause.
a useful aid in creating a broadly based mass movement for disarmament. It simply recognizes that
most people will not give up their attachment to a war of cosmic significance unless they are given
another such war in its place. Those who insist on the total abolition of war will not be happy with this suggestion. But those who
insist that the show must go on, with war and all, may see merit in it.

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Link… TNWs
The affirmative deploys the means-ends reasoning that makes nuclear war possible. Only
the alt’s sacred over-flowing can confront the violence of nuclear weapons.
Beyond these practical considerations, the shift to a mythic

perspective has significant theoretical aspects. Many of the terrors of the modern world, both nuclear and non-
nuclear, have grown out of an exclusive concern with technical means-and-ends reasoning. While much of life
is still re-enactment of scenes from the human drama, undertaken for its own sake, Western civilization has come to
deny this truth. A new focus on mythic play could teach us how frequently we are pursuing ends in themselves
without knowing it. More importantly, by raising this fact to consciousness it could give us a conceptual
framework in which to assess the value of those ends and thus free us to choose new ends. If nuclear armament
has become largely an end in itself, it is hard to imagine a more desperately needed lesson. We might discover
that freedom to perceive and choose our forms of play is also freedom from the rationalism, literalism, and
psychic numbing that plague us so perilously. We might discover, too, that we need not justify our lives as
means to some end which is in turn only a means to some other end. As our world overflows with more and
more means, it is increasingly drained of consciously perceived ends to give meaning to those means. Surely
this sense of meaningless futility is deeply related to our numbed apathy in the face of impending disaster.
The more we try to calculate purely rational means to save ourselves, the more firmly we fasten ourselves
into this trap. The myths and teachings of religious traditions can help to free us—not so much by preaching
the moral sanctity of life as by teaching us to value ends over means and to find fulfillment in the play of life as
an end in itself. Only if we see life as an end in itself will we cherish it and preserve it. The world will always be
filled with conflict and folly and evil. We will always be tempted to ask, as Walt Whitman once did, what good
life and self can be amid "the empty and useless years." If we learn to see life as an infinite theater, though, we
may find deep meaning and comfort at such moments in Whitman's simple answer: "That you are here—that life
exists and identity, that the powerful play goes on, and
you may contribute a verse."

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Terrorism
Terrorism is an excess generated by the solutions designed to address it. There is no end to
the cycle of terror and counter-terror.
Stefano Harney & Randy Martin 2007
[theory & event 10:2 ]
If the Cold War contested the future, its apparent heir, the war on terror battles over the present. This
is more than the hyper-vigilance of a politics of fear. The terrorist is the quintessential figure of bad risk
however effectively it may be deployed. We cannot await it. The only safety lies in bringing its moment
into our midst, that is, by pre-emptive strike. Terror's temporality is anti-utopian, it implies the
immanence of the future in the present. The risk economy, the investment action upon a possible
future difference in the present, shares the same sensibility. Foreign and domestic applications of risk
management forge a nefarious connection in George W. Bush's 2002 National Security Document. In this proud proclamation of imperial
doctrine, pre-emption is bequeathed to one nation and friends (whether old or newly acquired) affirm their allegiance by replicating U.S. anti-inflationary monetary
policy. Low and behold this same language turns up in Iraq's strategy for national development. Inflation, when it is not an assault on labor (as low unemployment or
high wages) anthropomorphizes the world of goods (supply being chased by demand and puffing itself up accordingly). Just as industrialization forced
association upon self-sufficient labor, and consumerism wove a common web of dreams in the marketplace, financialization imposes a generalized condition of
mutual indebtedness. Personal finance, like free wage labor, amounts to an enormous aggregation of the capacity to produce financial value while assuming the risks
of failure to realize value. Like production and consumption, financialization is also a form of dispossession of one array of life-making circumstances that forces an
elaboration of what people must subsequently do and be together. The future itself becomes a factor of production as each possible outcome is shifted into an
actionable present. The derivative represents the moment when a small intervention, an arbitrager's momentary opportunity, seizes upon a highly dispersed volatility
and leverages it to extensive effect. Unlike the entrepreneur, born of initiative, the arbitrager exists only through the action of others, deriving themselves as a cluster
of volatilities. The derivative is the extensive energy within the body of finance. It is also incorporated into the grand strategy for engaging and negating unsupportable
risk and excess.
Terror wars are in this respect derivative wars. They "deter forward" using small
deployments of risk capable special forces to leverage imperial intervention. They succeed in their
initial displacements (of toppling regimes) but produce the very thing they claim to fight but that are
in actuality their condition of further circulation, namely terror. Terror is an inassimilable excess
that occasions intervention without end. Unlike earlier imperialisms that sought to extract, civilize and develop, this logic of occupation
quickly becomes indifferent to its prize and impatient with itself. It would be tempting to see in the gap between a general interest in combating terror everywhere,
and a particular occupation of two energy states an affirmation of Bataille's equilibration of devastation and profit. Afghanistan's geo-strategic potential for
transshipment of oil and gas, Iraq's prized proven oil reserves, Halliburton's corrupt profiteering would seem to affirm the straightforward arithmetic captured by the
slogan, "blood for oil." Control of energy consumption would prove the ultimate colonization of Bataille's accursed share. As compelling as the slogan has been to lay
bare the motives of imperial excess, Bataille's thought would also have us refuse the enclosure of our own surplus capacity in so certain a lock down of interest-borne
scarcity. There can be no denying oil's requirement to the present economic convention. But the necessity of oil politics as they are presented must be contested if the
present mode of excess is to be seen as other than laying us all to waste as an inexorable drive to war to control supply in the face of imminent scarcity.
Specifically, blood for oil is a pipeline that has smuggled in a Malthusian logic of genocidal scarcity. The argument goes like this. The days of expanding oil supply
are behind us. The rate at which new wells are drilled has been eclipsed by the rate at which new demand has expanded, in consequence, a bell-shaped forecast named
for the geo-physicist who made it, "Hubbert's Peak," pinpoints the date of diminishing returns. Population growth assures that there will not be enough oil to go
around. Security for the imperium dictate that it grabs hold of whatever remains. Oil and war are fraternal twins. Yet Hubbert's peak, so pointed in sounding the alarm,
is also vulnerable on its own economic foundations. As oil prices rise, abandoned fields again become profitable, along with the rationale for further investment to
extract oil from otherwise unappealing shale. The conflation of access to oil with control of its sources certainly lines up with imperial history. But that history
discloses how the very regimes installed to control oil territories repress domestic populations and wind up destabilizing access, a lesson reflected in the fully
While financial protocols have been installed as governing ideas, the occupation
financialized oil futures markets by meeting volatility with arbitrage. i
of Iraq looks like anything but a design for control. Instead, oil exports have held steady, and risk has been distributed
throughout a population that has been cleaved from its national form and from its own productive capacities. Iraq's Public Distribution System,
the last remnant of Baathist socialism is to be displaced by small cash handouts to fuel the now rampant speculative economy. ii But to render
socialism scarce is to commit an error of measurement and concept. The extensive energy of consumption privileged the erotic as the alter to
commodification, and maintained socialism as that portion of the world devoted to a social economy that capital could not absorb. The erotic
which animated consumer desire has now been displaced by risk, which inhabits the intensities of circulation. Populations at risk may be treated
instrumentally but they are also freed from instrumentality-they exist, not to accomplish further accumulation, but as human assemblages in their
own right. The war on terror claims that population makes no difference and touts its capacity to
intervene anywhere at anytime. Its excess belies another. The notion that intervention can be anywhere raises the
prospect that it could be for anything. The empire of indifference passes intervention from necessity to the realm of discretion, acting upon
difference becomes a luxury within reach. Added to this is the discretionary force of something like the derivatives market, a hitherto
unfathomable wealth sundered from use that exists only to further itself. The recourse to war that cannot discern between foreign and domestic,
that attacks terror, but also crime, drugs, culture, and the like, sketches in negative relief the magnitude of the difference that state and capital now
resist. Never mind that they had a hand in proliferating it all. The abundance of difference in our midst, along with excess wealth advertised for
all-purposes, presents the immanence of the social as a self-expanding luxury for all. The war on terror is not the only project legible in the
transfer of Bataille's mode of excess into the present. Terror gives urgency to the proliferation of financial risk but
it also deflects attention from that excess which the state has increasing trouble concealing--its own
criminality. If capital morphs under the present mode of excess, so too does its strange bed-fellow, the
state-form.

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Link… Respect/Empathy for Other

The rhetoric of empathy and respect is a rhetoric of method. Only the alternative’s
willingness to risk communication as violence and interruption allows an ethical
relationship to the other.
GARY PETERS 2004

[University of the West of England, Human Studies 27: 187–206]
The essence of rhetoric is its lack of essence, its emptiness, which, nonetheless, bewitches and persuades thanks to a speech that literally formulates the body of the
speaker for the duration of the teaching event. This body does not mirror the other but, rather, flares-up as an embodied language: an improvi- sational gesture that
radically exceeds the reflexive power of the alter-ego, thus constituting a teaching, albeit one devoid of a body of knowledge that can be passed from teacher to
student. As Merleau-Ponty affirms: “nothing really passes between them” and yet “the fact is we have the power to understand over and above what we may have
178) But, and this is the point, it is a power that is produced by the movement of
spontaneously thought.” (1981, p.
rhetoric into an exteriority that is radically absent from given forms of knowledge. In this respect, and
contrary to the derogation of rhetoric, it is an art of persuasion that does not hide absence behind the
illusory presence and substance of its fine words. On the contrary, rhetoric draws attention to and
intensifies the experience of a fundamental ontological void, the “primordial silence” (1981, p. 184)
between the “speaking word” (1981, p. 197). This is the power of rhetoric, the power to produce a world
in the face of a radical phenomenological pluralism that, in spite of Husserl’s efforts, unravels the
intersubjective lifeworld, casting its inhabitants out into a solitary exteriority that only rhetoric can
speak to, albeit obscurely. By all accounts this describes very well Heidegger’s “manner” of teaching, creating, in his case, a pedagogy where
phenomenology and rhetoric, working in tandem, become the vehicle for the radical transformation necessary to remember and address again the question of
Being. Anticipating, in a sense, Merleau-Ponty’s observation that nothing passes between teacher and student – and yet there is transformation, Rudiger Safranski
grasps the absence at the core of Heidegger’s singular, but famed, teaching when he recalls Jas- per’s comments on Heidegger: It is astonishing how Heidegger
manages to captivate us. . . Admittedly, his students then will have felt much the same as we do today – that one is drawn into his thought until one arrives at the
moment of rubbing one’s eyes in astonishment and asking oneself: that was quite something, but what use is the. . . experience to me? Karl Jaspers strikingly
formulated this experience with Heidegger’s philosophizing in his notes. . . This is what Jaspers said about Heidegger: ‘Among contemporaries the most exciting
thinker, masterful, compelling, mysterious – but then leaving you empty-handed’ (Safranski 1999, p. 100). All of the rhetorical ingredients are here: mastery,
compulsion, mystery and nothingness.
Rhetoric gives nothing, it does not instruct, it persuades, and persuasion
masters the other not through a superior grasp of a knowledge that can be bequeathed by the teacher, but
through the production of a fascinating, seductive and compelling body, occupying in a specific
manner, an other, more powerful world. Merleau-Ponty, with typical subtlety, grasps this particular mode of learning: I begin to understand
a particular philosophy by feeling my way into its existential manner, by reproducing the tone and accent of the philosopher. In fact, every language carries its own
teaching. . . (Merleau-Ponty 1981, p. 179). Merleau-Ponty is not describing “empathy” but something quite different. The model of learning suggested here is, like
Kant’s, imitative or reproductive and forms part of the model of exemplification where the singular manner of the teacher provides the model to be adopted by the
students and used in their own way. (Kant, 1973, para. 49) In this regard, and with the phenomenological project in mind, it is the fundamental productivity of the
phenomenological/ rhetorical compact which ensures that the reproduction in question is, paradoxically perhaps, the reproduction of production: production can
A pedagogy based upon the reproduction of production will
only be reproduced. Pluralism, Language and Estrangement
not be empathic but, rather, pluralistic. Instead of eroding the barrier between self and other through
dialogue and understanding, the infinite plurality of producers (and the production of infinite plurality) creates what Blanchot
calls a relation of the “third kind.” He writes: Now what ‘founds’ this third relation, leaving it still unfounded, is no longer proximity – proximity of struggle, of
services, of essence, of knowledge, or of recognition, not even of solitude – but rather the
strangeness between us: a strangeness it will
not suffice to characterize as a separation or even as a distance. – Rather an interruption – An
interruption escaping all measure (Blanchot, 1993, p. 68). Teaching, in this view, would resemble a
regime of estrangement rather than of empathy, where teacher and student are cast as strangers rather
than ana- logical twins, and where the phenomenological continuity between self and other, so
important for Husserl as a guarantor for a “predictable” intersubjective world beyond/after the
“reduction,” suffers an “interruption” that, as Blanchot will argue, breaks the bonds of intersubjectivity.
Instead of an organic/psychic bond there is an “interval”; an empty space, a “between” that demarcates a
radical pluralism not based upon the all-too- familiar notions of diversity, co-existence and toleration, all
of which sit only too comfortably alongside empathy and dialogue, but one signifying a fundamental
inequality that strips the other of its horizon (its “sphere of own- ness”), its position in space and time, its
selfhood. For Blanchot this does not leave nothingness but, rather, it leaves speech – the violence of
speech.

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Link… Schmitt
Schmitt is right that the state is built on the sovereign exception, but their politics justifies
endless extermination. The alternatives solves by declaring itself sovereign through the act
of sacrifice, creating the exception to the exception.
Bülent Diken 2006
[Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, Alternatives 31 (2006), 431–452
Significantly in this respect, Benjamin was the first to divide Schmitt’s concept of exception, producing a remainder
of it. For Schmitt, exception is a limit concept that presupposes a “normal” situation as its background. The state of
exception aims at the preservation of this normality with extraordinary means. In other words, Schmitt’s project is
to legitimize the state of exception, or to normalize what is exceptional. Along similar lines, we could argue that
the state of exception on the island is reactionary, or, to phrase it differently, that violence is rational. The
generalized exception, the festival, is Jack’s way of strengthening his power. In this, everything is made fluid; all
hierarchies are reversed. But one thing remains constant: Jack, the leader. To be sure, Benjamin was in many ways
inspired by Schmitt’s methodological extremism, even though his own project was opposed to Schmitt’s. Whereas
Schmitt wanted to legitimize Nazi power, Benjamin criticized it. Schmitt was conservative, Benjamin
revolutionary. Indeed, this tension found its best expression in their understanding of sovereignty. Hence to
Schmitt’s exception Benjamin opposed the suspension of suspension, a “real” exception, or, better, an exception
to exception itself. What is decisive here is the notion that, when generalized, exception loses its status as a limit of
normality. The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the
exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall
clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the
struggle against Fascism.57 Whereas in Schmitt exception is the political kernel of the law, it becomes divine
justice in Benjamin. And then we are confronted with the difference between two exceptions: Schmitt’s exception is
nothing else than an attempt at avoiding the “real” exception, the revolution, or divine justice. Benjamin’s
exception, in stark contrast, suspends the relationality between the law and its suspension in “a zone of anomy
dominated by pure violence with no legal cover.”58The question of this real exception is the one that cannot be
posed today without immediately facing the accusation of being a nihilist or a fundamentalist. And why is it so? To
end with an answer to this question, let us focus on the final scene.

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Link… Theory (e.g., Critical Theory)

You must sacrifice the theoretical knowledge of the 1AC. It is servile production that
ultimately means nothing.
Jason DeBoer no date given
[“Bataille versus Theory” http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7XwWuL0tswIJ:www.sauer-

thompson.com/essays/Bataille%2520Versus%2520Theory,%2520an%2520essay%2520by%2520Jason
%2520DeBoer.doc+Bataille+versus+Theory%E2%80%9D+Fierce+Language&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us]
The writings of Georges Bataille have recently become the object of a certain resurgence, or rather, a recuperation, within the academy. As Bataille’s death in 1962
recedes into the past, the number of critical essays and articles about him continues to grow at an incredible rate. Most of this criticism has taken the approach of
situating Bataille and his ideas into a pre-determined framework of “postmodern” thought, either through the systematic embellishment of his role as
an intellectual influence on Foucault, Derrida, and others, or his role as an intermediary figure between Nietzsche and the French postmodernists. While there
certainly is merit and validity in linking Bataille intellectually to these writers, it is the radicalness and originality of Bataille’s writing which ultimately becomes lost
in these analyses when viewed through such an historical lens. It seems inevitable that Bataille, like Nietzsche, will be subjected to a critical scrutiny, which,
in
the guise of earnest analyses and close readings, serves foremost to dispel the threat that such writers
pose to academia. A calculated process of intellectual taming is deployed against these radical thinkers; this procession of commentaries and dissections
nearly always leaves nothing but a dilution of the original work. To avoid this, I will not concern myself with situating Bataille’s writings within the present state of
theory (whether it be philosophical, critical, sociological, or psychological). Rather, I think it would be more noble to attempt a critique of the theoretical enterprise by
analyzing it through Bataille’s own array of concepts. If the ideas of thinkers like Nietzsche, Sade, or Bataille are to be afforded the credence they deserve, it is only
fitting that theory itself be judged according to their claims, which may run in opposition to the claims made by traditional theory. Georges Bataille organizes his
writings around many core concepts or ideas, many of which remain diffuse and somewhat underdeveloped in their definitions or meanings. Communication,
sovereignty, heterology, inner experience, the sacred, dépense or expenditure, transgression, excess, etc.; each concept appears in his texts as a momentary
connotation, a brief enunciation that creates an impact in the reader, then disappears before becoming fully ensnared within the parameters of conceptualization.
Perhaps it is this vagueness or ambiguity inherent in all of Bataille’s concepts that prevents them from being appropriated by the theoretical mainstream and being put
to work in a dogmatic system. In order for an idea to be put to work, for it to be able to perform a function, perhaps it must first have a proper definition... which many
of Bataille’s concepts lack. The broadness of his terms (indeed, Bataille’s move from a restrictive to a general economy shows a digression from the specific, from
specialization) may keep them from being utilized by others; this subversion of utility arises from the difficulty of pinpointing where or when a Bataillean concept
begins or ends. This sacrifice of clarity certainly is an intentional strategy, Bataille’s own “employment” of unworkable concepts. It is within this arena of thought that
I wish to examine the contemporary state of theory. When one wants to discuss things such as philosophy, literature and poetry, as such, in their broadest sense, it
seems impossible to provide a working definition which encapsulates enough of the defined to provide a basis for meaningful discourse. As soon as one makes
statements about “philosophy”, etc. the stage is set for interpretive breakdown. Without a general concept of “philosophy” there will be confusion as to the term’s
meaning; with such a normative concept, there will be disagreement over the validity of such a norm. Traditionally, philosophers have countered the problems of
conceptual vagueness by imposing stricter and stricter specialization on their terms. Bataille, on the other hand, has reveled in the imprecision of such terms as
“philosophy”, and, instead of specializing and building on such traditional notions, he has deployed his own set of concepts from the basis of whim (which he saw as
the opposite of specialization). His attacks against philosophy strike it as a generality, before the complexities and specialties of epistemology, ontology, philosophy
philosophy must be attacked insofar as it is
of language, etc. muddy the issue and make such a meta-critique more difficult. For Bataille,
a general project, not in its particular and multiple manifestations, and this can only be done by
contrasting philosophy with other general concepts which differ from and oppose it... the sacred,
excess, communication, etc. With this view in mind, I will attempt to compare and critique the
theoretical enterprise itself, using Bataille’s notions as both guidelines and weapons. Firstly, though, I
should remark on the victim, the generality referred to as “theory.” Theory (again, whether it be
philosophical, critical, sociological, etc.) can be said to consist of a variety of related movements. It can
be thought of as the analyses of givens, predictions for the future, the systematic organization of
knowledge, the very path along which thought must follow, or even thought itself. Theory is almost
invariably a process that maintains knowledge (guaranteed by certainty) as its end result. Bataille contests
the claim that a process of examination leads somehow to knowledge, because for him this external
theorizing can only depart from or deny the only certain knowledge that humans may have: “We have
in fact only two certainties in this world -- that we are not everything and that we will die.” Bataille posits
knowledge of death not as the end result of a theoretical operation, but as an inner experience from which everything else radiates. This
knowledge of death is in no way an understanding or comprehension of death; it is only the certainty that death will some day consume us, only a
knowledge of mortality. Death cannot be regarded as an object of knowledge because it cannot be managed or subordinated by thought. Death is
sovereign, hence inconceivable. Knowledge of our own mortality can only be peripheral to death itself. (Bataille’s other certainty, “that we are
not everything”, paves the way for his notions of heterology and discontinuity, which I will examine in another essay.) Thus, the supposed end-
product of theory, knowledge, is declared impossible by Bataille, except for the certainties of death and the discontinuity of beings. He writes:
“we can have no knowledge except to know that knowledge is finite.” Death, in the end, consumes thought. Any truth claims of theory are not
sustainable according to Bataille’s rigid criteria for knowledge (namely, that only absolute certainty could guarantee knowledge). Bataille’s
thought desires to exceed the very notion that knowledge is possible or that theory produces what it claims: “going to the end means at least this:

Kirk, Flynn, et al
that the limit, which is knowledge as a goal, be crossed.” Bataille

continues to attack knowledge insofar as it relates to
the strivings of theory, with knowledge either as the end product of theory’s work or as the

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Link… Theory (e.g., Critical Theory)

presumed foundation from which theory issues. Since knowledge is always linked to work and project,
it is always servile to a concern for the future; it takes us away from the sovereignty of inner
experience, which is only concerned with the moment. This inner experience is incapable of theorization; it evades the project-oriented grasp of language:
“Everyday the sovereignty of the moment is more foreign to the language in which we express ourselves, which draws value back to utility: what is sacred, not being
an object, escapes our apprehension. There is not even, in this world, a way of thinking that escapes servitude, an available language such that in speaking it we do not
fall back into the immutable rut as soon as we are out of it.” Bataille’s suspicion, even hatred, of language runs deep. However, this does not prevent him from
according theory, philosophy, and science their place in the world. He believed that man should relegate such operations to a less prominent role in his thought, and
instead concentrate more on his own inner experience. Bataille creates a dichotomy between experience and theory… with silence, sovereignty, and concern with the
moment functioning as aspects of inner experience, and language, servility, and preparation for the future existing as inherent aspects of theory. By opposing language
with inner experience, Bataille creates a dilemma for himself and his own writings. His steadfast position makes him something of an idealist regarding inner
experience; Bataille leaves little room for reconciliation between a true silence which resists definitions and a sovereign use of language which is able to resist project.
It is poetry, he finally decides, that is able to occupy this space, as a form of language that is sacred—a term Bataille used atheistically, meaning opposed to utility,
usefulness, and concern for the future. Even with his extreme cynicism that theory could ever transgress the servile nature of language in order to offer a glimpse into
inner experience, Bataille continued to write, and not just poetry. In order to justify the agenda behind theoretical writings like Nietzsche’s or his own, which were
able to perform a metaphilosophical critique of theory while still using some of its forms of questioning, Bataille needed to temper his idealism with a modified
definition of project: “Nevertheless inner experience is project, no matter what. It is such—man being entirely so through language which, in essence with the
exception of its poetic perversion, is project. But project is no longer in this case that, positive, of salvation, but that, negative, of abolishing the power of words, hence
of project.” In other words, his is a theory which questions itself by attacking the foundation of theory itself: language. In this way, through a type of writing that
strives for silence, even topics such as inner experience can be broached. “Principle of inner experience: to emerge through project from the realm of project.”
Although Bataille writes that “the nature of experience is, apart from derision, not to be able to exist as project,” it is this derisive character of experience that can be
expressed in a theory that ridicules itself, that acknowledges the impossibility of its own goal: knowledge. Bataille finds the perfect form of such anti-foundational
thinking in the aphoristic writings of Nietzsche: “I am talking about the discourse that enters into darkness and that the very light ends by plunging into darkness
(darkness being the definitive silence). I am talking about the discourse in which thought taken to the limit of thought requires the sacrifice, or death, of thought. To
my mind, this is the meaning of the work and life of Nietzsche.” Not only did Nietzsche mirror Bataille’s own disgust for Christianity and philosophy, but the writing
form which Nietzsche championed, the aphorism, became another weapon in Bataille’s arsenal, a “useful” tool against the utility of philosophical language. Only an
aphoristic, fragmentary writing can harbor the violent, sacred qualities of poetry; only an incomplete form of writing can trace or elucidate the impossibility of
knowledge as a product of theory, by revealing a lack within knowledge itself. For Bataille, the swift violence of aphorism was the most effective method of attacking
philosophical theory, by critiquing all theoretical foundations in a series of broad strokes: “A continual challenging of everything deprives one of the power of
proceeding by separate operations, obliges one to express oneself through rapid flashes, to free as much as is possible the expression of one’s thought from a project,
to include everything in a few sentences...” It was this stylistic strategy that Bataille adopted for circumventing theoretical project, and he understood the difficulty (in
fact, the impossibility) of proceeding any other way. Bataille believed that only a violent theory could usurp a utilitarian one, only a violent theory could clear the way
for violence, which would put an end to the possibility of language. The excess of violence is silent, “the opposite of the solidarity with other people implicit in logic,
laws and language.” In a way, violence consumes theory; its very excess countermines reason. He writes: “the expression of violence comes up against the double
opposition of reason which denies it and of violence itself which clings to a silent contempt for the words used about it.” And there certainly is a violent nature to
Bataille’s nihilistic critique of theory and philosophy. Indeed, he may consider one deficit of philosophy to be that it does not strive violently for silence, but instead
only meekly labors over question after question: “Philosophy cannot escape from this limit of philosophy, of language, that is. It uses language in such a way that
silence never follows, so that the supreme moment is necessarily beyond philosophical questioning. At any rate it is beyond philosophy as far as philosophy claims to
theory, lost in the servility of work, is doomed to struggle from an
answer its own questions.” Philosophical
untenable foundation (a non-arbitrary basis for language) to an impossible end-product (certain

knowledge, besides that of mortality or the discontinuity of beings). Bataille believed that “goal and
authority are the requirements for discursive thought” and that subsequently “discourse forms projects.” If
this goal is knowledge, this authority, for philosophy, is ultimately external and metaphysical, hence
religious. For Bataille, the only authority is inner experience, but its authority is in no way externalized. Outside the
self, there was only chance and the randomness of the universe. “Instead of God, chance.” If theory sought the guarantee of God to support its
claims, it was both misguided and ultimately empty of value. “For those who grasp what chance is, the idea of God seems insipid and suspicious,
like being crippled.” Bataille was no irrationalist, but his critique of the metaphysics anchoring theory finally involved a rejection of reason itself,
in order to purge the mind of any need for a connection with a God or metaphysical foundation. “But the supreme abuse which man ultimately
made of his reason requires a last sacrifice: reason, intelligibility, the ground itself upon which he stands— man must reject them, in him God
must die; this is the depth of terror, the extreme limit where he succumbs.” It is an ecstatic moment of doubt. He believed that “one reaches
ecstasy by a contestation of knowledge.” Bataille’s challenge to theory reaches its zenith as the abandonment or transgression of reason’s
need for God. “Salvation is the summit of all possible project and the height of matters related to projects.” Bataille’s atheology replaces the authority of metaphysical
foundation with the sovereign authority of experience, and the work of philosophy is overcome in an act of transgression: “Compared
with work,
transgression is a game. In the world of play philosophy disintegrates. If transgression became the
foundation-stone of philosophy (this is how my thinking goes), silent contemplation would have to be
substituted for language. This is the contemplation of being at the pinnacle of being.” It is at this
pinnacle that theory becomes a victim, a sacrifice at the hands of a great, “silent” theorist, Georges
Bataille.

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Agamben Link
Agamben reduces sacrifice to a political problem of homo sacer. The failure to fully confront the sacred nature of
violence dooms them to repeating communities of extermination.
Jeffrey Librett 2007

[Professor German University Oregon diacritics 37.2-3]
This philosophical program in Agamben’s early essays guides his later work on the homo sacer-
sovereign relation but also distorts and disturbs the later work in three principal ways. First, it prompts
him to propose an exclusively juridicopolitical understanding of the sacredness of the homo sacer,
effectively scapegoating the juridical sphere for a more broadly theopolitical problem, while placing
the specifically Christian background [End Page 11] of his antinomianism in a misleadingly secular,
rational, and universalist light. Symptomatically, in order to accomplish this juridicopolitical reduction
Agamben must reject Bataille’s analysis of sacrifice—along with the entire modern anthropological
reading of the sacred—out of hand. For this rejection protects his discourse against any sustained
confrontation with the importance of the sacrificial dimension for both what he calls the homo
sacer and his own approach to law in his theorization of the homo sacer..
Second, Agamben’s philosophical program impoverishes the account he provides of the Nazi death
camps as an extreme example of the sovereign- homo sacer relation by making it impossible for him
to appreciate the importance of Christian antinomianism in the formation of National Socialist ideology.
For Agamben’s philosophical orientation requires or presupposes that he ignore or underestimate, first of
all, the sacrificially anti-Semitic dimension of Christian antinomianism—the tendency of such
antinomianism to make Judaism responsible for the ontological desert into which representation exiles us
all. Further, as a consequence of his continuing commitment to this tradition, Agamben cannot see how
important the tradition remains, even if in a displaced form, for Nazi anti-Semitism. I argue that
Agamben’s animus against the letter blinds him to the Christian and sacrificial dimensions of the
Holocaust—he ignores the former and explicitly, emphatically denies the latter dimension—because this
animus represents his own commitment to the Christian antinomianism that, in its racialized National
Socialist form, attempts to rid itself of the letter by sacrificing not only Judaism but the (biologically,
racially construed) Jews. Because his radically antinomian program would become unsettled by his
recognition of its important overlap with the ideological bases of National Socialism, Agamben cannot
ultimately acknowledge the Christian and sacrificial aspects of the Holocaust.
Finally, in Remnants of Auschwitz—his main reading (outside of Homo Sacer) of the significance of the
Nazi death camps—Agamben positions “testimony” as the exemplary instance of the speaking of speech,
the taking-place of language. The result of the destruction of European Jewry becomes here the revelation
of poetic speech as a manifestation of the absolute. Unwittingly, Agamben ends up participating in the
very kind of theodicy he ostensibly wished to avoid by denying the sacrificial character of the
Holocaust in the first place. This observation makes it difficult to avoid the conclusion that his politics is
to be founded not merely on metaphysics, as Adam Thurschwell rightly stresses, but also on positive
religious commitments [see note 1] as in turn his religion—or his messianism—is, as he repeatedly
suggests, to be realized as a politics.2

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Psychoanalysis Link
Reject their mournful psychoanalys, which treats desire as lack rather than glorious excess. Our commitment to risk
destruction for exuberance cannot be second-guessed under the sterile gaze fo the analyst.
In giving expression to the sense of elective communities, Bataille's exposition relies heavily on the figure lovers. Lovers are exemplary of elective community,
finding one another by chance, attracted by one another [p. 40] with a momentum and intensity indifferent to the demands of work and social cohesion. The
appearance of the beloved on the scene falls with the swiftness and decisiveness of an ax, tearing the lover away from all other interests, including that of
self-preservation, bestowing on him the exhilaration of total risk. The beloved shines with a "precarious radiance" that exerts upon the lover a violence and suspension
like that of falling dice, which arrange existence anew. "The lovers' world, like life," writes Bataille, "is built on a set of accidents that give an avid, powerful will to
be the response it desires" (CS 51/20). In other words, the attraction configured by chance requires the lover to stake herself, putting her entire being in play, ut it
requires this as an obsession and not an obligation. As Bataille puts it n On Nietzsche ,
"the desire in us defines our luck," shapes the
chance constellation of beings and events wherein it finds itself, and it does so by risking itself and by
virtue of the risk it itself is (OC 6: 88/ON 73; tm). And that means the coincidence of wills in the face of
chance-which is the contact of love itself-results from a gamble and not a calculation. "It 'risks' me and the one I
love"; it plays us [II inc 'use! en jets, met en jets l'être aiiné], says Bataille of carnal love. The lover's response to the radiance of the beloved is incomprehensible and
outrageous! So much so that "[c]ompared to the person I love, the universe seems poor and empty" (OC 6: 84/ON 69). The example of lovers is of particular
importance because it articulates both the insufficiency and the innocence that dominate Bataille's ontological considerations. In a sense, the tenuousness and
tenderness of lovers reflects a more generally constitutive condition of human life, that "[t}here exists at the basis of human life a principle of insufficiency" (OC 5:
97/IE 81). When that insufficiency is repressed and mythologized into the ontological primacy of the individual, making of sociality a contract added on for the sake
of security, existence is rendered guilty. But guilty
insufficiency is as restricted a sense of human being as Marxist
economic analysis is of community; indeed, both subsist on the reftssal of chance, the one staking its
future on the calculated probability of survival, the other on dialectical necessity. The lovers who
chance everything and are constituted in that risk (hasard), however, exhibit all the "magnificence"
of an existence "created in the image of a universe untouched by the defilement of merit or
intention" (CS 53/21). Their contact is so innocent that it excises itself altogether from the world of
reward and punishment, justification and critique, their insufficiency excessive to the impoverished
world of need. Thus, Bataille insists, "What characterizes man from the outset and what leads up to the completed rupture at the summit is not only the will
for sufficiency, but the cunning, timid attraction on the side of insufficiency" (OC 5: 105/EE 88). And "what attracts isn't immediate being, but a wound" (OC 6:
The
45/ON 22). Excessive insufficiency is an ontological condition, since "[aj being that isn't cracked [p. 41] isn't possible;' writes Bataille (OC 5: 259/G23).
cracked being, however, is at once, at the very point where its self-enclosure ends and it opens onto
the world, exposed and naked, falling outside itself, a lucky being, a chance being. Insufficiency and the excess of suffering that characterizes it is the
condition of play. with it and through it "we go from enduring the cracks (from decline) to glory (we seek out the cracks)" (OC 5: 259/G 23). Community is not,
therefore, an extant division or willed unity within the social order, but a configuration of luck and chance where one being opens onto another and is what
it is only through this opening. The language of exposure and ex-position goes a long way in articulating the structural conditions of this occurrence, but it is
nevertheless insufficient to characterize the contact here at issue. Bataffle insists rather that this opening is a wound and elective community the affective attraction of
one lacerated insufficiency by another. Community is constituted in the overlapping of wounds, the sharing not only of what
cannot be shared, but the sharing of a suffering that is neither mine nor yours, a suffering that does not belong to us, but which gives us to one another, and in doing so
both maintains and withdraws the beings so configured. In community, the other does not complete me but completes my insufficiency, shares the luck which is never
only mine. Elective community is like a lovers' kiss-an exhilarating affirmation of chance, the will to be what befalls it but that its will could never
produce. With respect to the lover, we desire like a gambler wagers. "Like the winnings of a gambler;' writes Bataille, "sexual, possession prolongs desire-or
extinguishes it" (OC 6: 106/ON 86).The sheer momentum of the movement requires that its strength be squandered .
Desire is unsatisfied not
because it fails, but because it exceeds the search for satisfaction, because it is also raw expenditure.
For this reason, desire is misunderstood if it is represented as the infinite tragic movement toward an
inaccessible object, as though desire not only is prohibited by its very structure from attaining its aim,
but as though its structure is fundamentally teleological. The obsession with this logic is always
mournful (psychoanalysis) or moral (transcendental philosophy) and in both cases remains theological
insofar as the concern is governed by or measured against an imaginary sense of propriety or ownership
or end. The desire that binds lovers is not so much directed toward an unattainable sumnut,
however, as it is itself the summit, the point "where life is impossibly at the limit."' Desire and summit can no
more be separated than lightning and its flash. In this respect Bataille is unequivocal: "The summit isn't what we 'ought to reach,' " (OC 6: 57/ON 39; tni)). Rather,
"It's what is. Never what should be" (OC 6: 111/ON 91). If desire is unsatisfied, that is because it exceeds the conservative search for satisfaction, because it is not
teleological, because we are driven beyond the need of satisfaction without being driven to anything, because our unfinished character is in this very way excessive,
The lovers' love is sacred. It does
[p. 42] not impoverished. If love is unsatisfied it is because it has perished, leaving us wasted and ruined.
not belong to the profane order of work and its accumulated labor, the profane and banal order of
capital. For Bataille, the sacred designates an object that is beyond all others in value, but the
sacred character of our carnal love has nothing to do with divine love. The sacrifices brought about
by the love of lovers require expenditure without recuperation; we give up our careers as dancers, we speak on the phone for
hours on end, we waste the day in bed, and we give ourselves over entirely to that waste and identify ourselves with it.

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Link… Anti-Capitalism
The Revolution must be awesome.
A The aff works to liberate the futrue through accumulation of anti-capitalist productivity.
This drive to hoarde dooms them to new cycles of capitalist accumulation. We cannot
escape the ghosts of past oppression through laboring for the future.
Wendling, 2k6. (Amy Wendling, Assistant Professor of Philosophy @ Creighton College. Reading
Bataille Now. Ed. Winnubst. P 64-51)
Sovereignty and the Revolutionary Subject Bataille's discussion of "sovereignty" occupies the entire third volume of The Accursed Share. This volume explains the
final two chapters of volume 1, in which Bataille sketches the forms of consumption characteristic of Soviet industrialization as a modality of the forms of
In sovereign consumption, consumption is not
consumption characteristic of the bourgeois world, as a cruel accumulation.
subjected to an end outside of itself. In the terms of classical Marxism, to act sovereignly is to privilege use over
exchange value, or individual over productive consumption. In a temporal schema, to act sovereignly is to
privilege the present over the past or future. We might recognize sovereign consumption as
noncoercive pleasure or play, consumption that exceeds a productive, work-driven economy. A
sovereign world would have the vision-and the language-to accommodate such a recognition and to accommodate it in a mode other than dubbing it irresponsible,
irrational, childlike, or mad. Let me offer an example of sovereign consumption from the realm of sexuality, a realm that Bataille also highlights in both his fiction and
his philosophy. The compulsory productive heterosexuality characteristic of bourgeois cultures is also part of the coercion to production. Bataille's por [p. 47]
nography, all of which describes nonreproductive if mostly heterosexual sex, fits into his project for this reason. Nonreproducrive sex-sex for sex's sake, queer sex, or
sex for pleasure-are all modes of nonproductive, or sovereign consumption: consumption that does no work, produces no new workers, and uses energy without
recompense. All bourgeois cultural taboos about sexuality are rooted in the coercion to production. For Bataille, the sovereign individual, a version of the Nietzschean
noble or Hegelian master (1991b, 219; 1973, 267), "consumes and doesn't labor" (199lb, 198; 1973, 248). Like Nietzsche, Bataille argues that bourgeois societies-we
Accumulation eclipses
readily recognize them as our own-have made this sort of consumption impossible for us by inverting the values attached to it .
the character of the sovereign: we stockpile, hoard, and hold in reserve rather than use or enjoy.
Our deepest pleasures derive from the hoarding itself: from the security of knowing it is there,
should we want it. Because of this out pleasures remain vicarious, theoretical, indefinitely deferred and
abstract. In an inversion of economic values, the pressure to accumulate eclipses Bataille's sovereign consumption. Similarly,
in Nietzsche, the priest's inversion of moral values eclipses the goodness of nobility. For Bataille, the bourgeois class is the
first-and ultimately only- r revolutionary class: an ascetic class that revolts specifically against the sovereign nobility in favor of
accumulation. The bourgeois revolution over against sovereignty conditions and inescapably schematizes all subsequent
revolution and appeals to revolution. The very idea and practice of revolution is itself bourgeois. Revolution
is a bourgeois concept, and the world in which Bataille finds himself continues to be the world of a
feudal order that is breaking down. Bataille writes: 1 cannot help but insist on these aspects: I wish to stress,
against both classical and present-day Marxism, the connection of all the great modern revolutions, from the
English and the French onward, with a feudal order that is breaking down. There have never been any great
revolutions that have struck down an established bourgeois domination. All those that overthrew a
regime started with a revolt motivated by the sovereignty that is implied in feudal society, (1991b,
279; 1973, 321) Conceptually, revolution demarcates the transition from sovereignty to
accumulation. Revolution will always be connected with the dissolution of a feudal order and the privileges emblematized by
such an order: access to nonproductive consumption, enjoyment, or use-value itself, by right of birth. [p. 48] But why not, rather,
a conception of plenitude and entitlement for all, also by right of birth, instead of competition and struggle for survival?
Such a view is impossible when Nietzschean ressentiment is the impetus for liberation, because
postrevolutionary subjects have learned to demonize the very things that they most desire. This
point goes some distance toward explaining why revolutionary class hatred is insufficiently analytic
and confuses the aristocracy with the bourgeoisie. It also explains why the revolution attempted in 1848 was a disaster. Bataille
writes: The days ofJuue, the Commune, and Spartakus are the only violent convulsions of the working masses struggling against the bourgeoisie, but these movements
occurred with the help of a misunderstanding. The workers were misled by the lack of obstacles encountered a little earlier when the bourgeoisie, in concert with
them, rose up against men born of that feudality which irritated everybody. (1991b, 289) Under this historical error, born of the precipitous mixing of classes, the
particularity of the bourgeoisie is misunderstood. The bourgeois is no lord or lady waited upon, but a money-grubbing, guilt-ridden, obsessive worker, too cheap to
hire help, self-righteously confirmed in his or her work ethic and ascetic way of life. I am not suggesting that the bourgeois does not have privileges. He or she does,
but not in the same way as the feudal lord or lady. The bourgeois goal is always further accumulation, never consumption, and therefore never sovereignty.
Bataille writes, "The masses have never united except in a radical hostility to the principle of sovereignty" (l99lb, 288; 1973, 329). The masses do not unite against
accumulation, except when that accumulation is expressed as sovereignty, and therefore not as accumulation at all, but as consumption. The proletarian

Kirk, Flynn, et al
worker perceives an excessive consumption as the necessary result of the bourgeois accumulation of property. But this is a misperception, for the bourgeois
When the proletarian worker comes to power, a bourgeois revolution recurs
does not enjoy but accumulates.
because this mass worker, the slave ascendant, forever operates in an economy of scarcity:
hoarding resources from the memory of being deprived. The problem of accumulation begins
again. The structure is of actual scarcity, followed by perceived scarcity and hoarding that holds on
as a historical remainder. Never fully overcome, this remainder becomes part of the historically
sedimented fear through which bourgeois cultures function. The problem is that a resentful
revolutionary subject is unfit and unable to enjoy wealth and, by extension, political sovereignty. In
The German Ideal [p. 49] ogy, Marx answers this criticism by claiming that through the process of revolutionary action, the proletariat is able to overcome
accumulated habit and conditioning, learn to consume well, and thus become fit for rule (1978, 193). Only an upsurge of violent revolutionary action will be a
sufficient lesson in consumption, a trial by violence that returns the bondsman back to the scene of the struggle to the death. For Marx, the emergent subject, baptized
the process of revolutionary
by fire, is transformed into a being capable of sovereignty-or dead-at the end of the process. But we have seen that
action instills not liberation but a fearful repetition of servitude, now internal. In short,
transformation is never so neat as Marx would have it. The problem of how subjects who have lived
through oppression wield power has been notoriously sticky, reappearing in all thoughtful
considerations of postrevolutionary subjects.

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B. The alternative sways to the rhythms of the revolution. Only abandoning the security of
programmable protest can exorcise the capitalist demons haunting anti-capitalist
production.
Wendling, 2k6. (Amy Wendling, Assistant Professor of Philosophy @ Creighton College. Reading
Bataille Now. Ed. Winnubst. P 64-51)
Conclusion T remain hopeful about postrevolurionary subjects and the abilities of such subjects to occupy positions of power in
critical and self-aware ways. I also remain hopeful about a notion of sovereignty partially liberated
from the context of oppression in which it was forged and about consumption as
enjoyment that somehow exceeds a context of production, or work. In seeking to keep sovereignty
alive, Baraille too does not envision a return to the oppreslive sovereignty characteristic of a feudal system . Sovereignty
operates for Bataille more as a conceptual, methodological, and practical postulate rather
than as a historical nostalgia. But it is precisely because of this that sovereignty can stage its insurgency anywhere.
Baraille suggests that enjoyaunt itself is the upsurge of sovereignty: "The enjoyment of production is in opposition to accumulation
(that is, [in opposition) to the production of the means of production) . . . [Sovereignty is] neither anachronistic nor insignificant
[because it is the general) condition of each human being" (1991b, 281; 1973, 322, my emphasis). Sovereignty is the
overcoming of the urge to hoard; the overcoming of bourgeois subjectivity; the refusal of
the historical sedimentation of cruelty, accumulation, and the bad conscience, Acting
sovereignly, I leave behind fear, and I stop living in expectation of death. I fear the loss of
enjoyment more than death. Bataille's sovereignty anticipates the existentialist refrain of freedom at any cost. But
unlike in existentialism, Bataille's sovereignty preserves corporeality: I live sovereignly, not despite my feats of
death, but because of my enjoyment of life. For according to Baraille, "if we live sovereignly, the
representation of death is impossible, for the present is not subject to the demands of the
future. That is why, in a fundamental sense, living sovereignly is to escape, if not death, at least the anguish of [p. 51] death. Not
that dying is hateful-but living servilely is hateful" (1991b, 219). Nor has Bataille given up on communism: "Sovereignty is no longer
alive except in the perspectives of communism" (1991b, 261; 1973, 305). For communism is the only kind of thinking and practice
that tries to restore individual consumption, to restore use-value and with it enjoyment as the general condition of life. Bataille
knows that the jury is out on communism: its historical moment is too near to rake a clear view of its implications as a whole.
Because of its historical proximity, communism has fallen between the cracks of dogmatic and politicized positions. Bataille writes
that "the lack of interest in understanding communism evinced by practically all noncommunists and the involvement of militants in
a cohort acting almost without debate-according to directives in which the whole game is not known-have made communism a
reality that is foreign, as it were, to the world of reflection" (1991b, 264). Bataille's comments on communism in volume 3 of The
AccnrsedShare seek to redress this gap, forcing the owl of Minerva to rake her customary flight earlier than usual. Cleansed of
teleology, communist revolution becomes the theoretical and practical pursuit of such enjoyment, of a different kind of liberation.
And in contemporary thinkers as diverse as Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, and Antonio Negri, we find sketches of
non-teleological liberations, which are no longer revolutions that reinstate repressive
subjectivities. Derrida speaks of ongoing, underground practices of resistance (1994, 99).
Haraway insists on the non-innocence and impurity of all positions of resistance that
appear alongside hegemonic cultural ideals (1991, 1997). Addressing the temporal deferral of communism itself,
Negri writes, "Communism does not come in a 'subsequent period,' it springs up contemporaneously as a process constituting an
enormous power of antagonism and of real supersession" (1991, 181). Anticipating these thinkers, Bataille situates the real
interest of communism in its vision of a human being whose general condition is to
play without labor in an economy of plenty. No price must be exacted for enjoyment, and there is no
question of entitlement. The
eclipse of this assertion, in favor of the accumulating and stockpiling
of the means of production for future use, is communism missing its own best point

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We must sacrifice the need to promote the greater tood to break with capitalism.
Yang 2k. (Mayfaire Mei-Hui, Professor of Anthropology @ the U of California, Santa Barbara. Current
Anthropology, Volume 41, Number 4. Aug-Oct. 2000)
Another body of critiques of capitalism emerging in French intellectual circles (Schrift 1997, Botting and Wilson 1998) offers a very different approach from the more
dominant tradition of political economy which privileges the tropes of labor and production. Inspired by Marcel Mauss’s (1967) classic work on primitive gift
economies and by a Nietzschean challenge to the asceticist ethics and utilitarianism of capitalism, these writers include Georges Bataille (1985, 1989a, 1989b),
Jean Baudrillard (1975), Pierre Bourdieu (1977), Marshall Sahlins (1972, 1976), and Pierre Clastres (1987). Instead of taking capitalism as the subject of analysis,
these writings seek to mount their critique from outside capitalism, focusing on the radical difference of primitive economies and the way in which primitive
sacrificial, ritual, and festival economies present oppositional logics and harbor the potential for
gift,
alternative social orders. Despite certain shortcomings, these works are more conducive to re- conceptualizing capitalism in such a way as to
reveal the multiplicity of economies, the tensions between them, and their differential embeddings within the larger social formation. The passage from The
Grundrisse with which we began is also cited by Baudrillard in The Mirror of Production (1975:86–87), but he does so in order to launch his unique critique of
historical materialism. Baudrillard ob jects to Marx’s assumption that the contradictions of labor and ownership in capitalism can be projected back to
precapitalist societies such as primitive, archaic, and feudal forms as their structural pivots. Although Marx
.challenged bourgeois
society, his theories did not go far enough to extricate themselves from the productivist and utilitarian
ethic of capitalism found in such concepts as subsistence, labor, economic exchange, and relations
and means of production. For Baudrillard, this failure to achieve a radical break from capitalist
epistemology means that Marxism liberates workers from the bourgeoisie but not from the view
that the basic value of their being lies in their labor and productivity. Historical materialism is thus
unable to grasp the profound difference between societies based on symbolic circulation and
societies based on ownership and exchange of labor and commodities. Notions of labor and production do violence to
these societies, where the point of life and the structural order are predicated not on production but on symbolic exchange with humans, spirits, and ancesors.
Historical materialism cannot see that these societies possess mechanisms for the collective consumption of the
surplus and deliberate antiproduction whenever accumulation threatens the continuity of cycles of reciprocity (p. 143). It fails to recognize
that they did not separate economics from other social relations such as kinship, religion, and politics or distinguish between infra- and superstructure. It also
perpetuates the Enlightenment invention of Nature as a resource for human production rather than
an encompassing symbolic field whose offerings to humans must be compensated through
sacrifice.13 Baudrillard’s emphasis on consumption and the radical difference of precapitalist formations owes much to the earlier work of Georges Bataille.
Bataille produced a very different kind of critique of capitalism, one focused not on production but on consumption. He found that in archaic economies “production
was subordinated to nonproductive destruction” (1989a:90). The great motive force of these societies was not the compulsion to produce (which unleashes a
process of objectification whereby all forms of life, including humans, become things) but a desire to escape the order of things and to live for the present moment
through exuberant consumption in the form of excesses of generosity, display, and sacrifice. The societies of Kwakwa _ka _’wakw potlatch feasting, Aztec human
sacrifice, Islamic militarism, and Tibetan monastic Lamaism all understood the necessity of nonproductive expenditure (Bataille 1989b). They set aside a major
proportion of their wealth for expenditures which ensured the “wasting” and “loss” of wealth rather than rational accumulation. This destructive consumption allowed
them to avoid the deadly hand of utility and to restore some of the lost “intimacy” of an existence without a separation between sacred and profane. Whereas Weber
(1958) looked to religion to explain the origins of the capitalist ethic, Bataille looked to archaic religion for seeds of a subversion of capitalism. If forms 13.
of archaic ritual prestation and sacrificial destruction of wealth could be reintegrated into modern economies, capitalism would have built-in mechanisms for social
redistribution and for limiting its utilitarian productivism and incessant commodification of nature and culture. Its expansionary tendencies would suffer frequent
shutdowns and reversals. Baudrillard contests the functional explanation that primitive magic, sacrifice, and religion try to accomplish what labor and forces of
sacrifice is engagement in reciprocity with
production cannot. Rather than our rational reading of sacrifice as producing use values,
the gods for taking the fruits of the earth (1975:82–83).

Bataille’s project called for widening the frame of our economic inquiry to what he called a general
economy, which accounted not only for such things as production, trade, and finance but also for social
consumption, of which ritual and religious sacrifice, feasting, and festival were important components in precapitalist economies. In
Bataille’s approach, religion was not an epiphenomenal derivative of the infrastructures of production but an economic activity in itself. A general economy treats
economic wealth and growth as part of the operations of the law of physics governing the global field of energy for all organic phenomena, so that, when any
organism accumulates energy in excess of that needed for its subsistence, this energy must be expended and dissipated in some way. What he proposed in his
enigmatic and mes- merizing book The Accursed Share was that, in our modern capitalist productivism,
we have lost sight of this
fundamental law of physics and material existence: that the surplus energy and wealth left over after
the basic conditions for subsistence, reproduction, and growth have been satisfied must be expended. If
this energy is not destroyed, it will erupt of its own in an uncontrolled explosion such as war. Given the
tremendous productive power of modern industrial society and the fact that its productivist ethos has cut off virtually all traditional avenues of ritual and festive
expenditures, energy surpluses have been redirected to military expenditures for modern warfare on a scale unknown in traditional societies.

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Ba- taille thought that the incessant growth machine that is the post-World War II U.S. economy could be deflected from a catastrophic expenditure on violent warfare
only by potlatching the entire national economy. In giving away its excess wealth to poorer nations, as in the Mar-shall Plan to rebuild war-torn Europe, the United
States could engage in a nonmilitary rivalry for prestige and influence with the Soviet Union, that other center of industrial modernity’s radical reduction of
nonproductive expenditure.14 Thus, Bataille wished to resuscitate an important dimension of the economy, nonproductive expenditure, that has all but disappeared in
both capitalist and state socialist modernity.

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Sacrificial expenditure challenges the logic of accumulation that sustains consumerism
Yang 2k. (Mayfaire Mei-Hui, Professor of Anthropology @ the U of California, Santa Barbara. Current
Anthropology, Volume 41, Number 4. Aug-Oct. 2000)
Scholars such as Jean-Joseph Goux (1998) have pointed to a troubling overlap between Bataille’s views on
luxury and sacrificial expenditure and postmodern consumer capitalism. Consumer capitalism is also
predicated on massive consumption and waste rather than on the thrift, asceticism, and
accumulation against which Bataille directed his theory of expenditure. It exhibits potlatch
features in the tendency for businesses to give goods away in the hope that “supply creates its own
demand”; it collapses the distinction between luxury and useful goods and between need and desire
(Goux 1998). Unlike modernist capitalism, postmodern consumer capitalism is driven by consumption
rather than production. Thus, Bataille’s vision of the ritual destruction of wealth as defying the principles
of accumulative and productive capitalism does not address this different phase of consumer capitalism,
whose contours have only become clear since his death in 1962. It seems to me that despite their overt
similarities, the principles of ritual consumption and those of consumer capitalism are
basically incompatible. If Bataille had addressed our consumer society today, he would have said
that this sort of consumption is still in the service of production and productive accumulation,
since every act of consumption in the world of leisure, entertainment, media, fashion, and home de´
cor merely feeds back into the growth of the economy rather than leading to the finality and loss of
truly nonproductive expenditure. Even much of modern warfare is no longer truly destructive but tied
into the furthering of military-industrial production. Nor, despite its economic excesses, does our
consumer culture today challenge the basic economic logic of rational private accumulation
as a self-depleting archaic sacrificial economy does.15 Furthermore, capitalist consumption is
very much an individual consumption rather than one involving the whole community or
social order.

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Alternative Solves…
Alternative Solves… Extincton

Only a confrontation with the violence of human ritual can prevent extinction
Wendy Hamblet, Asst Prof Philosophy at Adelphi University, 2004
[Sacred Monstrous: A Reflection on Violence in Human Communities p. 7-13]
The ontological assumptions and logical mechanisms that structure our actions and are played out in
our experiences issue from an existential ground far deeper and more complex than can be fathomed
by rational analysis, and they exercise a power far greater than that of rational argument-a fact that, until the postmodern era, perhaps Nietzsche alone hilly appreciated.
Nevertheless, persistent mechanisms structuring sequences of actions can be rationally analyzed. They can be identified, tracked and employed as an interpretive device to indicate possibilities
for future actions. Persistent mechanisms have been traced over lifetimes, over generations of lifetimes, over centuries and even millennia. This is because sequences of actions repeated over
long periods of time become inscribed into the bodies of the participants, just as, over time, sequences of practices become inscribed into the "bodies" of participating cultures-into [p. 8] the
painful recollections of their elders, into the submissive timidity of their womenfolk, into the fleshy expectations of their young. Bodily practices come to settle deep into the resentment-riddled,
guilt-prone, swaggering or timorous materiality of their progeny. Actions repeated over long periods become "ritualized." That is, they take on, by virtue of their time-defying persistence, a
portentous seriousness--a "sacred" import-in the minds of practitioners and their inheritors. This is how traditions are formed and come to assume a "timeless validity." The practices that mark
individuals as belonging to a cultural group, and that mark cultures as self-identical over time and distinct from alien others, come eventually to be obsessively regulated with strict governance
over the place, time, and circumstances of their repetition. All manner of valuable-and not so valuable-practices become part of a people in this way. People become wedded to their customs
("rituals" in ethological parlance). Giving up what we do comes to be equated with giving up who we are, forsaking the glory of our pasts and betraying our destinies. Thus rituals acquire a
time-honoured weight in a community. Their communicative power extends the identity and indeed often, in the beginning, the very life of the group across vastly fluctuating politico-economic
circumstances. Rituals comprise a medium of continuance, a powerfully conservative force, precisely because they compose a kind of communication, the most concrete kind, Rituals, as
sequences of actions rooted in pragmatic interactions, convey the traditional "wisdom" that regulates the life of the group-matters of hygiene, sexual practice, marriage custom, rites surrounding
birth and death, and especially rites of passage initiating newcomers to full membership in the fold. Many of the practices persisting in this way were originally adaptive and many remain crucial
to the healthy continuance of the group. Whether they remain adaptive within the evolving social unit or not, their "goodness" is categorically affirmed with each repetition by each new
generation, perceived as empirically tested and reconfirmed across time. Ritual traditions thus become emotionally-significant, utterly tangible, materially embedded realities, and though their
origins and functions may have become utterly lost to the group's memory or shrouded in myth, their communicative power remains fully functional even without memory or
ritual traditions do not simply convey rationally-identifiable and meaningful

understanding.' Therefore
information-ideologies. In fact some rituals do not convey any explicit messages at all, but, rather,
they comprise an in-form-ing process that directly "affects" (in all the multivocal senses in which this
term is classically understood) the addressee as much as the addressor. Many scholars, like Mircea
Eliade, have argued that the truths expressed in myths comprise ontological and ideological
disclosures that dictate visions of cosmic reality and patterns of dominance and exchange. However, if
myths are the symbolic expression of deeper, older, experiential truths, as contemporary scholarship now agrees, then it is reasonable to accept the claim of many
anthropologists that our thinking and our behaviors today remain in-form-ed by the practices repeated by our distant forbears. [p. 9] Experiences speak to the core of
our psyches. They seep into the very sinews of our bodies and carve themselves into our feelings and desires so that new 'needs" crop up where old practices have
gone before, new needs that now require satisfaction. Walter Burkert explains this biological process called "imprinting": Biology has drawn attention to the
phenomenon of "imprinting," an irreversible modification by experience, distinct from normal learning by trial and error; it is most notable in early stages of life. In
fact, religious attitudes seem to be largely shaped by childhood experience and can hardly be changed by arguments; this points to the imprinting effects of ritual
tradition. 4 There are other indications that ritual practices have powerful and lasting effects. Since the rituals practiced by early human communities were almost
entirely rituals of murder, torture and expulsion, long-standing rituals may very well have manipulated the evolutionary chain. After all, ritual murders, ritual
castrations, and ritual expulsions are very real extinction, very real closure of certain genetic lines, very real ejection from the genetic pool of the social group. Thus,
the powerful individuals who oversaw the ritual life of the community (priests, kings, medicine men) could not only self-select for survival. They were in a position to
fix and manipulate the biological-as well as the religious and moral-composition of the group and define, by elimination of the "contaminating" elements, the markers
of identity peculiar to it. 5 For a number of sound reasons, then, the power of ritual histories and their mythological expressions needs to be taken seriously. Thus it
seems important for thinking human beings to examine not only their present rituals and their recent histories, for traces of the in-form-ing violences, but to consider
as well the rituals that were practiced by our ancestors in the distant past of human time. Granted, this examination of self and species may expose things more
comfortably left concealed. As Edward Shils has asserted in his article "The Sanctity of Life": To persons who are not murderers, concentration camp administrators
or dreamers of sadistic fantasies, the inviolability of human life seems to be so self-evident that it might appear pointless to inquire into it. To inquire into it is
embarrassing as well because, once raised, the question seems to commit us to beliefs that we do not wish to espouse and to confront us with contradictions which
seem to deny what is self-evident.6 Thus I do not expect that an exposure of the continuity between our current supposedly benign self-defining practices and the
bloody practices whereby human communities have historically taken shape will prove reassuring of our assumptions of the moral progress of the species. But,
hopefully, this exposure will require us to look at ourselves differently. Perhaps it will unsettle the selfrighteous assumptions peculiar to Western capitalist nations and
force us, as [p. 10] individuals, to question our own behaviors and suspect a personal quota of the legacy of violence. Ancient rituals have proven fascinating to
experts from a wide range of disciplinary fields. Psychologists, behaviorists, classicists, philologists, literary theorists, historians, zoologists and anthropologists have
contributed to the rich discourse on this intriguing subject. What strikes me as uncanny is the number of correspondences among the various theories, correspondences
all the more significant for the diversity of inductive bases grounding the various disciplines, for the dissimilar approaches and methods of investigation, and for the
diversity of assumptions and impulses driving their pursuits for insight. I shall assume that the mysterious correspondences among the theories can offer us a firm
ground for thought about the nature of our species' early ritual histories. The Exaggerated and the Grotesque The debate over ritual's penetration into human psyches
and cultural forms first began in the 1960s with the shocking claim of behavioral physiologist Konrad Lorenz that human adaptive rituals, designed to ensure species
survival, had turned maladaptive early in the dawn of human time, thwarting the healthy development of the species in the direction of a grossly exaggerated
aggressiveness. In his masterpiece, On Aggression >7 Lorenz does not simply claim that humans maintain beastly instincts, but, rather, that the beasts are more
adaptively evolved than humankind and thus less disposed than humans to murder their own kind. Lorenz explains that, in early humans, the development of cultural
artifacts rapidly outpaced biological evolution. Humans developed an arsenal of weaponry of unparalleled destructive potential and variety of form, while failing to
develop the inhibitors, natural to animals, that would discourage their turning those weapons upon each other. Lorenz's point is precisely that humans are different
from animals (a point lost to many of Lorenz's more critical readers8). Animals adapted more effectively to environmental changes along a slower evolutionary path
so that healthy braking mechanisms kept pace with their destructive potential. Human beings were not so "evolutionarily" lucky. Intra-specific aggression is

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originally an adaptive process, Lorenz explains. It develops in species to serve four important selective

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Alternative Solves… Extincton

functions. First, it helps to maintain an even distribution of animals over a given inhabitable area. Second, it aids in sexual selection. The rival fight naturally selects
the hardier, more aggressive fighters to command both territorially and sexually. Thereby a third benefit is accomplished. Family defense is enhanced since the
selective process favors the evolution of particularly strong and courageous defenders of family and herd. Fourth, intra-specific aggression leads to the establishment
of a ranking order in the group, a feature Lorenz notes as crucial to the development of advanced social life in higher vertebrates. Ironically, the "pecking order" that
[p. 11] results from aggressive rivalry ultimately brings stability to the community since it creates a social situation in which fights between the members are limited
to the service of sorting and ordering functions." intra-specific aggression, then, serves important functions in the healthy evolution of the animal group and remains
adaptive where its limits are intact. Under restricted conditions, it accomplishes the cooperation and cohesion that hind the group and enhance its chances for survival
in hostile environments and over against other animal groups. Humans, however, are distinguished from animals in this regard: humans evolved very quickly into the
kinds of beings who were not restricted by their environment. They gained a relative freedom ti-om environmental exigencies very early in their evolution, beginning
with their mastery of fire. This remains the crux of the problem for humankind's exaggeratedly aggressive urges. In a particularly disturbing passage, Lorenz
tells: Obviously, instinctive behavior mechanisms failed to cope with the new circumstances which culture unavoidably produced even at its very dawn. There is
evidence that the first inventors of pebble tools, the African Australopithecines, promptly used their new weapon to kill not only game but fellow members of their
species as well. Peking Man, the Prometheus who learned to preserve fire, used it to roast his brothers; beside the regular use of fire lie the mutilated and roasted
bones of sinanthropos pekinensis himself. !O Lorenz explains that when intra-specific aggression exerts selective pressures uninfluenced by environmental pressures,
it can develop in a direction that is markedly maladaptive. Evolution of the species can then take a turn that can he irrelevant or detrimental, or even catastrophic to the
Aggressive behavior can, more than any other qualities and functions,
survival of the species.
become exaggerated to the point of the grotesque and the inexpedient. Humans have been particularly exposed to the
ill consequences of maladaptive selective processes, according to Lorenz, The "grotesque and inexpedient" destructive intensity of the human being is a "hereditary
evil" that drove the earliest men to slaughter their fathers and brothers and neighbours. Lorenz asserts that selective processes gone astray are what we are still
witnessing today in elaborate displays of aggressive prowess, those perverted elaborations of swaggering machismo and overblown bravado still practiced in
obsessively patriarchal societies. In nature, fighting is an ever present phenomenon and the weapons and behavior mechanisms that serve that process are highly
developed. Yet fights between intra-specific rivals rarely end in death. Encounters between prey and predator may result in death but this does not constitute
aggression, on Lorenz's terms. According to Lorenz, a victim sought for food does not incite "aggressive" impulses any more than a chicken in the refrigerator incites
human aggression. Animals stalking food do not display the "expressive movements" that signal aggression. On the other hand, those signals are clearly displayed in
the [p. 12] way young boys thrash each other in the schoolyard or young men brawl in barrooms, or eyed in the heated explosions characteristic of political debates
or sports contests (among both participants and spectators). 1 venture the speculation that the
mere invention of atom bombs by beings
as flammable as we are testifies to the perversion of human aggressive impulses toward "the
grotesque and the inexpedient." Lorenz distinguishes between rituals transmitted by tradition and those passed by heredity, but the distinction
is a moot one, Rituals that have begun as traditional practice, like the redirected aggression ritual (a ritual that prevents aggression toward the mate or another intimate
member of the social group by diverting it toward a more remote or defenseless object) become, after long practice, part of what Lorenz calls "the fixed instinct
inventoiy"2 of the species. This indicates that rituals
take hold one way or another. They will eventually become
identifying marks of the group whether consciously accepted, enforced and transmitted to the young, or
absorbed into the bodies of the participants to develop into needs that become, in turn, driving forces
that require their means of discharge. Perhaps the most stunning among Lorenz's many shocking claims is the priority of aggression rituals
to rituals of love, nurturance and friendship. The latter, explains Lorenz, developed over many generations as trans form at ions of "ceremonies of appeasement,"
rituals meant to redirect aggression by placating the attacker. Intra-specific aggression-selective practices grown "grotesque and inexpedient"-are fundamental to the
human world, thousands of years older than love or friendship, and source and origin of the latter. Lorenz asserts: intra-specific aggression can certainly exist without
its counterpart, love, but conversely there is no love without aggression. 13 Even laughter in its original form was probably an appeasement or greeting ceremony
developed from redirected aggression.' 4 I suggest that we can still witness its aggressive roots in the cruel way that children (and many adults) ridicule others who are
mentally or physically different or culturally alien to the home group. Lorenz's project is to demonstrate that, by observing the natural behavior patterns of the animal
world, we will discover not only much that will remind us of our own behavior, but much that warns us that our behavior may not be under the strict governance of
reason that we believe it to be. Lorenz is committed to collapsing the popular fallacy (the fallacy upon which was originally founded the discipline of anthropology)
that all that is "natural" is adaptive. Our inclinations may all too often follow blindly the patterned materiality of our histories and, since our histories are primarily
murderous, that is a problem for healthy human engagement. Many people today still refuse the evolutionary explanation for the development of humankind on earth.
It not only contradicts their religious myths and challenges the notion of human centrality in the cosmic drama, but the claim that we are evolved from apes offends
their sense of species supe [p. 13] riority. However, if Lorenz is correct, the common origin of human and beast is not at all the problem. It is the differences between
us and the animals since the forking in the evolutionary chain that causes our greatest problems. Lorenz has fallen from the foreground of the discussion of human
nature largely because he employs the language of "instincts" to speak about human behavioral dispositions. The concept of instinct has lost favour in philosophical
and social scientific discourse not merely because that term reminds us of the discomfiting fact of our animal ancestry, but because the admission of instinctive
behaviors suggests a "biological fatalism" that precludes the viability of analytical solutions to human problems." Instincts are morally blind and thus it is disturbing to
think our behaviors under their sway. But it is important to note that Lorenz himself was no biological fatalist. He firmly believed that we can, over time, alter even
fundamental dispositions. But his final analysis of the human situation was not overly optimistic, as the concluding words of his book testify: how abjectly stupid and
undesirable the historical mass behavior of humanity actually is. 16 Lorenz does not intend to clear human beings of the charge of maladaptive behaviors. Rather, he
wants the history of that inaladaptativeness to stand as an ethical warning to the species.
Unless we develop healthier rituals of
engagement, we are doomed to the biologically just deserts of species extinction.

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Alternatives Solves… Ethics

Sacrifice confronts the horrific violence dripping through our language of justice and
peace. The aff dooms us to excessive murder in the name of the good.

The problem with equating Bataille and Kierkegaard is that the depiction of sacrificing the low for the
high suggests a more conventional moral position than Bataille puts forth, one where sacrifices are
understood as good, in the name of a greater good, whether we reach this good or not. This is precisely the position Bataille sets out to
resist, however, and not only because, as he puts it, "we do not possess the excessive store of strength necessary to attain the fulfillment of our sovereignty" (1962,
167). The problem is more one of the value or direction of our exertions than of their strength or brute force. Some of our exertions are good but others are evil.
Sovereignty actually takes us in the latter direction, with our sacrifices authenticated but in the name of
something other than the good, perhaps something not higher but lower. Bataille's own words to this effect are that "Evil-an
acute form of Evil-has a sovereign value for us. But this concept does not exclude morality: on the contrary, it demands a 'hypermorality" (4973, unpaginated preface). indeed, his view is that our
ultimate aspirations will be misunderstood unless we see them less on the side of good than of evil. When he calls for a hypermorality, he demands we recognize that in fully accounting for
ourselves, the prohibition of evil aspirations does not suffice. Here Bataille invokes Sade to represent sovereign aspirations as entirely gratuitous, what Bataile calls "the need for an existence
freed from all limits" (1962, 162). Sade is an exemplar to show us that we have such aspirations. What we can see in him, says Bataille, "is the ruinous form of eroticism. Moral isolation means
"pleasure is • . . close to
that all the brakes are off; it shows what spending can really mean" (1962, 167). One thing such spending shows, according to Bataile, is that
ruinous waste" (1962, 166), with "[e]rotic conduct ... the opposite of normal conduct as spending is the
opposite of getting" (1962, 166). In this view, we regularly engage in behaviors that actually amount to
an extravagant exercise in" squander[ing ourselves] ... to no real purpose" (1962, 166). Moreover, these include both
sexual behaviors as well as others far more extreme, &uta&ty aaˆ munlcc are further steps in the same direction. Similarly prosti tution, coarse language and everything to do with eroticism and
infamy play their part in turning the world of sensual pleasure into one of ruin and degradation. Our only real pleasure is to squander our resources to no purpose, just as if a wound were bleeding
away inside us; we always want to be sure of the uselessness or the ruinousness of our extravagance. We want to feel as remote from the world where thrift is the rule as we can. As remote as we
can: that is hardly strong enough; we want a world turned upside down and inside out. The truth of eroticism is treason. (Bataille 1962, 166-67) The purpose of offering a series of such strong,
disturbing characterizations is not to dismiss ordinary moral values but to supplement them, to say that such values are not enough for us. At the same time that we outlaw and condemn all of
these ruinous squanderings, our sovereign aspirations demand them. The list includes brutality, murder, prostitution, swearing, sex, infamy, ruin, degradation, and finally treason. These are
activities we must prohibit, activities we cannot allow ourselves to participate in, but which at the same time identify who we are. Hypermorality instructs that while we cannot take up such
behaviors, we cannot not take them up either. We cannot not squander ourselves in these and other ways, many of which are offensive of mention to ordinary morality. To help emphasize just
, the communal production of
how offensive, there is a passage near the beginning of Death and Sensuality depicting the spectacle of primitive ritual human sacrifice
a wasteful expenditure witnessed in common. Bataille uses the word "sacred" to describe the experience
of the witnesses, underlining just how fundamental and revelatory to us he thinks such events were.
Disturbing as it must be to us, he holds that the event of the spectacle of ritual sacrifice has power of
conveying a profound meaning, This sacredness is the revelation of continuity through the death of a
discontinuous being to those who watch it as a solemn rite. A violent death disrupts the creature's
discontinuity; what remains, what the tense onlookers experience in the succeeding silence, is the
continuity of all existence with which the victim is now one. Only a spectacular killing, carried out as
the solemn and collective nature of religion dictates, has the power to reveal what normally escapes
notice. (Bataille 1962, 16) It is a disturbing thought that only a spectacular killing, that only events of this
kind, can satisfy the human desire for the experience of sacred meaning. Along with a fear of our own immoral excess comes
the question of whether hypermorality invites unleashing this destructive excess. Would Bataille like to see us unleashed, perhaps in the style of Charles Manson, to produce our own spectacles
of ritual sacrifice? Certainly Bataille describes irrational violence as having an undeniable meaning, one that is revelatory of the sacred continuity alluded to in the previous citation. Soon after
that citation he similarly asserts that we seek "the power to look death in the face and to perceive in death the pathway into unknowable and incomprehensible continuity" (1962, 18). Where do
described above. In other words, to acquire the power to
we find this power? We find it in transformative experiences akin to the sacrifice
know the unknowable, the production of transformative violence is the key. In the name of this power,
the production of violence is not an accident but a goal. This production is the key to the
transformative experiences that give our lives a sense of intensity, depth, and meaning. Hence, we always have
ample motive to seek such experiences, to seek to bear witness to transformative violence. Given such ample motive, violence and spectacles of such violence will be produced. Moreover, no
morality will ever be able to put an end to these productions. No morality has the power to stop the persistence of the sacred violence in our lives, since this violcnce is the only key we have to
the experience of the miraculous, of the sacred. As for Charles Manson, Bataille would certainly try to understand Manson's and our own violence in this context of the sacred, of our need for
depth and meaning. The production of transformative violence is fundamental to our being, whether we are conscious of it in this way or not. He, then, would not regard Manson's production as
an anomaly, as unlike what he himself would be driven to produce. Yet in our lives there are also limits. It is unlikely that Bataile would applaud Manson for the same reason he ultimately
rejects Sade. They are both indiscriminate; they both go too far. "Continuity is what we are after,' Bataille confirms, but generally only if that continuity which the death of discontinuous beings
can alone establish is not the victor in the long run. What we desire is to bring into a world founded on discontinuity all the continuity such a world can sustain. De Sade's aberration exceeds that
limit. (Bataille 1962, 13) In other words, our wasteful consumption must also have limits. To actually approve of our own self-destruction goes too far. Later on in Death and Sen suality,
Bataille continues, Short of a paradoxical capacity to defend the indefensible, no one would suggest that the cruelty of the heroes of Justine and Jullette should not be wholeheartedly
abominated. It is a denial of the principles on which humanity is founded. We are hound to reject something that would end in the ruin of all our works. If instinct urges us to destroy the very
thing we are building we must condemn those instincts and defend ourselves from them. (Bataile 1962, 179-80) This passage is crucial for understanding Bataille's ethics. Usually Bataille writes
on behalf of the violence that remains unaffected by absolute prohibitions. Prohibitions cannot obviate this transformative violence. There is always ample motive to produce the experiences of
sacred transformation, i.e., to transgress the prohibitions. Yet self-preservation is also a

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fundamental value for BatailIe there is also ample motive to resist the violence that denies the value of the well being of life itself. As he says in the second of the above passages, we must
condemn what threatens to destroy us; our sovereign aspirations can be taken too far. In another passage he speaks of our need "to become aware of... [ourselves] and to know clearly what... [our]
It is when we are ignorant of these aspirations that
sovereign aspirations are in order to limit their possibly disastrous consequences" (1962, 181).
we are most vulnerable to them, enacting them anyway, albeit inattentively. In the end, hypermorality asks us to encounter our aspirations to evil, to join in what Bataille
calls "complicity in the knowledge of Evil" in order to construct what he calls a "rigorous morality" (1973, unpaginated Preface). What does it mean to encounter such aspirations, to join in such
complicity? Bataille's hypermorality requires that, as a culture, we appreciate the value of becoming more active in our productions of violence. From his earliest writings to his latest, Bataille
the decline of the practice of sacrifice in the modem world, beginning in the West, and he
always bemoaned
always believed that such a decline only obscures our productions of violence, rather than doing away with them or the needs
from which they stem. Two closely related discussions of this appear in his early essays "The Jesuve" and "Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh," where Bataille
suggests that the decline of the practice of sacrifice has been far less than a blessing for us. He argues that the production of violence continues, the danger of this production continues, although
in the most unrecognizable forms. The examples given in the essay "Sacrificial Mutilation" emphasize both how easy it is to distance ourselves from this danger as well as how terrible such a
danger could be. They include a man twisting off his own finger and a woman tearing out her own eye, both terrible examples of our strange, cruel, and uncontrollable needs for expenditure.
Along similar lines, as a commentary on events of this kind, Bataile argues, The practice of sacrifice has today fallen into disuse and yet it has been, due to its universality, a human action more
sacrifice, with the goal of answering a need as
significant than any other. Independently of each other, different peoples invented different forms of
inevitable as hunger. It is therefore not astonishing that the necessity of satisfying such a need, under the
conditions of present-day life, leads an isolated man into disconnected and even stupid behavior. (Bataille
1985, 73) Here as throughout his writings, Bataile emphasizes two key aspects of the decline of sacrifice
that we ignore at our own peril. In the first place, he contends that the violent need that ritual sacrifice
was once able to address remains with us despite all optimism to the contrary. We don't put violence on
display in the same ritualized fashion, but the need remains constant. We've only become less aware of it
in ourselves, and less aware of ourselves as those who have need of such violence. Thus Bataille's first
point is that the need for nonproductive usages does not diminish when it is denied. His second point is
that this denial in which the need persists represents a decline in self-awareness, one with obviously
dangerous consequences. No longer do we congregate as a community to witness the violence we
desire to bring into this world and to affirm our lack of control over this violence, our lack of control
over this desire. We no longer congregate to produce the sacrificial spectacle, to produce thereby a
community of mutual complicity in the knowledge of the sacred continuity of being. We no longer
allow ourselves to organize spectacles in the name of the sacred that enact that which exceeds the good.
Such spectacles would have to violate every stricture of human rights known to us today. Yet we have not changed, according to Bataile, except for becoming less known to ourselves than ever.
We are now more than ever the condemned on the way to becoming the destroyed by way of imagining ourselves as the good. Even an utter catastrophe like the Holocaust does little to alter our
naive self-image. In his short piece on David Rousset's book The Universe of the Concentration Camp, Bataille refuses to side with the moralists because moralistic self-delusion here is our
problem, not our solution, There exists in a certain form of moral condemnation an escapist denial. One says, basically, this abjection would not have been, had there not been monsters .... And it
is possible, insofar as this language appeals to the masses, that this infantile negation may seem effective; but in the end it changes nothing. It would be as vain to deny the incessant danger of
cruelty as it would be to deny the danger of physical pain. One hardly obviates its effects flatly attributing it to parties or to races which one imagines to he inhuman. (Bataille 1991, 19) Based on
what we have already seen in this paper, Bataille can never accept the moralist's claim, distancing us from the purveyors of evil, no matter how attractive it is to join hands at a particular moment
of victory over an oppressive enemy. It would be inconsistent for him to specify a particular set of disagreeable behaviors and state that they aren't human, that they aren't ours. Even at this point,
standing in the ruins, the main point would be to obstruct our all-too-ready inclination to find ways of denying the cruelty at the heart of us all; to interfere with our desire to attribute all cruelties
to the monstrous one or the aberrant few. For hypermorality, this cruelty is precisely what we need to take into account of ourselves, rather than to deny it as the evil of others. How is this to be
done? Bataille faces a serious dilemma that a contrast between his hypermorality and Aristotle's morality helps to show. The goal of morality is to take virtuous behaviors into account, to make
them part of our lives by learning through habituation to enjoy right behaviors with respect to our pleasures and pains. Aristotle says that it is the job of "legislators [to] make the citizens good by
forming habits in them .... and it is in this that a good constitution differs from a bad one" (1941, 952, 1103b). He continues saying that "the whole concern both of virtue and of political science
is with pleasures and pains; for the man who uses these well will be good, he who uses them badly bad" (1941, 955, 1105a). As he puts it, "We assume ... that excellence tends to do what is best
with regard to pleasures and pains, and vice does the contrary" (1941, 955, lIlO4b). How do we become excellent? We begin with instruction by role models, who demonstrate the praiseworthy
behaviors and the rule to follow in practice until we follow it automatically, internalized as part of our second nature of moral character. Such learning is by imitation of those who delight in
shunning the wrong pleasures, who delight in withstanding the right pains. Such imitation is difficult but noble and good, making us excellent. In contrast to these virtuous displays serving
Aristotle's purposes of moral instruction, what about the kinds of spectacles or displays Bataille proposes with his hypermorality? Whereas Aristotle's are displays of virtue, Bataile's would be
closer to displays of vice. Whereas the former invite imitation of the right relations to pleasure and pain, the latter would invite imitation of morally wrong relations. In the former case we have a
heroic role model. In the latter case, the role model would be closer to the opposite, to the traitor, the practitioner of vice; the role model would be closer to Sade. Hence, finally, whereas in
Aristotle, the learner easily accepts the identification with the role model and wants to continue to imitate his/her virtuous pursuits and aversions, in the latter case, such identifications would
hypermorality proposes that we
have to be tenuous at best, always fraught with ambivalence and would even be unacceptable. In this sense, Bataille's
witness ourselves as we can never accept ourselves. In the sacrificial spectacle, we witness ourselves
far removed from the Aristotelian model, closer to vice than virtue, closer to evil than good, closer to
the other's pain than to his or her pleasure. For Bataille, only by witnessing ourselves in this way (as
we are) do we begin to take into account the cruelty that lies at the heart of us all. Still, how far in the direction of
praiseworthy cruelty can we really go? Bataille bemoans the decline of the practice of ritual sacrifice, seeing in our cultural and personal excesses of violence the same need at work as in the
ritual sacrifice, albeit in a far more destructive fashion. But there can be no clear solution to this problem we face, even assuming it has been correctly understood and portrayed. Bataille himself
admits in discussing Sade that we cannot consent to practices that are overly destructive On the other hand, only the sacrificial spectacle would seem to be effective in showing us to ourselves,
with the prospect of such showing lying at the heart of hypermorality itself. What to do in the face of such a dilemma? It is obviously horrible to exercise cruelty, yet perhaps even worse to do
, "Our
nothing, to find no way to praise and pursue this exercise. Doing nothing, we can have the pleasant ease of remaining ignorant of our situation and dilemma. But as Bataile explains
ignorance only has this incontestable effect: It causes us to undergo what we could bring about in our
own way, if we understood" (1988, 23). Pie! asks us, in support of Bataille, to consider the only options
we have, Will. - [we] continue to "undergo" what.. [we] could "bring about." that is, to let the surplus
provoke more and more catastrophic explosions instead of voluntarily 'consuming" it, of consciously
destroying it through ways .[we) can choose and" agree to"? (Pie! 1995, 104).

Kirk, Flynn, et al
The tragic spectacle of sacrificial violence enacts the best ethical relationship to the horror
described by the 1AC. As we wound, we ourselves are broken. If we flay the affirmative,
we also wear their skin.
David Allison, Prof Philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook, 2009 [The Obssessions of George Bataille:
Community and Communication ed. Mitchell/Winfree p. 122-123, 127]
To communicate with another is to break through his integrity, his independence, his autonomy, his
nature-to intrude upon him, unsettle him, wound him. Communication takes place when beings put
themselves at risk, each putting himself and the other in the region of death and nothingness.
Communication is suicidal and criminal. It is striking that the longing to communicate with those most unlike ourselves-with sacred and
demonic beings-so dominates ancient humanity. The outer zone where the sphere of work and reason comes to an end is the sacred--sacrum,
Sacrifice-of goods, other animals, even of our firstborn children--is the most significant of all
"separated.”
human acts (OC 2: 1 3/VE 73). It is as fundamental as the satisfaction of needs. The word
sacrifice-sacrum ficio---etymologically means "to make sacred.” In a sacrifice something supremely
precious-our finest harvest and livestock, our firstborn son-_is set aside from all use, separated
absolutely from the profane sphere. What is set apart from all profane use is separated absolutely,
definitively, in being destroyed. The knife that tears open the body of the sacrificial victim, tears
apart his protective hide or skin that kept him functioning, releasing blood and the writhing turmoil of
spilt organs, reveals the violence of a stag or boar taken from the wilderness, the inner violence of its life, reveals anonymous untamed forces in the child.
The shaman, the priest, Abraham penetrates into the sacred zone, and there, in the violence of the knife and consuming fire, sacrifice reveals the sacred. The
sacrificial priest leaves the profane sphere to perform the sacrifice and act in the name of the people who identify with his act. Bringing to him of their harvest and
Those who perform sacrifice identify
livestock, the beast of the wilderness, or their firstborn child, they participate in his deed.
themselves with the victim. The[p. 123] Aztec priests covered themselves with the blood of the
sacrificial victims, excoriated them, and pulled the skin of the victims over their own naked bodies. And
we who consign to the sacred sphere our resources, the game from our hunt, our own children, identify with them, identify with the victims. The stag or wild boar
sacrificed would have sustained and nourished us, How could we not identify with our own firstborn child, sacrificed to the mountain god Jahweh? At the moment of
the blood sacrifice, the participants find their own identity plunged into the void. When the fire blazes upon a sacred victim, it blazes too on us .
We slash
open, crucify, or burn in holocaust the divine force that has been revealed in the sacrificial victim. The
slashings and fire we inflict on what is precious to us-our finest livestock and harvest, our firstborn son
wounds us irremediably. We communicate with wounds inflicted and self-inflicted. The communication
takes place between humans and sacred beings, each rent, wounded, exposed to one another by their
wounds. God and humans communicate in the violation of the integrity of their natures, in crime.
Continued….
Tragedies, whether the real tragedies of individuals or those represented in tragic theater, hold us in anxiety and
in fascination. Our energies are expended in contact with terrifying cataclysms of nature and with individuals
torn asunder, whose agonies rend our self-sufficiency. Tears and grieving disconnect the future and recognize
that the force and meaning of the past have come to an end. The forces of life hold on with strength and will to the
present with all its irrevocable loss, inconsolable with words and projects. Tragic art holds humans in thrall to
losses that they themselves have not known. Communication occurs when doctors, nurses, and truck drivers go to
the 50 million people today displaced by wars and famine, to perform surgeries in dusty tents, distribute sacks of
food, nurse children dying of AIDS. [p. 127] "What seems 'faultless' and stable-a whole that has a look of
completion (house, person, street, landscape or sky). The 'fault,' or defect can appear though" (OC 5: 266/C 30). They, too
are incomplete. They are not crystallizations in the intersections of the universal laws of the universe. "On the same level you find-the ridiculous universe, a naked
woman, and torment" (OC 5: 267/C 31). In current language, communication strongly denotes communication among humans; but Walter Benjamin found biologists
wondering whether in fact all animate organisms communicate, whether communication belongs to the nature of animate organisms. However, communication there
meant the transmission of information. In Being and Time, Heidegger, replacing the substantive account of things with the relational account of implements, reduces
things to the force that informs the user. The term communication, as Bataille uses it, to denote the contact of a sovereign being with what is other, is first the
communication with the sacred and demonic; it is also communication with other species, inanimate
things, the material universe. It is with our incompleteness, our orifices gaping open, and our
unanswerable questions that we communicate with a world out of joint, spread about us disconnected, a concatenation
of riddles, fragments, and dreadful accidents.' Indeed, communication with the sacred and with natural things is prior to communication with other humans.

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Alternatives Solves… Ontology

Sacrifice enacts ecastic community, celebrating a non-servile ontology beyond enslavement
to fear of loss
I propose to assume as a law that human beings are never united with each other except through tears
or wounds, an idea that has a certain logical force in its favor. When elements arrange themselves to
create the whole, this is easily produced when each of them loses, through a tear in its integrity, a portion
of its particular being for the benefit of the communal being. Initiations, sacrifices, and festivals
represent just such moments of loss and communication between individuals.78 This passage
captures the important interconnectedness of sacrifice, ontology, and community in Bataille's
thought. Human beings are not united by self-interest or altruism; they are not bound together by fear,
faith, or contract. Com p. 184 munity begins only when useless, violent, and wasteful activities
force humans to confront death, calling the integrity of their selves into question. This
confrontation with nonbeing is liberating because it generates a nonservile ontology: Indeed, in this
state of being, one is not even a slave to one's self. Bataille writes: "The sacrificial tear opening the
festival is a liberating tear. The individual who participates in the loss is vaguely aware that this loss
engenders the community sustaining him."" Community and liberty thus paradoxically arise during
frenzied, violent moments of self-disintegration, when communication between individuals is
nondiscursive and ecstatic. The group Ac6phale, Bataille's final collaboration of the 393 as, attempted to use sacrificial practices in
order to conjure a Bataillian community into existence. Unlike the Cercle or ContreAttaque, Acbphale was a secret society whose members
expressed no interest in engaging in politics or organizing a mass movement. Instead, Acéphale met and conducted sacrificial rites in the
Saint-Nom-la-Bretbche forest outside Paris. In an effort to practice what the College had been content merely to debate, Acéphale sought to
reconstitute the sacred in everyday life. Its goal, according to Stoekl, was "to stimulate the rebirth of the kind of social values Bataffle had
espoused in the Critique sociale essays: expenditure, risk, loss, sexuality, death ?'8° In creating Ac6phale, Bataille wished to bypass politics,
which had proved to be only an impediment to the formation of his sacrificial community. The members of Acéphale ominously contemplated
conducting a real human sacrifice, but no one was willing to play the role of executioner. The failure of these sorcerer's apprentices-the term used
by Bataille to describe Acéphale's "work"-illustrates the exhaustion of Bataille's concept of sacrifice. There is a direct connection between
Bataille's reading of the regicide of Louis XVI and Acéphale's conjuring of a sacrificial community. The sacrifice of the king and of politics
prepares for the possibility of a community formed by a tragic but joyful disposition toward death. Death is vital to communal formation because,
as Richmart remarks, "it reveals to all persons both their finitude and extension into unbounded ecstasy."81 In notes titled "Joy in the Face of
Death:' Bataille ruminates on the regicide's principal mystery, which inaugurated the discdurse on sacrificial violence: "Human hearts never beat
as hard for anything else as they do for death?' Maistre marvels at soldiers' enthusiasm on the battlefield. Sorel reflects on the attractive,
contagious, and sublime qualities of martyrdom. Bataille responds similarly to the importance of the experience of sublime violence:"It seems
that a sort of strange, intense communication p. 185 is established among men each time the violence of death is near them?' Batailie, like Maistre
and Sorel, believes that the individual experience of death promotes a kind of ecstatic communication that possesses important social effects.
Unlike them, however, Bataille points to a fundamental disruption of being as the impulse to communicate: The grave, decisive change that
results from death is such a blow to spirits that, far from the usual world, they are cast, transported and breathless, somewhere between heaven
and earth, as if they suddenly perceived the dizzying, ceaseless motion possessing them. This motion then appears to be partly dreadful and
hostile, but external to the one threatened by death or the one dying; it is all that is left, depriving the one who watches the dying as much as the
one who dies. Thus it is that, when death is present, what remains of life only lives on outside, beyond and beside itself .
Ecstatic
experience-life that "lives on outside, beyond and beside itself"-is the basis for the kind of
communication that renders Bataillian community possible. This experience is instantiated
sacrificially, allowing the sacrificer to participate in the unrecoverable loss of the sacrificed. The
cumulative effect of such a confrontation with death is ontological destabilization, which Bataille
characterizes as a permanently wounded self. For Bataille, the regicide involves such a total loss that
it augurs the formatioi of a community in which all political concepts, including man himself, have
been sundered, leaving nothing behind save unemployed negativity itself. While participating in Ac6phale, Bataille
held that sacrifice's tearing of being would join humans together through communication that invoked a unique. communality: "Those who look at death and rejoice
are already no longer the individuals destined for the body's rotten decay, because simply entering into the arena with death already projected them outside

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themselves, into the heart of the glorious community of their fellows where every misery is scoffed at ...•• The community is necessary to them in order to become
aware of the glory. bound up in the instant that will see them torn from being.""

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Sacrifice breaks with the ontology of goods, enabling ecastic community beyond the
humanist subject
Chris Gemerchak, PhD Philosophy from Katholike University in Leuven Belgium, 2009
Bataille assimilated the wisdom of the underground man who realized the inhumanity of subjecting
oneself to reason and mathematics, calculation and prosperity, and who asserted the positive value of
letting pure caprice and whimsical desire command one's actions, even if-no, precisely because-it goes
against reason and common sense. Alternatively, I could have asserted that the foundation of Bataille's
ethics rests on a refusal to submit to the homogeneous economy of goods insofar as that is to forfeit the
fullness of our humanity, that one should not treat others as things insofar as that is to turn oneself into a thing among things, self-same, separate and
isolated. Neither response would have been wrong, but neither do they get to the obscure heart of the matter-the very obscurity of which is why it was and remains a
very challenging question, one that has stayed with me ever since that sweltry afternoon. For while it may be true that there are obvious answers, it is not necessarily
the case that they do justice to the question, or even understand the question in a deep sense. On the one hand then, it is possible to specify clearly Bataille's views
concerning ethics or morality as those terms are commonly understood: namely, as concerning the deliberative choices of a subjective agent, an individual who
autonomously determines the best course of action in the interest of the greatest good and according to existing norms. For it is precisely this style of normative,
utilitarian ethics that Bataille will challenge on the grounds that it is inadequate to the breadth and ambiguity of life. And this is because every term involved
in such an ethics-deliberation
and action, but particularly individual, interest, good and should—is
representative of the very type of humanist ideology and representational thinking that Bataille sees
not only as distorting but also as alienating with regard to the human province. This is not to suggest that
Bataille advocates an unrealistic, anarchistic gesture of eliminating morality full stop. In fact the existence
of traditional morality is rather convenient in terms of having something against which one can resist.
What he contests rather is the hegemony of an ethics that adheres to the principle of reason, which,
as he asserts frequently, comes down to the calculations of interest for the good of the individual or a
community of individuals and is oriented toward survival in the future rather than life in the present. If he is to contest
the ethical perspective that guarantees the sovereign rights of these terms-'individual' and 'community,' 'good' and 'interest'-then the first step is to undermine the
stability of these terms themselves. To approach the core of Bataille's thought with respect to being "ethical"-or ethical being-we will thus follow Bataille's
methodology as he tries to unearth the component elements of traditional ethics from their sedimentation. This method involves a double gesture. The
first
move is a radical questioning-or better, putting at risk-of the ethical individual, the [p. 65] humanist
subject (individual or group) as the paradigm of an ethical being. That which undermines the individual perspective, and
thus is at the core of his ethical thought, is a moment of communication, an "inner experience" (l'exptirience intérieure) that reveals the existence of community. This
will become clearer as we continue. For now let us say that his new ground and paradigm of ethical thought will be community. The second move then, as just
suggested, will be to rethink this alternative "ground" of ethics and to rethink "the Good" which is at stake, a task that will engage us in an exploration of his thought
concerning the transformation of communal being, the being of community No Interest in the Individual Bataille was infamous for the lengths to which he would go
to undermine our habitual perspectives, and the fundamental target at which his various excesses took aim is the one habit it seems hardest for us to unlearn-the
individual perspective. As indicated above, the first step in any articulation of his morality is the calling into question of the subjective agent itself, the human subject
understood in the traditional sense of an active, self-reflexive identity or ego (the "I" or the Cartesian subject) who autonomously determines a course of action based
upon prior knowledge of its goals and in conformity with a doctrine of human goods and norms. In question is effectively any notion of a transcendental subject with
The central problem to address when articulating Bataille's ethics of community is thus his
good intentions.
critique of the ideology of the subject qua individual, which is the primary obstacle to overcome if
community is to emerge. Yet Bataille knew how recalcitrant our mentality is when it comes to challenging this notion. He knew that the individual
perspective is not to be swept away with a single gesture. Indeed, one of the cornerstones and constants of his thought is precisely the attempt to undermine the notion
of a self-identical subject-the subject as a thing-or the notion of identity full stop. One might even go so far as to say that the entirety of his anthropological and
religious thinking rests on the notion of the insignificance of the individual in isolation. This assertion, however, brings with it an entire shift of perspective
concerning our activities and values, our capitalist economy and parliamentary democracy, and of course our ethical doctrines. For with this challenge to humanist
ideology as a starting point, all those ways in which an individual affirms oneself and pursues one’s own interest-right down to the very desire to persevere in being, to
stay alive, to banish death from life-are viewed as betrayal of the truth of existence: the truth of "intimacy." Intimacy, to be sure, is a term which resists positive
definition. It is not a state that [p. 66] can be achieved.
It is simply there in anguishing and ecstatic moments of self-loss
or coniniunication: anguishing because of the violence enacted on the individual who has the impression
of being torn, of dying to oneself as an individual; ecstatic in that the habitual perspective of being a
separate individual-of having one's own existence apart from others and the things of the world-dissolves
in communication with the outside, a brief moment of release that effectively extends one beyond (one's)
being and out into nothingness. These terms will be clarified as we continue. In short then, the challenge
of intimacy or communication to the hegemony of individuality is the hidden foundation of Bataille's

Kirk, Flynn, et al
identifiable morality. The challenge is precisely this: intimacy and communication occur in moments
where one puts one's existence into play by assuming the risk of death (se niettre ell'/e,4), such that
failure to do so, to flee from death or fear for one's continued existence in the future is to forgo the
truth of "sovereign" (free and useless) existence and accept a life of servitude: "Play ... leads to the
inoperable spirit (ci l'esprit désoeuvré)" (OC 5: 234/US 208; tm); play has "as its end the indifference
to every end, being only an occasion to show a soul beyond the concerns of utility" (OC 12: 106). To the "obvious" answers to the question of Bataille's
ethics that I mentioned above, we could thus add something like this: to exist in the service of some interest, to subordinate present life to an end or future goal, to
judge actions according to their usefulness, consider the greater good or even think of consequences beyond the present moment ... in short, to work or employ one's
negativity in any way is a betrayal of the humanity within us, is a "fragmentation" of existence and the time of existence.
Continued…
It is possible to pinpoint almost exactly the crossroads where this difficulty first became explicit. We jump to July 4, 1939, the date of Bataile's final lecture to the
loose association of influential intellectual figures known as the "College of Sociology?' Political forces and technological rationality had combined to bring Europe to
a state of critical mass, With the dying breath of the College, Bataille articulates what he claims to be the "final question of man, or, to take it further, the ultimate
question of being," which hangs in the balance as the group disbands, and its members go their separate ways. Now during his lecture leading up to the formulation of
this 'ultimate question,' Bataille refers to certain cardinal notions that had emerged in his most recent writings and that he would continue to reformulate and refine
with an increasing sense of urgency in the years that immediately followed.' Foremost among these is one of his most influential concepts penned in the seminal article
from 1933 ("The Notion of Expenditure," OC I: 302-20/yE llô-29) and pursued under different guises for the better part of thirty years, namely, the "principle of loss"
or "nonproductive expenditure.” With this he means violent, destructive, or "unreserved" expenditure
that is blind to and in defiance of recompense and that generates sacred, symbolic, or nonutilitarian
value.
In addition to, and perhaps in contradiction with, the active sense of loss as excessive expenditure that had
often dominated his thought to this point, in this final lecture to the College he also emphasizes one of his
other fundamental principles, the "insufficiency" of being(s)," which brings with it mutually implicative
ontological and anthropological connotations. First, the principle of the insufficiency of being rejects the
traditional notion that Being is something substantial and knowable (or even something at all), some
higher identity or essence that serves as a foundation and goal of existence. Being, rather, is no-thing and
nowhere, is movement and pure difference. Second, this principle also establishes the radically desirous, open, or social nature of the
human being. According to the insufficiency of being, the human [p.70] being is desire pure and simple: "revealed nothingness, an unreal emptiness, the presence of
the absence of a reality,"" which seeks to recognize itself in another being of desire, another emptiness housed within an external form. If one is not to close one's eyes
to an upsetting consciousness of the truth of existence, then one must be willing to acknowledge the fact that one is essentially nothing, an absence misguided by
reflection into thinking it is a presence. It is just such a revelation that Bataille, in countless ways, attempts to bring to light. But as suggested earlier, the principle of
individuation is always putting up its defenses to this abysmal truth.
Consequently, the insufficient or "incomplete" nature of the human being entails that the being in question is always and everywhere searching for something that will
provide it some self-assurance and restore its sense of identity. If the subject is essentially insufficient or incomplete it will attempt to fulfill or complete itself outside
itself, whether through production, acquisition, or merger. It would seem then that the human
being is defined by a fundamental
impasse: the desire to lose is coupled with desire as insufficiency, which quickly translates into the
desire of the individual to "lose itself in some other ['vaster being"] that exceeds it" (OC 2: 369/VE 250),
to gain being by losing it. Again, he declares a fundamental 'need' for loss as expenditure: "Men,
assembling for a sacrifice and for a festival, satisfy their need to expend a vital excess.” This "loss,"
however, is not exactly irrevocable: "The individual who participates in loss is obscurely aware that this
loss engenders the community that supports him" And this brings us back to Batailles "ultimate question,"
which reads as follows: "[I]t is difficult to know to what extent the community is but the favorable
occasion for a festival and a sacrifice, or to what extent the festival and the sacrifice bear witness to the
love individuals give to the community" (OC 2: 371/VE 251). This simple opposition, proving
undecidable, would have a crippling effect on Bataille's attempt to identify a real community that would
remain faithful to his inviolable principles.

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Sacrifice shatters the ontologies of wholeness we use to rationalize the world
Alexander Irwin, Asst Prof Religion Amherst College, 2002
[Saints of the Impossible: Bataille, Weil, and the Politics of the Sacred p. 161-163]
Because sacrifice resists rational or moral purpose, Bataille provides it with a radically different charge. During most of the,
rg3os, Bataille views sacrifice as a form of collective violence, but one that no longer operates within the domain of people's
beliefs, serving to structure and bound them in politically meaningful ways. Instead, Bataille conceptualizes the effects of
sacrificial violence ontologically because he identifies reification, not moral decadence, as the fundamental modern problem. In
his view, capitalism, utilitarianism, and parliamentarianism have reduced human beings to servile things. The spirit of Bataille's
diagnosis of the human condition is not, prima facie, dissimilar from that of either Maistre or Sorel. They, too, argue that the
morally regenerative properties of sacrificial violence will serve to heal human beings of their reification. But because Baraille
includes morality itself among those phenomena that contribute to the decadence of the modern age, he rejects his predecessors'
concern with a return to moral and spiritual wholeness. Bataille criticizes the goal of human wholeness as a
religious and philosophical fantasy that serves only to enslave human beings to the ideal dictates of
reason and morality. Furthermore, even if wholeness were desirable, sacrificial violence, as Bataille
conceives of it, no longer possesses a regenerative capacity. Rather, sacrifice is a violent operation
that exposes human beings to death, loss, rupture, and fragmentationelements of accursedness that
Bataille treats as essential components of humanity. Rather than allowing human beings to flee
from their base humanity into realms of idealism and purity, such as religion, philosophy, or politics,
Baraille suggests that sacrifice offers them a visceral reminder that their humanity is thoroughly
intertwined with what humans reject as radically orher, namely, death or not -being. Thus, the
antidote to reification in the modern age consists not in regenerative morality or reconstructed
wholeness, but rather in a confrontation with what Bataille calls the accursed share (ha part
inaudite).14 For Bataille, unity and wholeness are antithetical to being human, which avoids
reification only when it confronts its own absence, an experience achieved through sacrifice.
Although Bataille radically rejects many of the previous definitions of sacrificial violence in the
French discourse, he retains its most important feature: communality. Even in Bataille's hands,
sacrificial violence illustrates the paradox of a community built around violent destruction. Maistre
characterized sacrificial loss conservatively: death reinvigorated preexisting, divinely sanctioned, social
and political norms. The French revolutionaries and Sorel viewed sacrifice more creatively as the
collective taking of a life for the sake of a new sociopolitical order. Because Bataille defines sacrifice as
violent, unrecoverable loss, it contributes to a concept of community fundamentally opposed to those
envisioned by Maistre, Sorel, and the revolutionaries. Republicanism, monarchism, and
anarcho-syndicahsm all presuppose the possibility of authority, even if they posit radically different
embodiments of it. Baraille's concept of sacrifice gives rise to a community in which the act of
foundation never coheres. What binds the community together is the shared experience of
unrecoverable violent loss. Sacrifice cultivates community by fostering a nondiscursive communication between human
beings whose sundered individuality permits the formation of an ecstatic bond. This bond gives rise to a metapolitica.l
community in which sovereignty has neither basis nor dominion. In Bataille's view, sacrifice cannot participate in the
construction of republicanism, monarchism, or anarcho-syndicalism because, like the obelisk, those ideas of community betray
their sacrificial origin by positing the possibility of a renewed erection of authority. Baraille's concept of sacrifice invites
reflection on what community would be if it were never to recover what was violently destroyed to create it. This is a
fundamentally antipolitical notion of community insofar, as it subverts all the concepts that have historically made politics
possible. Although Maistre, Sorel, and the French revolutionaries agree on little politically, all posit a theory of sacrificial
violence that requires replacement or recovery of that which sacrifice destroys.

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Alternative Solves… Resistance

Rational political discourse fails. Only claiming the sacred enables resistance to power.

How, in the context of a country without a future, a society whose moral bases had collapsed, a
civilization poised on the brink of suicide, was it possible to find meaning in life, to articulate ethical
positions, to speak of beauty, loyalty, love? No area of individual or collective life appeared unaffected
by the contagion of meaninglessness, violence, cynicism, and sham (RCL, ). The language itself in which conventional philosophical and political discourse had
been conducted appeared corrupted to the point of uselessness. For many, words like "democracy," "freedom," or "revolution" -to say nothing of the still more vacant
abstractions of theology and old-fashioned moral philosophycould elicit nothing but indifference, or a sneer. The old values were unquestionably defunct. But how
(from what materials and according to what guidelines) were new values to be discovered or "created" (BOG II, a73)? Even if new, legitimate values were somehow
to emerge, moreover, it seemed doubtful they could be disseminated. Public
debate on ethical and political questions -whether
in the academy, the intellectual and artistic world, or the parliamentary institutions of bourgeois
democracy -appeared to lead nowhere. Rational discussion degenerated into demagoguery or
remained powerless in the face of immediate or threatened violence. An endless proliferation of
mutually exclusive theories, claims, and programs filled a plethora of short-lived reviews, bulletins,
journals, books, and manifestos, yet the outpouring of frantic intellectual energy generated few if any
meaningful results. To argue political and moral [p. 215] positions honestly appeared impossible when
the very language of discussion had been undermined by propagandistic misuse and when Hitler's
example seemed to demonstrate conclusively that not ideas but brute force ultimately charted the course
of history. How, even if good ideas could be devised, could they ever be convincingly expressed and
allowed the chance to exert influence? The better political and social ideas were, Weil argued in the
concluding pages of Reflections, the more likely they were to challenge fundamental societal
assumptions, and the more certain it became that media enfiefed to the status quo would caricature
or ignore these ideas, effectively preventing them from ever becoming matters of serious public
debate. These are the challenges with which Well and Bataille found themselves confronted in the
19305. They are issues that will perhaps strike us as not wholly unrelated to our own experience. The
difficulty Bataille, Weil, and their contemporaries confronted was the necessity both to create (or
discover) values and to communicate them. The social context rendered these tasks urgent and inseparable. As Weil again noted in the
later pages of Reflections, the structures of education, information, capital, and power in European society had created a situation in which those possessing the skills
and tools for effective communication had nothing meaningful to say, while those with insights into the truth of the social mechanism were deprived of means of
reflection and communication, How (if at all) could the two dimensions -truth and expressive power, content and form - be brought together? The problem may again
strike us as not without relevance to our own historical moment.
CONTINUED…
The elusive, "sliding" quality of the sacred was one of the concept's most important advantages from Bataille's and Well's perspective. In closing, I would like to focus
on a particular aspect of this elusiveness. Connected to the Durlcheimian polarity between "right" and "left" forms of sacrality is another fundamental ambiguity, one
Bataille and Weil turned to advantage. In both Bataille's and Weil's work, passages can be found in which sacredness appears as what can best be termed a textual
phenomenon: a particular way of writing or representing beings, relations, and practices: above all a mode of writing/performing one's self. Seen from this angle ,
sacredness or sainthood would be above all a style of self-production and specifically a
literary-political attitude of mobile otherness adopted with respect to the normalizing, monopolar,
monolithic power Bataille labeled "homogeneity" and Well "the social." On this reading, sacredness
appears not as a particular, fixed content or attribute, but as a shifting stance of perpetual self-giving in
and as self-distancing: a stance that maintains the gap between the self and the social order, holding
open that separation or wound as the free space for critique and spontaneous creative action. If the
sacred is seen in this way, sacredness or "sainthood" might be understood as a tactical self-positioning
comparable to that described by David Halperin in his discussion (within the framework of an impressive piece of contemporary hagiography) of opportunities for a

Kirk, Flynn, et al
Foucauldian queer political praxis. Halperin analyzes queer "identity" not as a rigid essence but as a tactical posture of resistance. Queerness is not a stable feature,
disposition, or set of predetermined behaviors. Instead, for Halperin, queer "identity" is or should be an "eccentric positiouality" or "strategic possibil [p. 221] ity"
defined by its oppositional character and subject at all times to shifts and revisions.'° As another theorist has succinctly phrased it, "The great virtue of 'queer' [lies]
precisely in its undefinability; [...] The point is precisely to refuse the accepted identities, the expected and predictable alignments or divisions." Whatever its ultimate
fate within the field of contemporary

Kirk, Flynn, et al

theory, the notion of queerness as "positionality" illuminates a significant aspect of the way in which notions of the sacred functioned for Bataille and Well. Bataille
and Well frequently discussed sacredness, heterogeneity, or sainthood in terms that allow these qualities to appear as names or markers for a strategic stance or
"potentially privileged site for the analysis of cultural discourses." 12 For these figures, sacrality names an intellectual style, a pattern of self-positioning in political
spaces. Sainthood as practiced by Weil and Bataille is a systematically critical orientation to society and politics, always operating from a stance of heterogeneity and
risk. Sacrality is the performative assertion of alterity and unmasterability. As Weilian good or as Bataillean evil, the
sacred is a "sliding" positionality of resistance to the normalizing effects of dominant social value systems, the perpetual reassertion of a critical "nonidentity. 1113
This sort of nonidentity, much more than a haughty rejection of communal bonds as such, was what Weil intended with her famous refusal to "live in a setting
[milieu] where one says 'we' and to be a part of that 'we'" (AD, z6). To position! construct oneself as sacred is to model a movement confounding hegemonic forces'
efforts to assign stable, manipulable social and political identities (e.g., "woman," "Jew," "philosopher," "leftist," or "homosexual") correlated with predictable
patterns of thought and behavior. Weil's and Bataille's mobilization of religious language in political space functioned as a means to elude standard grids of
ideological localization and control. Yet numerous passages can also be cited in which both authors describe and invoke the sacred not as a "textual" phenomenon,
but as a real and potent force capable of exerting a concrete influence on the world. This is patently true of Weil's absolute good (object of the saint's love and radical
obedience), which she routinely characterizes as a binding and transforming energy, an "active force" (E, 336) whose powerful effects on individual human be [p.
222] ings and communal milieus can be discerned, by the qualified observer, with a precision and assurance comparable to those attained in the prediction,
verification, and measurement of physical forces by the natural sciences." Meanwhile, Suzanne Guerlac has shown convincingly that Bataille,
too, is
concerned with the sacred not merely as a textual phenomenon or literary trope, but as a real
affective force capable of generating real political effects. In contrast to his later admirers in the Tel Quel group, preoccupied
above all with textual transgression and with "a question of philosophy, and of its end," Bataille himself pursued "the religious question of the sacred (which, since
Durkheim, is related to the implicitly political issue of social cohesion)." As Guerlac indicates, this preoccupation has been a source of discomfiture for Bataille's
antireligious admirers and exegetes, who have generally sought to "evacuate" the dimension of the sacred from their interpretations of his work." Which is it, then? Is
the sacred a critical positionality, or is it an explosive emotional force unleashed through certain forms of individual and collective practice and capable of altering the
shape of what it may no longer be appropriate to call "subjectivity"? Is sainthood a stance one adopts, a theatrical mask one borrows, or is it a heterogeneous force that
the
borrows us (and that transforms, transmutes, perhaps "decreates" us in the process)? Bitaille and Well refused to decide this question in binary terms, and
protean (call it "formless" [BOG I, 117]) character of the sacred enabled this equivocation. Therein lay
a part of its appeal. "The sacred" could point simultaneously and equally to an "eccentric positionality"
and to an emotional energy, a "force agissante" unleashed through the communicative practices
these writers sought to model. Precisely this double valence made the concept valuable for the
revisionings of political and literary practice on which Bataille and Weil embarked, Yet if sacredness is a
force (the motor of the "sovereign operation"), it is never in these two writers the unilateral discharge of
power. On the contrary, sacrality/sovereignty manifests itself as perpetual "revolt," never "the
exercise of power" (BOG V, zar). Sacredness is the mobile, multifaceted contestation of all efforts to fix
power in rigid hierarchies that place some human beings "at [p. 223] the disposal" of others (RGL, 52,
83-84). That this stratification and the resulting exploitation regenerate themselves perpetually within any
complex social order as a consequence of its unavoidable division of labor only means that resistance to
oppression must be just as tirelessly renewed. Sainthood became for Bataille and Weil a way to name
(and, by naming, summon) the real energy of moral wakefulness necessary for this ongoing effort. The
sacred as Bataille and Well embodied it was not the engine of a theocratic tyranny, nor an investment
of certain structures of power with supernatural legitimation, but rather the endless contestation of all
forms of authority that would confiscate autonomy or claim unconditional allegiance. The divine (the impossible) provided leverage for the relativization
of all merely human, merely "possible" power claims. As the religious insurgents of all eras have known, men and women inhabited by the holy assume a
"marvelous," though no doubt also dangerous, freedom vis-à-vis the established social order (BOG I, 270). For Bataille and Well, such freedom - which may become
an "obligation" (EL, 8o84) - is the liberty to venture perpetually into those "places" (social, political, religious, erotic) that are "most repugnant to decent society"
(BOG I, 270). It is in the experience of this transgressive freedom that the emotive and political dimensions of sainthood (its dual aspects as active force and critical
positionality) come together. It is to participation in this interminable performance, the never-completed "rites of liberation" (270), that Bataille and Weil incite.

Kirk, Flynn, et al

Sacrifice enacts a headless community, radically challenging all hierarchy and authority
Because the obelisk is like an authoritative pile driven into a foundational swamp filled with sacrificial blood, it cannot return to the French what they, in a fit of
revolutionary fervor, destroyed. In the Place de la Concorde, spatially speaking, an empty notion of authority surrounds a traditionally elevated one. As Denis Holier
writes, "Bataille's Place de la Concorde ... is the place where loss is incarnate-embodied in a man who identifies himself by his lack. The headless man,
Acephalus, rises up where the guillotine let in the freezing gales of empty space."' Holier's observation reveals
Bataille's agreement with Maistre: the regicide was a profoundly evil act, which Maistre lamented and Bataille celebrated. Rather than auguring the return of God, as
Maistre had hoped, the regicide killed him, leaving in his place an absence so complete that it forbids the accumulation of transcendental power. Negativity or
destruction without recompense: such is the fruit of the regicide and the basis for Bataille's concept
of sacrificial violence. The regicide does not make way for the obelisk, which represents none other than
the next generation's sovereign intentions. Rather, the regicide calls into question any future claim to
authority, leaving the Place de la Concorde to represent not a place of peace, but rather one of permanent disorientation and subversion. Somewhere under the
obelisk remain the impression of the guillotine and the blood of the king. Informing Bataille's novel interpretation of the regicide, antipathy toward morality, and
subversion of power-indeed, his attitude toward politics in to lo is a trenchant rejection of idealism. He rejects all traditions of thought that value the ideal or elevated
over the material or base. One of his most eloquent critiques of idealism appears in an early essay in which Bataille argues that the big toe is "the most human part of
the body." Using the big toe as a metaphor for seductive baseness, Bataille explains that human beings reject aspects of their uniqueness when they celebrate all that is
noble and pure in the hope of masking all that is low and impure: Although within the body blood flows in equal quantities from high to low and from low to high,
there is a bias in favor of that which elevates itself, and human life is erroneously seen as an elevation Human life entails, in fact, the rage of seeing oneself as a back
and forth movement from refuse to the ideal, and from the ideal to refuse-a rage that is easily directed against an organ as base as the foot. 'O Bataille uses the image
of the big toe to criticize the metaphysics of elevation. Humans err in their belief that humanity is uniquely an ideal achievement. Idealism is reason's attempt to hide
the truth about being human from human beings. This error led human beings to demonize the very part of their bodies that Bataille argues is the most human, an
exercise in self-loathing. Without the "grotesque" big toe, humans could not stand erect, nor could they differentiate themselves from beasts. This observation recalls
Maistre's claim that the greatest human achievements are mired in the worst. Bataille's celebration of the big toe is a reminder that what it means to be human is
inescapably deformed, dirty, base, immoral, material, and incapable of rational thought. At the same time, however, Bataille does not seek to elevate the big toe to a
higher status. Its value consists paradoxically in its abjectness. Like the regicide, the big toe symbolizes a permanent destabilization of the boundaries established by
idealistic thought. When the former royal executioner Sanson guillotined the king, neither monarchists nor republicans imagined that the sacrifice would be a
permanently destabilizing loss. Both the Roman and Christian sacrificial traditions instructed otherwise. During the Revolution, the examples of Brutus and Jesus
illustrated that different forms of sacrificial violence could be used to destroy as well as create authority. In the minds of the revolutionaries, and then later in the
writings of Maistre and Sorel, the concept of sacrificial violence became inextricably linked to the formation of both political and spiritual communities bound
together by traditionally elevated notions of power. Sacrifice accomplished this remarkable task by skillfully manipulating the sacred categories that structure people's
perceptions of authority. Impurity and purity, sin and redemption, moral decadence and regeneration-these are the dueling sacred polarities altered by sacrificial
bloodshed in the French discourse. Sacrifice negotiates be-tween these terms by fostering different forms of exchange. Kill the king, the revolutionaries believed, and
the republic would be purified. Embracing a similar logic, Maistre claimed that the Terror would punitively cleanse the French of their secular hubris. More than a
hundred years later, Sorel argued that proletarian martyrs would regenerate working-class morality saving-in the religious sense of the word-French society from
bourgeois decadence. In all three cases, the sacrificial death of one human being generated new social bonds by neutralizing and reconfiguring the sacred bases of the
old ones. Sacrificial loss thus came to be associated with the creation of new morality, new authority, and new political regimes. Sacrificial Innovation in the Work of
Bataille Bataille's interpretation of the regicide as a sacrifice that cannot recover what it has lost presents a radical challenge to the Roman and Christian sacrificial
traditions as well as to their incorporation into the French discourse on sacrificial violence.
Unrecoverable sacrificial loss is a violent
operation that only wastes. In producing nothing useful, sacrifice subverts all idealistic distinctions.
Stripped of idealism, Brutus' filicide and Jesus' crucifixion can no longer participate in the task of
foundation because sacrifice loses its ability to produce popular authority or redemption. In order for
authority to be legitimate or for redemption to cleanse bodies or souls, the sacrificial operation must be capable of establishing stable, hierarchical boundaries between
sacred polarities. Cathartic, expiatory, and redemptive exchange permits this delimitation to take place because violent loss is balanccd against some kind of
psychological, spiritual, or moral gain. However, regicide that does not recover something from the violent destruction of the king-that does not make sacred in a
particular way-is useless. In this way, Bataillian
spcrifice permits no establishment, no obelisk, no higher source of
power or authority, because it is a total loss without sacred exchange. It has no capacity to establish
order, as, for instance, between sacrilegious and divine bloodshed, or between force and violence. It
can neither recover, nor make useful, the pure sacred authority of the king. Only if conceived in
ideal and compensatory terms can the collective taking of a life delineate between high and low,
pure and impure. If the desire to practice the art of politics were compared to the myth of Icarus,a
favorite of Bataille's, then sacrifice would correspond to the sun's blinding, wasted energy, which
melted Icarus' wings, reminding all human beings of the fragility of their activities and their
existence. Bataillian sacrifice challenges human beings to confront and test the limits of their being,
without ever allowing for the reestablishment of order. It is a violent and ecstatic state of permanent
alternation between purity and impurity With no finality, no conservation, and no reserve, Bataille's

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concept of sacrifice reflects not just a critique of idealism but also, more specifically, of Hegelian dialectics. Bataille attended A.lexandre Kojève's lectures on Hegel
during which Kojéve famously declared history to be over. Bataille's confrontation with Hegelian philosophy left him feeling "suffocated, crushed, shattered, killed
ten times over."" If history was over, what was left to do? In a letter to Kojêve, Bataille wondered what it meant to act freely in such a condition: "If action ("doing")
isas Hegel says-negativity, the question arises as to whether the negativity of one who has 'nothing more to do' disappears or remains in a state of 'unemployed
negativity' Personally I can only decide in one way, being myself precisely this 'unemployed negativity' (I would not be able to define myself more precisely). ,12

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A2 A2
A2… Bataille misunderstands “x” (e.g., excess)
This argument is irrelevant--we don’t have to prove Bataille is right about everything to
win that the aff is utterly incapable of addressing the state’s inherent tendency to excessive
violence
Sacrifice provides the key to understanding violence in human societies

Turner argues that sacrifice permits human collectivities to cope with the "negative sentiments" that
accumulate as a result of hierarchical social structures. His point about the origin of sacrificial rites is political:
the distribution of power in any society-ancient or mo4ern-produces conflict, which, in turn, finds an outlet in
sacred practices. Turner overemphasizes the extent to which sacrifice serves as a valve for the release of social
pressure. Sacrifice has too many differ-' ent modalities and meanings to be reduced to one function. At the same
time, however, Turner makes clear that one important function of sacrifice is the reduction of conflict, which he
characterizes as the fostering of "generic human communality" Unlike René Girard, who limits the role of sacrifice
to the reduction of intracommunal violence, Turner recognizes that sacrifice is also a ritual stage upon which
communities play out social, political, and economic conflicts, sometimes with the intention of renovating
them, sometimes with the goal of reconfiguring them altogether.32 In claiming that sacrifice fosters communal
unity, Turner assumes a distinct political attitude toward sacrifice. This attitude hinges upon his recognition that
sacrifice is an ambiguous and process-oriented form of violence that alternates between structure and chaos.
According to Turner's terminology, sacrifice is, on one hand, a prophylaxis, which functions to maintain, reinforce,
or construct socio-moral boundaries. In this form, sacrifice is highly ritualistic, a preventive talisman against
communal disaggregation and harm. On the other hand, Turner writes that sacrifice "may be an indicator of the
dissolution of all structuralfines or boundaries, an annihilator of artificial distances, restorative of
communitas however transiently,' 133 In contrast to prophylactic sacrifice, this description of sacrificial "abandonment" captures the capacity of sacrifice to dissolve
the bounding limits of social life. Together, these opposing sacrificial impulses illustrate that the sacrificial process is not, strictly speaking, a movement to or from an ordered society. Instead, the
sacrificial process contains opposite movements-consistent with Nietzsche's Apollonian and Dionysian forces-that contribute in different ways to communal unity and coherence. Describing this
double movementjurner writes: In the sacrifice of abandonment, the classical theological notions of sin, redemption, and atonement all find their places as phases in a process which seeks
personal and social renewal through the surgical removal, interiorly in the will, exteriorly by the immolation of a victim, of the pollution, corruption, and division brought about by mere
participation in the domain of social structure. Sacrifice is here regarded as a limeo, or entry into the domain of corrununitas, where all that is and ever has been human and the forces that have
caused humanity to be are joined in a circulation of mutual love and trust. In the sacrifice of prophylaxis, structure certainly is cleansed, but left intact; here enlightened self-interest
Turner's sacrificial process holds in tension and displays opposing Violent impulses. The sacrifice of
prevails.
abandonment restores a "primitive," undifferentiated unity to the sacrificing community; the prophylactic
sacrifice instantiates moral frameworks and structural bonds. According to Turner, prophylactic sacrifice "employs the metaphor of death to
establish or reestablish structures of society and culture, with which orderly life may be lived?' Thus, the prophylactic sacrifice captures the dominant meaning of martyrdom, which uses the
"metaphor of death" to highlight a set of ideals or particular way of life. In contrast, the sacrifice of abandonment generally maps to scapegoats, in whose destruction communities cathartically
sacrifice is not exclusively a reaction to crises, to the natural or human forces of
participate. Finally, Turner reveals that
dissolution. Sacrifice can also serve to set in motion disuniing forces in order to es tablish power relations on a
new basis. For Turner, sacrifice is ultimately a potent structuring, restructuring, and "destructuring" force
capable of bonding communities. 34 Turner's political attitude toward sacrifice is instructive for thinking about the French Revolution, which encompassed such a
variety of sacrificial practices. Paradoxically anachronistic and modern, these practices formed a sacrificial process through which different segments of French society alternately sought political
protection and dissolution. In the hands of the revolutionaries, who were self-consciously aware of their intention to transform French politics radically, sacrifice came to serve both functions.
The revolutionaries used sacrifice to demolish the Old Regime and to shore up the new Republic. The instrumental use of sacrifice during the French Revolution illustrates that there is no
conservatism intrinsic to the sacrificial mechanism. Echoing Nietzsche, it also demonstrates that ancient ideas of communal violence can participate in as well as mask modern political struggles
. Those who dismiss the sacrificial practices of the French revolutionaries as anachronistic barbarism
for power
fundamentally miss how those selfsame acts contributed to the dissolution and establishment of political
obedience. According to this violent tradition, which has such powerful roots in ancient Western politics and
religion, authority and communit' begin with neither the word, the deed, nor the contract. Instead, in the

Kirk, Flynn, et al
beginning, there is only sacrificial blood.

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A2… Kritik contradicts itself because productive/achieves good

Voting neg enacts the sacrifice described in the alternative text. Even if achieves some
external goal, that is purely an accidental by-product. At the moment of sacrifice, it is pure
expenditure without the expectator of reward.
Even if they win that’s the alt is somewhat calculative, the aff and perm’s subsumption of
sacrifice to a political program links a great deal more. The fact that we are willing to risk
the 1AC’s impact proves we are giving up the goods that block our access to the sacred.
If the kritik is productive, it is only accidently. The initial moment of the alternative’s
sacrifice is one of pure loss.
Alexander Irwin 2002
[Prof Religion at Amherst College, Saints of the Impossible: Bataille, Weil, and the Politics of the Sacred
p. 14-15]
Revolution is not- at the very least, not primarily - a means to a practical end (the overthrow of
capitalism, the creation of a workers' state); it is an end in itself, a sacrifice in defiance of the principle
of utility. The Bataillean revolution aims not at victory, but at pure loss. The political triumph of the
proletariat, if it were in fact to come about as a result of such an effort, would have to be seen as a kind
of accidental by-product. Yet Bataille is not entirely limpid on the questions of ends and means. Certain passages in "The Notion of Expenditure"
(including the lines just cited on the desire of "the miserable" to enter "the circle of power") can be read as positing overarching political aims for the sacrificial
revolution, thus calling into question the purity of "pure loss" in the political realm. While he challenged Durkheim's domestication of the sacred, the reduction of
sacrifice to social utility, Bataille recognized that such utility did in fact attach to sacrificial operations (as Mauss had shown that it did to potlatch) and that not only
sociologists but the practitioners of "primitive" sacrifice themselves might very well, if questioned, describe their ritual behaviors in terms of utilitarian aims. Bataille
did not deny the utilitarian
aspects of sacrifice and its equivalents, but he did maintain that these aspects were
secondary and that in the concept of pure expenditure he had identified sacrifice's essential nature.

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A2 Util Good
Util’s search for the greatest good collapses into the greatest evil, for it imposes a false
bottle-kneck that ensures catastrophic expenditure.
Dan Stone, Professor of Modern History at University of London, 2006

[History, Memory and Mass Atrocity p. 70-73]
In his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), a book originally intended as the
preface to a huge tract on crime and punishment, Bentham sought 'to rear the fabric of felicity by the
hands of reason and of the law'.4 In this first 'scientific' penal code, Bentham argued that human nature was
governed by two basic feelings: pleasure and pain. He believed these feelings existed as empirical facts and required no special proof. But from
this basic premise he jumped [p. 71] to a value judgement that people desired the maintenance of pleasure at all times, a kind of psychological
hedonism, which he described thus: By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever,
according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question: or, what is the
same thing in other words, to promote or to oppose that happiness. [PML: 11-121 Bentham's 'calculus of felicity', the support of the majority for
a given policy, required no justification, because it was necessarily bringing the greatest happiness to the greatest
number. Given the possibility for immoral applications of Bentham's utilitarianism, we can see why so many today feel appalled by it. For example, how is the
liberty of a rapist to be balanced with the pain of the victim? Benthamite arbitration is based not on concerns of equality but on vague notions of 'general welfare'.
Clearly, one cannot countenance a philosophy which necessitates a degree of pain commensurate with the degree of happiness to be attained, and that has no moral
The extermination of the Jews was justified (when it was mentioned at all) on
argument against the misery of the few.
similar utilitarian grounds - the creation of the Volksgenieinschaft. It would thus appear to be the
ultimate proof of the unacceptability of Bentham's philosophy . But can the origin of the Nazis' goal be explained rationally?
Since it is borne of 'irrational' fears of racial pollution and so forth, the justification complies with utilitarianism, but the birth of the thought and its realisation do not:
'Only the truly mad could have believed that it was war that they were waging against the Jews.'5 Thus, no matter how indebted to the workings of Zweckrationcditdt
(purposive rationality) the bureaucracy of mass murder was, the utilitarian justification of genocide for rhetorical purposes seems only to scratch the surface of the
Holocaust.6 The Nazis did justify their actions on utilitarian grounds, and without formally deviating from the hedonistic psychology of Bentham. But one never
escapes the feeling that this was merely a cover. Despite the findings of historians with regard to what ordinary people knew at the time, so that it is no longer possible
to claim 'Niemand war dabei and keiner hat's gewujlt',7 the extermination of the Jews was not (other than tacitly) a publicly mandated policy. And since Bentham
himself worried that increased state intervention would only diminish the possibilities for the pursuit of individual happiness, the utilitarian claim becomes, in the Nazi
context of the '55 State', simply an official [p. 72] lie, although those involved in the actual killings attempted to convince themselves and others of the veracity of this
he. As SS-Obersturmfiihrer Karl Kretschmer wrote to his wife on 27 September 1942: 'As I said, Jam in a very gloomy mood. I must pull myself out of it. The sight of
the dead (including women and children) is not very cheering. But we are fighting this war for the survival or non-survival of our people.'8 Nor can one equate Hitler
with the Benthamite ideal of the lawmaker, even given the claim that the 'happiness of the individuals, of whom a community is composed ... is the end and the sole
end which the legislator ought to have in view', that it is 'the sole standard, in conformity to which each individual ought, as far as depends upon the legislator, to be
made to fashion his behaviour' (PML: 34, Bentham's emphasis). The trouble is that Bentham equated utilitarianism with conscious calculation, hence usefulness, even
though this was not consistent with his basic definition of the principle of utility. In other words, for Bentham, the greatest happiness for the greatest number must
necessarily be with the aim of increasing production, of providing benefits for its recipients. And as Hannah Arendt reminds us, it is precisely the absence of utilitarian
What is required here is a utilitarianism that goes
criteria for the concentration camps which lends them their 'curious air of unreality'.9
beyond utility, that accounts for the apparent paradox that utilitarian goals can aim at uselessness as
much as at 'usefulness'. This might provide a clearer response to the Holocaust than the statements so typical of earlier commentators, caught in the
same trap as Bentham. They, on the one hand, claimed that the Holocaust must be irrational precisely because it served no useful purpose. It is usually the fact that the
murders diverted energy away from the war effort that is cited in order to back up this claim; as Alain I'inkielkraut writes: 'We know today that the Germans went
against their own interests by eliminating an often irreplaceable labour force which fed their wartime economy."° An emphasis on the usefulness of the 'useless' might
provide more insight than those theories which, on the other hand, sought to account for the Holocaust within some sort of Malthusian scheme of the ridding of
surplus populations (Rubenstein/Aly and Heim), or within a 'Marxist' framework in which the language of the 'Jewish Question' was merely a front for the economic
gains to be had from the elimination of the Jews (Kraus and Kulka). Both interpretations can be disproved on straightforward empirical grounds )'
An
interpretation of utilitarianism founded on uselessness would be thoroughly consistent with the logic
of Bentham, but fundamentally out of step with his emphasis on the benefits to be derived from
it. Such a system of thought is to be found in the writings of Bataille. Central to his work is a denial that
the energy within human society is [p. 73] adequately accounted for by the notions of production and
conservation contained within classical economic theories. Such theories, he claims, are therefore those of a 'limited economy'. As much a critique of Marx as
of Smith, Bataille argues, from his essay 'The Notion of Expenditure' (1933) to Eroticism (1957), that the production and distribution of wealth cannot encompass the
entirety of human activity:
The living organism, in a situation determined by the play of energy on the surface of
the globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy
(wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or

Kirk, Flynn, et al
if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it
must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.12 Indeed, Bataille affirms that the
excess can never be completely absorbed into the rational economy, that profit will unavoidably be
squandered by

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A2 Util Good
'dissipat[ing] a substantial portion of energy produced, sending it up in smoke' (AS, I: 22). The 'general
economy' comprises both the 'limited economy' of Marxists and liberals, as well as the energy which
cannot be used 'profitably' for the increase of equipment.3 The experience of this 'life beyond utility'
Bataille terms 'sovereignty' (AS, II: 198). Where Bentham talked of affect in terms of pleasure and
pain, and the controlled balance between them to be maintained by calculated action, Bataille's concept of
sovereignty was to give full reign to affect: sovereignty is 'the negation of prohibition' (AS, II: 254; cf.
403). In contrast to the utilitarian goal of the production of production (that is, spending on the basis of an
expectation of future returns), sovereignty justified all useless consumption, all nonproductive
spending (AS, II: 312). Sovereignty was the experience of society's 'heterogeneous energy', entirely
dissociated from instrumental action. Failure to permit the functioning of the general economy, that is
to say, failure to permit the squandering of excess energy, leads to bottlenecks in the system and
'deprives us of the choice of an exudation that might suit us' (AS, I: 23-4), with potentially catastrophic
results. Already we can see where such thought is leading us with regard to the Holocaust. Can the
Holocaust be seen as the attempt, under the bourgeois 'limited economy', to attain a life ruled by banished
sovereign values?

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A2 Util Good
Util fails because it is impossible to distinguish between pleasure and pain.
Mark Sullivan 2004
[MD PhD, Department Editor of American Pain Society Bulletin
American Pain Society Bulletin v. 14 n. 6 ““Pain and Ecstasy: From Suffering to Sacrifice to Exaltation”]
As Sontag mentions, the modern view is that pain and pleasure are directly opposed to each other.
One excludes the other in a simple zero-sum game. Jeremy Bentham founded that most modern of
ethical theories, utilitarianism, on just this hedonic calculus. Utilitarianism calculates the ethical value of
an action by summing the pleasure created and subtracting the pain produced. This theory acknowledges
that something could be both pleasurable and painful. But the possibility that something could be
pleasureable because it is painful throws the theory into disarray. Subsequent modern philosophers have challenged parts
of Bentham’s calculus. For example, John Stuart Mill thought some pleasures were higher, or qualitatively better, than others, but he did not challenge the opposition
between pleasure and pain. This theme can be found in modern poetry as well. The first stanza of Emily Dickinson’s poem “125” is: For each ecstatic instant We
must an anguish pay In keen and quivering ratio To the ecstasy. The modern framework rationally balances pain and pleasure in terms of ethical value and of what is
deserved. To understand one’s reaction to the photo of the ecstatic tortured Chinese man, one needs to look beyond this framework. This photograph does not really
show the simultaneous experience
of pain and pleasure. It shows both pain and ecstasy. The Oxford English
Dictionary defines ecstasy as “the state of being ‘beside oneself,’ thrown into a frenzy or stupor, with
anxiety, astonishment, fear or passion.” So it is clear that ecstasy can be produced by unpleasant experiences. As they further explain, “The
classical senses of [the Greek word for ecstasy] are ‘insanity’ and ‘bewilderment,’ but in the late Greek the etymological meaning received another application, viz.,
‘withdrawal of the soul from the body, mystic or prophetic trance’; hence, in later medical writers the word is used for trance etc., generally. Both the classical and
post-classical senses came into the modern languages, and in the present uses they seem to be blended” (OED Online, accessed 9-22-04). So
ecstasy
encompasses the mystical “state of rapture where the body was supposed to become incapable of
sensation, while the soul was engaged in the contemplation of divine things.” The Chinese man does indeed appear as if he might be engaged in the
contemplation of divine things. To help with the understanding of how pain is compatible with ecstasy, Sontag refers us to the ecstasy of martyrs like St. Sebastian. St.
Sebastian was an early Christian popularized by Renaissance painters and believed to have been martyred during the persecution of Christians by the Roman emperor
Diocletian. When it was discovered that he was a Christian who had converted many soldiers, Sebastian was ordered to be killed by arrows. The archers left him for
dead, but a Christian widow nursed him back to health. He then presented himself before Diocletian, who condemned him to death by beating (Encyclopedia
Britannica Online, 2004). A martyr’s death brings him to God. This is enough to make the dying process ecstatic. The pain thus endured was thought to provide a
cleansing of sins and perhaps thereby to further contribute to ecstasy. The example of St. Sebastian helps one understand pain as a path to ecstasy. But this Chinese
man is not known to be a martyr in the traditional religious sense, so some broader path between pain and ecstasy must be found. Perhaps this man murdered the
prince as part of a popular revolt, and thus became a martyr for a political cause. Even if this were true, one still needs to understand the path from pain to ecstasy on
psychological rather than purely spiritual terms. Sontag offers us a suggestion of this path: from pain to sacrifice to exaltation. The pain is suffered for the sake of
another. The purpose of the pain lies outside of the sufferer. And the experience of pain for this purpose literally takes the sufferer out of himself in ecstasy. This is a
view of pain and suffering “rooted in religious thinking,” but perhaps the sense of sacrifice need not be explicitly religious. One nonreligious modern example of pain
and ecstasy is the Ecstatic Birthing program in the United Kingdom. Ecstatic Birth is a system designed to help women give birth consciously, easily, and without
medical intervention. “We can give up our devotion to pain and struggle, expand and give birth to our babies, our projects and our lives in ecstasy” (Ecstatic Birth,
2004). This program is similar to other natural birth programs in the United States that focus on relaxation through breathing and visualization as a means to avoid
pain medication and other medical intervention (Gaskin, 2002). Although a primary purpose of these programs is to avoid the hospital and medications, the programs
also focus on using the pain of uterine contractions as energy that may promote bliss. This is supposed to produce a healthier and happier baby. What is not modern
about this image of the Chinese man,
and what makes the viewer cringe, is its picture of “extreme suffering as a kind
of transfiguration.” This simply does not compute in a secular and scientific world view. In this world,
pleasure is good, and pain is bad. The notion that pain and pleasure can fold back onto each other in
complex ways is absent. The ways in which pain and pleasure can annihilate the self and liberate one
from the bounds of the ego are not included. One exception to this rule is an intriguing study that
showed that noxious thermal stimuli produced activation in putative reward circuitry as well as
classic pain circuitry. (Becerra, Breiter, Wise, Gonzales, & Borsook, 2001). The authors conclude that
their data “support the notion that there may be a shared neural system for evaluation of aversive and
rewarding stimuli.” Although this finding provides a possible physiological mechanism for the ecstasy
of martyrs, it makes it no less disconcerting. Here, let us return to the eroticism that was Bataille’s
primary concern. He considered eroticism a “little death” precisely because the boundaries of the self
are overcome in sexual climax and the edicts of the rational ego often ignored in its pursuit. We dismiss
the pursuit of sexual ecstasy through pain, i.e., masochism, as a perversion that has nothing to teach the
rest of us. But for Bataille, this was only one example of liberation through surrender, a paradoxical
but universal feature of the human psyche. So, gaze upon this disturbing image of the Chinese man and
observe how it makes you feel. Draw your own conclusions.

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A2… Cede Political to the Right/Militarism
We outweigh. At best, this argument proves we aren’t politically productive. We’re

winning the imperative to recover the ecstasy of sacrifice is more important than politics,
even if it dooms us to nuclear war.
Turn-The political discourse of the aff has ZERO chance of checking back militarism.
War’s exuberant horror has become its own reward, and the aff’s indignation conceals the
utter irrationality of state violence.

Similarly, the method used by the State to subordinate the war-machine to State-purposes and meaning
remains always problematic for the State. We have seen above how the State appropriates and
subsumes nomadic logic, marshalling and harnessing it, but that then, the institutions of the State overspill the constraints of
State logic to reinvent themselves as war-machines. The same thing happens specifically in relation to war. The State appropriates the war-machine and gives it war as
its set object. Because of its universalising thinking and its commitment to finality, the State always drives to transform its war-machine into total war. This links State
war to capitalism, according to Deleuze and Guattari, because only capitalism can provide the resources that make total war possible. Furthermore, in total war, the
social and its future change from being a mere resource to being the meaning and purpose of war. Alternative [p. 96] societies in total war are not merely to be
subdued but annihilated. In this sense, total war "merely realizes the maximal conditions of the appropriation of the war machine by the State apparatus" (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1987, p. 421).
But unconditioned war is itself always a threat to the State, not only the States it targets but the State that seeks to put
it into operation. Once warfare has become unlimited, with an absolute object, then the State is itself encountering its limits and flirting with the
perilous game of trying to put them into operation. The State has given rise to a worldwide war-machine to which it increasingly becomes
subordinate. "the appropriation has changed direction, or rather that States tend to unleash, reconstitute, an immense war-machine of which they
are no longer anything more than the opposable or apposed parts" (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 421). The war-machine then encompasses the
whole earth, and exceeds the States that have chosen it. This remapping of the planet by a war-machine in excess of the State was, in Deleuze and
Guattari's hands, a way of describing in a new way a world under threat of Mutually Assured Destruction, during the Cold War. However, it is
worth considering this in terms of the War On Terror, which has equally held the world hostage to a war-machine perhaps impossible to control.
"[lit is necessary to follow the real movement at the conclusion of which the States, having appropriated a war machine, and having adapted it to
their aims, reimpart a war machine that takes charge of the aim, appropriates the States, and assumes increasingly wider political functions"
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 421). The
war on terror unleashes a total warmachine that overflows the logic
of the State and that the State is unable to control. In turn, the culture of the State, its commitment to
identity; citizenship and order are under threat from the impulse to violence and domination ostensibly
used to protect the State. Because it does not recognise responsibility, the war-machine, even when the
State believes it has it under control in the institution of the military order, cannot be held accountable.
As we have seen in Freud and Bataille, the inclusion of this logic within the State always means that the military order can so easily slip over into atrocity. It also
means that the imperative of war can be used to evade the normal constitutional restraints of civil society: the culture of war brings into politics a violence and
desperation protected from legal niceties like civil rights by a sentimental and physical crudeness and impatience that over-rides the subtleties of law, and even the
discussion of political priorities. We must pay attention to the gravity of generals. We must support the troops no mailer how cynical or absurd is the war in which
they are prepared to fight. [p. 97]
There are other, perhaps more phantasmatic, ways in which the warmachine redefines the State. For example, in entertainment ,
politics becomes
subordinate to a kind of lust, in which the State becomes the mere nominal shell of a visceral violence.
A teenager secretly refights the Gulf War, He wins a faster, a simpler victory this time, purging his
country's purpose of any complication or hesitation. He can ignore all nagging voices. So pure, so
patriotic, so uncompromising, so intent, so meaningful, so violent is his trajectory, the parliamentary,
bureaucratic, media-savvy sophistries that the State itself has to negotiate cannot inhibit him. There
is a clean, vicious, notable and unironic splendour in his violence that he feels he needs to hide, even
though he is proud of it. He is more merciless, more purposeful, more right than even the righteousness he commemorates. Folded into his glory is the
validation of the victory of his nation and the carnal luxury of the cruelty it licenses but cannot publicly enact. His mission is a daylight validation of the troops but
lacks the conscience and constraint, and the reason to be right. So, his dirty war is a dirty secret he keeps from even himself. Bodies fly backwards over his head,
uncounted, unnamed, an ill-defined yet maniacal vermin, easily forgotten. Even the righteous victory of the missionary State played out in your darkened room is
shameful: a bit too unrestrained, a bit too cruel, a bit more than might be necessary. The licence provided by the victorious State validates but chokes the cruel
subterfuge of the vicious righteous child.

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The hot cathexis of national solidity ensures the President of inalienable righteousness. From here on
in, it is all just planning and persuasion. He knows it can only end well. Even cruelty and subterfuge are
allowed, perhaps even enjoyed in the confirmation of righteousness. Who can stop us? Force and then

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success excuse everything, creating realities on the ground that must be accepted. Who then can say they
are better than us when we have won? There is no logic of empire, just aggrandisement, the
meaningfulness of more, of stronger, of , of FREEDOM. No one can take it away. The point is that
even when it is validated by the higher reason of the State, even when it is suppressed into the strict
lineaments of the military apparatus, even when there is a liberalism, a humanism, a liberation, a
democracy, a rationalism, an idealism, human rights, a coherent academic argument, a law, a justice,
a discourse of gender equity, national progress, human meaning and so on and so forth, it is always a
violence unleashing cruelty, righteousness, calumny, honour, intimidation, sentimentality, brutality and
all the other logics of the rampant war-machine, the war-machine and reason allowing, excusing,
validating, concealing one another.
[p. 98] How does the fighting child connect with the righteous president, the pondering general, the ambitious journalist and the anxious activist? They play
out a meaningful give and take where different levels of decision validate one another. The hidden lineaments of the fighting boy may or may not feed the hard
calculation of the president; the heroic worldliness of the soldier may or may not require the president's duty of cynical care, but draws on it, and is released by it
anyway. 'What lies behind the decisions that get made, what memories? What traces? What trust in now or never, now and forever? What lusts are in question?
Something gives us energy, faith, hope, trust, where does it come from if not the unleashing of the disruptive energy of rebuilding to which our violence is committed?
In other words, we are doing it now. The double logic of the war-machine and the State run through the social body, the way it twists in on itself, choosing and
unchoosing the violence that brings both order and freedom, in our politics, in our diplomacy, in our social vision, in our relationships and in our entertainment, all
enfolded in and over one another, refusing, frustrating and feeding on one another. The
war that appals us, that we conjure as the
forever last resort, defies all of our values, but it also reassures us, flatters us and frees us, and we trust
it. The order that we implement is the consolidation of the energy of disruption, harm, movement and
self-mutilation we revile, and, in turn, only order requires movement. It will not end, this feeding and
folding over of that which despises multiplies and alienates itself. It will never be over.

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The aff’s critqiue of militarism is redundant. Only sacrifice without purpose or good
creates the glorious expenditure and community that can avert extinction.
Allan Stoekl, Prof French anc comparative literature at Penn State University, 2007
[Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Sustainability p. 189-192]
There is virtually no point any more in trying to work out a critique of modernity: depletion does it for
us, relentlessly, derisively, definitively. Perhaps the knowledge modernity has provided, both technical and theoretical, has been necessary; in this
case the fossil fuel regime inseparable from modernity has been a necessary, if ephemeral, stage of human development. But the fall, the die-off, looms.
The larger problem (entailing a task never fully undertaken by Bataille) is to think a "good" duality the
postmodern affirmation of sheer expenditure through dread and the recognition of limits (interdiction, the mortality of reference) on the
scale of human muscle power and the finitude of the body. A return to the past? Not really, since the imminent depletion of fossil fuel resources will push us in that
direction anyway: muscle power, body power, will be a, if not the, major component in the energy mix of the future." But certainly
what is imperative
is an awareness that any economy not based on the profligate waste of resources (commonly called a "sustainable" economy) must recognize and
affirm the tendency to expend, indeed be based on it. And inseparable from that tendency, as we know, are
the passions, as Bataillewould call them: glory, but also delirium, madness, sexual obsession. Or,
perhaps closer to home, a word rarely if ever used by Bataille: freedom. Not the freedom to consume, the
waste of fossil fuel inputs, but the freedom of the instant, from the task, freedom disengaged from the
linkage of pleasure to a long-term, everreceding, and largely unjustified goal. An "intimate" freedom-but not the
freedom of prestige, rank, not the freedom of Man in and as security. "Expenditure without return" is a floating concept, defined in opposition to the restrained
economy whose possibility it opens but which it defies. As an end not leading outside itself, it could be anything; but what is most important is that with it there
is a movement of "communication," of the breaking of the narrow limits of the (ultimately illusory)
selfinterested individual, and no doubt as well some foriiilf personal or collective transport, enthusiasm. This concern with a mouvement hors de soi
can no doubt be traced to Sade, but it also derives from the French sociological tradition of Durkheim, where collective enthusiasm was seen to animate public life and
give personal life a larger meaning." As Bataille puts it in L'economie a hi mesure de l'univers (Economy on the Scale of the Universe): "You
are only,
and you must know it, an explosion of energy. You can't change it. All these human works around you
are only an overflow of vital energy ... You can't deny it: the desire is in you, it's intense; you could
never separate it from mankind. Essentially, the human being has the responsibility here [a la charge in]
to spend, in glory, what is accumulated on the earth,what is scattered by the sun. Essentially, he's a
laugher, a dancer, a giver of festivals." This is clearly the only serious language. (CC,
7:15-16) Bataille's future, derived from Durkheim as well as Sade, entails a community united
through common enthusiasm, effervescence, and in this sense there is some "good" glory-it is not a term that should be associated exclusively with
rank or prestige. Certainly the Durkheimian model, much more orthodox and (French) Republican, favored an egalitarianism that would prevent, through its collective
enthusiasm, the appearance of major social inequality. Bataille's community would continue that tradition while arguing for a "communication" much more radical in
that it puts in question stable human individuality and the subordination to it of all "resources." On this score, at least, it is a radical Durkheimianism: the fusion
envisaged is so complete that the very boundaries of the individual, not only of his or her personal interests but of the body as well, are ruptured in a community that
would communicate through "sexual wounds." De Certeau brings to any reading of Durkheim an awareness that the effervescence of a group, its potential for
"communication," is not so much a mass phenomenon, an event of social conformity and acceptance, but a "tactics" not only of resistance but of intimate burn-off and
of an ecstatic movement "out of oneself" If we are to think a "communication" in the post-fossil fuel era, it will be one of local incidents, ruptures, physical feints,
evasions, and expulsions (of matter, of energy, of enthusiasm, of desire)-not one of mass or collective events that only involve a resurrection of a "higher" goal or
justification and a concomitant subordination of expenditure.) Yet there is nothing that is inherently excessive. Because waste can very easily contribute to a sense of
rank, or can be subsumed as necessary investment/consumption, no empirical verification could ever take place. Heterogeneous
matter-or energy-eludes the scientific gaze without being "subjective."This is the paradox of Bataille's project: the very empiricism we would like to guarantee a
"self-consciousness" and a pure a'epense isitself a function of a closed economy of utility and conservation (the study of a stable object for the benefit and progress of
mankind, etc.). Expenditure,
depense, intimacy (the terms are always sliding; they are inherently unstable, for
good reason) are instead functions of difference, of the inassimilable, but also, as we have seen on a
number of occasions, of ethical judgment. It is a Bataillean ethics that valorizes the Marshall Plan
over nuclear war and that determines that one is linked to sacrifice in all its forms, whereas the other is
not. In the same way we can propose an ethics of bodily, "tactical" effort and loss. We can go so far as to
say that expenditure is the determination of the social and energetic element that does not lead outside

Kirk, Flynn, et al
itself to some higher good or utility Paradoxically this determination itself is ethical, because an
insubordinate expenditure is an affirmation of a certain version of the posthuman as aftereffect, beyond
the closed economy of the personal and beyond the social as guarantor of the personal. But such a determination does not depend on an
"in-itself," on a definitive set of classifications, on a taxonomy that will guarantee the status of a certain act or of a certain politics.

Kirk, Flynn, et al
A2… Sacrifice is violent
Humans cannot escape the problems of violence and death.

At best, we can enact a theatrical sacrifice that disperses the violent energies that would
otherwise be accumulated by the state for its policies of extermination.
This argument proves why they will never win a link turn or perm. If they are too
squeamish to confront the sacrifical violence of the 1AC, then they have no chance of
contesting the appalling savagery of the state.
Violence is inevitable, which means sacrifical expenditure is the best way to break apart the
dominating violence of the state.
This chapter's exploration has already clarified significant points regarding Bataille's attitude vis-â-vis a possible "closure" of
Even as he resisted the Durkheimian view of sacrifice's utility and
sacrifice.
reasonableness, Bataille remained Durkheimian enough to see sacrificial dynamics
as the enduring paradigm for relations between individual and collectivity.
Bataille never fully banished from his writing the Durkheimian schema of a sacrificial
convulsion productive of shared meaning and communal cohesion (even if, for Bataille,
what is shared is the calling into question of all meaning, at the "extreme limit of the possible"). Thus, the specter of a
(constantly suppressed, constantly resurfacing) "utility of the useless 1154 haunts Bataille's writing on/of sacrifice. On the
border (along the déchirure) where sacrificial violence passes into language, perhaps matters could not be otherwise.
Nancy's demand for a politics that renounces dark "outsides" retains its force. Yet if the price of dissipating the specter of
sacred [40] violence is subscription to the bald claim that "There is no 'obscure God.' There is no obscurity which would be God,"
then we can see that the closure of the sacrificial vision must be undertaken not only "after Bataille [...j and beyond him,"55 but
directly against him. For if it is undeniable that "fascination is already proof that something has been accorded to obscurity and
its bloody heart,"- 16
is no less true that Bataille as the Acéphale held his own bloody heart in his hand and vowed to "live only from what
fascinates" (BOC I,
Through the avatars of sacrifice, Bataille interrogated the permutations of
what he saw as the fundamental violence of the human being. He sought to
understand, on the one hand, how violence connects humans to an acephalic
universe and, on the other, how violence functions in the political realm.
Violence (sometimes overt, sometimes veiled) is the key instrument of political tyranny ,
of "Caesarian" domination and the exploitation of the poor by the rich. How could such domination and
exploitation be opposed? Since Bataille considered violence an irreducible aspect of
human nature, it could not for him be a question of "nonviolent resistance," but
of searching for a different kind of violence that could resist dominating force.
Bataille's investigation of sacrifice was an ongoing quest for liberative potentials in the
conjunction of violence and an atheistic "religious spirit. 11-17
As Bataille pursued his obsessive investigation of sacrificial violence in its psychological, political, and
poetic dimensions, another French thinker was exploring related issues. Simone Weil saw in the concept
of "force" a principle connecting war, social exploitation, cosmic order, and mystical truth. For Weil,
force was encountered as the instrumentality of dehumanizing oppression. Yet to eliminate force
from human life was impossible, since in a real sense our existence is made of force composed of that
which destroys it. Chapter z will trace Well's efforts to come to terms with the challenges posed by this
contradiction.

Kirk, Flynn, et al
A2… Sacrifice is violent
Sacrifice creates a community against the violence of the state. We are motivated by a
tragic politics mutually exclusive with the extermination their evidence asssumes.
Alexander Irwin 2002

[Prof Religion at Amherst College, Saints of the Impossible: Bataille, Weil, and the Politics of the Sacred p. 22-24]
While Acéphale sought communal bonds, the accents of a defiant individualism
also reemerged in Bataille's writings in this period. One expression of this
ambiguous coexistence of group identification and individual authority was the
"shamanistic" position occupied within the secret society by Bataille himself . Roger
Calllots notes that for Bataille, the "theoretical interest" of shamanism was vivid "only to the extent that he could aspire to
become a shaman himself. 1130 At the same time that he preached the ideal of the headless community "without a chief" (BOG
1,489), there can be no doubt that, in the group Acéphale as actually constituted, Bataille himself claimed the clear and
unequivocal leadership role, amounting to a sacerdotal authority. "The cards were in his hands alone; he dealt them out in his
own way following a hierarchy of participants of which he remained the only master" (ML, zz). If the community was
to be the matrix of a rekindling of sacred forces, Bataille in his own person was the primary
channel and vector of those forces. Pierre Klossowski, who participated in some of the group's rituals, affirms
that the acephahc figure that symbolized the aspirations of the community was in fact a portrait of Bataille
himself. The Acéphale is "purely Bataille emblematized by Masson. The figure of the god with his attributes" -
the sword, the flame, the labyrinth represented by the visible entrails - "formed a sort of mandala in which
Bataille contemplated, and invited us to contemplate, his own experience."31 Bataille thus cast himself in a
double role incorporating the two dimensions of Durkheimian sacrifice. As the Acéphale, Bataille became both a
symbolic figure representing the community to itself and a shaman or sacrificial priest palpably unleashing
sacred forces through rituals intended to fuse the members in intense solidarity. The Acéphale is a forbidding
and isolated figure, but his solitary self-mutilation liberates the energies that make possible the cohesion of the
group.
Nietzsche had also been a lonely thinker haunted by the notion of community. Placing Acéphale under
Nietzsche's intellectual sign, Bataille underscored the significance for the community of the emblematic or
heroic individual. Thus, Bataille's mythologizing of "Nietzsche-Dionysos" in the pages of the journal Acéphale
con [p. 23] stitutes not only a homage to a philosophical predecessor, but an account of the role Bataille
envisaged for himself. Following Karl Jaspcrs's suggestions in Nietzsche: Fin fuhrung in this Verstandnis seines
Philosophierens (1936), Bataille believed an "imitation of Nietzsche" (atheistic rewriting of the imitatio Christi)
was possible and necessary, for those willing to abandon the confines of a "small politics" for the open-ended
exploration of the "total possibilities of humanity."" Shaping oneself to the Nietzschean ideal opened the road to
a community freed from all forms of servility.
In the Acéphale texts devoted to defending Nietzschean thought against fascist co-optation, Bataille stressed
both Nietzsche's representative character (which enables Nietzsche to point to, in some sense to become, the
binding force of a new form of human community) and the terrible solitude that was Nietzsche's lot. "Because
he could not confuse emasculation and knowledge, and because his thought opened on a lucid explosion which
could not cease before having exhausted his forces [...], Nietzsche collapsed in a humiliating solitude." But
Nietzsche became by his very isolation a symbol and rallying point, the "hero" of all who
refused conformity and servitude (BOG I, 480). "In the image of the one [Dionysosj he was avid to be
even to his madness, Nietzsche is born of the Earth torn by the fire of the Sky, is born lightning-struck and in
that way charged with this fire of domination becoming FIRE OF THE EARTH" (484). Nietzsche, fused with
Dionysos, rises to messianic stature: "THE SACRED -NIETZSCHEMJ - FIGURE OF TRAGIC DIONvsOs DELIVERS LIFE
FROM SERVITUDE" (484). Bataille salutes in Nietzsche the "incarnation" of humanity's
maddest and most exalting possibilities, life and thought transformed into a "festival," the
assertion of a freedom so vast that "no language would suffice to reproduce its
movement"
As a sacred figure, Nietzsche forms a pendant to the "heterogeneous" fascist leader, radiating a "force that
shatters the regular course of things" and inspires ecstatic communal devotion (BOG I, ',4. Yet the
community summoned by Nietzsche is rooted not in imperative violence but in a
"tragic experience of self and world," an "experience of the negative [...] or
of the impossible," consisting precisely in the "affirmed certainty that it is not
possible to place oneself outside the reach of tragedy. 1133 [p. 24] This is what
Bataille means by "religion": a community without domination, united at
once by the demand for a mad freedom and by the awareness of shared

Kirk, Flynn, et al
vulnerability to tragedy. From the conjunction of freedom and tragic

consciousness springs a paradoxical, nonhierarchical, permanently wounded
sovereignty. Such sovereignty separates people from each other irrevocably in
the very moment that it exposes them to each other in the nakedness of tragic
compassion. (The Acéphale stands naked and isolated, with his heart in his hand and a death's head lodged in his groin.)
Decisive for Bataille's subsequent thought is the understanding that humans commune in the limit experience of the tragic
sacred and that sacrality must be crystallized or channeled ("incarnated") by a sacred-symbolic individual. This figure animates
community while at the same time remaining separated from community in an infinite solitude that is both sovereignty and
"humiliation."

Kirk, Flynn, et al
A2… Alt > Fascism

We produce a headless community, a commitment to sacrifice the political authority that
would make fascism possible. All their arguments about how the kritik rejects the state
prove that we are 100% aligned against totalitarian politics.
The alt ruptures the authority that enables fascism. Only the perm’s linking of sacrifice to
the sovereign imperative of the plan produces the fascism they describe.

Modern French Thought p. 169-174] acephalic meand without head
Most important, Bataille's fascism essay reveals that his sacrificial view of
proletarian revolution is in tension with his critical understanding of fascist power.
Seeking to prevent the proletarian revolution from taking a fascist turn, Bataille
argues that any attempt to use sacrifice for the sake of political foundation
risks fascism, the logical culmination of sacrificial founding violence used to constitute
authority. By claiming that unproductive sacrificial loss ruptures political
authority, Bataille's discussion of fascism begins his repudiation of the French discourse on sacrificial violence. In his
essay on unproductive expenditure, Bataille offers no vocabulary for the internal dynamics of transformative sacrificial
processes. How does the unrecoverable sacrifice of a person or thing affect the participants? What role does such sacrifice play
in the realm of politics? Seeking to answer these questions in his essay, on fascism, Bataille significantly broadens his analysis
He introduces the
of sacrifice from a study of the act itself to an inquiry into the sacred concepts upon which it depends.
concepts of homogeneity and heterogeneity in order to describe two opposing modes of
existence, each of which highlights different roles of the sacred in modern life.
Homogeneity, which is similar to the profane, describes societies structured by production, rationality, specialization,
organization, conservation, predictability, and preservation. For Bataille, these terms characterize modern Western
bourgeois society, which excludes anything that does not conform to its homogeneous structure. "Above all:' writes
Michèle Richman, "homogeneity is identified as comtnensurabiity among elements and a
consciousness of the process whereby 'human relations can be maintained by a reduction
to fixed rules based on the identity of person and well-defined situations; in principle,
violence is excluded from the course of an existence so defined! '129 The hallmark of the
homogeneous society is the contract, which forms the basis of all social bonds because, as jean-Michel Heimonet observes, "the
contract establishes a general equivalence among men, things, and men and things."" Heterogeneity; which is more closely
associated with sacredness, is a bipolar category that encompasses everything that is unproductive, irrational,
incommensurable, unstructured, unpredictable, and wasteful.While
homogeneity excludes violence,
heterogeneity is the chief domain of violence. Bataille offers five descriptions of heterogeneous elements: (i)
taboo and mana; (2) everything resulting from unproductive expenditure, including excrement, eroticism, and violence; (3)
ambiguous phenomena that are simultaneously attractive and repulsive; (4) excess, delirium, and madness; and () any reality
that is affectively forceful or shocking.3t The bipolarity of heterogeneity captures two related but opposing, shifting, and
unstable characteristics of sacred things; purity and impurity." Pure sacred and impure sacred, which Bataille labels "right" and
"left" respectively, challenge Mauss's and Durkheim's rigid theoretical views on sacred objects, which they consider (negatively)
as the source of all prohibitions.33 Mauss and Durkheim qualir the sacred as dangerous and repulsive. In contrast, building upon
Maistre's observation that the pure authority of-the king requires the impure violence of the executioner, Bataille captures the
ambiguity of the sacred by qualifying it as a form of energy that fluctuates between two oppositely charged poles.34 Bataille
also counrerintuitively describes both heterogeneous sacred polarities as sovereign in an effort to convey the double
significance of the sacred.When qualified with the word "imperative," the term "sovereign" describes sacred things, such as
kings, who are noble, pure, elevated, and singular.35 In contrast, Bataille uses words like "base:' "abject:' and "accursed" to
characterize subversive sovereignty, sacred power that is ignoble, impure, mired, or chthonian. The executioner, who also
participates in the formation of monarchical power (imperative sovereignty), exhibits subversive heterogeneity that is radically
impure, and as a result is placed completely outside the social hierarchy defined by the king. Thus, Bataille's theoretical
elaboration on Maistre's original distinction reveals that both the king and his executioner are sovereign, but in consequence of
opposite sacred qualities and with different ontological effects. Bataille's dualistic concept of heterogeneity serves as the basis
for his novel understanding of sovereignty. Because heterogeneity is its primary animating force, sovereignty has two forms, the
imperative and the subversive. Imperative sovereignty describes ruling power whose legitimacy is constructed on a hierarchical,
elevated, and amplified basis. In his postwar writings on sovereignty, Bataille describes its imperative form as belonging to
kings, priests, chieftains, and "all men who possess and have never entirely lost the value that is attributed to gods and
'dignitaries."36 Although imperative sovereignty is the preeminent source of state power and is typically associated with
mastery and supremacy, Bataille argues that it,is actually servile because it is useful. In contrast, subversive or revolutionary
sovereignty derives its power from the abject and useless. Bataille writes: "Life beyond utility is the domain of sovereign ty:'37
Subversive sovereignty is experienced as unproductive loss and dissolution; instead of authoritatively establishing limits (laws),
this revolutionary form of power comesinto being when limits are transgressed. For this reason , sacrifice plays an

Kirk, Flynn, et al
essential role in the invocation of an impure heterogeneous sovereignty. When useless,

sacrifice also gives rise to an acephalic community, which has no trace of,
imperative sovereignty and, therefore, no leader or authority. No headless
community can form, however, if its members seek to conserve some aspect of
the sacrifice. Bataille rejects sovereignty that relies upon purity and hierarchy in order to establish dominion. Bataille uses the concepts of
homogeneity and heterogeneity to describe the affective qualities of politicalpower embodied by leaders, institutions, symbols, and the like. All
traditional forms of political power combine homogeneous and heterogeneous elements, albeit in different ways. Consider three extremes: liberalism,
monarchism, and fascism. The liberal state is the most homogeneous. As Stoeki interprets Bataille's fascism essay, however, homogeneous forces
"The imperative, or sovereign, form of
never completely exclude heterogeneous ones, even in liberal states:
heterogeneity goes to aid the homogeneous forces: it guarantees the stability
of a society which can give itself meaning only through the sadistic exclusion of
impure heterogeneity."" Stoeki's reading of Bataille suggests a quasi-Weberian interpretation of liberal states: -parliamentary
regimes remain stable thanks to legal-rational authority, which they achieve, in part, through the force of the law, namely
violence. The homogeneous state maintains, through the army and police, a store of imperative heterogeneity, which guards
the boundaries of the state's homogeneous authority through violent exclusion. Monarchies and fascist regimes operate
differently. As Stoeki points out, "The king or the fascist leader (as imperative heterogeneity) is in a way excluded from the
homogeneous activities of society, but he dominates that society and embodies it."" In the case of the king, the imperative
sovereignty of the monarchy, which itself relies on the equally imperative heterogeneity of Christianity, cooperates with and co-
opts the subversive (impure) heterogeneity of the executioner in order to police the boundaries of the royal body. For the fascist
leader, as Bataille's essay reveals, the mixture of homogeneity and heterogeneity becomes increasingly potent and complex.
His analysis, which focuses particularly on fascism's appropriation of religion and the military, reveals a fascination with the
important role of imperative

Kirk, Flynn, et al
A2… Alt > Fascism

Although Bataille recognizes, even admires, the revolutionary
heterogeneity in the fascist movement.
potential of this mixture of pure and impure sacred fascist power, he remains convinced
that only communities organized on the basis of subversive
heterogeneity can be truly liberating. The fluidity of the categories used by Bataille to describe the
psychological structure of fascism demonstrates the importance of the sacrificial mechanism, which inserts an element of
agency into what otherwise appears as an unchangeable world of sacred polarities. The crucifixion of Christ clearly
demonstrates this mechanism when it transforms the impure, bleeding, and agonized body of Christ into the pure,
Bataille, like his predecessors in the discourse,
transcendental figure of the corpus nsysticurn.
recognizes that sacrificial violence makes things sacred . Unlike them, however,
Bataille also realizes the theoretical importance of the capacity of sacrifice to
negotiate between different forms of the sacred . For Bataille, the imperative
heterogeneity of the army is not the same kind of sacred power as the
subversive heterogeneity of the proletariat . Indeed, in his discussion of the army
Bataille characterizes it as imperatively heteroge-neous: hierarchy and discipline in the
service of death. Because the army amalgamates purity and violence, it possesses an
ambiguous attractive power, which Bataille describes in the following way: "This process
is the intermediary through which disgusting slaughter is radically transformed into its
opposite, glory-namely, into a pure and intense attraction. "40 Although armies are not engaged in
sacrificial acts per .se, the military demonstrates that violence can be transformed into a positive, glorious accessory of political
power. Similarly, religion has a dual characterization that contributes to its own form of attraction. Bataille writes: "The supreme
being of theologians and philosophers represents the most profound introjection of the structure characteristic of hooaigeueity
into heterogeneous existence: in his theological aspect, God preeminently fulfills the sovereign form?'41 Religion is attractive
because it elevates the abject through sacrificial symbolism, such as Christ's sacrifice. Religion confers order, status, and purity
on death, which is originally and profoundly impure. In describing the affective power of fascism, Bataille focuses on the army
and religion because of their long, combined historical complicity in the foundation and exercise of political power. Bataille
perceives both institutions as possessing violent and/or sacrificial mechanisms that provide for the purification of impure
heterogeneity. In their ability to convert subversive heterogeneity into pure or imperative heterogeneity-to transform abject
sacred into pure sacredthe army and the church support the augmentation and stabilization of authoritarian political power. Like
the French revolutionaries, Maistre, and Sorel, Bataille appreciates that the effectiveness of political power-its authority-is
intimately linked to the afectivity of violence. Bataille's analysis of the emergence of fascism also suggests that he is particularly
attuned to the affective impact of fascism's use of both martial and religious violence. "Fascist power;' Bataille writes, "is
characterized by a foundation that is both religious and military, in which these two habitually distinct elements cannot be
separated."" Bataille discovers that fascism taps into the same sacred well of affectivity as other regimes, but in ways that
Although Bataille admires fascism's ability to convert impure
vastly increase mass enthusiasm.
heterogeneity into a pure sweetener of its authority, he rejects the desirability of
a revolution based on imperative heterogeneity. Like other forms of Western
politics, fascism is politically unfeasible without imperative heterogeneity, the pure
sacred product of armies or churches. Sword and scepter participate in the establishment of authority by
conferring legitimacy upon the exercise of power, which is elevated and concentrated in the leader or
Führer. With or without these institutional props, Western forms of authority, be they traditional, legal-rational, or charismatic,
in the Western political tradition, this
rely on the pure sacred qualities of imperative heterogeneity. Furthermore,
uplifting of power to the status of right always occurs at the expense or with the
complicity of subversive (impure) heterogeneity What makes fascism unique, according
to Bataille, is that it is the most authoritative of all political regimes. Bataffie compares the "total
power" of the fascist chief with that of a king, who "manifests ... the fundamental tendency and principle of all authority: the
Fascism requires supreme authority,
reduction to a personal entity, the individualization of power."43
which is concentrated like royal power in its chief. It is this kind of authority that Bataille
hopes to destroy by marshaling the impure heterogeneity of unproductive sacrificial
violence.

Kirk, Flynn, et al
A2… Alt > Nihilism

Extend the alt debate from above. Sacrifice is key to both liberation from domination and
an ethical stance that can give value to our existence.
The ecastic community provides the only avenue for politics and ethics in an age of
totalitarianism masquerading as liberal democracy.
Christopher Stanley 1998 [University Leeds, International Journal for the Semiotics of Law VoI.XI no.32]
This point is made through the apparent movement in the thought of Bataille from exteriority to interiority, which I interpret as a move from lapolitique to le
politique. Bataille appears to stop "thinking" community in a turn to "inner experience": but this is only an appearance. BataiUe is neither
concerned with the inner or experience (as Derrida notes in his essay on Bataille)) 6 The event of excess leading to this
point of rupture in terms of Bataille's "activities in community" were both political and aesthetic
(totalitarianism and surrealism). This
period of excess resonates with the contemporary. This may appear as an
unexpected allusion. However, statements to "think the political" in terms of radical finitude express
the realization that the current manifestation of democratic liberalism is that of an "unheard totalitaria-
nism" and that "democracy is to come". The excesses of the contemporary may be less obvious than that of the 1930s and 1940s. The eradication of
conflict in terms of ideology and political economy which contemporary democracy purports to deliver incurs
the flattening of meaning and the totalisation of value. The political sphere has been "closed" in a process of
simulation and multiple ordering of representation (as Baudrillard would suggest). 17 It is in response to this
appearance of closure that a re-thinking of the political occurs. The space of this "thinking the
political" is in the interstitial of the remainder at the "end of politics ": a rejection of the tyranny of representation and the
commencement of thinking the political through the philosophical as the only response available in "opposition" to the sovereignty of form externally determining desire and language.
"After" law and society comes justice and community both in terms of repressive rhetoric and in the affirmation of finitude and imminence. Bataille's realisation at the point of his "turn"
to interiority having thought the limit of community was that the limit is not of the subject's interiority but a crossing (glissement) beyond and toward the outside of the limit. There is less
contradiction than might at first appear between Bataille's writings on transgression and desire and those on sovereignty and community. Both are expressions of working at the limit as
excavations in the communication of communality. They are reliant upon one another. 18 If his later work (such as "Inner Experience" which is often interpreted as reflecting a Sartrean
existentialism in the sense of raising an engagement)19 has been neglected within contemporary commentaries it is because it has been possible to appropriate Bataille to the excessive
and relativist claims of the postmodern. However, it is the "uneasiness of political exigency" haunting Bataitle, which (and this is the parallel move in the postmodern) causes him to
consider sacrifice not in terms of economy and transcendence but in terms as finitude and abundance: from the economy of the limit as scarcity to the economy of the limit as abundance
and excess of communication (the limit as a point of passage not closure in a Heideggarian sense). There is a relation between sacrifice and finitiude in terms of economy but it is
Bataille's "move" from exteriority to interiority which suggests thinking at "another limit" wherein the issue of sovereignty is re-figured in terms of finitude and sacrifice as abandonment
as opposed to transgression. This "move" to abandonment is the subject of the dialogue between Blanchot and Nancy and can be traced through Bataille's involvement in the Ac~phale
Group and in his novel "The Blue of Noon" (1935). Significant at this stage is Bataille's thought on the dynamics of social groups leading him to the think the "limit" (contestation) of
community in "Inner Experience" (1943). By means of "experiments" conducted in the second half of the 1930s in the names of groups such as Contre-Attaque, Acdphale and the College
de Sociologie, Bataille sought to grasp the nature of communal existence through the experience of political extremity in the form of the Soviet experience and Fascism. 20 Bataille
wanted to understand the mystery of the social bond distinguishes Bataille's world of excess, irony, violence, Blanchot's economy of impersonality and nocturnal dispersion, and the
Levinasian universe of gravity, disymmetry and responsibility, a single configuration of communication insists." See Joseph Libertson, Proximity: Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and
Communication (Boston MA: Kluwer, 1982), 3. and perceive in the same gesture the sense of awakening of the Great Politics for which Nietztsche so longed. Bataille's activities during
this period were informed by the belief that totalitarianism "completed" history and that there was another way of being-together save the seduction of Fascism or betrayal by the
bureaucratic horror of Stalinism. 21 These two ideas motivated Bataille to rethink the social bond in terms of ritual, myth and sexuality, engaging in a reconfiguration of the political in
the remainder of the excess of ideological and aesthetic forms. In the end, in the early years of the Cold War, Bataille appears to capitulate in the sense of relying on a political neutrality,
he by-passes the opposition between resistance and collaboration in the recognition that neutrality meant the refusal of all action and a distancing from all political undertaking. This
apparent failure can be contested if "Inner Experience" is interpreted as a text not of aesthetics (in the sense of Heidegger's "move" to poetics after the Rectoral Address of 1933 or of
Blanchot's recits during the Cold War period after his ambiguous political position during the Occupation). The point of contestation crucial to this "move" is Bataille's idea of experience
as ek-stasis referring also to the outside, as the prefix ek determines. The experience is also something impossible (the limit in the extreme limit of possible). Bataille's
politics becomes not a politics of the possible but a politics of the impossible: he remains political in the sense of Beardsworth's
re-thinking of the question of the political in terms of radical finitude. Bataille moved during the 1930s from an "outward", action-orientated definition of desire (virility) to an "inward"
one. It is a move "from" politics to philosophy enabling a re-thinking of the political. It is a move related to the evolution of European politics and the outward definition only achieves
resonance again in Paris in May 1968 in the marginality of the situationist or autonomes. Prior to the point of Bataille's "withdrawal" from the political he experienced the conflict between
opposition and collaboration which thrust him toward partial solutions through alternative mechanisms of communality, sacrifice and sovereignty. In May 1968 it appeared as though the
collective rituals that had fascinated members of the "secret societies" Bataille was involved with in the 1930s were being staged on the boulevards of the Latin Quarter in Paris. 22 This
"explosive communication" (at the limit of communication in the sense of the affirmation of exposure to the outside (other) in the incompletion of meaning) resulted from a dissymmetry
of desire which is the foundationof an ethic of all relations with others (following Levinas). In this formulation desire is both fatal and vital and is placed as a sovereign function above or
removed from law and convention. The political and social context Bataille witnessed denied him the ability to experience desire and community out-with the Law in this form as
The restrictions of excessive political

abundance because of activity: work as opposed to un-working; experiment as opposed to innovation.
economy forced Bataille's "turn" to "inner experience". 23 The tension before the limit of the political
apparently causes Bataille to withdraw from the political. It is a withdrawal which enables him to discover
an "abundance" of desire (desire without the limit imposed by the sovereignty of law) through the "devastation" of the subject through inner
experience as the exposure of the subject to the outside. It is this "devastation" (the exposure to abundance) and his rejection
of the aims of Acephale (that communality should commence with the relationship between the group and
sacrifice as foundational in the construction of the social bond and therefore in the interrogation of the
prohibition which eliminates violence) which could prompt Bataille to state "The community of those who do

Kirk, Flynn, et al
not have a community". 24 Bataille could only arrive at this comment through the arrival at the limit of death in the sacrifice of another whose existence confirms the
existence of the singular being, forcing the confrontation or exposure with the limit of being at the point of finitude It is a move from a restricted to a general economy of
.
desire which eliminates sovereignty through the "devastation" of the subject whose desire is otherwise than for Law. Bataille's recognition is that of
the limit of the social bond (as com-unus or com-munis) which in the 1930s he had struggled to understand but which could only be comprehended
through unworking (at which point sovereignty is no-thing) and at the limit of thought and language.

Kirk, Flynn, et al
A2… K Romanticizes Natural/Past

We do NOT romanticize the past. We invoke a new form of sovereignty, not a return to
some natural essence.
Bataille conflicts with romanticism --- can’t return to lost origins

Rebecca Comay 1990
[Yale French Studies 78]
" Intimacy" would involve, then, not the transparency of identity, but rather the
opaque intransigence of what connects at the point of greatest secrecy. "Normal" communication (in the "profane" sense of
correspondence and consensus) cannot be more fragile, therefore, than when "sovereign communication" silently rules. The
darkness of "common subjectivity" (to use Bataille's language) would thus be prior to the communal mergers of
intersubjectivity, at least as classically conceived. Communication, in my sense, is in fact never stronger than when
communication, in the weak sense, in the sense of profane language which makes us-and the world-penetrable) proves useless,
This
and becomes the equivalent of darkness. We speak in various ways to convince others and to seek agreement ....
incessant effort. would be apparently impossible if we were not first bound to one another
by the feeling of common subjectivity, impenetrable to itself, and for which the world of
distinct objects is impenetrable. [9, 311] And is it enough to point out that Bataille's
"nostalgia" is at best an "uneasy" one (5, 155), opposed to every form of pastoralism and
every form of naive escape? This "unease' is, indeed, at the root of Bataille's
confrontation with Breton,9 with Bãumler (1, 447-65), with Romanticism (9, 206),
with Hemingway (8, 230-33), with (at times) Proust (5, 156-75), with naturalism ("the
poetic fallacy of animality" [7, 293]), with sexual liberationism,'° with "Orientalism" (5,
30): with every attempt to reduce transgression to the sentimental movement of
restoration and return. Such nostalgia would have the "suspicious and lugubrious"
(5, 540) stupor of an idealizing aestheticism: "the European's sickly taste for an exotic color" (5,
conditions which only
30)-"like a film about 'primitive' countries" (1, 530)-a numbing abstraction from present
masks an accommodation to the status quo. It would occlude the historic
specificity of the given with the passive longing for the past, hypostatizing
present circumstances by the very appeal to bygone days. History itself would
prevent such an easy overcoming. 9. Bataille's (not unambivalent) critique of the surrealists tends to focus,
among other things, on the naiveté of their appeals to transcendence (the "sur") which would, in his view, obscure
contemporary social conditions (with its concomitant technical rationality) thus leading to various regressivities and archaisms.
For the clearest elaborations of this argument, see "La 'vieille taupe' et le prefix sur dans les mots surhomme et surrealiste" (2,
93-112), "La Valeur d'usage de D. A. F. de Sade" (2, 54-69), "La Religion surrealiste" (7, 381-95), and "Le iurréalisme en 1947"
(11, 259-61). 10. "Despite
appearances, I am opposed to the tendency that seems to prevail
today. I am not one of those who see in the abolition of sexual taboos a way out"
The radical impurity of beginnings and ends-the ambivalent birth and death of
"history"-should prohibit any temptation to regress. "The nostalgia for a bygone world
is ... based on a shortsighted judgment . . ." (7, 126). Even if we do have a paradoxical nostalgia for it, we
can only by some aberration regret the loss of the religious and royal edifice of the past. The effort to which this edifice
responded was only an immense failure and Hit is true that the essential is missing from our world we can only go further,
without imagining, even for an instant, the possibility of a return back. [8, 275] From what would one escape? It is too late to
speak of leaving. Has not the "experience" of fascism itself blurred forever the line between effervescence and utility, organizing
lumpen uselessness into the efficiency of state service, fusing charismatic sovereignty with the mechanical rationality of order,
marking the final penetration (to speak Habermasian) of Zweckrationalitat into the lifeworld of pure dépense? (1, 339-7 1). Such
blurring indeed would erode the last enclave of uncontaminated spontaneity-implicating the body, the unconscious, desire,
sexuality itself within the restricted circuit of the commodity exchange. A blurring which would paralyze-as Adorno and
Horkheimer saw all too clearly, Marcuse not clearly enough-all hope of exit and mock every fantasy of regression as being the
collusive daydream of the herd. Making "Auschwitz" henceforth (as Bataille puts it, with an almost Adornian pathos) the very
"sign of man" (11, 226), the decisive rubric of our day. Turning the present into a "field of ashes" (5, 40), without an option of
escape.To what would one return? Historic precedents are neither conceivable
nor provided. There is no historic form of sovereignty which is not already
implicated in the machinations of profane rationality. Even the most "primitive"
potlatches of the Tlingit and Kwakiutl were already contaminated by the calculus of
acquired rank and power (Bataille does not, despite appearances, share Mauss's
idealizations of the communifying bond of archaic "generosity.") Early potlatch was
already caught up in the rational circuit of exchange . Tribal depense proves to be a "comedy" (7, 73) of
compensation and control 82 Yale French Studies an insurance policy underwritten by the machinations of a "crooked will" (7,
75). For the Pacific chieftain indeed is guaranteed to win through losing-gift summoning countergift-stockpiling prestige and
honor in return for the dilapidations of the fiscal reserve. "He enriches himself with his contempt for wealth, and what he shows

Kirk, Flynn, et al
himself to be miserly of is the power of his own generosity" (7, 72 ). Nor is prehistoric "nature" a
nostrum. If it is true that, in his invocation of "ends in themselves" (1, 305), Bataille would seem to invoke the most
classical split between the natural and the cultural the immanent entelechy of phusis pitted against the exteriority of techné
(Aristotle); the apparent "purposelessness" of the flower pitted against the functionality of the artifact (Kant); the wasteful
effusions of the songbird pitted against the niggardly efficiencies of the craftsman (Schiller) -he is unsentimental in his
attachments, and dismisses every yearning for archaic Nature as being just "poetic fulguration" (7, 294). Despite appearances.
It is true that our meager acts of effervescence are said to be just "the expression of the Earth and its laws" (2, 155) -the very
laws of "cosmic energy" which one would ignore, warns Bataille, at one's own peril (7,33). True, too, that "communication" at
And it is true that the
times seems modelled on the labyrinthine bondings of molecular existence (1, 433ff.).
undulations of expenditure seem to suppose a "link between lovemaking and lightwaves"
(5, 283)-"perhaps arbitrary," demurs Bataille, but no less telling. But this is not the "cosmic
Lebensphilosophie" some might imagine. '1 For natural immediacy is not an option. "In this kind of situation there is no recourse
to animality" (8, 196). The unfettered immediacy of natural existence (apparently unquestioned
by Bataille)'2 is neither possible nor desirable for humanity. For one thing, such immediacy remains "unfathomable" (7,
294). For another, it lacks all verve. The soggy indifference of "life" ("like water in water" [7, 295]) in
fact is devoid of sacred tension. The animal (unfettered by work and prohibitions) knows
not the joyful horror of transgression; it knows just the "slumber" (7, 313) of instinctual
life. Libertarian appeals to 11. Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987(, 235.
12. On evidently Hegelian grounds. The epigraph to Théorie de Ia religion cites Kojève (whose testimony is taken to be
impeccable( on the difference between the immediacy of animal hunger and the mediated "negativity" of human desire
REBECCA COMAY 83 nature would only neutralize "sin" as wholesome spontaneity (fun sex, healthy appetite): Genet and Sade,
For the violation of taboos is
Baudelaire and Proust knew rather the awful attraction of forbidden fruit.
not a "return to animal violence" (10, 68): transgression (dialectically?) 1-3
preserves the very prohibition it would surmount.

Kirk, Flynn, et al
A2… Alt is patriarchal

Turn: Our model of sacrifice is expenditure, breaking down the accumulating forces that
enable traditional masculine conquest

Although virility is commonly defined as an accumulation of male force, especially sexual potency Bataille
views it through the lens of unproductive expenditure. The result is a concept of male power that relies on an
ontology of waste, not accumulation. For Bataille, the male erection has no purpose other than to waste itself, an
image captured by Troppman, the main character in Bataille's novel Le Bleu du clef (Blue of Noon), written in 1935
but not published until 3957. Susan Rubin Suleiman remarks that Troppman is symbolically castrated, a reflection of
Bataffle's characterization of the impotence felt by antifascist French intellectuals in the I93 0s. For instance, when
Troppman is unable to make love to a beautiful woman named Dirty, she euphemistically taunts him: "If only you
could lose your head?'60 Suleiman argues that this slippage between castration and decapitation indicates
increased virility from a uniquely Bataillian
perspective: -
Decapitation is a symbolic castration, if Freud is to be believed; but Troppman is already symbolically castrated, so
his decapitation would be redundant. (Troppnian, incidentally, was the name of a mass murderer beheaded in Paris
in 5870.) Unless, of course, "losing his head" restored his potency, according to that characteristically Baraillian
equation which states that a violent loss of control is the precondition ofjouisaauce, a radical letting go. 61
It is precisely this "violent loss of control:' anticipated by unproductive expenditure, celebrated in Blue of Noon,
and captured in Bataille's Contre-Attaque writings, that characterizes Bataille's concept of virility.Virility is
paradoxically a form of orgiastic powerlessness or jouissance, a sort of antiauthoritarian authority. This state of
being forms an exact parallel to Bataille's notion of sub
p. 180
versive or acephalic sovereignty62 In disposing of itself effervescently, virility permits ontological self-sacrifice
in the service of a revolution that wastes unproductively all that it opposes. The revolutionary role of sovereign
virility is thus metapolitical because it promises a self-wounding masculinity that turns the proletariat inward and
upon itself. Sovereign virility also thwarts traditional notions of political foundation, which require idealism and
elevated authority.

Kirk, Flynn, et al

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UTNIF 2010 Sacrificial Refudiation K

No head is better than one.

‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’-motto of Hanseatic League 1

‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’-motto of Hanseatic League 2

“The Pups of War”

‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’-motto of Hanseatic League 3

‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’-motto of Hanseatic League 4

‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’-motto of Hanseatic League 5

Shells… Pups of War and Cerberus

Labor on, Hercules!

‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’-motto of Hanseatic League 6

The Pups of War… 1NC Shell Link (v K aff)

Act 1: The Annointing.

Spiralling into the conﬂagration of the

‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’-motto of Hanseatic League 7

‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’-motto of Hanseatic League 8

The Pups of War… 1NC Shell Link (v K aff)

‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’-motto of Hanseatic League 9

‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’-motto of Hanseatic League 10

Shell… Cerberus… 1NC Shell Link (v Policy Aff)

Act 1: The Annointing

Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat 2007

‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’-motto of Hanseatic League 11

Cerberus… 1NC Shell Link (v Policy Aff)

‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’-motto of Hanseatic League 12

Cerberus… 1NC Shell Link (v Policy Aff)

‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’-motto of Hanseatic League 13

Cerberus /Yelping Pups… 1NC Shell Alt/MPX…

Liran Razinsky 2009

‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’-motto of Hanseatic League 14

‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’-motto of Hanseatic League 15

Cerberus /Yelping Pups 1NC Shell Alt/MPX…

‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’-motto of Hanseatic League 16

‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’-motto of Hanseatic League 17

Cerberus /Yelping Pup 1NC Shell Alt/MPX…

‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’-motto of Hanseatic League 18

‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’-motto of Hanseatic League 19

Cerberus /Yelping Pup 1NC Shell Alt/MPX…

‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’-motto of Hanseatic League 20

community in crisis is pregnant with a new political order.

‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’-motto of Hanseatic League 21

Essential Dual Purpose Blocks

2NC OV… Cerberus

‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’-motto of Hanseatic League 22

Perm 2nc (Both)

‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’-motto of Hanseatic League 23

Perm 2nc (Both)

Jesse Goldhammer 2005

‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’-motto of Hanseatic League 24

Perm 2nc (Both)

Jason Winfree, Assoc Prof Philosophy at California State University, 2009

‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’-motto of Hanseatic League 25

Perm 2nc (Both)

‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’-motto of Hanseatic League 26

Perm 2nc (Both)

‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’-motto of Hanseatic League 27

A2 Aff challenges militarism (Both)

‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’-motto of Hanseatic League 28

A2 Aff challenges militarism (Both)