Agamben K Final 1

University of Michigan
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AGAMBEN K
Agamben K.................................................................................................................................................................................1
LINKS REFUGEES................................................................................................................................................................3
LINKS HUMAN RIGHTS......................................................................................................................................................6
LINKS TERRORISM...........................................................................................................................................................12
LINKS - BIOTERRORISM.....................................................................................................................................................15
LINKS DISEASE..................................................................................................................................................................19
LINKS IMMIGRATION.......................................................................................................................................................21
LINKS - DATABASES............................................................................................................................................................22
LINKS - MEDICALIZATION.................................................................................................................................................23
LINKS - ABORTION...............................................................................................................................................................25
LINKS - HUMANITARIANISM.............................................................................................................................................26
LINKS IMMIGRATION.......................................................................................................................................................27
LINKS NATURAL DISASTERS.........................................................................................................................................28
LINKS NEEDLE EXCHANGE............................................................................................................................................31
LINKS WELFARE................................................................................................................................................................32
LINKS WOMENS RIGHTS................................................................................................................................................36
LINKS DRUG WAR.............................................................................................................................................................38
LINKS DEMOCRACY.........................................................................................................................................................39
LINKS COURTS...................................................................................................................................................................40
LINKS TERRORISM COURT SPECIFIC...........................................................................................................................41
LINKS POPULATION MANAGEMENT............................................................................................................................43
LINKS POLICING................................................................................................................................................................44
LINKS ECONOMIC CRISIS...............................................................................................................................................45
LINKS POVERTY REFORM...............................................................................................................................................46
LINKS PATERNAFARE.......................................................................................................................................................48
INTERNAL LINKS STATE OF EXCEPTION....................................................................................................................49
LINKS/IMPACT TERRORISM............................................................................................................................................52
IMPACTS STATE OF EMERGENCY.................................................................................................................................54
IMPACTS WAR....................................................................................................................................................................55
IMPACTS - MASS VIOLENCE..............................................................................................................................................56
IMPACTS - TOTALITARIANISM..........................................................................................................................................57
IMPACTS VIOLENCE.........................................................................................................................................................58
IMPACTS GENOCIDE.........................................................................................................................................................59
IMPACTS VALUE TO LIFE................................................................................................................................................60
TURNS CASE TERRORISM...............................................................................................................................................61
TURNS CASE IMMIGRATION..........................................................................................................................................63
TURNS CASE DISABILITIES............................................................................................................................................64
TURNS CASE VETERANS.................................................................................................................................................65
ROOT CAUSE OF POVERTY................................................................................................................................................66
CRISIS POLITICS/STATE OF EMERGENCY......................................................................................................................67
ALT WHATEVER BEING....................................................................................................................................................70
ALT WHATEVER BEING IMMIGRATION SOLVENCY..............................................................................................77
ALT WHATEVER BEING A/T: BIOMETRICS...............................................................................................................78
ALT WHATEVER BEING AT: IMPOSSIBLE/UTOPIAN...............................................................................................79
ALT INDIVIDUAL RESISTANCE......................................................................................................................................80
ALT UMASK THE FICTIOn................................................................................................................................................81
EPISTEMOLOGY FIRST........................................................................................................................................................82
AT: PERM................................................................................................................................................................................83
AT: POLITICS..........................................................................................................................................................................88
AT: WE ARE GOOD BIOPOWER..........................................................................................................................................91
AT: STATE GOOD...................................................................................................................................................................92
AT: NO IMPACT......................................................................................................................................................................93
AT: BIOPOWER INEV............................................................................................................................................................94
Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian
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AT: WE CHALLENGE PARTICULAR ABUSE.....................................................................................................................95

AT: NO SOVEREIGNTY NOW..............................................................................................................................................96
AT: FOUCAULT......................................................................................................................................................................98
AT: SOVEREIGNTY SOLVES WAR......................................................................................................................................99
AT: FRIEND/ENEMY GOOD...............................................................................................................................................100
AFF ALT FAILS..................................................................................................................................................................101
AFF STATE OF EXCEPTION TURN................................................................................................................................106
AFF ALT CAUSES POWERLESSNESS...........................................................................................................................110
AFF RIGHTS DISCOURSE GOOD...................................................................................................................................111
AFF ALT UNDERMINES RESPONSIBILITY..................................................................................................................113
AFF ALT IS TOO NEGATIVE...........................................................................................................................................114
AFF VICTIMIZATION TURN...........................................................................................................................................115
AFF ALT IS TOTALIZING.................................................................................................................................................119
AFF IMMIGRATION LINK TURN...................................................................................................................................120
AFF IMMIGRATION LINK TURN...................................................................................................................................121
AFF CIVIC ENGAGEMENT LINK TURN.......................................................................................................................122
AFF AT: HUMANITARIANISM LINK.............................................................................................................................124
AFF BROADBAND LINK TURN.....................................................................................................................................126
AFF NO LINK/NO IMPACT..............................................................................................................................................127
AFF NO IMPACT...............................................................................................................................................................128
AFF NO IMPACT TECHNOLOGY................................................................................................................................129
AFF CEDES THE POLITICAL..........................................................................................................................................130
AFF AT: TERRORISTS ARE HOMO SACER..................................................................................................................131
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LINKS REFUGEES
The humanitarian refugee camp is a biopolitical extension of the state of emergency that refuses to confront itself
it reduces refugees to bare biology
Redfield 5 Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina [Doctors, Borders, and Life in
Crisis Peter, Cultural Antrhopology, Washington, Copyright University of California Press. Colume 20, Issue 3, page 328]
Consider one of the key spatial contexts within which MSF and other humanitarian actors operate: a refugee camp
explicitly defines biopolitics in terms of the preservation of life where it has otherwise been abandoned or put at risk-an
attenuated form of government, if you will (see Biehl 2001; Pandolfi 2002). At the same time, it is important to recognize that a refugee camp is
not a concentration or a death camp, although they may share certain technical traits and general strategies of control. When properly functioning, a
refugee camp fosters the possibility of mass survival, not mass extermination.22 Nonetheless, the troubling status of refugees plays a critical
role in the efforts of Arendt (1973) and Agamben to comprehend the political trajectory of totalitarian genocide; the image
of massed refugees undeniably represents an archetype of human suffering (Malkki 1996). In both kinds of camps, those
designed for refuge as well as for elimination, the figure of the human emerges from behind that of the citizen, in a bodily
condition exposed by crisis. Concerns for stateless persons and victims of genocide pervade international codes for human rights and humanitarian
law that followed World War II. Although those documents have rarely enjoyed enforcement, an elaborate system of UN agencies, national
governments, and NGOs, has established the refugee camp as the predominant mechanism of practical response to severe
political and ecological instability. In exceptional conditions of displacement, an exceptional space of preservation now
opens, to relieve a population, if never quite cure or fully care for it. This is where the threshold possibility of Agamben's
"bare life" again comes into view within the circumscribed existence of the involuntarily displaced.
To further clarify the point, let me return to the ethnographic example from my introduction. In the fall of 2000, MSF
brought a traveling exhibit to several sites in greater New York and Los Angeles as part of a special publicity campaign on
behalf of displaced people.23 Entitled "A Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City," it brought together two of Agamben's key elements-the camp
and the city-as a small circle of tents briefly appeared in the center of Central Park. MSF volunteers and staff issued identity cards to visitors and then led
them through the exhibit in small groups to experience the key features of a miniature model camp. The first section of the exhibit illustrated basic needs:
shelter in the form of simple tents adapted to different climates, water purification in the form of a giant bladder dispensing five gallons per person per day,
food in the form of compact bars providing 2100 calories, and finally hygiene in the form of a latrine (the VIP version) equipped with both a public
education folk painting about hand washing and an ingenious method of trapping flies. Here was a panorama of survival in all its measured
essence. To one side hung a small poster about mental health and trauma and beyond lay the medical zone, featuring a
model clinic, a weighing station, and vaccination center, and finally a cholera exclusion area. The tour closed with a
depiction of landmines and a photographic testimonial to the plight of refugees.
In this model camp the spatial order is both exact and essential. It does not represent a final solution or a politics involving
fully realized subjects, however, but an endlessly temporary defense of minimal existence. In this sense, it is the precise
inverse of a concentration camp, if likewise revealing a border zone between life and death. The camp arranges itself
around an effective rationale of immediate concerns localized within biological necessity. There are bodies to cleanse, to
shelter and protect from hunger and disease. There are children to weigh, inoculate, and categorize by the circumference of their
upper arms. In the model camp, links between these different tasks are clear. Indeed, a number of volunteer guides remarked how much clearer the system
appeared to them in this context than it had in the chaos of an actual emergency. Life itself is exposed beneath the language of rights
invoked to defend it and the protest against conditions that produced the camp in the first place. In this setting, human
zoology exceeds biography: those whose dignity and citizenship is most in question find their crucial measurements
taken in calories rather than in their ability to voice individual opinions or perform acts of civic virtue. The species body,
individually varied but fundamentally interchangeable, grows visible and becomes the focus of attention.
Here the context of MSF's "ethic of refusal" comes most sharply into focus. The group's insistence on
a politics of witnessing combined

with its abstention from taking a directly political role stems from an unwillingness to accept the extended state of
emergency within which it generally operates. Simply to denounce situations would achieve no immediate humanitarian
ends and to endorse political agendas would potentially sacrifice the present needs of a population for the hope of future
conditions. But to maintain formal neutrality at all times without protest would mimic the classic limitations of the Red Cross movement that the
founders of MSF originally rejected. Confronted with such a range of unsatisfying options while still being committed to humanitarian values, MSF's
ideological strategy is to claim a position of "refusal" in the form of action taken with an outspoken, troubled conscience.
Refugees are the prime example of the sovereigns biopolitical exclusion of individuals
Owens, 9 Professor at the University of London
(Patricia, Beyond Bare Life: Refugees and the Right to Have Rights, International Studies Association,
http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p313631_index.html)
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What is so special about the figure of the refugee? Why does Agamben begin here and not with one of the other symbolic
devices found across social and political theory, the worker, the subaltern, the multitude, or the terrorist? There are
four principal reasons for Agambens choice. First, the one and only figure of the refugee (2000: 16) is said to more
deeply expose the fiction of national sovereignty and all associated legal and political categories such as people, public,
human rights and citizen. Second, the refugee can be represented as the paradigmatic site - and victim - of modern
techniques of what Michel Foucault called governmentality (2007: 108), the organised practices and techniques used to
produce, care for and/or dominate individual subjects. Third, and perhaps most originally, Agamben argues that refugees
can be seen as the ultimate biopolitical subjects, those who can be regulated and governed at the level of population in a
permanent state of exception outside the normal legal framework: the camp. There they are reduced to bare life, humans
as animals in nature without political freedom. Finally, it is suggested that by fully comprehending the significance of
refugees we may countenance new ways of political belonging and the limits and possibilities of political community in the
future. After the nation-state and its associated legal and political categories have been assigned to history the refugee will
remain as perhaps the only thinkable figure (Agamben, 2000: 16; also see Diken, 2004, Diken and Lausten, 2005).
Refugees represent Sovereigntys ability to name human rights and strip them away through the creation of naked
life
Owens, 9 Professor at the University of London
(Patricia, Beyond Bare Life: Refugees and the Right to Have Rights, International Studies Association,
For Agamben, refugees reveal the limits of any assumed continuity between man and citizen in the system of nationstates and in the related concept of human rights. The function of modern international organisations is to manage refugee
populations in a manner that does not radically undermine the framework on which the nation-state rests. The three
principle solutions to refugees, repatriation, integration into the society to which they have fled or resettlement in a third
country, all affirm the classical trinity of nation-state-territory with its ideas of citizenship and rights. Eventually refugees
must either return home or be naturalised somewhere else. The bearer of human rights, Agamben argues, is the originary
figure for the inscription of natural naked life in the political-juridical order of the nation- state (2000: 20). By definition, a
nation-state is one that makes nativity or birth (that is, naked human life) the foundation of its sovereignty (2000: 21). The
refugee camp is significant here because it supplements, but ultimately destroys the classical trinity; by breaking the
identity between the human and the citizen and that between nativity and nationality, [the refugee] brings the originary
fiction of sovereignty to crisis (2000: 21)
Refugees are reduced to bare life since they arent allowed a right to citizenship and excluded from the political
sphere
Caldwell 04 Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Louisville
(Anne, Bio-Sovereignty and the Emergence of Humanity, Theory & Event, Volume 7, Issue 2, Project Muse)
If sovereignty operates as a regulation of indeterminacy, spanning domestic and international space and cutting across
particular political groups, what relation can such a power have to life? Agamben's more concrete analysis of the French
Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen offers us a way to approach this question. The ambiguities of the French
Declaration are not new. They have been most famously noted by Arendt, whose account influences Agamben. Both see[s]
the world wars of the twentieth century as exposing the real basis of the Declaration, and its deficits. The French
Revolution established the model of the state form dominant until World War I and still influential today: a "functional
nexus between a determinate localization (territory) and a determinate order (the state) . . . mediated by automatic
regulations for the inscription of life (birth or nation)" (Agamben 2000: 42.3). That model broke down with the end of
World War I, as a variety of groups emerged within European states who refused them all protection. / Those refugees,
whom Agamben identifies as figures of homo sacer, are the focus of his account of the inter-war crises. The lessons he
derives from the refugee, however, are directed toward domestic nation-state citizenship. Precisely because refugees and
denaturalized citizens were abandoned by the European states, the refugee forced into open " the difference between birth
and nation." In doing so, the refugee "causes the secret presupposition of the political domain -- bare life -- to appear for an
instant within that domain" (Agamben 1998: 131). The European states, refusing to recognize refugees, revealed that
national citizenship has never really been defined by political categories, but by sheer birth into a nation. What the refugee
reveals is the oscillation between natural and political life within the nation-state. Modern citizenship, defined by
seventeenth century thinkers as based in natural equality, now appears as neither simply natural, nor political. The ground
of citizenship is rather the life formed by the mixture of the natural and the political: homo sacer.
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LINKS HUMAN RIGHTS

The precise moment that they claim for human rights is simultaneously when the state strips those very rights away
Hussain and Ptacek 2k - * Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst University [Nasser and
Melissa Review: Thresholds: Sovereignty and the Sacred Publiched by Blackwell Publishing, Law & Society Review,
Vol 34, No 2, pp. 495-515. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3115091]
When Agamben declares that Arendt's The Origins of Totalitar- ianism (1958) is "altogether lacking in any biopolitical perspective," it is not entirely
clear what he means. Interestingly, returning to the relevant sections of Arendt's text, one finds a number of references to what Agamben would consider
bare life. For Arendt, the entire problem with human rights is that they are invoked at the precise moment at which the rights
of a citizen, the political artifice that bestows human dignity, are stripped away, leaving one with "the abstract nakedness of
being human and nothing but human"-a condition that, despite the best-in- tentioned humanitarianism and the loquacious
declarations of human rights, is for her essentially "worthless" (1958:297). The calamity of human rights in this regard thus
is registered for Ar- endt by the appearance of what is assuredly bare life in Agamben's sense. Arendt's images of this life
alternate between the animalic and the savage. Early declarations of an international rights of man, she astutely notes, bore
an "uncanny similarity in language and composition to that of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals." She
ends the chapter by once again denouncing the loss of political community-"our human artifice"-a loss that reduces human
beings to mere "savages."
The decision of whether or not to invoke humanitarian assistance places the sovereign in a position that reduces
populations to bare life
Ibur, 9 Professor of Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center
(Aaron M. Humanitarian Intervention, the Responsibility to Protect, and Abuse of the Law: The Internationalization of
States of Exception, February 15-18, All Academic)
Using Agambens theories of bare life and sovereign exception, this paper argues that
humanitarian intervention is analogous to the state of exception on several planes (1998/2005).
For one, when abuse of humanitarian language is used to justify intervention, a state of exception
is created by this disregard of normative standards for the purpose of narrow self-interest. In this
case, the state of emergency is declared in the international realm and thus, international law too
is to be suspended. On the other hand, the exception is invoked when states do not intervene in
clear situations of extreme humanitarian crisis. That is, states refuse to fulfill their duties to
protect civilians whose own governments cannot or will not do so themselves. In either case,
civilians in crisis zones are reduced to their biological life function (bare life) and thus allowed to
be killed with impunity for the sake of political expediency. While the Responsibility to Protect
attempts to redefine and normalize a new legal sovereignty, without necessary protective
mechanisms, abuse, paternalism, and selective interventions reduce civilians, subject to the
horrors of contemporary war, to bare life. Moreover, as Agamben claims in the domestic realm,
the state of exception becomes in the global sphere the new normative paradigm.
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The question of intervention versus non-intervention positions civilians as objects to be acted upon, regardless of the
desirability of this instance of assistance.
Since Security Council resolutions, made under Chapter VII, arguably may enshrine those issues contained within them
into international law, the Responsibility to Protect may be seen as carrying this weight. If this is the case, then sovereignty
itself has now legally taken on this responsibility. Likewise, international society, made up of states and international
organizations, carries the legal burden of protecting civilians when their own governments are unwilling or unable to do so.
Failure to do so in cases where mass deaths are occurring or imminent due to human malfeasance, is to invoke a state of
exception where the law no longer applies and those in danger are reduced to bare life. On the other hand, interventions in
cases where such tragedy is not taking place or immediately threatened, especially when humanitarian objectives are
claimed as the reason for the interference, also invokes the state of exception. The problem is one of a lack of standards
and accountability where civilians are pawns in a political game that ignores international law. Unless and until reasonable
provisions are made to uphold legal and moral obligations, the state of exception in the terrain of humanitarian intervention
will remain the normal situation in international relations and international law.
The plans use of human rights language is used to justify purely self-interested interventions. This reduces whole
populations to bare life and prevents future movements from being successful.
It would appear that the emerging responsibility to protect addresses this very issue. In fact its
purpose is to address humanitarian issues from the perspective of victims rather than states
(Pace and Deller, P.1). This, now codified into international law, makes those affected the targeted
peoples to be 'protected' in interventions instead of states. Thus, the responsibility to protect
attempts to take a human rights approach rather than a state centered one. Unfortunately, this
too can be used, not for the purpose of ensuring the rights of peoples, but for invoking a state of
exception where again, human life is reduced merely to its basic functioning. This is not due to a
human rights perspective being implemented, per se, but to the abuse of human rights language
being used to justify purely self-interested interventions on the grounds of enforcing the
responsibility to protect. If this happens, the entire state intervened upon becomes the territory of
the camp in that all are liable to be killed without being sacrificed, and are thus homo sacer.
Since no one is actually to be protected and the aim of the invading state is to accomplish some
politico-military goal, all who might serve this purpose are reduced to bare life. Their function is
as mere bodies living or killed for political expediency. Moreover, the fallout from the abuse of
humanitarian goals, such as in the case of the US invasion of Iraq, may hinder future, necessary
interventions by removing them as a legitimate or even possible objective of the international
community (Johnson, P. 116).
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Rights are a smokescreen for sovereign exceptionalism Rights are always trumped by the sovereigns right to
rescind them.
Prozorov, 9 Professor of Political Science at the University of Helenski
(Sergie, The Appropriation of Abandonment: Girgio Agamben on the State of Nature and the Political, February 15 th,
International Studies Association, http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p313215_index.html)
Yet, what does it mean for this right to be left to the sovereign if we reject the idea of the
temporal antecedence of the state of nature? What we are dealing with here is not a residue from
a pre-political era but rather a remainder that is temporally coexistensive with the political order,
the remainder of the political that cannot be subsumed under the positive order of politics
(Schmitt 1985, 12). For Schmitt, this means that every legal system necessarily inscribes within
itself something that is radically heterogeneous to it and cannot be represented in its terms, the
nothingness, from which the sovereign decision famously emanates (ibid.). Similarly, Agamben
argues that [t]his space devoid of law seems to be so essential to the juridical order that it must
seek in every way to assure itself a relation with it, as if in order to ground itself the juridical order
necessarily had to maintain itself in relation with an anomie. (Agamben 2005a, 51) This
inscription of exteriority into the positivity of nomos entails that at the heart of any normative
system there resides the ineradicable potentiality of its self-suspension, whereby the rights given
to the sovereign (as well as rights given by him to the subjects) are suspended by the realization
of the right that was left to the sovereign, a paradoxical right that necessarily must be left out
from the distribution of rights in a normative structure. The state of nature is nothing other than
the being-in-potentiality of the law (Agamben 1998, 35), its potential not to be, i.e. it is what
remains of law if law is wholly suspended. (Agamben 2005a, 80. See also Agamben 1999a, 181184; 250-259) The state of nature qua state of exception is thus the negative foundation of every
constituted power, negative both because it is necessarily effaced in the positive legal edifice and
because it is itself nothing other than the negativity that this system harbours as the condition of
its possibility. This topology of political order is in Agambens argument the quasi-transcendental
condition of Occidental politics, characterizing all Western political orders from the ancient times
onwards (for a critique see e.g. Laclau 2007; Fitzpatrick 2005; Deranty 2008). What does vary
historically is the precise status of the state of exception within the order that it founds. In
Agambens reading, the political history of the West demonstrates the gradual expansion of the
state of exception from a circumscribed area within the political order, which manifested itself in
concrete occasions of public tumult, the death of the ruler, anomic feasts, etc. (Agamben 2005a,
65-73), to the entire domain of nomos itself: [W]hat happened and is still happening before our
eyes is that the juridically empty space of the state of exception (in which the law is in force in
the figure of its own dissolution, and in which everything that the sovereign deemed de facto
necessary could happen) has transgressed its spatiotemporal boundaries and now, overflowing
outside them, is starting to coincide with the normal order, in which everything again becomes
possible. (1998, 38)
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Great powers inevitably abuse human rights rhetoric in order to expand their sovereignty among other populations
This reduces civilians from both states involved to bare life.
When humanitarian language gets misused in such a way, the state of exception has been
invoked in that (usually) a great power has used the law in order to suspend its enforcement on
itself. The state in violation has, in fact, abused the threshold criteria for a just cause. Whether an
action is endorsed by the international community or not is importance of an intervention on
humanitarian grounds, it then is given the green-light to take all means it thinks necessary to
accomplish its goals. Reducing civilians to bare life is accepted if the offending state's population
thinks it is winning. This is especially true if those intervened upon are seen as an 'other,' where
many may believe, following government propaganda, that this other is already existing as homo
sacer at home. It may be the case that the populous in the offending state eventually come to
realize the deception they have suffered, but by then, the damage may already be done. In this
sense, the civilians of the offending state have also been, it could be claimed, reduced to bare life
as bodies to be recruited and then marched off to war or, back at home, as taxpayers and
supporters allowing the government to pursue its extralegal goals. Such a scenario was evoked
when the US government and media encouraged Americans to continue their consumer spending
to boost the economy and fund the 'war or terror' after the 2001 World Trade Center attacks. In
any case, the violation of international law, because of 'democratic' processes within the
intervening state, creates a state of exception justified at once by being within its own law at the
domestic level and outside the law at the international level. In other words, the abuse of
humanitarian language in this case takes place at the threshold of domestic law and international
law.
Human rights intervention forces populations into the state of exception Kosovo proves our argument
There are several examples which potentially highlight the state of exception being declared in
international relations over the last two decades. Highlighted here are three representative
instances where intervention has occurred extra-legally or where the international system has
failed to offer an adequate response where one was required: Kosovo, Iraq, and the 2008 disaster
in Burma. In Kosovo, the Security Council failed to act and responsibility for the intervention was
taken by NATO, where the bombing of the Serbs in Belgrade was unrelenting from March 24 to
June 10, 1999. Whereas, regional organizations are to be used under Chapter VIII of the UN
Charter, interventions by such agencies are only to take place with Security Council authorization
under Chapter VII. Therefore, some argue that UN endorsement under Chapter VII is a sin qua
non so that intervention without it is a violation of international law (Weiss, P. 201) This leads to
questions about what should happen when there are dire humanitarian circumstances existing in a
conflict and the UN fails to act (Banda, P. 26). Interestingly, in the Kosovo case, while the
intervention may have been illegal, there was significant international acceptance of NATOs
claim that it was acting to avert a humanitarian crisis (Williams and Bellamy, P. 37). In the words
of the Independent International Commission on Kosovo, the bombing campaign was illegal but
legitimate (Lederer, Chicago Sun- Times). This is exactly the type of language used by
executives when the state of exception is implemented within states. The idea is that there is an
absolute necessity that some suspension or overriding of law takes place to prevent or stop a
threat. In Kosovo, as in many domestic cases, the real need of taking such extreme actions is
questionable and falls outside the originary purposes of invocation of the state of exception.
Moreover, NATO failed to take any significant risks to its personnel, using high-altitude, precision
guided weapons to strike military, media, and other infrastructure targets. Ground troops were
never seriously considered until late in the campaign. In the end, more than 500 persons were
killed as collateral damage and many more were forced to flee as refugees or IDPs (some of
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whom were killed themselves by errors made by NATO forces) (Human Rights Watch 2000). Here
civilians were reduced to bare life by a declared state of exception admitted to be illegal by an
independent commission investigating the action, which was invoked for the very purpose of
protecting civilians.
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Iraq proves our argument Humanitarianism was used to justify the invasion of the sovereign power and has now
created
In Iraq, one of reasons claimed for military intervention was to avert a humanitarian crisis within
its borders. This especially became the case as original justifications were not holding water.
According to Bellamy during the run-up to the invasion, the US, Britain, and Australia all began to
emphasize the humanitarian necessity of the incursion once it became clear that the UN
Security Council was not going to authorize the use of force (P. 136). Whereas the original
justification proclaimed for the war was to rid Iraqi President Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass
destruction that were said to pose an immediate threat, the failure of that argument to garner the
desired response led the three states to find other justifications. Especially adamant on this track
was British Prime Minister Tony Blair who argued that the humanitarian situation on the ground
constituted a crisis that amounted to an exception to non-intervention. Yet, as Bellamy points out,
one of the principle causes for the dire human rights situation was actually the sanctions regime
aimed at Hussein. For example, he states Blair seemed to imply that the war was being waged, in
part, to minimize the negative consequences of the prior [sanctions] of those that were initiating
the war (Ibid., P. 136). In any case, Bellamy concludes that the humanitarian situation on the
ground in Iraq did not constitute a supreme emergency, a requirement for intervention to be
validated. While it is true that Hussein had a long history of human rights abuses under his belt,
most occurred before and then immediately after the first Gulf War. At that time, intervention may
have been justified, but by 2003, it was not. The question of timing is fundamental and to
militarily intrude upon Iraq could not be legitimated for humanitarian purposes since the major
violations that may have shocked the conscience of mankind had long since abated (Ibid., P.
143).3 This discussion points to a concrete example of abuse of humanitarian principles to
establish a just cause for intervention. Clearly, this presents a strong case where a state of
exception was implemented for less than humanitarian goals. Along the way, more than onemillion civilians have been exposed to death, malnutrition, and other injury (Opinion Research
Business). Many more have ended up as refugees or have been displaced internally. Nearly the
entire territory of Iraq (with some Kurdish areas in the North being omitted) exists as bare life in a
state of exception. Obviously, international law has been violated as the Security Council never
authorized the intervention in the first place. However, it is the lawlessness continuing in the
present (even though law exists on paper both through the Iraqi government and US Forces),
which continues the exclusion of entire groups of society and exposes nearly all to a plain animallike existence. Thus, the abuse of human rights and humanitarian law was used in Iraq to stake a
claim for a right to invade a sovereign territory without a legitimate right or responsibility to do so.
As in the state of exception in domestic cases, the law itself was used to suspend the law.
Every case for humanitarian intervention calls for a sovereign decision on life human rights is the discourse of life
in a state of permanent crisis and permanent emergencyregardless of intentions
The complexity of the relationship between bio-sovereignty and humanity is most evident in the issue of humanitarian
interventions. If such interventions limit nation-state sovereignty, they serve as a ground for bio-sovereignty. Every
potential case for intervention -- whether or not it is acted upon -- raises as a question the status of life, and calls for a
sovereign decision on life. The post-sovereign world of bio-politics described by Foucault now takes on a new meaning.
Foucault argued that in modernity, man's politics placed his existence in question. If, as Agamben argues, sovereignty
maintains its power by deciding on the status of life, then a world in which politics places life in question by retaining the
power to decide its fate, is not post-sovereign. It is the open expression of the sovereign ban or exception. / Human rights,
from this perspective, is the discourse of life in a state of permanent crisis. Moreover, human rights and sovereignty share
the same referent: an indeterminate and precarious bare life. Agamben therefore asserts humanitarian organizations,
"despite themselves, maintain a secret solidarity with the very powers they ought to fight" (1998: 133).12 Humanitarianism,
speaking for the very life sovereignty grounds itself in, provides the justification for the "exceptional" measures of
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sovereign powers. Today's "moral interventions," exemplified in the work of NGO's who categorize and call attention to
human rights violations, prefigure "the state of exception from below" (Negri and Hardt 2000; 36). This complex situation,
in which humanitarianism and sovereignty work together, should not be taken as a condemnation of humanitarianism. It is
rather a sign of the failures of a tradition which requires humanitarianism while reducing its effectiveness. / The apparently
emancipatory, law bound discourse of human rights thereby finds itself implicated in very old paradigms of domination.
The relation is similar to the way that early modern discourses of rights proved complicit with novel forms of surveillance
and regulation. The language of human rights does not stand outside the crises such rights are invoked to counter; it does
not stand outside the sovereign powers that produce life as endangered. Neither natural nor exceptional, humanitarian crises
belong to a "structure of permanent emergency" which has become "objectified in institutional arrangements" (Edkins
2000a: 146).
While humanitarianism seems to be territorial sovereignty, it actually is bio-political and global
These dynamics of interventions are one sign that global bio-sovereignty is supplanting nation-state sovereignty. That shift
is not always easy to recognize. Humanitarian interventions, for example, often make use of the language of the nationstate. They can easily appear as repetitions of modern nation state sovereignty. This is why Soguk, a scholar critical of the
nation state order, argues interventions perpetuate that order. As he argues, interventions, particularly around refugee crises,
produce "the specific territorially bound and territorially activated hierarchy of citizen/nation/state on which the very
ontology of the state system continues to rest" (1999: 188). Humanitarianism, treating refugees as "aberrant citizens" (p.
194) to be returned to their appropriate nation, seems to reinforce modern territorial sovereignty. Nevertheless, such actions
exceed the order of the nation-states. Refugees, as we have seen, embody not only nation-state citizenship, but a human or
international status. The moment one sovereign power acts to protect those who belong to other states, or those who have
been so severely abandoned by their own states as to have no other category of belonging than humanity, sovereignty
reinforces an international definition of life, rights and belonging. In that moment, sovereignty undermines the very
identifications and connections of the citizen/nation/state order. A sovereignty ruling over such groups is no longer liberal
and national, but bio-political and global.
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LINKS TERRORISM
Terrorism fills the gap of imagination, creating a diversion that the government uses to create a state of exception
Aretxaga 1 Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texis at Austin, visiting professor at the University of
Chicago, former professor at Harvard University [Terror as Thrill: First Thoughts on the War on Terrorism
Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 75, No. 1, Winter 2001, Published by The Feorge Washington University Institute for
Ethnographic Research, pp. 139-150. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3318342]
I cannot help but think now about Afghanistan and about the way the new disasters of war taking place in that remote
country are skillfully cut off from the thriller-like media images of the war against terrorism. Among Goya's de- sastres,
there is one entitled "Murio la Verdad" ("Truth Died"). The drawing shows a young woman as allegory of truth lying down
on the ground. A bish- op stands over her body, officiating, surrounded by a crowd held at bay by priests, while on the side
Justice cries desperately. The drawing conveys the per- verse ideological function of organized religion in the production of
a version of reality in the service of sovereign power. Truth and Justice are sacrificed to the official reality of church and
sovereign. As in Goya's drawing, the truth of the "War against Terrorism" is also disappearing fast in the interest of national
security and patriotic unity. In its place, fantasies organize reality as fear and thrill.
The Scene of the War
I watched the attack on the World Trade Center (WTC) with the same sense of unreality as everyone I know. In the Basque
city of San Sebastian where I grew up and where I was visiting, it was 3:00 pm, prime time news. An annual international
festival was about to begin and small snippets of film were repeatedly shown on televsion. For a moment, the attack on
the WTC seemed like a film preview that had crawled unannounced into the wrong place. The very fa- miliarity of the
scene, already seen in popular Hollywood disaster movies made reality unreal and shocking. It was not that a terrorist
attack on the U.S. was unimaginable, it had in fact been imagined to satiety in films like "Independence Day." Not only had
the imaginary of a disaster saturated public culture with apocalyptic anxieties during the last decade, but so too had filled
the imagination of the United States Department of State. After the end of the Cold War, terrorism had become the object of
obsessive publishing by the state department, replacing the old figure of communism as the spectral enemy.
The anxious scene of foreign terrorists attacking the United States was not new but was in fact in place and ready to be
occupied. Fantasy constitutes a scenario within which real action can take place and be interpreted. What was
unimaginable was then not the attack itself, but that the fantasy of the attack could materialize. If inside the United States
there was trauma, outside the country what followed the stunned moment of seeing the impossible materialized was fear,
not of terrorism, but of a military intervention by the United States and its consequences for the rest of the world. The fear
was made stronger by the mix of religious trascendentalism and cowboy justice in which the response to the attack was
initially cast. The President of the U.S., George W. Bush, spoke about a monumental "crusade" of good against evil, while
demanding Osama bin Laden's body "dead or alive." The attack was immediately framed as an attack on American
values which, under attack, appeared all of the sudden obscurely pristine; then it was framed as an attack on Western values, then an attack on civilization. The "War against Terrorism" was presented as both inevitable and epic: "a war to save
the world" as George Bush said just before starting the bombing in Afganistan, a "just war."
Anti-terror legislation creates a state of emergency
Paye 2004- Belgian Sociologist
(Jean-Claude Camp campaign http://www.campcampaign.info/stateofexception.htm)
Anti-terrorism legislations, whether ancient or modern, always aim to legitimise exceptional criminal procedures at all
levels of the judiciary process, from the inquiry itself up to and including the final judgement. We are talking here special
methods of investigation such as surveillance, mail interception, telephone tapping and electronic monitoring. These
measures can nowadays be implemented even in the absence of an infraction. Suspicion of terrorist activities now also
warrants exceptional preventive detention or administrative custody, even of simple witnesses, as in the United States.
Anti-terrorism legislation also condones curbing communications between an accused person and her or his attorney, and,
on a more general plane, allows for the setting up of specific emergency jurisdictions.
Cries of terrorism justify the detention of social activists in the name of security
Paye 2004- Belgian Sociologist
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In such a context, it is easy to envisage how rallies, strikes, squatting or 'hijacking' public spaces, occupying infrastructure
installations, or disrupting mass transit, all with the intention to put pressure to the government to enact social policies or to
stop the dismantlement of the same, can easily be assimilated to terrorist acts.
Similar actions, aimed at the policies of international bodies or organisations, could meet the same treatment. The General
Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), whose objective is the complete removal of all rules that impede a total
liberalisation of services, is an example of the complete dismantlement of state regulation. A spirited opposition movement
fighting for the maintenance of public services, or for the regulation of certain sectors of the economy, could thus easily be
branded as terrorist.
The new criminal legislation corresponds with the second phase of the establishment of an integrated structure of power at
the global level: Empire. The first phase consisted in the political organisation of the global market, and the liberalisation of
the movements of goods and finance capital. Labour force management remained at this stage the resort of the national
states. The negotiations about liberalising investments, and about the GATS, are initiating a second phase of the process,
that of globalisation of management of the workforce and of its reproduction parameters. The dismantling of the existing
political set-up is the precondition for the shift in its organic composition.
The End of the Separation of Powers.
The USA Patriot Act is still based on a dual judicial system: on the one side, some legal protection for US citizens, even if
increasingly restricted; on the other, abolition of rights for non-nationals. This dual system disappears under the Patriot II
draft, since it enables the executive to strip American citizens of their nationality and to transfer them from a system of
legal protection to an environment where the rule of law does not obtain.
The fight against terrorism thus marks a fundamental break in the Western political structure, which was traditionally based
on a dual system: rule of law inside the national territory, and pure violence abroad.
Terrorism is used to justify a state of emergency where basic rights can be permanently curtailed in the name of
keeping the peace
Paye 2004- Sociologist
The fight against terrorism causes a re-structuring of political power by way of a strengthening of the powers of the
executive. Through the enactment of framework legislation, which is then being applied by way of decrees and
administrative circulars or even simple lists established by the justice ministry (such as lists of purported terrorist
organisations), the executive fully functions as legislative power and instrumentalises completely the judicial apparatus.
Such arrangements are typical of a state of emergency. Since the state of emergency is usually considered a political
phenomenon, defining the concept in precise legal terms it is not a simple matter. As described by Carl Schmitt, it wavers
in an uncertain and ambiguous fashion at the cross-road between the political and the legal(3). Traditionally, declaring a
state of emergency answers a necessity, as put forward by the actual power, to maintain public order in the face of
extraordinary circumstances, usually within a context of civil strife. The fight against terrorism is routinely described in
terms of a world-wide civil strife, a war on the long haul against an enemy in need of being constantly redefined. This
situation, however, differs from the habitual state of affairs. The (global) power does not so much face actual disturbances,
but strives to neutralise virtual threats.
Here, the discourse bandied by the global power harbours a paradox: judicial reform is motivated by a sudden emergency,
but the emergency itself is said to be of long duration. Hence the state of emergency becomes a permanent fixture. It comes
to be considered as the new form of the political order, with the aim to defend democracy and human rights. Or to put it
differently, citizens must accept for a long time to come the curtailment of their concrete liberties in the defence of a selfproclaimed and entirely abstract democratic order.
The fact that most of these measures are enacted as laws also proves that the global power is going for the long haul. To
achieve this, it is seeking a new legitimacy whereby the people must voluntarily abide by the dismantlement of their
constitutional safeguards.
Terrorism justifies increases powers ceded to the executive
Paye 2004- Sociologist
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What we do see is a world-wide instrumentalisation of the judiciary by the executive. The fight against terrorism allows for
the prosecution of any person suspected to be member of an organisation listed as terrorist by the ministry of justice or even
by a simple officer of police. The most advanced instance of such a conflation of powers happens in the United States,
where the executive has claimed for itself the authority to nominate judges to sit in military emergency courts. The
concentration of powers within the executive, as it also acquires those of the judiciary, transform the president into a
magistrate with very extended competences bestowed to him by all sorts of specific laws, acts, and decrees.
Terror discourse creates the sovereign the sovereign defines itself in opposition to the terrorist
Rogers 08 PhD, a Lecturer in law at the School of Law and Justice at Southern Cross University, Lismore
(Nicole, Law Text Culture, Terrorist v Sovereign: Legal performances in a state of exception, Lexis)
[*163] Agamben distinguishes his approach from that of Foucault in that he focuses on the connection between biopolitics
and sovereignty, or the 'hidden point of intersection between the juridico-institutional and the biopolitical models of power'
(Agamben 1998: 6). He acknowledges an unlikely symmetry and relationship between homo sacer, controlled and
disciplined by the biopolitical mechanisms which characterise the contemporary political era, and the sovereign, who
creates and administers such biopolitical strategies. Both homo sacer and the sovereign are, for different reasons, outside
the law, and thus they represent 'the two poles of the sovereign exception' (Agamben 1998: 110). This point is made with
some poignancy by Terry Hicks, the father of David Hicks who, for so long, in his extended incarceration in Guantanamo
Bay, exemplified homo sacer; Terry has marvelled over the fact that his son's name is so frequently mentioned by President
Bush (Souter 2006). Others have observed that the sovereign and the terrorist are linked in the 'war against terrorism'
discourse. Anna Szorenyi and Juliet Rogers argue that 'the sovereign in contemporary legal discourse is located vis-a-vis the
terrorist' and that terrorism, which is 'an injury to the body sovereign', provides meaning for the sovereign figure (2006: 11).
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LINKS - BIOTERRORISM
Threats of biological weapons and diseases threats are used to justify endless biological security
Galloway and Thacker 2005 * author and associate professor in the Department of Culture and Communication at New
York University **Associate Professor of Literature, Communication, & Culture at Georgia Institute of Technology
(Alexander and Eugene Sovereignty and the State of Emergency http://intertheory.org/thacker-galloway.htm)
One of the results of the American-led war on terror has been the increasing implosion of the differences between emerging
infectious diseases and bioterrorism. Not so long ago, a distinction was made between emerging infectious disease and
bioterrorism based on their cause: one was naturally-occurring and the other the result of direct human intervention.
International organizations such as the WHO and UN still maintain this distinction, though only vaguely. The U.S.
government, in the meantime, has long since dispensed with such niceties, and as a result has radically streamlined the
connections between the military, medicine, and the economics of drug development. A White House press release outlining the
President's 2003 proposed budget discusses how, "in his 2003 Budget, the President has proposed $1.6 billion to assist State and local health care systems
in improving their ability to manage both contagious and non- contagious biological attacks..." Similarly, a 2003 press release describes Project BioShield
as a "comprehensive effort to develop and make available modern, effective drugs and vaccines to protect against attack by biological and chemical
weapons or other dangerous pathogens." The implication of the word "or"-biological weapons or other pathogens-signals a new, inclusive stage in modern
biopolitics. Regardless of the specific context, be it disease or terrorist, the aim is to develop a complete military-medical
system for "alert and response" to biological threats. Context and cause are less important than the common denominator of
biological effect. It matters little whether the context is terrorism, unsafe foods, compromised Federal regulation of new
drugs, or new virus strains transported by air travel. What matters is that which is at stake, and what is always at stake, is
the integrity of "life itself." This U.S. program of military, medical, and pharmaceutical governance ushers in a politics of
"biological security." Biological security has as its aim the protection of the population, defined as a biological (and
genetic) entity, from any possible biological threat, be it conventional war or death itself. What this also means is that the
biological threat--the inverse of biological security--is a permanent threat, even an existential threat. It is a biological angst
over "death itself" (the biopolitical inverse of "life itself"). This requires a paradigm in which "the population" can be
regarded as simultaneously biological and political. As Foucault notes,
at the end of the eighteenth century, it was not epidemics that were the issue, but something else--what might broadly be
called endemics, or in other words, the form, nature, extension, duration, and intensity of the illnesses prevalent in a
population...Death was now something permanent, something that slips into life, perpetually gnaws at it, diminishes it and
weakens it. [1]
It is clear that, in this context, there is no end to biological security, its job is never finished, and by definition, can never be
finished. If there is one site in which the state of emergency becomes the norm, it is this site of non-distinction between war
and disease, terrorism and endemic.
The equating of diseases with war through bioterrorism creates the ultimate state of exception
Thacker 2005- Associate Professor of Literature, Communication, & Culture at Georgia Institute of Technology
(Eugene Living Dead Networks http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue4/issue4_thacker.html)
No other state of exception is quite as exceptional as an epidemic except perhaps war. In fact, the most powerful state of
exception is one that is not recognized as such. The sovereign exception obtains its most intense level of legitimation in an
environment in which the exception is the rule that is, a situation in which exception is directly correlated to a threat
that is, by definition, indeterminate. In this regard nothing is more exceptional than the inability to distinguish between
epidemic and war, between emerging infectious disease and bioterrorism. Although, wars have the benefit of being waged
by individual and collective human agents, humans fighting humans. Epidemics ignite public fears with great ease, in part
because the enemy is often undetected, and therefore potentially everywhere. But more than this, it is the alien, nonhuman
character of epidemics that incite public anxiety there is no intentionality, no rationale, no aim except to carry out
iterations of what we understand to be simple rules (infect, replicate, infect, replicate). The exceptions of epidemics and
war implode in biological warfare, bioterrorism, and in the way that US policy enframes the public health response to
infectious disease. In the US, the rubric biodefense which is increasingly taking on epidemic proportions itself has
come to incorporate within itself what was, at least on an institutional level, the non-defense concerns of public health. A
recent White House press release states that the [US] President believes that, by bringing researchers, medical experts, and
the biomedical industry together in a new and focused way, our Nation can achieve the same kind of treatment
breakthroughs for bioterrorism and other threats that have significantly reduced the threat of heart disease, cancer, and
many other serious illnesses (White House, 2003).
Their discourse of bioterrorism places the state as the protector of the bare bios and furthers state biopower
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Pease 3 Professor of Englis at Dartmouth University, Avalon Foundation Chair of the Humanities, Director, Master of
Arts in Liberal Studies Program [Donald E., Volume 30, Number 3, Fall 2003, pp. 1-18, The Global Homeland State:
Bushs Biopolitical Settlement, http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/boundary/v030/30.3pease.html]
This biopolitical sphere emerged with the state's decision to construe [End Page 11] the populations it governed as
indistinguishable from unprotected biological life. Insofar as the Homeland State's biopolitical imperative to regulate the
life and death of the population that it governed was irreducible to the denizens of the nation-state, the Homeland State's
biopolitical regime became potentially global in its extensibility. The body of the people as a free and equal citizenry
endowed with the capacity to reconstitute itself through recourse to historically venerated social significations was
replaced by a biological population that the state protected from biological terrorism. The biopolitical sphere
constructed by the provisions of the Homeland Security Act first subtracted the population from the forms of civic and
political life through which they recognized themselves as a national people and then positioned these life formsthe
people, their way of lifeinto nonsynchronous zones of protection with the promise that their future synchronization
would resuscitate the nation-state. 6
In undergoing a generalized dislocation from the national imaginary through which their everyday life practices become
recognizably "American," the National Peoples underwent a mass denationalization and were reconstituted as biological
life forms. As vulnerable biological life under the state's protection, the biopoliticized population also could play no active
political role in the Homeland State's reordering of things. The Homeland State thereafter represented the population as an
unprotected biological formation whose collective vitality must be administered and safeguarded against weapons of
biological terrorism.
The state's description of the weapons that endanger the aggregated population as "biological" in part authorized the state's
biopolitical settlement. In representing its biopolitical imperatives in terms of a defense against weapons of biological
destruction, the state also produced an indistinction between politics and the war against terrorism. This redescription
produced two interrelated effects: it transformed the population's political and civil liberties into life forms that were to be
safeguarded by the state rather than acted on by the citizenry; more importantly, it turned political opponents of this
biopolitical settlement into potential enemies of the ways of life that the state safeguards. [End Page 12]
The Homeland Security State was the sole beneficiary of the indistinctions that were thus effected between global and
domestic security and between war and politics. But after the Homeland Security Act described the populations under the
Homeland State's governance as indistinguishable from unprotected biological life, this legislation also produced an
indistinction between two constituencies of the populationthe People with Rights and the disposable peoples lacking
rightsthat the Homeland State needed to taxonomize in distinctly different biopolitical categories.
The threat of bioterrorism and infectious disease create an inherently biopolitical situation in which the sovereign
has the responsibility to respond to these threats.
Thacker, 5 Assistant Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of
Technology
(Eugene, Nomos, Nosos and Bios, Culture Machine,
http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j007/Articles/thacker.htm)
Both bioterrorism and emerging infectious disease present us with unique instances in which the tension-filled zone
between nomos and nosos is displayed in a new light. Specifically, the concurrence of bioterrorism and emerging infectious
disease provides us with a biopolitical situation in which biology, information, and war all play a role. Consider the U.S.
responses to these twin threats. On the issue of bioterrorism, the U.S. Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness
and Response Act (2002) significantly increases the monitoring of a wide range of suspect biological materials in the U.S. including those used in
legitimate, federally-funded, university-based biology labs (Kevles, 2003).2 Likewise, the U.S. Project BioShield, which was announced in 2003, offers
unprecedented funds for three key areas: the development of next-generation medical countermeasures (some $6 billion over the next ten years), NIH
funding for those research projects that show promise in the development of vaccines and drugs to counter bioterrorist attacks, and new legislation which
gives the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) the ability to designate fast track drug candidates and speed up the FDA approval process (the FDA
Emergency Use Authorization for Promising Medical Countermeasures Under Development) (U.S. White House, 2003). All in all, in 2002 the U.S.
dedicated nearly $6 billion to biodefense initiatives for the 2003 budget - a 300% increase from the previous year (U.S.
DHS, 2004). Even the NIHs National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) - a program that has
traditionally dealt with non-defense-related initiatives - was awarded $85 million under Project BioShield for research into
human immunity and biodefense (U.S. NIH, 2003).
In programs such as these, we see several themes coming together which characterize the post-9-11 era of national and
homeland security. One of these is the emphasis on bioscience research, especially in the areas of genetic engineering,
immunology, and the possible linkages to the emerging fields of genomics, proteomics, and genetic diagnostics.3 The
ability to sequence the genomes of pathogens is seen by many scientists as the important first step to understanding how
those pathogens are able to mutate and infect healthy cells. But alongside this there is also an equal emphasis on the
technological infrastructure that enables federal, state, and local health officials to communicate and make decisions in
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response to possible health crises (U.S. DHS, 2004). This infrastructure includes computer databases and networks (e.g.
hospital informatics, up-to-date diagnostic technologies, emergency communications systems), as well as drug production
and distribution systems, and the training of health care personnel. In the broadest sense, information plays a key role in
enabling the communication of health-related data, be it via teleconferencing, via patient-specific data being uploaded to a
server, or via the rapid distribution of drugs from the U.S. Strategic National Pharmaceutical Stockpile.
Yet, from the U.S. perspective, an emphasis on biology and information is only part of the equation. At all levels, the ability
of government to respond to an emergency is crucial for the biological and informatic components of biodefense to operate
in an effective manner. This is where the particular philosophy of war adopted by the U.S. has come into play, and it is a
philosophy in the sense that, at the same time that familiar Cold War concepts are deployed (a pharmaceutical stockpile or
scenarios involving a dirty bomb), U.S. policy has ontologically redefined war along the lines of terrorism; that is,
terrorism as precisely a series of non-catastrophic but highly threatening events. In this sense not only is all terrorism
bioterrorism, but we may be witnessing a new definition of life itself in which terror exists virtually in relation to life.
What might this mean, for terror to exist virtually in relation to life? For one thing, it means that the use of the metaphor of
war to talk about disease has ceased to be a metaphor, and that the biological affair of intentionally causing or of fighting
disease is literally, in bioterrorism, a form of war. A 2003 NIAID progress report outlines some of the results of its research,
which has had an added benefit for diseases not related to bioterrorism. It notes that the increased breadth and depth of
biodefense research not only is helping us become better prepared to protect citizens against a deliberately introduced
pathogen, it also is helping us tackle the continuous tide of naturally occurring emerging infections such as SARS and West
Nile virus (U.S. NIAID, 2003).
In short, the U.S. response to the twin phenomena of bioterrorism and emerging infectious disease has been to treat the
latter in terms of the former, and to define the former bioterrorism in terms that efface their differences in cause, and
only focus on their unanimity in effect. U.S. policy articulates this in three ways: through an emphasis on biology, through
an equal emphasis on information as the inverse of biology, and through enabling an ontological redefinition of war to
contextualize the links between biology and information.
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Bioterrorism policy justifies the state of exception and an endless war on biology
Technology
Nevertheless, the ongoing development (and funding) of various surveillance initiatives illustrates the degree to which the
broad concept of biodefense has come to include both bioterrorism and epidemics in a unique zone of indistinction. This
implosion has been made explicit in the way that the U.S. government speaks of biodefense. Consider President Bushs
remarks in his 2001 State of the Union address: Disease has long been the deadliest enemy of mankind . We have
fought the causes and consequences of disease throughout history and must continue to do so with every available means.
All civilized nations reject as intolerable the use of disease and biological weapons as instruments of war and terror (U.S.
White House, 2002). At a press conference announcing the Biosurveillance Project, HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson
noted that these new investments will not only better prepare our nation for, and protect us from, a bioterrorism attack,
they will also better prepare us for any public health emergency. In fact, weve already seen our investments pay off last
year in CDCs leadership in fighting the SARS outbreak, and a coordinated public health response to the West Nile Virus
(U.S. DHS, 2004).
No one will deny the real threats posed by emerging infectious disease, and the limited but demonstrated effectiveness of
bioterrorism; that is, obviously, not what is at issue here. What is at stake is the manner in which U.S. biodefense policy has
created an atmosphere in which it is impossible to distinguish national security from public health, war from medicine,
terror from biological life. The inordinate amount of funding and emphasis given to biodefense nearly suggests that public
health can only be improved through the condition of permanent exception that is war, that the health of the population can
only be improved by continually targeting the population as biologically vulnerable. In the case of U.S. biodefense policy,
the perspective of necrology shows us that the current biopolitical state of emergency is maintained by constantly producing
the virtual dissolution of the body politic. Here, security, defense, and medicine fold in to a single problem: how to identify
any and all threats to the life of the population, such that prevention and preemption will coincide perfectly. The threat to
the body politic is also the threat to the collective body natural, and thus the threat to life itself is also life itself; the
threat to the medico-political conception of the state is, at some basic level, biology. The very concept of biological warfare
implies this biology is the weapon, the means, and the target all at once. U.S. biodefense policy is actually a
philosophical, even existential statement: that, be it an intentional bioterrorist attack or an unintentional epidemic, the
common threat to the population is life itself. By definition, this undeclared war on biology is without end, precisely
because life itself is constantly threatened with its own end.
In a sense, however, this biopolitical situation is to be found wherever a governmentality of public health confronts a
medical emergency that is also a perceived political emergency (war, famine, epidemic, natural disaster). Indeed, the
historical examples Foucault gives of biopolitics all suggest that public health always develops in a state of exception. The
situation of U.S. biodefense today is, in this sense, no different. What is unique about the situation today is that the way in
which that state of exception is governed. Today, over and above the networks of infection and transportation that make
epidemics and bioterrorism possible, we are witnessing a network of communication and information that is deployed as a
countermeasure. The CDCs NEDSS combats West Nile virus, the WHOs network combats SARS. Networks fighting
networks. Today, it is information or code that mediates between war and biology. Computer databases at hospitals,
information networks transmitting real-time health data, protocols surrounding the handling of medical data in relation to
insurance companies, FDA approval of new vaccines for anthrax and other bioweapons, investment in pharmaceutical
R&D, and the use of high-tech diagnostics technologies (pharmacogenomics, DNA microarrays), will all be used in this
biopolitics.
We can move, then, from biology to necrology. In doing so, we point to the complicated layers of analogy, metaphor, and
artifact in the U.S. biodefense ontology. Disease accounts for social ills, but in the form of epidemics it is a social ill. War
provides the interpretive lens through which to metaphorize medicine, as well as to literalize the technology of biological
weapons and bioterrorism. War and disease impact each other, and infect each other, in ways that are at once metaphorical,
material, and artifactual. In this regard, a necrological perspective is worth thinking about as the boundary between
bioterror and epidemic is blurred, for it raises the key issue of how a notion of life itself is mobilized to guarantee
sovereignty in the age of biopolitics.
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LINKS DISEASE
Allowing the government to be responsible for the biology of populations reinforces state control and biopolitical
management.
Technology
For Foucault, biopolitics involves three main processes, working in concert. The first is a redeployment of medical
knowledge concerning the biology of populations. Here the notion of population becomes the bearer of all medical and
social specificity. Biopolitics tends to treat the "population" as a mass of living and coexisting beings who present
particular biological and pathological traits and who thus come under specific knowledge and technologies (Foucault,
1997: 71). But this process of accounting for the population as simultaneously political and medical implies a certain
quantitative sophistication. Thus, in addition to a medical view of the population, there is a second element, which is the
development of a set of numerical, statistical, and informatic means of defining and thus managing the population. This is
the biology of large numbers, which has its beginnings, for instance, in the regular use of mortality tables kept by parishes
in 17th century England (Porter, 1997: 236-38). Its aim is to rationalize the problems presented to governmental practice
by the phenomena characteristic of a group of living human beings constituted as a population: health, sanitation, birthrate,
longevity, race (Foucault, 1997: 73). Finally, a last element is required for biopolitics to function, and that is an
infrastructure for performing this ongoing statistics of the population. This is where what Foucault calls governmentality, or
the art of governing, comes into play, in which the movement that brings about the emergence of population as a datum
provides the conditions for an objective of governmental techniques (Foucault 2000: 219). The concerns of population
characteristics in light of political economy the mercantilist view that the health of the population equals the wealth of the
population is but one example of governmental management of biopolitical concerns.
But it is in this last element that Foucaults points about biopolitics have the most resonance for our current context of
bioterrorism and emerging infectious disease. In his Collge lectures, Foucault says more about the governmentality
specific to biopolitics. He asks, How can a power such as this kill, if it is true that its basic function is to improve life, to
prolong its duration, to improve its chances, to avoid accidents, and to compensate for failings? (2003: 254). In other
words, what is the relation between older forms of sovereignty and the emerging, modern biopolitical practices of public
health policy, hospital reform, the professionalization of medicine, and the methods of statistics and demographics?
Foucault offers one response, which is that the acquisition of power over man insofar as man is a living being, that the
biological came under State control, that there was at least a certain tendency that leads to what might be termed State
control of the biological (2003: 239-40). But how is the exceptional character of sovereign power instantiated in such
decentralized systems, in which the bureaucratic management of numbers and bodies takes hold?
There must be some set of principles for allowing, in exceptional circumstances, the introduction of sovereign power. In other words, there must be some
set of conditions that can be identified as a threat, such that a corresponding state of emergency can be claimed, in which the formerly decentralized
apparatus of biopolitics suddenly constricts into the exception of sovereignty. It is at this moment that racism is inscribed as the basic mechanism of
power, as it is exercised in modern States (2003: 254). But I would argue that Foucault means racism here in a specific, medical and biological sense.
Racism in this sense is a biologically-inflected political relation in which war is rendered as fundamentally biological:
Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of
everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres
have become vital the existence in question is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological
existence of a population. (1978: 137)
In a curious turn of phrase, Foucault later calls this a democratization of sovereignty, a condition in which the sovereign
state of emergency emerges through a widespread and generalized threat to the population (2003: 37). In such conditions,
both a medical-biological view of the population, and a statistical-informatic means of accounting for the population,
converge in the identification of potential threats and possible measures of security. In a sense, it is war that acts as the
hinge between population and information, but a war that always puts at stake the biological existence of the population
(and thus nation). The body natural, even as it serves as an analogy for the body politic, is always what is fundamentally at
stake in the body politic.
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Identifying disease threats perpetuate the sovereigns legitimacy over entire populations
Technology
What is particularly noteworthy in this regard is a technique used by several authors putting forth a decisively secular
vision of the body politic, to create what amounts to tables of comparison between diseases in the body natural, and threats
to the body politic. For instance, Thomas Starkeys Dialogue Between Cardinal Pole and Thomas Lupset (written in 153536), carries out a more systematic analysis of the body politic and the particular diseases that afflict it (Englands decline in
population as akin to consumption, the unemployed poor are compared to dropsy, and the dissent of commoners against
the monarch is a pestilence) (1948: 79-83). Hobbes, as we have noted, spends an entire chapter documenting the
correlation between diseases and various political actions and ideologies that threaten the unity of the sovereign power. In a
sense, each political treatise which spends time explicating the constitution of the body politic is often obliged to spend
time acknowledging the dissolution of the body politic. And the aim of such analogies is to reinforce the naturalness of the
body politic (and in particular, the sovereign), as well as to deter or dissuade any possibility of popular dissent or civil strife
to prevent revolting bodies.
In fact, we can suggest something further about this hidden history of the body politic: that, in the body politic, disease is
always the medicalized lens through which dissent is interpreted. Although the passages in these political treatises that deal
with the disease analogy are short in comparison to the entire chapters dedicated to the origin of the body politic, in a sense
they are more important, for they function as furtive, uncertain acknowledgments of the possible end of the very concept of
body politic. Hobbes, as well as Spinoza arguably on opposite sides of the fence politically both agree that the greatest
danger to the body politic comes from within. Even for Spinoza, the newfound theorist of democracy for many
contemporary thinkers, the fickle disposition of the multitude almost reduces those who have experience of it to despair,
for it is governed solely by emotions, not by reason (1951: 216). The same things that constitute the body politic are
therefore also the things that dissolve it (the multitudes, civil strife, dissent, factionalism). Put another way, the body
politic is defined by a set of topological fissures that are immanent to it, for it contains its own capacity for disease,
dysfunction, and in some cases death. While such political treatises spend a great deal of time working out the constitution
of the body politic, there is another position we can adopt in understanding their relevance for our current era of the war on
terror, bioterrorism, and emerging infectious disease.
This is a shift from the biology of the body politic to a necrology of the body politic. Instead of focusing on the narrative of
constitution of the body politic, a necrology would focus on the furtive, fragmentary, admissions of the dissolution of the
body politic. A necrological analysis of the concept of the body politic in 16th and 17th century political thought whose
basic concepts (sovereignty, right, consensus) are still with us today would reveal to us several things. For one, it would
suggest that in any political order, there is always a greater threat from within the body politic than from without. It would
also suggest that, keeping with the medical analogy, the dissolution of the body politic is an endemic problem, perhaps even
an autoimmune problem. Finally, a necrological view would suggest that the body politic is always defined by and even
constituted by its capacity for dissolution. This last point is in many ways the most important, for it suggests that part of the
function of sovereign power especially today in the age of global empire is to carry out the ongoing management of a
political order by constituting points of dissolution or threats. In other words, sovereignty today derives its legitimacy
from its ability to continually identify potential and actual diseases in the nation and threats to the population.
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LINKS IMMIGRATION
The affs extension of documentation causes migrants to strip themselves of legal identity to evade state control
that creates a reverse state of exception
Ellermann 9 Professor of Political Science at the University of British Colombia, Faculty Associate at the Centre for
European Studies, and Faculty Associate at the Centre for International Relations [Antje, Undocumented Migrants and
Resistance in the State of Exception Presentation at the European Union Studies Association meeting in LA, April 2009,
http://www.unc.edu/euce/eusa2009/papers/ellermann_02G.pdf]
Whereas Agamben treats the states denial of a legal identity to migrants as the sine qua non of state power, this paper
examines what might be called the reverse state of exception: instances where migrants strip themselves of their legal
identity in order to evade state control. Whereas Agamben treats legal status as the basis for individual rights, this paper
will consider the circumstance where the possession of a legal identity constitutes a liability for the migrant. The paper
argues that in instances where migrants have lost all claims against the stateas is the case with individuals under
deportation ordersmany will resort to an extreme act of resistance against the state: the destruction of their identity
documents. By rendering themselves unclassifiable or, in James Scotts words, illegible, migrants can oftentimes
succeed in tying the hands of the sovereign who is forced to operate within the constraints of the international legal order
that requires the possession of identity documents for [end page 2] repatriation. The paper concludes with the paradoxical
finding that, under certain extreme conditions, the fewer claims migrants can make against the state, the more constrained
the power of the liberal state to secure the obedience of the individual.
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LINKS - DATABASES
Databases restructure our conception of knowledge and the world
(Eugene, Database/Body: Bioinformatics, Biopolitics, and Totally Connected Media Systems
http://switch.sjsu.edu/web/v5n3/E-1.html)
In his essay "Database as a Symbolic Form," Lev Manovich discusses the increasing ubiquity and standardizing potential of
the database in late-20th century cultures:
"Indeed, if after the death of God (Nietzsche), the end of grand Narratives of Enlightenment (Lyotard) and the arrival of the
Web (Tim Berners-Lee) the world appears to us as an endless and unstructured collection of images, texts, and other data
records, it is only appropriate that we will be moved to model it as a database. But it is also appropriate that we would want
to develop a poetics, aesthetics, and ethics of this database."[1]
As Manovich points out, what is at issue here is not necessarily a deterministic and exhaustive encoding of culture; what is
needed are modes of analysis, critique, and practice which embody the database, both as a technical apparatus and as an
organizational logic. In relation to the biological technosciences, this means focusing on the current intersections between
the biomedical body and the computer database, and their resultant tensions and aporias. In fields such as genomics,
bioinformatics, telemedicine, and computational molecular biology, the database forms a central part of the kinds of
research being done, as well as structuring the kinds of propositions and questions which may be brought up.
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LINKS - MEDICALIZATION
Medicalization reinforces biopolitical control of populations
(Eugene Nomos, Nosos and Bios http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/25/32)
While Agamben's work does much to develop our understanding of the political and philosophical mechanisms of
biopolitics, something is left out, something which is also absent in the work of Hardt and Negri: the role of medicine in
relation to the 'life itself' of biopolitics. For Agamben, medicine is just one particular form that biopolitics takes in the
broader meeting of sovereign power and homo sacer (thus Agamben traces the beginnings of biopolitics to Roman law).
For Hardt and Negri, biopolitics is primarily the relation between social life and labor, with medicine or bioscience not
being a factor at all (although even Marx commented on the transformations of the 'species being' in labor power). In these
interpretations, one cannot account for the way that a hegemonic science articulates 'life itself'; one cannot account for the
character of the bio- part in biopolitics. Recall that, for Foucault, it was precisely the role and historically-changing
meanings of medicine that mediated between politics and life. It was Foucault's general claim that biopolitics does not
happen without the requisite medical, biological, and scientific infrastructure to identify the possible threats to the
population, or, indeed, to identify 'population' itself as a biological and medical concern. 'Medicine is a power-knowledge
that can be applied to both the body and the population, both the organism and biological processes, and it will therefore
have both disciplinary effects and regulatory effects' (Foucault, 2003: 252). This is not simply a doctrine of 'medicalization,'
but a recognition of a condition in which medical and political concerns always fold in upon each other.
Doctors are the sovereign of the health system they try to survey and control their patients
Perron and Holmes 04 PhD, School of Nursing, University of Ottowa; Associate Professor, School of Nursing,
University of Ottowa
(Amelie; Dave, Agents of Care and Agents of the State: Biopower and Nursing Practice, 7/22/04)
Primary nursing interventions, such as those dedicated to the promotion of health and the prevention of diseases, are
arguably the best examples of the effects of bio-politics. During an intervention, nurses accumulate an abundance of
information about the targeted populations who receive care. Nurses convey information about behaviours that should be
adopted to preserve health, and they collect patients secrets using surveys and evaluations or through various forms of
counselling. The promotion of health is accomplished at many levels and through extensive awareness campaigns aimed at
informing the population of the risks presented by their practices. These campaigns support healthy practices as moral
obligations (Petersen & Lupton 1996). These interventions attempt to encourage citizens to take responsibility for their
health in order to achieve an optimal level of health. When an entire population does this, it functions at maximum capacity
with nothing but benefits for the state (Foucault 2002a). However, those who refuse to adhere are labelled as noncompliant, and nurses are mandated to educate the population about healthy behaviour and to pay particular attention to
those who continue to resist change.
The medicalization of politics cedes power to sovereignty.
Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, Professors of Anthropology to Yale University, 2K6 (Sovereign Bodies,
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i7996.html)
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. This operation, which aimed at containing and negating the "sovereign
moments" and spontaneity of life that Bataille describes, had its counterparts in the rise of disciplinary institutions and
welfare governmentality in Western democracies. In both cases this amounted to a "politicization of life" as well as a
"medicalization of politics": a political rhetoric using metaphors of contamination and diseases of the body politics, and
political rationalities that employ health, risk, balance, and prophylactic action as justifications for a range of interventions,
from immunization programs to eugenics. Through these medical and corporeal metaphors, the body-as-organism
popularized in nationalist ideology and political romanticism, returned once again as a privileged trope of society and
community. To Agamben, "the state of exception," the sovereign sphere deciding on the exclusion of "bare life" (zoe), has
remained constitutive of the political community. It has acquired even more force as the empirical "multitude" of
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individuals have been incorporated into the political community of "the people" through franchise, citizenship, and
universal entitlements in many nation-states in the twentieth century. The exception appears in three forms. First , as
ideologies and institutions of improvement of "the people"--always haunted by the connotations of being poor,
undisciplined and plebeian--seeking to produce good citizens and thus constitute proper life of the community and the state.
Second, the exception appears as decisions on the status of life and death as new medical technologies blur and dissolve
erstwhile definitions death and as genetic engineering undermine definitions of biological life. Increasingly, biological life
subjected to the authoritarian and illiberal underside of liberal democracies (Hindess 2001b), is not merely in prisons and
asylums, but within the citizen's own body--tissue, genes, or irrationalities beyond the control of the individual, legislated
by the state or patented by corporations. Third, the exception is to be found in the camps of asylum seekers and refugees in
many parts of the world. In this space, the displaced, the poor and the disenfranchised are governed as life outside the
community while they are prepared for orderly entry into the polis. Agamben argues, that "the camp" has become an
important, if not constitutive, metaphor of modernity, an ideal space of governance, order, categorization and discipline that
in multiple forms functions as the necessary but uncomfortable and sometimes disavowed support of the reproduction of
"normal" citizenship and community life (Agamben 1998, 166-80). Although immigration and accelerated movement of
people around the world undoubtedly has brought the illiberal, exclusive, and sometimes openly racist dimensions of
democracy and nation-states to the fore, it is equally clear that even the richest nations in the world are unable to contain
and control these movements.1
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LINKS - ABORTION
Abortion legislation trivializes women and creates a state of exception where they are not allowed to control their
own body
Roger Passman 2007- Ed.D. in Language and Literacy from National-Louis Universitys National College of Education.
editoral board of the Journal of Literacy Research, a publication of the National Reading Conference, and on the
Manuscript Review Committee of the International Reading Association
(Precedents? We dont need no Stinkin Precedents! http://rpassman.wordpress.com/2007/04/19/precedent-we-dontneed-no-stinkin-precedents/)
Somehow, Bush relates the notion of life to the sacred. But has Bush analyzed with any precision what sacred really means?
We can look to the work of Giorgio Agamben (1998) as he writes about Homo Sacer (Sacred Life) in the following terms.
The sacred is found in a double state of exception between the unpunishability of killing and the exclusion from sacrifice.
Agambens analysis rests on a snippet from Pompeius Festus from the treatise On the Significance of Words in which
Festus writes: The sacred man is the one whom the people have judged on account of a crime (this man has been excluded
from the community). It is not permitted to sacrifice this man (to offer him up to the gods), yet he who kills him will not be
condemned for homicide (he may be executed by the state without subjecting the executioner to the crime of murder).
Agamben understands the sacred (sacer) then to take the form of this double exception both from the human and the divine
sphere of influence, from the profane and the religious spheres. The fact that sacrifice is taboo for homo sacer is another
way of saying that what already belongs to the gods cannot be offered up to those very same gods and so is excluded from
sacrificial consideration. At the same time, the homo sacer is included within the community as he/she takes the form of
being able to be officially killed. Life that cannot be sacrificed and yet may be killed is sacred life (Agamben. 1998, p. 82).
Sovereignty lies at the crossroads of this double exception.
The sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a
sacrifice, and sacred lifethat is, life that may be killed but not sacrificedis the life that has been captured in this sphere
(Agamben, 1998, p. 83).
Bush trivializes the sacred when he speaks about upholding human dignity and the sanctity of life. What is really happening
here is that the sovereign makes the choice to create an exception for women, to exclude women that opt for termination of
pregnancy, to cause those women to become homo sacer. In the case of abortion, this amounts to a minority of religious
zealots dictating policy while the rest of us stand by watching. What is being sacrificed here is precisely the sacred, that
very quality Bush is so ready to protect. The Bush/Roberts court, by creating the exception that creates homo sacer
effectively perpetrates a violence at the crossroads of the profane and the divine that is subtractive of both the profane and
the divine.
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LINKS - HUMANITARIANISM
Humanitarian policies consistute the bare life status being applied to those considered in need of those rights
Heins 2005- Professorof Political Science at McGill University
(Volker Giorgio Agamben and the Current State of Affairs in Humanitarian Law and Human Rights Policy G erman Law
Journal Vol. 6 No. 5 - 1 May 2005 http://www.germanlawjournal.com/print.php?id=598)
Agamben maintains that since the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 the "bare life" of the individual has been subjected to a
twofold move: it was given a protected, even "sacred" status beyond the immediate grasp of political power, but it was also
isolated and separated from the wider range of human forms of expression. The bare life of physical individuals, stripped of
moral agency and social intercourse, became the object of a particular juridical mode of attention. Agamben mistrusts the
human right to physical integrity in a way that is reminiscent of Michel Foucault, who felt that the discursive isolation of
"sexuality" along with its construction as a singular object of attention was far more significant than the fluctuating history
of its "liberation" or "repression."[5]
There is, of course, some prima facie plausibility that the trafficking of human beings, medical end-of-life issues or the
detention of "illegal combatants" have indeed turned the bare life of individuals into an object of widespread concern and
debate.[6] The concern for the life of others is also nurtured by the reporting mechanisms of U.N. human rights bodies as
well as the continuous attention of specialized NGOs and the media. In all these cases, Agamben's principal cause for
vexation lies in the persistent separation of this core aspect of the human from wider political and communitarian questions.
Drawing on the distinction between human rights and civil rights made by Hannah Arendt, he writes:
The separation between humanitarianism and politics that we are experiencing today is the extreme phase of the separation
of the rights of man from the rights of the citizen. In the final analysis, however, humanitarian organizationswhich today
are more and more supported by international commissionscan only grasp human life in the figure of bare and sacred life,
and therefore, despite themselves, maintain a secret solidarity with the very powers they ought to fight [...]. A
humanitarianism separated from politics cannot fail to reproduce the isolation of sacred life at the basis of sovereignty, and
the campwhich is to say, the pure space of exceptionis the biopolitical paradigm that it cannot master.[7]
Humanitiarianism contributes to human suffering
Sometimes it only requires a small shift in perspective to see those who bear the suffering of catastrophes not as endangered
and thus worthy of protection, but instead as dangerous and worthy of containment or rollback. Ironically, aid organizations
themselves may inadvertently contribute to such a gestalt switch. This is precisely what happened when, in the summer of 2004, the
German aid organization Cap Anamur rescued African refugees in the Mediterranean Sea only to use them as anonymous extras in a spectacle that was
perceived by many as an unfortunate attempt to advertise the organization itself.[41] Individuals from Nigeria, Niger und Ghana, who had hoped to reach
the European coast in the still of the night and then quickly disband found themselves transformed into captives of a media event that, in the end, made the
lives of Africans willing to flee their continent even more dangerous: first, because it signaled to other Africans that when in distress at sea they could
count on being rescued by such selfless friends of humanity; and second, because a false impression was created in the media that Europe is being flooded
by immigrants from Africa, whereas in reality only a tiny number ever actually undertake such a practically hopeless voyage . By inciting false hopes
where warnings would have been warranted and by creating anxieties where accurate information was necessary, the aid
organization arguably contributed to a net increase in human suffering.
In this light, the claim that humanitarian organizations, "despite themselves, maintain a secret solidarity with the very
powers they ought to fight,"[42] is vague, but not completely off the mark. Yet the question is whether the separation of
narrow humanitarian concerns from politics can be held responsible for such misdirection. In my view, the problem lies
rather in the paradoxes inherent to humanitarian actionparadoxes that have less to do with the illusions of those who
provide assistance than with the structure of the field in which they operate. In many crises, international aid does not
benefit those in need, but instead the very local authorities who are responsible for the fact that external assistance is
needed in the first place. The following prominent example illustrates this point.
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LINKS IMMIGRATION
The affs drive for the inclusion of immigrants is doomed to failure exclusion of non-citizens is intrinsic to sovereign
power Astor, 9 PhD from the University of Michigan
(Avi, Unauthorized Immigration, Securitization and the Making of Operation Wetback, May 29th, Latino Studies,
Sociological Abstracts, Palgrave Journals)
Bare life is life that is excluded from the political order. The relation of bare life to the political order, however, is not
purely a relation of exteriority. Rather, bare life is the "zone of indistinction" in which political life and natural life
"constitute each other in including and excluding each other" (p. 90). Citizenship, the lynchpin of the modern political
order, would be meaningless without the presence, whether real or imaginary, of non-citizens. But the role played by noncitizens in constituting the political order is contingent on their exclusion from this order. Agamben sees this exclusive
logic as the fatal flaw of the modern nation-state, and attributes the myriad abuses suffered by refugees and denaturalized
subjects during the last two centuries to its immanent unfolding.
The utility of Agamben's insights derive from their uncanny ability to highlight both the constitutive role that politically
marginalized populations play in shaping the modern political order and the logic of their exclusion from this order. They
are not excluded simply by virtue of being non-citizens, refugees or stateless persons, but by virtue of being the
embodiment of pure life itself, which has no place in the modern political order when decoupled from political existence.
Scholars must be cautious, however, not to lose sight of the fact that Agamben's analysis of bare life emerged from his
analysis of specific European events, most notably the Holocaust, and therefore may miss unique aspects of the experiences
of racism and exclusion in non-European contexts. Hesse (2004), for instance, argues that Agamben's conception of racism
is "Eurocentric," as it defines racism as a "relation of exception" and consequently overlooks the ways in which racism is
built into social institutions. Taking the Holocaust as the ideal-typical case of biopolitical exclusion, Hesse writes, obscures
other experiences of racist exclusion that cannot be assimilated into this paradigm.
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LINKS NATURAL DISASTERS

State attempts to include immigrants have empirically failed They result in even further discrimination and
exclusion from society.
Astor, 9 PhD from the University of Michigan
The practices of government agencies not only increased the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States, but
also worked to isolate them from the social and political life of communities in the Southwest. A common practice of the
INS was to disappear during the harvest season and then to magically reappear once the harvest was over to apprehend
undocumented workers once their services were no longer needed (President's Commission on Migratory Labor, 1951;
Garca, 1980). Aside from exposing the INS to be a tool of grower interests, this prevented immigrants from integrating into
the social life of the communities in which they resided. A study conducted in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas at the
time attests to the social isolation of the immigrant population in the Southwest. The sociologists who conducted the study,
Lyle Saunders and Olen Leonard (1976 (1951)), write that the typical immigrant "establishes few or no intimate ties of
friendship except occasionally with other wetbacks and has human contacts only with the group with whom he works
and lives and with the employer or foreman who hires him" (p. 45). Immigrants often lived in makeshift camps that were
isolated from the rest of the community, or if they did manage to rent a place in town, it was almost always in the
"Mexican" sections, which were segregated from the "Anglo" sections. During harvest season, when many immigrants
were present, it was even common for them to live out in the open due to their employers' unwillingness to give them
shelter. Mexican immigrants were also excluded from recreational facilities and certain commercial enterprises. A quote by
a Texas politician exemplifies the attitudes that justified such segregation: "Although there is no discrimination in the
Valley, of course there is segregation in a few things, but that is for hygienic, not racial reasons. Spanish-speaking people
live in their own part of town and have their own businesses. They prefer it that way. They are excluded from swimming
pools and barber shops. The exclusion from pools is because it is not possible to tell the clean ones from the dirty, so we
just keep them all out. We just can't have all those dirty, possibly diseased people swimming with our wives and children.
(Saunders and Leonard, 1976 (1951), p. 67)"
Through the practices of government agencies and social attitudes regarding Spanish-speaking populations, Mexican
immigrants were reduced to what Agamben (1998) calls "bare life." Lacking legal protection and political inclusion,
immigrants had no recourse for complaint when they were mistreated or underpaid. However, the absence of legal
protection and political inclusion alone does not explain why Mexican workers were so frequently the objects of
discrimination and abuse. Rather, it was their isolation from social life that hindered general social awareness of the abuses
they suffered and prevented people from the communities in which they resided from seeing them as social beings, rather
than cheap labor or potential threats. The only advocate Mexican immigrants had was the Mexican government. However,
the relative weakness of the Mexican state and its poor bargaining position made such advocacy ineffective (Calavita,
1992). Consequently, the welfare of Mexican immigrants was completely at the discretion of their employers and others
with whom they interacted. This is well illustrated by Saunders and Leonard (1976 (1951)), as they write, "During the
summer of 1950, the authors heard a good many accounts, pro and con, about the health conditions and services available
to wetbacks. They ranged from the quite callous account of one farmer who playfully chased a wetback with a tractor,
crushed his foot, and then turned him over to the Immigration Service for return to Mexico, to humanitarian behavior of an
employer who paid medical bills averaging two hundred or more dollars each month for the care of his wetback employees.
(p. 48)"
State attempts to alleviate natural disasters result in the biopolitics of disposability Katrina proves
Giroux, 6 - Professor at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department
(Henry A., Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability, College Literature 33.3, Project
Muse)
Soon after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, the consequences of the long legacy of attacking big government and
bleeding the social and public service sectors of the state became glaringly evident as did a government that displayed a
"staggering indifference to human suffering" (Herbert 2005). Hurricane Katrina made it abundantly clear that only the
government had the power, resources, and authority to address complex undertakings such as dealing with the totality of the
economic, environmental, cultural, [End Page 174] and social destruction that impacted the Gulf Coast. Given the Bush
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administration's disdain for the legacy of the New Deal, important government agencies were viewed scornfully as
oversized entitlement programs, stripped of their power, and served up as a dumping ground to provide lucrative
administrative jobs for political hacks who were often unqualified to lead such agencies. Not only was FEMA downsized
and placed under the Department of Homeland Security but its role in disaster planning and preparation was subordinated
to the all-inclusive goal of fighting terrorists. While it was virtually impossible to miss the total failure of the government
response in the aftermath of Katrina, what many people saw as incompetence or failed national leadership was more than
that. Something more systemic and deep-rooted was revealed in the wake of Katrinanamely, that the state no longer
provided a safety net for the poor, sick, elderly, and homeless. Instead, it had been transformed into a punishing institution
intent on dismantling the welfare state and treating the homeless, unemployed, illiterate, and disabled as dispensable
populations to be managed, criminalized, and made to disappear into prisons, ghettos, and the black hole of despair. The
Bush administration was not simply unprepared for Hurricane Katrina as it denied that the federal government alone had
the resources to address catastrophic events; it actually felt no responsibility for the lives of poor blacks and others
marginalized by poverty and relegated to the outskirts of society. Increasingly, the role of the state seems to be about
engendering the financial rewards and privileges of only some members of society, while the welfare of those marginalized
by race and class is now viewed with criminal contempt. The coupling of the market state with the racial state under George
W. Bush means that policies are aggressively pursued to dismantle the welfare state, eliminate affirmative action, model
urban public schools after prisons, aggressively pursue anti-immigrant policies, and incarcerate with impunity Arabs,
Muslims, and poor youth of color. The central commitment of the new hyper-neoliberalism is now organized around the
best way to remove or make invisible those individuals and groups who are either seen as a drain or stand in the way of
market freedoms, free trade, consumerism, and the neoconservative dream of an American empire. This is what I call the
new biopolitics of disposability: the poor, especially people of color, not only have to fend for themselves in the face of
life's tragedies but are also supposed to do it without being seen by the dominant society. Excommunicated from the sphere
of human concern, they have been rendered invisible, utterly disposable, and heir to that army of socially homeless that
allegedly no longer existed in color-blind America.
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Giving the state responsibility for natural disaster relief legitimizes military policing and biopolitical control
Muse)
In one of the most blatant displays of racism underscoring the biopolitical "live free or die" agenda in Bush's America, the
dominant media increasingly framed the events that unfolded during and immediately after the hurricane by focusing on
acts of crime, looting, rape, and murder, allegedly perpetrated by the black residents of New Orleans. In predictable fashion,
politicians such as Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco issued an order allowing soldiers to shoot to kill looters in an effort
to restore calm. Later inquiries revealed that almost all of these crimes did not take place. The philosopher, Slavoj iek,
argued that "what motivated these stories were not facts, but racist prejudices, the satisfaction felt by those who would be
able to say: 'You see, Blacks really are like that, violent barbarians under the thin layer of civilization!'" (2005). It must be
noted that there is more at stake here than the resurgence of old-style racism; there is the recognition that some groups have
the power to protect themselves from such stereotypes and others do not, and [End Page 176] for those who do not
especially poor blacksracist myths have a way of producing precise, if not deadly, material consequences. Given the
public's preoccupation with violence and safety, crime and terror merge in the all-too-familiar equation of black culture
with the culture of criminality, and images of poor blacks are made indistinguishable from images of crime and violence.
Criminalizing black behavior and relying on punitive measures to solve social problems do more than legitimate a
biopolitics defined increasingly by the authority of an expanding national security state under George W. Bush. They also
legitimize a state in which the police and military, often operating behind closed doors, take on public functions that are not
subject to public scrutiny (Bleifuss 2005, 22).3 This becomes particularly dangerous in a democracy when paramilitary or
military organisations gain their legitimacy increasingly from an appeal to fear and terror, prompted largely by the presence
of those racialized and class-specific groups considered both dangerous and disposable.
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Agamben K
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LINKS NEEDLE EXCHANGE

The attempt to help drug users is futile the failure to legalize drugs leaves any needle exchange program
biopolitical
Draus, 8 American Sociological Association
(P., Heroin and bare life: drugs work and worth in the aftermath of urban abandonment, July 31st
Ethnographic interviews conducted among heroin users in Detroit reveal patterns of use that suggest how heroin fits into a
subsistence/survival cycle adopted by city dwellers in the post-industrial era. The majority of the 25 men and women so
far interviewed participate in patterns of patchwork labor, drug selling, and drug use, some of them subsisting entirely
below board, others rotating in and out of the new economy which consists mainly of shit jobs: low-paying,
interchangeable and expendable, with no fringe benefits, and sometimes associated with a degraded identity. Located
below the bottom rung of the economic ladder, these substratum positions are largely reserved for the unemployed and the
unemployable (due to prison records, low education, appearance, addiction and so on.) These are lives, as Agamben wrote
of homo sacer, that are both external and internal to society, united to power by the official ban on drug use (in other
words, always susceptible to policing and arrest), while simultaneously banished from society by a variety of formal and
informal mechanisms of exclusion: educational, racial, geographic, economic, medical, and so on.
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LINKS WELFARE
Welfare policy enacted by the state results in further centralization and dehumanizing principles
Arnold, 4 Lecturer on Social Studies at Harvard University,
(Kathleen, Asceticism, Bio-power and the Poor, March 11th, All Academic)
Furthermore, despite the appearance of economicand hence, political deregulation, two
processes have emerged with the globalization of the economy and the increased
disenfranchisement of this new working class (new not only demographically but also in terms of
what constitutes blue-collar employment). On the one hand, deregulation actually requires a
strengthening of certain elements of the state even as others become weakened. Early on Karl
Polanyi showed that there has never been a truly free market and more recently, Saskia Sassen
demonstrates how capital is still dependent on governments to guarantee contracts, transnational
agreements, protect assets and have the military backing to enforce these arrangements. In this
way, state power prerogative poweris strengthened while democratic practices become
increasingly irrelevant and spatially displaced. The second trend is the surveillance and control of
those who do not benefit from the increased mobility of economic globalization. While capital
demands control, protection and security from the state, a hierarchy is created where those
destined to stay in their localitythe working poor, the disenfranchisedare policed. Although it
may seem counterintuitive to argue that the groups discussed above have less geographical
mobility, consider the facts that immigrant guest-workers are tied to their employer sponsor;
refugees and other resident aliens must stay put in order to establish residency and fulfill other
legal requirements; and, as William Julius Wilson has described poignantly, many residents of the
inner city remain there not by choice but due to limited savings, poor transportation, and few
options. The actual policing of the poor involves, among other things: welfare caseworkers who
push recipients not only to become more self-disciplined individuals (practice sexual abstention,
save money, do not drink alcohol) but also to accept lowing paying jobs in lieu of welfare; INS/BCIS
policing of immigrants status but not their work conditions; the rapid arrest and deportation of
certain immigrants; racial profiling in the poorest areas of cities when there is inadequate public
transportation, few job opportunities and a decaying infrastructure; and the interference of
housing authorities with regard to rules but again little regard for the conditions in which residents
live. To add to this control, ordinary citizens have power over these individuals: employers can
threaten to fire them or turn them into the INS/BCIS, vigilante groups can harass immigrants, and
the media can make them all feel as if they do not fit in economically or politically. These cases
are not reflections of a bureaucracy run amuck. Rather, they represent state ideology and control
of a population that is increasingly disenfranchised (if enfranchised at all, in the case of illegal
immigrants or foreign residents), an asymmetrical power dynamic where these groups have
limited agency, and the increasing dehumanization of certain groups within the population.
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Welfare policy and state are inextricably tied The affirmative places prerogative and arbitrary power in the hands
of the government
While the first point regarding the common good may appear inconsequential, I will argue that it is
of the utmost significance in defining modern political power and the justification for coercive
action against some members of a polity. Webers conceptual division of the state on the one hand
and bureaucracy on the other, warfare on one side and welfare on the other shows erroneous
reasoning. In fact, as Sheldon Wolin argues, welfare and warfare in the modern nation-state are
not mutually exclusive but one and the same.57 Both indicate reason of state guided by concerns
of welfare or the common good; what Wolin calls Wohlfahrtsstaatsrson. Indeed, it is this notion of
the common good that enables Locke to argue that his ideal political government is far more
democratic than Hobbes or those who justified divine right monarchy (like Hooker). Because
Locke argued for the division of governmental power, checks and balances, and the subjection of
any political leaders to the law, he seemingly moved away from both Hobbes and Hooker. 58 First,
sovereignty would not be deployed by any one person and thus an impersonal character (a key
feature of liberalism and bureaucracy) would be lent to sovereignty that hadnt existed before.
Second, any political leaders would be chosen for their political skills, education and wisdom thus
ensuring the good of all. Hence, sovereignty and political power would not be exercised for
personal reasons or the defense of the kings body but rather for all citizen-subjects. The fact that
the leaders are subject to their own laws and the people can theoretically rebel in cases of
egregious abuse on the part of the government further reinforces the case that sovereignty is now
being configured impersonally,on behalf of all people and to achieve a common good. This
reasoning justifies the coercive nature of the Poor Laws, for example; it is to realize the common
good under the enlightened goal of improving and disciplining the poor. Indeed, this is why Locke
argues that under these circumstances, prerogative power can certainly be exercised.59
Prerogative power is the decision of one or more leaders in times of emergency (such as war)
and/or when the law does not account for a specific situation. It is legitimate arbitrary power. In
the first case, it can involve a temporary suspension of the law. Prerogative power does not follow
the rule of law but depends on its suspension and can unleash the full force of the states
violence. But as Wolins term implies and Lockes writings clearly spell out, prerogative power,
which we usually assume is intended for foreign relations and in war, is conceived as operating
domestically just as much as internationally. Here, Weber is certainly correct that the modern
state affirms its legitimacy and monopoly on violence in the face of both internal and external
threats. However, Weber does not reconcile the arbitrary power and violence exercised as
prerogative power with the cool and impersonal detachment that makes up a highly rationalized
bureaucracy. They appear to be opposite and in this way, ascetic values would remain firmly in the
civil, economic and religious spheres rather than what is clearly the most political: the ability to
make war or use violence legitimately.
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The affirmatives ascetic ideals reduces the impoverished to bare life they are viewed as excluded from society and
needed to be integrated by the state
If ascetic recommendations were meant for the entire society then what we have is not merely an
ethos but a form of structuring political and economic life around what Giorgio Agamben calls
bare life. An ascetic political and economic structure aimed at all nevertheless is applied
coercively to the poor, who serve as the exemplary group outside of the norm. In this way, a
threshold is established with one groupsubject citizenswho are viewed as active participants in
the work of civilization allowed autonomy and the benefits of a liberal democracy and the other
group needing guidance, discipline and protection. The second group become objects of
prerogative power and face not only the suspension of the law but possibly, bodily harm.
Prerogative power and asceticism in the context of welfare policy reduces the impoverished to bare life this results
in totalitarianism and genoicde
By the time Bentham and Malthus were writing, ascetic values were conditioned by other factors: the growth of the market
economy, an increase in poverty and geographical dislocation, and the perception of scarcity. Ascetic values served as
dogma preached to the poor by ministers, politicians and the newspapers of the time, on which both Marx and Nietzsche
remarked but came to very different conclusions. In this way, asceticism has become the ethos of bare life and modern
power. It applies to all, albeit unequally and in different forms. Marx is right to call what appears as a double standard
hypocrisy and domination. But he doesnt recognize the implications of an ascetic ethos that is the foundation of modern
politics: anyone can become bare life. Under the Nazis, the killing of the Jew was not capital punishment nor sacrifice but
simply the actualization of the mere capacity to be killed inherent in the condition of Jew as such; the truth is that Jews
were exterminated not in a mad and giant holocaust but as Hitler said, as lice. 64 The control and management of the
species is directed towards all and the development of eugenics was a logical outgrowth of this development. It was perhaps
comforting to think that radical asceticism was a tool of class domination, exerted on the poor alone. The more disturbing
reality is that asceticism is the organizing principle around which our society revolves. In a totalitarian society, the result
can be genocide. In the United States, prerogative power based on bare life is aimed at the disenfranchised and those
conceived of as biological: poor immigrants of color, racial minorities, and women, among others.
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Welfare policy designed at saving the poor gives power to the sovereign this results in a genocide and mass
slaughter
Thus, the entire complex of my argumentthat prerogative power is exercised at the bureaucratic level as well as the
executive level, that it works in conjunction with capitalism with asceticism as its guiding principledemonstrates a
historical shift in sovereign power and aims. In the past, The sovereign exercised his right of life only by exercising his
right to kill, or by refraining from killingThe right which was formulated as the power of life and death was in reality
the right to take life or let live. Its symbol, after all, was the sword. 65 In contrast, modern power has been based on the
right to live; this is particularly true of liberalism as its most fundamental element is natural law (for example, the right to
self-preservation). The sovereign right to kill is now manifested as simply the reverse of the right of the social body to
ensure, maintain, or develop its life. Yet wars were never as bloody as they have been since the nineteenth century, and all
things being equal, never before did regimes visit such holocausts on their own populations. 66 On the one hand, power
administers, manages, optimizes, and measures life; on the other, Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign
who must be mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital.
67 In this way\
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LINKS WOMENS RIGHTS

Womens rights merely resinscribe disciplinary power and result in ceding power to the site of injury that produced their
necessity.
Brown, 2k2 (Wendy, Prof Poly Sci @ Berkeley, Left Legalism, Left Critique, Suffering the paradoxes of rights Ed.
Wendy Brown and Janet Halley)
Yet this very list of our historical woes and their minimal redress over the past century through a proliferation of rights for
women also recalls that rights almost always serve as a mitigation - but not a resolution - of subordinating powers.
Although rights may attenuate the subordination and violation to which women are vulnerable in a masculinist social,
political, and economic regime, they vanquish neither the regime nor its mechanisms of reproduction. They do not
eliminate male dominance even as they soften some of its effects. Such softening is not itself a problem: if violence is upon
you, almost any means of reducing it is of value. The problem surfaces in the question of when and whether rights for
women are formulated in such a way as to enable the escape of the subordinated from the site of that violation, and when
and whether they build a fence around us at that site, regulating rather than challenging the conditions within. And the
paradox within this problem is this: the more highly specified rights are as rights for women, the more likely they are to
build that fence insofar as they are more likely to encode a definition of women premised on our subordination in the
transhistorical discourse of liberal jurisprudence. Yet the opposite is also true, albeit for different reasons. As Catharine
MacKinnon has rightly insisted, the more gender-neutral or gender-blind a particular right (or any law or public policy) is,
the more likely it is to enhance the privilege of men and eclipse the needs of the women as subordinates.4 Cheryl Harris
and Neil Gotanda have made similar claims about race and the "color-blind" Constitution.' The first part of the paradox
might be understood as the problem that Foucault painted most masterfully in his formulation of the regulatory powers of
identity and of rights based on identity. To have a right as a woman is not to be free of being designated and subordinated
by gender. Rather, though it may entail some protection from the most immobilizing features of that designation, it
reinscribes the designation as it protects us, and thus enables our further regulation through that designation. Rights ranging
from the right to abort unwanted pregnancies to the right to litigate sexual harassment have presented this dilemma: we are
interpellated as women when we exercise these rights, not only by the law but by all the agencies, clinics, employers,
political discourses, mass media, and more that are triggered by our exercise of such rights. The regulatory dimension of
identity-based rights emerges to the extent that rights are never deployed "freely," but always within a discursive, hence
normative context, precisely the context in which "woman" (and any other identity category) is iterated and reiterated.
Womens rights consolidate regulatory norms that reinscribe the laws inherent heterosexuality.
Brown,2k2(Wendy,ProfPolySci@Berkeley,LeftLegalism,LeftCritique,SufferingtheparadoxesofrightsEd.
WendyBrownandJanetHalley)
Asecond,relateddilemmaisthatrightsprocuredspecificallyforWomentendtoreinscribeheterosexualityasdefiningboth
whatwomenareandwhatconstituteswomen'svulnerabilityandviolability.Thisproblememergeswheneveritseemsthat
"woman'sdifference"mustbeaddressed.Indeed,gendertendstobetreatedassynonymouswithheterosexualityinthelaw,
notonlybecausemost"genderissues"areframedintermsofheterosexualwomen,butalsobecausesexandsexualityare
treatedastwodifferentbasesofdiscrimination.Theframingofreproductivefreedomprimarilyintermsofaccidentaland
unwantedpregnancytheneedforabortionrepresentsthefirstproblem;conventionalcodesofnondiscrimination,in
whichgenderandsexualpreferencearedistinctandunrelateditemsinalist,representthesecond.Ofcourse,legal
reformersworkingonbehalfofgayandlesbianrightshaveactivelysoughtreformsinlawspertainingtochildbearing,
adoption,andcustodybyhomosexualparents,andhavestruggledaswelltomakevisiblehomophobicharassmentin
schoolsandworkplaces,butthisonlyreaffirmstheextenttowhichtheseissues,definedasgayandlesbianissues,are
understoodasseparatefromtheprojectofsecuringwomen'srights.Theproblemhereisnotjustthatheterosexuality
continuestobenaturalizedandnormalizedbythesemoveswhileothersexualitiesaremarginalized,butthattheextentto
whichthecategorywomanisitselfproducedthroughheterosexualnormsremainscompletelyuntouchedbythisapproach.
Insum,theprocessbywhichwomenbecomewomen,bywhichbothwomanassignifierandwomanaseffectofgender
powerisproducedandsustained,iseschewedandtherebyreinforcedbytheheteronormativityofmostwomen'srights
projects.Putmoregenerally,therightsthatwomenbearandexerciseaswomentendtoconsolidatetheregulativenormsof
genderandthusfunctionatoddswithchallengingthosenorms.
Womensrightsdiscoursesolidifiesthefictionalizedgenderidentitythatmasculinityhasgivenitturnscase
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Agamben K
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Brown,2k2(Wendy,ProfPolySci@Berkeley,LeftLegalism,LeftCritique,SufferingtheparadoxesofrightsEd.
WendyBrownandJanetHalley)
WhathappensifwethinkaboutgenderalongthelinesthatHalleyhasmapped?Towhatextentismaleidentityaswellas
malesuperordinationconsolidatedthroughtheontologicaldisavowalofcertainactivities,vulnerabilities,andlaborsand
theirdisplacementontowomen?Ifgenderitselfistheeffectofthenaturalizedsexualdivisionofalmosteverythinginthe
humanworld,thenrightsorientedtowardwomen'sspecificsufferinginthisdivisionmayhavetheeffectofreinforcingthe
fictionofgenderidentityandentrenchingthemasculinistdisavowalofputativelyfemaleexperiencesorlabors,fromsexual
assaulttomaternity.Moregenerally,totheextentthat1rightsconsolidatethefictionofthesovereignindividualgenerally,
andofthenaturalizedidentitiesofparticularindividuals,theyconsolidatethatwhichthehistoricallysubordinatedboth
needaccesstosovereignindividuality,whichwecannotnotwantandneedtochallengeinsofarasthetermsofthat
individualityarepredicatedonahumanismthatroutinelyconcealsitsgendered,racial,andsexualnorms.Thatwhichwe
cannotnotwantisalsothatwhichensnaresusinthetermsofourdomination.It would appear that a provisional answer to
the question of the value of rights language for women is that it is deeply paradoxical: rights secure our standing as
individuals even as they obscure the treacherous ways that standing is achieved and regulated; they must be specific and
concrete to reveal and redress women's subordination, yet potentially entrench our subordination through that specificity;
they promise increased individual sovereignty at the price of intensifying the fiction of sovereign subjects; they emancipate
us to pursue other political ends while subordinating those political ends to liberal discourse; they move in a transhistorical
register while emerging from historically specific conditions; they promise to redress our suffering as women but only by
fracturing that suffering-and us - into discrete components, a fracturing that further violates lives already violated by the
imbrication of racial, class, sexual, and gendered power.
The affirmative reflects an ascetic policy that biopolitically excludes women.
Although notions of asceticism were targeted to all in early liberal writings, the policy of
asceticism is particularly suited to women and minorities as they are conceived of politically. It
reflects a particular manifestation of what Foucault calls bio-power in that biological existence
is reflected in political existence and law operates more as anorm; less a show of naked power
than molding, redistribution. 4In the present context, asceticism has an elective affinity with the
differentiation of gender and its intersection with poverty and race in political identity and
citizenship in liberal capitalist society. Thus, poverty and economic dependence are viewed as
particularly feminine and racial, while greed is transformed into a positive value, associated with
mainstream men and some women. Accordingly, those who make an economic contribution are
conceived of neutrally and allowed full citizenship. In contrast, the identity of those who are
conceived of biologically is formulated aswomen or racially (and so on) and a norm of femininity or
race is constructed that ultimately leads to varying degrees of political exclusion.
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Agamben K
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LINKS DRUG WAR

The drug war places heroin users in the state of exception
Draus, 8 American Sociological Association
(P., Heroin and bare life: drugs work and worth in the aftermath of urban abandonment, July 31st
The drug war engine only intensifies these gradients, as those caught up in its gears become mired within nearly
inescapable categories, first that of prisoner and then that of felon, in which case even the most basic of democratic political
rightsthe vote-- may be denied to them (Uggen and Manza 2002). Incarceration disproportionately affects urban minority
communities, on multiple levels. Most immediately, people of working and child-rearing-age are essentially absent from
those communities for years on end. The burden of integrating returning prisoners is then borne almost solely by those
same communities, which were of course more burdened with poverty and social ills to begin with. Meanwhile, the US
Census Bureau records prisoners as residing in their place of incarceration, not their home community, a fact which then
ironically transfers political power to the mostly rural and white communities where mostly urban and black individuals are
warehoused (Lotke and Wagner 2005). Mass incarceration, therefore, functions as a kind of mass degradation of status
similar to that which states may enact at will upon illegal or undocumented residents, or that experienced by refugees
with no state to claim them. The same low status, of course, is often accorded to heroin users. In her ethnography of New
York City street addicts, Waterston (1993) quotes an old timer named Lou, who states, The drug addict is, is, is the
vermin; the drug addict is the worm crawling under the ground of society, and this is disgusting to the average citizen. This
is worse than a fly, or a cockroach (p. 240). In my own sample, this utterly degraded identity was the exception, rather
than the norm. Most managed to avoid detection and stigma, and actively skirted known risks. Patterns of elusive behavior
were hammered into their days so thoroughly as to be unconscious. However, each individual lived in the shadow of these
implicit threats, and behind them all lurked the absolute fact of state power--the power to reduce them to nothing but a body
with a number attached.
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Agamben K
HPSW
LINKS DEMOCRACY
The affs attempt to spread democracy strips the human of his or her dignity and fuels radical evil
Raffin, 08 - Professor and Researcher at the University of Buenos Aires of Philosophy, Social and Political Theory, and
Human Rights; PhD in Philosophy, University of Paris
(Marcello, Symposium 2008: The United Nations Genocide Convention: A 60th Anniversary Commemoration:
Metaphysics, Politics, Truth: Genocide Practices as a Way of Deploying the Modern Paradigm, Lexis)
As we can see - and we can also recall the letter that Arendt sent to Karl Jaspers on March 4, 1951 n38 - she identifies the
phenomenon of radical evil with superfluousness, that is, human life deprived of its dignity and unpredictability. / But her
decisive discovery is not only that radical evil takes place in the context of a system that is generally totalitarian, but
[*120] also, and particularly, a democratic one. n40 Specifically, she writes that the danger of the corpse factories and
holes of oblivion is that today, with populations and homelessness everywhere on the increase, masses of people are
continuously rendered superfluous if we continue to think of our world in utilitarian terms. Political, social, and economic
events everywhere are in a silent conspiracy with totalitarian instruments devised for making men superfluous. The implied
temptation is well understood by the utilitarian common sense of the masses, who in most countries are too desperate to
retain much fear of death. The Nazis and the Bolsheviks can be sure that their factories of annihilation which demonstrate
the swiftest solution to the problem of overpopulation, of economically superfluous and socially rootless human masses, are
as much of an attraction as a warning. Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of
strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a
manner worthy of man. / This form of radical evil is not consequently exclusive of totalitarian regimes, but it can also
happen under democratic ones.
Squo Democracy is integral to biopolitics and indifferent from totalitarianism
Agamben 98, philosopher and professor of aesthetics at University of Verona Italy, Homo Sacer: Sovereign
Power and Bare Life, 1998, p. 121-121, http://korotonomedya2.googlepages.com/GiorgioAgambenHOMOSACERSovereignPow.pdf
The contiguity between mass democracy and totalitarian states, nevertheless, does not have the form of a sudden
transformation (as with, here following in Schmitts footsteps, seems to maintain ); before impetuously coming to
light in our century, the river of biopolitics that gave homo sacer his life runs its course in a hidden but continuous
fashion. It is almost as if, starting from a certain point, every decisive political event were double-sided: the spaces, the
liberties, and the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers always simultaneously prepared a tacit
but increasing inscription of individuals lives within the state order, thus offering a new and more dreadful foundation
for the very sovereign power from which they wanted to liberate themselves . The right to life, writes Foucault,
explaining the importance assumed by sex as a political issue , to ones body, to health, to happiness, to the
satisfaction of needs and, beyond all the oppressions or alienation, the right to rediscover what one is and all that one
can be, this rightwhich the classical juridical system was utterly incapable of comprehendingwas the political
response to all these new procedures of power (La voIont~ p. 191). The fact is that one and the same affirmation
of bare life leads, in bourgeois democracy, to a primacy of the private over the public and of individual liberties over
collective obligations and yet becomes, in totalitarian states, the decisive political criterion and the exemplary realm of
sovereign decisions. And only because biological life and its needs had become the politically decisive fact is it possible
to understand the otherwise incomprehensible rapidity with which twentieth-century parliamentary democracies were
able to turn into totalitarian states and with which this centurys totalitarian states were able to be converted, almost
without interruption, into parliamentary democracies. In both cases, these transformations were produced in a context in
which for quite some time politics had already turned into biopolitics, and in which the only real question to be decided
was which form of organization would be best suited to the task of assuring the care, control, and use of bare life . Once
their fundamental referent becomes bare life, traditional political distinctions (such as those between Right and Left,
liberalism and totalitarianism, private and public) lose their clarity and intelligibility and enter into a zone of
indistinction. The ex-communist ruling classes unexpected fall into the most extreme racism (as in the Serbian
program of ethnic cleansing) and the rebirth of new forms of fascism in Europe also have their roots here.
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Agamben K
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LINKS COURTS
The courts refusal to look behind the states use of force makes a democracy into a totalitarian state
The existence of legal black holes is apparent in two legal performances in which political activists argued that the decision
on the part of the United States and its allies to wage war on Iraq lacked legitimacy. The courts made it clear that such
decisions could not be reviewed by the judiciary. One of these cases resulted in a statement of reasons as to [*165] why a
law student could not bring a common informer suit against the Prime Minister of Australia in relation to his role in the Iraq
war; the other case was a House of Lords decision on whether the alleged illegitimacy of Britain's act of aggression in Iraq
provided a defence for activists accused of various criminal acts carried out at military and air bases in England. / In 2004,
Eric Bateman, a law student, attempted to bring a common informer suit against the Australian Prime Minister, John
Howard, under the Common Informers (Parliamentary Disqualifications) Act 1975 (Cth). In a statement of claim, which the
High Court of Australia Registry ultimately rejected, Bateman argued that Howard's actions, including, most importantly,
his decision to follow the United States into war in Iraq, amounted to an acknowledgment of allegiance to a foreign power.
This, according to Bateman, disqualifed the Prime Minister from continuing to sit as a member of the Australian Parliament
under section 44 of the Australian Constitution. / In his statement of reasons for refusing Eric's application to have a writ of
summons issued, Gummow J stated that: / The question which the Constitution would present is not whether the Prime
Minister has conducted himself in a particular way but whether, as a matter of law, he is 'under' any acknowledgment of
'allegiance, obedience or adherence to a foreign power' within the meaning of s 44(i) (In the matter of an application by
Eric Bateman: 2-3). / Of course, the Constitution does not 'present' a question so clearly. The High Court of Australia was
expressing, rather, a clear reluctance to judge the legal consequences of the political decision-making of the executive arm
of government, a reluctance which is mirrored in the next case study. The 2006 House of Lords decision in R v Jones also
suggests that the courts are not prepared to support attempts by activists to challenge the decision of their government to
engage in war. / In February and March 2003 the appellants carried out various criminal acts on English military air bases
including damaging fuel tankers and bomb trailers, damaging a runway and aircraft, destroying a fence, trespassing and
chaining themselves to tanks and vehicles. [*166] Although such acts involved force and the perpetrators had political
motives, they were not prosecuted for terrorist offences or labelled 'terrorists'. The appellants argued that their actions were
lawful 'because they were aimed at preventing a greater evil, namely the war in Iraq and its probable consequences' (R v
Jones: 43). The House of Lords dismissed this argument. Lord Hoffman expressed the strongest sentiments in response to
the defendants' arguments. / Lord Hoffman acknowledged the 'theoretical difficulty in the Courts, as part of the State,
holding that the State has acted unlawfully' (R v Jones: 65). Furthermore, 'the decision to go to war, whether one thinks it
was right or wrong, fell squarely within the discretionary powers of the Crown to defend the realm and conduct its foreign
affairs' (R v Jones: 66). / Lord Hoffman commented that one of the defendants had portrayed herself as 'a lonely individual
resisting the acts of a hostile and alien State to which she owes no loyalty' (R v Jones: 75). He found this puzzling given
that the state in question had 'protected and sustained her' and 'the legal system which had to judge the reasonableness of
her actions was that of the United Kingdom itself' (R v Jones: 75). Here the judge drew a distinction between the British
state, which he perceived as benevolent, and oppressive regimes such as the Nazi regime in World War II. This distinction,
according to Agamben, is illusory; he argues that in the age of biopolitics there is an 'inner solidarity between democracy
and totalitarianism' (1998: 10) and, in fact, democracies and totalitarian regimes are indistinguishable and interchangeable
(1998: 122). Given the judge's partial view of the state, it is unsurprising that he and the other judges condemned the use of
force by citizens in an attempt 'to see the law enforced in the interests of the community at large' and stated that 'the law
will not tolerate vigilantes' (R v Jones: 83). / Lord Hoffman concluded his judgment with strong criticism of the strategy of
activists to use the courts as a forum for challenging the legitimacy of state acts, including acts of war; he called this
'litigation as the continuation of protest by other means' (R v Jones: 90). The [*167] court's refusal to look behind the
state's use of force and interrogate the legitimacy of the decision to go to war delineates a classic legal black hole: an area
into which the rule of law does not extend.
40
7 Week Juniors
Agamben K
HPSW
LINKS TERRORISM COURT SPECIFIC

Courts cede power to the sovereign and ignore the rule of law, especially in terrorist cases
In the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia, accused terrorists have mounted a succession of legal challenges to
their indefinite detention by the executive, or to extreme restrictions on their freedom of movement and association. The
courts have been prepared to concede that they have jurisdiction to hear such challenges, even in situations in which there
have been no clear precedents. However, in general the courts have adopted a procedural approach, ensuring that the
executive can exercise such powers over accused terrorists provided that such powers are conferred in validly enacted
legislation. Thus the rule of law is diluted, and the courts have deferred to 'the executive's judgment about what is required'
(Dyzenhaus 2006: 19). Dyzenhaus believes that such judgments are far more destructive of the rule of law than is the judicial
recognition and acknowledgement of legal black holes (2006: 5). / A good example of the potentially broad ambit of the courts' jurisdiction in relation to such challenges can be found in the Australian
Federal Court's ruling in Hicks v Ruddock. In this ruling the court held that David Hicks's challenge to the refusal on the part of the Australian Government to request his release from Guantanamo Bay was
justiceable, and dismissed the Commonwealth's argument that it was not appropriate for the court to rule on the lawfulness or otherwise of particular political decisions and actions on the part of the
Australian and United States governments. Tamberlin J concluded that 'there are no bright lines which foreclose, at this pleading stage, the arguments sought to be advanced in the present case' (Hicks v
Ruddock: [93]). / However, the judge emphasised that his decision by no means paved the way for a successful outcome to Hicks's challenge (Hicks v Ruddock: Explanatory Statement); the significance of
the case was simply that Hicks's challenge could be heard. Hicks's subsequent release from Guantanamo Bay has left unanswered the question of whether the [*169] court would have been prepared to
curtail the discretionary powers of the Australian state in relation to accused terrorists and to declare certain actions and decisions on the part of the Australian and United States governments unlawful. The
critical issues underpinning the challenge, 'the relationship between the Judiciary and the Executive', or between the rule of law and the executive, and 'the relationship between the protection of individual
liberty and the national interest' (Hicks v Ruddock: Explanatory Statement), will not now be resolved by the court in the context of Hicks's detention. / The court has been prepared to apply the rule of law in
some of the challenges brought by accused terrorists against the executive. Stephen Humphreys cites the cases of A v Secretary of State for the Home Department and Rasul v Bush as examples of decisions
which 'hold out -- however temporarily -- against the encroachment of rule by exception' (Humphreys 2006: 686). In the first of these cases the House of Lords ended the indefinite detention of non-citizen
terrorist suspects in Belmarsh prison on the basis that the government was acting in a discriminatory fashion. In the second, the United States Supreme Court held that non-citizen terrorist suspects detained
at Guantanamo Bay were entitled to habeas corpus review within the United States judicial system. Humphreys argues that in both cases the courts were conferring rights on homo sacer, 'an outcome which
In most cases, however, in which challenges to executive power have

been mounted by an accused terrorist, there has been no substantive victory for the rule of law but rather the rule by law
approach deplored by Dyzenhaus, with its careful attention to procedure. Hamdan v Rumsfeld (hereinafter Hamdan), which
involved a challenge by a Guantanamo Bay detainee to the exercise of sovereign power by the United States executive
government, provides an example of this approach. The case could be read as an attempt on the part of the court to rein in
the power of the sovereign and assert the pre-eminence of the rule of law. Certainly Stevens J in his majority judgment in
Hamdan held that 'in undertaking to try Hamdan and subject him to [*170] criminal punishment, the Executive is bound to
comply with the Rule of Law that prevails in this jurisdiction' (Hamdan: 2798). However the decision of the United States
Supreme Court did not effectively curtail the power of the executive; in ruling that military commissions contravened the
international law of war as contained in Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions and were thus invalid, the majority
judges nevertheless invited the President to seek an appropriate authorisation for such military commissions from Congress
(Hamdan: 2799). The judges pointed out that the requirement for compliance with Common Article 3 could be waived by
Congress, and that 'the rules of most relevance here are those pertaining to the authority of Congress and the interpretation
of its enactments' (Hamdan: 2799). President Bush acted upon this suggestion in securing the passage of the Military
Commissions Act through Congress in October 2006, and thereby established an almost identical replacement regime of
military commissions. / In Hamdan v Rumsfeld, therefore, the glaring procedural problems with the first military
commissions, including the excessive degree of executive interference in, and control of, the proceedings, and the failure to
observe fundamental standards of fairness, were problematic only because Congress had imposed a statutory requirement in
the Uniform Code of Military Justice that military commissions must conform to the law of war. The case did not contain a
clear statement from the highest court in the United States that the executive must always respect fundamental legal
safeguards; instead, by resorting to principles of statutory interpretation, the majority judges decided an 'extraordinary' case
in accordance with 'ordinary rules' (Hamdan: 2799). / In considering the validity of control orders on accused terrorists or
terrorist suspects, the courts have also adopted a procedural approach. Control orders, which fetter an individual's freedom
of movement, communication and association in varying degrees of severity, are, as Humphreys has pointed out, clearly
biopolitical strategies (2006: 687); as the name would suggest, the sovereign seeks to control homo sacer [*171] through
disciplinary techniques and continuous surveillance. Control orders reflect the central focus in modern democracies on 'bare
life' as the 'political subject' (Agamben 1998: 123). In challenges mounted by accused terrorists to control orders, the courts
have accepted that control orders are a valid component of the new legislative framework developed in response to the
threat of terrorism.
suggests at least the relevance of a judicial role to Agamben's story' (2006: 687). /
Logic of deterrence reduces the accused terrorist to bare life and turns the state into a state of exception proven by
the terror trials, which are inherently dehumanizing
41
7 Week Juniors
Agamben K
HPSW
Trials can be viewed as law as propaganda (Boorstin 1971: 96). As state-orchestrated spectacle, the Australian terror trials
are intended [*174] to reinforce certain messages: specifically, that Australia is at high risk of terrorist attacks, that
individuals and groups within Australia are currently engaged in preparing for these attacks and, furthermore, that terrorist
attacks on Australian soil have been avoided thus far by the diligence and hard work of the Australian Federal Police and
the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) in pre-empting and thwarting terrorist attacks by bringing wouldbe terrorists to trial. To ensure that such messages are effectively conveyed, the members of the Australian Federal Police have been directed to lay as
many charges as possible under the new terrorism legislation (Allard 2007b). / These messages can be found in, for instance, Cummins J's judgment in the
2006 trial of Jack Thomas. Cummins J emphasised the importance of the 'principle of general deterrence' in the context of
terrorism (Director of Public Prosecutions (Cth) v Thomas 2006b: [14]). The Attorney-General also emphasised that
successful prosecutions of individuals in Thomas's situation would have a deterrent effect. According to Ruddock, the outcome of
the trial, which resulted in two convictions, demonstrated 'the seriousness with which these issues are dealt with by the law and highlights the
consequences of becoming involved in these activities' (Munro 2006). / The message of deterrence can further be found in statements by
the government and court in relation to the 2006 trial of Faheen Khalid Lodhi. After the verdict had been handed down in this trial, a
spokesperson from the Australian Federal Police commented that the conviction demonstrated the determination of the Australian government and its
security apparatus 'to counter any attempts of terrorist activities on Australian soil' (King & O'Brien 2006). In sentencing Lodhi, Whealy J identified the
'obligation of the Court' as being 'to denounce terrorism and voice its stern disapproval of activities such as those contemplated by the offender here' (R v
Lodhi: [92]). / The performances of the terror trials are designed to supplement and reinforce the strategies of the state in
fighting its domestic 'war against terrorism'; they are intended to be massively publicised ceremonies in which the terrorist
is prosecuted, convicted and then [*175] isolated from the community in extremely punitive circumstances. Philip
Boulten, Lodhi's barrister, believes that the exceptional circumstances of the terrorism trials, characterised by metal
detectors, an over-abundance of lawyers and the invasion of the courtroom by the state's security apparatus, create a
'forceful and theatrical statement' about the state's view of the accused (Boulten 2007). He has stated that 'the jury are quick
to perceive the nature of the struggle, when the state is waging war on terror in the courtroom' (Madden 2007). In the trials
themselves, and in the preliminary proceedings, we find a representation of the accused terrorist as homo sacer. / Most
terrorist suspects are denied bail. The accused terrorists experience the most extreme security conditions, virtual solitary
confinement, continuous surveillance and extraordinary security when attending court. Lodhi appeared at his trial shackled
at the ankles, arms and waist (Wallace 2006). At his committal hearing, Thomas was accompanied by four guards in body
armour and extra court staff wearing sidearms (Epstein 2004). The thirteen men arrested in the November 2005 raids in
Melbourne and the nine men arrested in the same raids in Sydney attended their committal hearing in a dock encased in
armoured glass (Kennedy & Allard 2007, Hoare 2006). This is not without precedent; the 1961 Israeli trial of the Nazi war
criminal Eichmann also featured the court appearances of the defendant within a bullet-proof glass box (Schechner 2002:
177). Terrorist suspects have been dressed in orange overalls, thereby evoking comparisons with Guantanamo Bay
detainees. / This treatment is clearly dehumanising. It corresponds to the process of 'bestialization of the human' which
Judith Butler has described in relation to the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. She writes that in such oppressive
conditions of imprisonment 'there is a reduction of these human beings to animal status, where the animal is figured as out
of control, in need of total constraint' (Butler 2004: 78). The representation of accused terrorists as less than human
corresponds with one of the mythical archetypes of homo sacer: the werewolf, 'a monstrous hybrid of human and animal'
(Agamben 1998: [*176] 105). Agamben argues that in the state of exception 'the city is dissolved and men enter into a
zone in which they are no longer distinct from beasts' (1998: 107). / It is not simply the conditions in which the trials are
conducted, and the visible degradation of the accused terrorists to beings less than human, which suggest a state of
exception. The evidence provided by the prosecution in the terror trials also supports a conclusion that the courts are
operating within a state of exception in which an apparently innocent sequence of events can inexplicably trigger
prosecution and the imposition of harsh punitive penalties. Agamben repeatedly describes the state of exception as a place
in which fact is indistinguishable from law (2005: 29). Peter Fitzpatrick has questioned whether the legal question can ever
be strictly distinguished from the factual question (2001: 262). However, this merging of fact and law is certainly apparent
in the Lodhi trial, in which the evidence regarding Lodhi's activities was not necessarily incriminating: the collection of two
maps of the Australian electricity system, a request for information about materials which could be used to make
explosives, the downloading of aerial photographs of Australian defence establishments, and the possession of a document
describing how to make various poisons and explosives. Evidence about his purchase of a large amount of toilet paper,
which could produce nitrocellulose for a bomb, formed the basis of a further count (later dropped) in the original
indictment. Such conduct could not be described as transgressive and was clearly capable of innocent explanation. Yet it is
in accordance with the arbitrary decision-making processes of the state that the author of such conduct is labelled a terrorist.
This confusion between transgression and compliance with the law, 'such that what violates a rule and what conforms to it
coincide without any remainder' (Agamben 1998: 57), is a central paradox of the state of exception.
42
7 Week Juniors
Agamben K
HPSW
LINKS POPULATION MANAGEMENT

Trying to control the population further endorses the sovereigns power they aim to use the subjects fragility to
reinforce the vision of the population
Clifford 01 Professor of American Studies and the English Language Political Genealogy
(Michael, After Foucault: Savage Identities, Routledge, pg. 111)
The emergence of population as a political category of primary importance has a double focus, a focus that operates "both
at the level of each individual who goes to make up the population, and also the interest of population as such."38 It will be
discovered that the population as a whole "has its own regularities," that it "carries a range of intrinsic aggregate effects"
(GV, 17). The state will seek to manipulate these effects by implementing certain practices and techniques that affect, for
example, birth rates, regional distributions of people, and the flow of capital to designated segments of the population. The
individual will become a unit of the population-deserving special attention, but always with reference to the welfare of the
larger social aggregate. The practices (as opposed to the ideology) of the state brought to bear on the individual will
recognize her, not so much as a person, but as a body, whose activities, lifestyle, habits, and relations reflect trends peculiar
to particular segments of the population. The power exercised on the individual will be essentially disciplinary in nature, in
that it will be characterized by distributions of individuals in space, the control of time and activity, and, above all, the
employment of a disciplinary gaze that monitors the individual and "fixes" her place in the broader demographic aggregate
of the population.39 The shift from the territory to population as the primary target of the state gave rise to a new type of
political rationality, says Foucault: that of "governmentality." To explain this rationality, Foucault contrasts the work of
Machiavelli and one of his contemporary critics, Guillaume de La Perriere. The politics of Machiavelli's The Prince, or at
least the interpretations of it that led to anti-Machiavellian literature, posited the sovereign as occupying "a position of
externality and transcendence" to his principality. In this perspective, the foundation of sovereignty is the territory, which
the sovereign acquires through inheritance or conquest. Subjects are merely inhabitants of the territory, to a great degree as
much property of the sovereign as the territory itself. The link between the sovereign and the territory, and the subjects that
inhabit that territory, is the principality, understood as the rule the sovereign exercises over a (more or less) defined
geographical area, as the relation the sovereign, as ruler, bears to the territory and its inhabitants. This link is a fragile one,
says Foucault, constantly threatened from both without and within. The task of sovereignty, the savoir-faire that The Prince
is written to explain and defend, consists in this, "that the objective of the exercise of power is to reinforce, strengthen, and
protect this principality." Thus, Machiavelli's text is concerned with (1) identifying dangers to the sovereign's rule, and (2)
with developing an "art of manipulating the power relations that will allow the Prince to protect his principality" (G V, 7-8).
43
7 Week Juniors
Agamben K
HPSW
LINKS POLICING
Policing and criminalization are tools of sovereignty
Agamben 2K, philosopher and professor of aesthetics at University of Verona Italy, Means Without End: Notes on
Politics, 2000, pg. 105-107
The entrance of the concept of sovereignty in the figure of the police, therefore, is not at all reassuring. This is proven
by a fact that still surprises historians of the Third Reich, namely, that the extermination of the Jews was conceived from
the beginning to the end exclusively as a police operation. It is well known that not a single document has ever been
found that recognizes the genocide as a decision made by a sovereign organ: the only document we have, in this regard,
is the record of a conference that was held on January 20, 1942, at the Grosser Wannsee, and that gathered middle-level
and lower-level police officers. Among them, only the name of Adolf Eichmannhead of division B-4 of the Fourth
Section of the Gestapo is noticeable. The extermination of the Jews could be so methodical and deadly only because it
was conceived and carried out as a police operation; but, conversely, it is precisely because the genocide was a police
operation that today it appears, in the eyes of civilized humanity, all the more barbaric and ignominious.
Furthermore, the investiture of the sovereign as policeman has another corollary: it makes it necessary to criminalize the
adversary. Schmitt has shown how, according to European public law, the principle par in parem non habet
iurisdictionem eliminated the possibility that sovereigns of enemy states could be judged as crim inals. The declaration
of war did not use to imply the suspension of either this principle or the conventions that guaranteed that a war against
an enemy who was granted equal dignity would take place according to precise regulations (one of which was the sharp
distinction between the army and the civilian population). What we have witnessed with our own eyes from the end of
World War I onward is instead a process by which the enemy is first of all excluded from civil humanity and branded as
a criminal; only in a second moment does it become possible and licit to eliminate the enemy by a police operation.
Such an operation is not obliged to respect any juridical rule and can thus make no distinctions between the civilian
population and soldiers, as well as between the people and their criminal sovereign, thereby return ing to the most
archaic conditions of belligerence. Sovereigntys gradual slide toward the darkest areas of police law, however, has at
least one positive aspect that is worthy of mention here. What the heads of state, who rushed to criminalize the enemy
with such zeal, have not yet realized is that this criminalization can at any moment be turned against them. There is no
head of state on Earth today who, in this sense, is not virtually a criminal. Today, those who should happen to wear the
sad redingote of sovereignty know that they may be treated as criminals one day by their colleagues. And certainly we
will not be the ones to pity them. The sovereigns who willingly agreed to present themselves as cops or executioners, in
fact, now show in the end their original proximity to the criminal.
44
7 Week Juniors
Agamben K
HPSW
LINKS ECONOMIC CRISIS

Sovereignty insulates itself from criticism by pointing to an ever present economic crisis.
Agamben 2K, philosopher and professor of aesthetics at University of Verona Italy, Means Without End: Notes on Politics,
2000, pg. 133
Nothing is more nauseating than the impudence with which those who have turned money into their only raison
detre periodically wave around the scarecrow of economic crisis: the rich nowadays wear plain rags so as to warn
the poor that sacrifices will be necessary for everybody. And the docility is just as astonishing; those who have made
themselves stolidly complicitous with the imbalance of the public debt, by handing all their savings over to the state in
exchange for bonds, now receive the warning blow without batting an eyelash and ready themselves to tighten their
belts. And yet those who have any lucidity left in them know that the crisis is always in process and that it constitutes
the internal motor of capitalism in its present phase, much as the state of exception is today the normal structure of
political power. And just as the state of exception requires that there be increasingly numerous sections of residents
deprived of political rights and that in fact at the outer limit all citizens be reduced to naked life, in such a way crisis,
having now become permanent, demands not only that the people of the Third World become increasingly poor, but
also that a growing percentage of the citizens of the industrialized societies be marginal ized and without a job. And
there is no so-called democratic state today that is not compromised and up to its neck in such a massive production of
human misery.
45
7 Week Juniors
Agamben K
HPSW
LINKS POVERTY REFORM

Poverty programs are only used to trace, track, and maintain records of the poor
Smith, 07 Professor of Government at Cornell University (Anna Marie, Welfare Reform and Sexual Regulation, 2007,
Page 9)
In the context of the current TANF regime, the State limits eligibility, subjects recipients to degrading workfare
requirements, and discourages poor women from making intimate choices that are deemed to interfere with their "work
readiness." In some cases, poor single mothers are being urged to enter marriages or to postpone childbearing. In almost
every case, the TANF recipient is pressed to participate in the paternafare system, regardless of her wishes. Compulsory
paternity identification and child support enforcement systems register the poor in a governmental database such that they
can be easily tracked, definitively identified with state-of-the-art biometrics, pinpointed in the seamlessly connected public
and private information networks, and physically hauled into court. In a sense, paternafare creates an opportunity for the
State to attach radio frequency identification tags to poor women, men, and children alike. Understood from the perspective
of Agamben, or that of Hardt and Negri, TANF facilitates the advance of biopolitical domination. As we will see, however,
their theories of biopolitics can be used only as sensitization devices, for they are ultimately incompatible with historically
specific and institution-based analysis.
For Agamben, sexual regulation in welfare policy would constitute only one moment within the State's timeless campaign
to produce "bare life." Agamben begins with Aristotle's distinction between life as mere subsistence, which is a life that
could be lived even if one found oneself outside the polis, and the pursuit of the "good life," which is a life that is possible
only for the citizen who is a member of a formally constituted polis. Agamben interprets this distinction as a tension
between two institutional postures that are adopted by the State toward "the people"; this tension establishes the
fundamental structure for any possible government. 3 In Aristotle's account, the male citizen could perfect himself only
within the polis. If he left the city -or if his government descended into anarchistic chaos and effectively dissolved itself -he
would revert back to a life in which his highest good would be nothing more than subsistence, or "bare life."
It appears, then, that one enters the condition of "bare life" only in the absence of government and that the existence of the
State prevents us from descending into an animalistic and subhuman form of life. That appearance achieves its ideological
perfection in modern liberal democratic legitimation discourse, for the latter promises to safeguard the life, liberty, and
happiness of "the people" by prohibiting arbitrary State intervention. Agamben would argue, however, that the liberal
democratic form of governance inevitably betrays itself. Even as it promises to embrace "laissez-faire," it busily measures
its population; tracks reproductive rates; controls immigration; manages the markets in food, housing, transportation, and
energy; polices the poor; and takes steps to ensure the ready supply of able-bodied military recruits. Ironically enough,
caregiving is thereby politicized, and, for all the ideological disavowal, biopolitics is established yet again as the essence of
governmental interest by the modern nation-State. The latter "assume[s] directly the care of the nation's biological life as
one of its proper tasks."4
Poverty reform ignores gender and racial issues they do not treat the poor as one, but separates them into groups
Smith, 07 Professor of Government at Cornell University (Anna Marie, Welfare Reform and Sexual Regulation, 2007,
Page 71-2)
Neoliberal champions of welfare reform constantly invoke the specter of the free market being strangled by bloated poverty
assistance budgets. Again, the underlying message is that if we stopped wasting public funds on the incorrigible, we, the
members of the "general population" with our insurable risk ratings, would benefit from tax deductions. That would be
entirely appropriate because we deserve the right to run the "race of life" without any undue governmental interference. The
neoliberals are, however, essentially lying when they tell us that welfare reform is designed to reduce taxes. Tax cuts for the
wealthy, military spending, corporate subsidization, middleclass programs, and the cost of servicing the national debt
account for the lion's share of budget deficits. Allocations for the AFDC/TANF program could never "bankrupt" the federal
government because they make up less than 1 percent of total federal spending. By the same token, no amount of welfare
program cuts could ever make a substantial impact upon the individual citizen's tax burden. Further, the soaring paternafare
budget is instructive. Even as it was ostensibly trimming the social spending budget by removing the most employable
48
poverty program beneficiaries from the rolls, the State was also continuing to invest heavily in the paternafare system. It
did so even though the public records plainly indicate that paternafare could deliver only a modest decrease in the poverty
rate. The interests of the State in social control where the poorest of the poor are concerned appear to trump neoliberalism's
ostensible objectives of public budget cutting and State downsizing.
46
7 Week Juniors
Agamben K
HPSW
Although the work of the post-Foucauldians on "risk society" theory is certainly suggestive, it remains limited in several
respects. On the whole, their analyses tend to privilege class-oriented perspectives over those that bring the intersection of
gender, race, and sexual differences to the fore.49 At times, the post-Foucauldians take neoliberalism at its word and
assume that its primary subject formation effect consists in its incitement of individual entrepreneurship and its
undifferentiated assault on the poor. Although it is certainly true that neoliberalism singles out the poor for some of the
harshest forms of regulation, capital and its allies in the State, the caring professions and the social science academy, do not
treat the poor as a homogeneous mass. On the contrary, these institutions are deeply committed to racially inspired and
gender segregated interventions into the intimate lives of the poor that operate along multiple axes at the same time. A
similar limitation can be found in the work of LOlc Wacquant and Mike Davis, two post-Marxist critics of the American
prison system. They tend to construct institutional racism in contemporary American society as a project that seeks the
complete segregation of poor blacks and Latinos within secure institutional spaces. However, because they generally ignore
gender differences50 and fail to detect the forms of regulation that do not involve easily identifiable spatial containment,
they tend to neglect some of the subtle but important ways in which racial-patriarchal capitalism is advancing.
47
7 Week Juniors
Agamben K
HPSW
LINKS PATERNAFARE
Paternafare is used as a form of population management
Smith, 07 Professor of Government at Cornell University (Anna Marie, Welfare Reform and
Sexual Regulation, 2007, Page 73)
But the forces of capital and institutional racism do not only rely upon easily identifiable secure spaces, such as the prison, to
impose social control upon the poor. In addition, they have hegemonized the State; the latter, under their leadership,
opportunistically draws in turn from its own repertoire of population management strategies, such as the digitalized information
systems, biometrics, poverty programs, and family law. The deployment of these State-specific tools allows the hegemonized
State to create a largely invisible detainment structure that advances social control, namely paternafare. Paternafare places the
burden of proof squarely upon the shoulders of the poor single mother and the alleged biological father . She must prove that she is
making a good-faith effort to cooperate; he must prove that he is not the biological father of her children. If the welfare mother's
caseworker decides that she has failed to meet the paternafare requirements, she will be excluded from the TANF program. If the
putative biological father refuses to submit DNA evidence or to attend the support court proceeding, the court may decide to
accept the welfare mother's allegation of paternity in his absence. The system treats them like criminals who have already been
convicted. In reality, neither figure poses a devastating threat to society. The hegemonized State and its allies in the business class
and religious right benefit, even as paternafare racks up another year of fiscal failure, because the policy demonizes and
demoralizes the poor and promotes patriarchal heterosexism.
48
7 Week Juniors
Agamben K
HPSW
INTERNAL LINKS STATE OF EXCEPTION

The state of exception has now become the rule and considered the norm
Agamben, 00 (Giorgio, translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, Means without ends, published in 2000, pg
7-8)
Thus, life originally appears in law only as the counterpart of a power that threatens death. But what is valid for the pater's
right of life and death is even more valid for sovereign power (imperium), of which the former constitutes the originary
cell. Thus, in the Hobbesian foundation of sovereignty, life in the state of nature is defined only by its being unconditionally
exposed to a death threat (the limitless right of everybody over everything) and political life - that is, the life that unfolds
under the protection of the Leviathan-is nothing but this very same life always exposed to a threat that now rests
exelusively in the hands of the sovereign. The puissance absolue et perpetuelle, which defines state power, is not foundedin the last instance on a political will but rather on naked life, which is kept safe and protected only to the degree to which it
submits itself to the sovereign's (or the law's) right of life and death. (This is precisely the originary meaning of the
adjective sacer [sacred] when used to refer to human life.) The state of exception, which is what the sovereign each and
every time decides, takes place precisely when naked life-which normally appears rejoined to the multifarious forms of
social life is explicitly put into question and revoked as the ultimate foundation of political power. The ultimate subject
that needs to be at once turned into the exception and included in the city is always naked life. "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.?" Walter Benjamin's diagnosis, which by now is more than fifty
years old, has lost none of its relevance. And that is so not really or not only because power no longer has today any form of
legitimization other than emergency, and because power everywhere and continuously refers and appeals to emergency as
well as laboring secretly to produce it. (How could we not think that a system that can no longer function at all except on
the basis of emergency would not also be interested in preserving such an emergency at any price?) This is the case also and
above all because naked life, which was the hidden foundation of sovereignty, has meanwhile become the dominant form of
life everywhere. Life-in its state of exception that has now become the norm-is the naked life that in every context separates
the forms of life from their cohering into a form-of-life. The Marxian scission between man and citizen is thus superseded
by the division between naked life (ultimate and opaque bearer of sovereignty) and the multifarious forms of life abstractly
recodified as socialjuridical identities (the voter, the worker, the journalist, the student, but also the HIV-positive, the
transvestite, the porno star, the elderly, the parent, the woman) that all rest on naked life. (To have mistaken such a naked
life separate from its form, in its abjection, for a superior principle sovereignty or the sacred-is the limit of Bataille's
thought, which makes it useless to us.)
The state of exception allows atrocities to occur and is now beginning to occur in the US
25-7)
One ought to reflect on the paradoxical status of the camp as space of exception: the camp is a piece of territory that is
placed outside the normal juridical order; for all that, however, it is not simply an external space. According to the
etymological meaning of the term exception (ex-capere), what is being excluded in the camp is captured outside, that is, it
is included by virtue of its very exclusion. Thus, what is being captured under the rule of law is first of all the very state of
exception. In other words, if sovereign power is founded on the ability to decide on the state of exception, the camp is the
structure in which the state of exception is permanently realized. Hannah Arendt observed once that what comes to light in
the camps is the principle that supports totalitarian domination and that common sense stubbornly refuses to admit to,
namely, the principle according to which anything is possible. It is only because the camps constitute a space of exception-a
space in which the law is completely suspended-that everything is truly possible in them. If one does not understand this
particular political-juridical structure of the camps, whose vocation is precisely to realize permanently the exception, the
incredible events that took place in them remain entirely unintelligible. The people who entered the camp moved about in a
zone of indistinction between the outside and the inside, the exception and the rule, the licit and the illicit, in which every
juridical protection had disappeared; moreover, if they were]ews, they had already been deprived of citizenship rights by
the Nuremberg Laws and were later completely denationalized at the moment of the "final solution." Inasmuch as its
inhabitants have been stripped of every political status and reduced completely to naked life, the camp is also the most
absolute biopolitical space that has ever been realized-s-a space in which power confronts nothing other than pure
biological life without any mediation. The camp is the paradigm itself of political space at the point in which politics
becomes biopolitics and the homo sneer becomes indistinguishable from the citizen. The correct question regarding the
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horrors committed in the camps, therefore, is not the question that asks hypocritically how it could have been possible to
commit such atrocious horrors against other human beings; it would be more honest, and above all more useful, to
investigate carefully how-that is, thanks to what juridical procedures and political devices-human beings could have been
so completely deprived of their rights and prerogatives to the point that committing any act toward them would no longer
appear as a crime (at this point, in fact, truly anything had become possible). If this is the case, if the essence of the camp
consists in the materialization of the state of exception and in the consequent creation of a space for naked life as such, we
will then have to admit to be facing a camp virtually every time that such a structure is created, regardless of the nature of
the crimes committed in it and regardless of the denomination and specific topography it might have. The soccer stadium in
Bari in which the Italian police temporarily herded Albanian illegal immigrants in 1991 before sending them back to their
country, the cycle-racing track in which the Vichy authorities rounded up the Jews before handing them over to the
Germans, the refugee camp near the Spanish border where Antonio Machado died in 1939, as well as the zones d'attente in
French international airports in which foreigners requesting refugee status are detained will all have to be considered
camps. In all these cases, an apparently anodyne place (such as the Hotel Arcade near the Paris airport) delimits instead a
space in which, for all intents and purposes, the normal rule of law is suspended and in which the fact that atrocities mayor
may not be committed does not depend on the law but rather on the civility and ethical sense of the police that act
temporarily as sovereign. This is the case, for example, during the four days foreigners may be kept in the zone d'attente
before the intervention of French judicial authorities. In this sense, even certain outskirts of the great postindustrial cities as
well as the gated communities of the United States are beginning today to look like camps, in which naked life and political
life, at least in determinate moments, enter a zone of absolute indeterminacy.
The state of exception applies to all of the sovereign including the police force and any leader
56-9)
ONE OF the least ambiguous lessons learned from the GulfWar is that the concept of sovereignty has been finally
introduced into the figure of the police. The nonchalance with which the exercise of a particularly devastating ius belli was
disguised here as a mere "police operation" cannot be considered to be a cynical mystification (as it was indeed considered
by some rightly indignant critics). The most spectacular characteristic of this war, perhaps, was that the reasons presented
to justify it cannot be put aside as ideological superstructures used to conceal a hidden plan. On the contrary, ideology has
in the meantime penetrated so deeply into reality that the declared reasons have to be taken in a rigorously literal senseparticularly those concerning the idea of a new world order. This does not mean, however, that the Gulf War constituted a
healthy limitation of state sovereignties because they were forced to serve as policemen for a supranational organism
(which is what apologists and extemporaneous jurists tried, in bad faith, to prove). The point is that the police-contrary to
public opinion-are not merely an administrative function of law enforcement; rather, the police are perhaps the place where
the proximity and the almost constitutive exchange between violence and right that characterizes the figure of the sovereign
is shown more nakedly and clearly than anywhere else. According to the ancient Roman custom, nobody could for any
reason come between the consul, who was endowed with imperium, and the lictor closest to him, who carried the sacrificial
ax (which was used to perform capital punishment). This contiguity is not coincidental. If the sovereign, in fact, is the one
who marks the point of indistinction between violence and right by proclaiming the state of exception and suspending the
validity of the law, the police are always operating within a similar state of exception. The rationales of "public order" and "security"
on which the police have to decide on a ease-by-case basis define an area of indistinction between violence and right that is exactly symmetrical to that of
sovereignty. Benjamin rightly noted that: The assertion that the ends of police violence are always identical or even connected to those of general law is
entirely untrue. Rather, the "law" of the police really marks the point at which the state, whether from impotence or because of the immanent connections
within any legal system, can no longer guarantee through the legal system the empirical ends that it desires at any price to attain." Hence the display of
weapons that characterizes the police in all eras. What is important here is not so much the threat to those who infringe on the right, but rather the display
of that sovereign violence to which the bodily proximity between consul and lictor was witness. The display, in fact, happens in the most peaceful of
public places and, in particular, during official ceremonies. This embarrassing contiguity between sovereignty and police function is
expressed in the intangible sacredness that, according to the ancient codes, the figure of the sovereign and the figure of the
executioner have in common. This contiguity has never been so self evident as it was on the occasion of a fortuitous
encounter that took place on July 14, 1418: as we are told by a chronicler, the Duke of Burgundy had just entered Paris as a
conqueror at the head of his troops when, on the street, he came across the executioner Coqueluche, who had been working
very hard for him during those days. According to the story, the executioner, who was covered in blood, approached the
sovereign and, while reaching for his hand, shouted: "Mon beau frere!" The entrance of the concept of sovereignty in the
figure of the police, therefore, is not at all reassuring. This is proven by a fact that still surprises historians of the Third
Reich, namely, that the extermination of the Jews was conceived from the beginning to the end exclusively as a police
operation. It is well known that not a single document has ever been found that recognizes the genocide as a decision made
by a sovereign organ: the only document we have, in this regard, is the record of a conference that was held on January 20,
1942, at the Grosser Wannsee, and that gathered middle-level and lower-level police officers. Among them, only the name
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of Adolf Eichmann-head of division B-4 of the Fourth Section of the Gestapo-is noticeable. The extermination of the Jews
could be so methodical and deadly only because it was conceived and carried out as a police operation; but, conversely, it is
precisely because the genocide was a "police operation" that today it appears, in the eyes of civilized humanity, all the more
barbaric and ignominious. Furthermore, the investiture of the sovereign as policeman has another corollary: it makes it
necessary to criminalize the adversary. Schmitt has shown how, according to European public law, the principle par in
parmz non habet iurisdictionem eliminated the possibility that sovereigns of enemy states could be judged as criminals. The
declaration of war did not use to imply the suspension of either this principle or the conventions that guaranteed that a war
against an enemy who was granted equal dignity would take place according to precise regulations (one of which was the
sharp distinction between the army and the civilian population). What we have witnessed with our own eyes from the end
of World War I onward is instead a process by which the enemy is first of all excluded from civil humanity and branded as
a criminal; only in a second moment does it become possible and licit to eliminate the enemy by a "police operation." Such
an operation is not obliged to respect any juridical rule and can thus make no distinctions between the civilian population
and soldiers, as well as between the people and their criminal sovereign, thereby returning to the most archaic conditions of
belligerence. Sovereignty's gradual slide toward the darkest areas of police law, however, has at least one positive aspect
that is worthy of mention here, What the heads of state, who rushed to criminalize the enemy with such zeal, have not yet
realized is that this criminalization can at any moment be turned against them. There is no head of state on Earth today
who, in this sense, is not virtually a criminal. Today, those who should happen to wear the sad redingote of sovereignty
know that they may be treated as criminals one day by their colleagues. And certainly we will not be the ones to pity them.
The sovereigns who willingly agreed to present themselves as cops or executioners, in fact, now show in the end their
original proximity to the criminal.
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LINKS/IMPACT TERRORISM
The war on terror recreates terror the state of exception that the plan creates is elevated to a permanent state
legitimizing the right of police and military intervention, normalizing violence and makes terrorism inevitable
This "material culture"-these "things"-has, like the fetish, the power to in- carnate the absent presence of terrorism. Their
power resides in the capacity to evoke a threatening presence about which we have little knowledge, a presence whose
reality is deeply entangled in ideological and popular fantasy.9 What we are witnessing now, I want to suggest, is the
materialization of this fictional reality of Terrorism, as an actual enemy of war: the displacement of this fictional reality
from the screens of the movie theaters onto the screens of the television newscasts. What we are assisting now, and experiencing, is
the en- trapment of political life into virtual reality, at least at a new scale; or as The New York Times put it: the line between government and show
business is being blurred.10 An indication of how deeply the reality of terrorism is embedded in- to the scenarios of fantasy is the recruitment of
Hollywood by the U.S. military "to brain storm about possible terrorist targets and schemes in America and to offer solutions to those threats." 11 The
virtual reality of Terrorism has the potential to become an actual reality. If Terrorism remains the overarching enemy without organizational, cultural or historical distinctions, and which becomes the pretext for all kinds of policing
and military practices, then we might very well find ourselves with a phenomenon of violence characterized by close
links between different organizations that might not have collaborated be-fore. So too may the scenarios of spectacular
violence provide the amplifying voice and claim to fame of otherwise obscure and marginal organizations. What I am
suggesting is that the war on Terrorism might indeed create the very enemy it is seeking to eradicate; it might create
Terrorism in a new way, setting the stage of war not as state of exception, but rather as a permanent state of affairs
in which the state of exception has become the juridical norm and the legitimating right of police and military
intervention.12 This permanent state of exception does not eliminate practices of terror; rather it instrumentalizes
terrorism for new kinds of social, political and economic production.
War on Terrorism: America Resolved
From September 11 to the beginning of the bombing in Afghanistan, the newspaper The Austin American Statesman reported the war news daily under
the same first page headline: "War on Terrorism: America Resolved." While the paper alluded to the determination of the country in its war against
terrorism, the headline revealed the fact that the war could be a form of resolution for the major ailments of the country and the current administration.
For a start, the war has produced a passionate nationalist unity and intense feeling of patriotism focused on the charged
figure of the American citizen. While the meaning of this patriotic fervor is not yet clear and its direction is still volatile,
there is little question that, for the moment, it has erased from view the scabrous issue of ongoing class and racial
violence. It has obscured from view the social abandonment and police containment of poor communities, and managed to
blame terrorism not only for the downturn of the economy but for the layoffs of workers as well. This is, of course not new.
Wars often serve the purpose of di- verting social tension. Not only are deeply entrenched inequalities within the U.S.
obscured by patriotism, but the surge of nationalist passion has elevated the popularity of an administration whose
legitimacy before September 11 was doubtful. Social policies and progressive agendas are falling fast from sight, giving space to a new set
of discourses and practices about national security that police dissent and censor information. For the time being, the war is productive for conservative
agendas and the security and military industries. The link between patriotic discourses and the machinery of the security is best
exemplified by the battery of counter-terrorist measures for which U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft summoned the
most awkward descriptive title ever given to a counter-terrorist package: "Provide Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and
Obstruct Terrorism Act 2001," a title which makes sense only when translated into its acronym form: PATRIOT Act 2001 . Patriotism and national
betrayal are emerging as the organizing terms of political discourse. The bill-scaled down from its initial draft, which called
for the indefinite detention of immigrant terrorist suspects-still gives wide authority to the police and secret services to
arrest suspects, wiretap conversations and monitor e-mail communications.13 Other measures proposed by the administration include
increasing the militarization of borders, tightening immigration procedures, and expanding the power of intelligence agencies. What all these
antiterrorist measures amount to is the suspension of civil liberties characteristic of a state of exception, one that
will, no doubt, target some populations more than others. The state of exception, of course, is not new either. How
else can we conceptualize the politics of containment, intensive surveillance and industrial imprisonment of poor
inner city communities legitimized by the war on crime and the war on drugs?
[AREXTAGA CONTINUES NO TEXT DELETED]
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[AREXTAGA CONTINUES NO TEXT DELETED]
The question is whether this new state of exception redefines the juridical dimension of the new new world order.
And if so, what form will this redefinition take? What implications will it have? Some scholars, such as Giorgio Agamben, have already warned about
the increasing redefinitions of the law by an ongoing state of exception in late modernity. One of the consequences of this new state of law, is to quote
Agamben, "that in the state of exception, it is impossible to distinguish transgression of the law from execution of the law,
such that what violates a rule and what conforms to it coincide without any reminder" (1998:57).14 This
indistinguishability between execution and transgression of the law, is also what characterizes the kind of guerrilla warfare
that is often grouped under the rubric of terrorism. A war against Terrorism, then, mirrors the state of exception
characteristic of insurgent violence, and in so doing it reproduces it ad infinitum. The question remains: What politics might
be involved in this state of alert as normal state? Would this possible scenario of competing (and mutually constituting) terror signify the end of politics as
we know it? Will it mean the subordination of the political to a state of right defined by security demands and military operations, as Toni Negri and
Michael Hardt have suggested? And what would constitute the passions that would sustain such an ongoing confrontation? In the poor regions and
neighborhoods of the Muslim world, where Islamist radicalism has found resonance, passions might be fueled by a vision of a society in which one is
redeemed from suffering, mar- ginality and alienation. But in the U.S., what would feed the passions necessary to endure the suffering and support the
violence of an unpredictable war? Would this be the thrill of terror provided by the spectacle of violence itself as it becomes routinized into timeless
temporality? If the fundamental question of widening inequalities and growing injustice that this neoliberal globalization is creating is not addressed, and
if U.S. foreign and domestic policies are not seriously reconsidered to stop the massive loss of human life that goes on un- spectacularly behind the
scenes, then there is little hope of ending terrorist forms of violence, including those practiced by state or state-like organizations. If military strategy
against a fictionalized and absolutized enemy predominates as a convenient and productive scapegoat against untenable
everyday violence, then we might find ourselves in a social space characterized by the timeless time of unending war, the
fictional realities of a permanent state of exception and the spectacle of violence; this is a scene that is already in place in many areas
of the world.
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IMPACTS STATE OF EMERGENCY

States of emergency justifies wars to be waged on behalf of the population culminating in extinction
(Eugene Nomos, Nosos and Bios http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/25/32)
There must be some set of principles for allowing, in exceptional circumstances, the introduction of sovereign power. In
other words, there must be some set of conditions that can be identified as a threat, such that a corresponding state of
emergency can be claimed, in which the formerly decentralized apparatus of biopolitics suddenly constricts into the
exception of sovereignty. 'It is at this moment that racism is inscribed as the basic mechanism of power, as it is exercised in
modern States' (2003: 254). But I would argue that Foucault means 'racism' here in a specific, medical and biological sense.
Racism in this sense is a biologically-inflected political relation in which war is rendered as fundamentally biological:
Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence
of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity:
massacres have become vital the existence in question is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the
biological existence of a population. (1978: 137)
In a curious turn of phrase, Foucault later calls this a 'democratization of sovereignty,' a condition in which the sovereign
state of emergency emerges through a widespread and generalized threat to the population (2003: 37). In such conditions,
both a medical-biological view of the population, and a statistical-informatic means of accounting for the population,
converge in the identification of potential threats and possible measures of security. In a sense, it is war that acts as the
hinge between population and information, but a war that always puts at stake the biological existence of the population
(and thus nation). The body natural, even as it serves as an analogy for the body politic, is always what is fundamentally at
stake in the body politic.
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IMPACTS WAR
Conditions of sovereignty lead to inevitable warfare
Mbembe, 03 PhD in History, DEA in Poli.sci, Post colonial theorist, has spent time working at Columbia University,
New York, Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C., University of Pennsylvania, University of California Berkeley, Yale
University, Duke University and Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (Achille, translated by
Libby Meintjes, Necropolitics, Duke University Press, 2003, http://www.jhfc.duke.edu/icuss/pdfs/Mbembe.pdf)
Under conditions of vertical sovereignty and splintering colonial occupation, communities are separated across a y-axis.
This leads to a proliferation of the sites of violence. The battlegrounds are not located solely at the surface of the earth. The
underground as well as the airspace are transformed into conflict zones. There is no continuity between the ground and the
sky. Even the boundaries in airspace are divided between lower and upper layers. Everywhere, the symbolics of the top
(who is on top) is reiterated. Occupation of the skies therefore acquires a critical importance, since most of the policing is
done from the air. Various other technologies are mobilized to this effect: sensors aboard unmanned air vehicles (UAVs),
aerial reconnaissance jets, early warning Hawkeye planes, assault helicopters, an Earth-observation satellite, techniques of
hologrammatization. Killing becomes precisely targeted.
Such precision is combined with the tactics of medieval siege warfare adapted to the networked sprawl of urban refugee
camps. An orchestrated and systematic sabotage of the enemys societal and urban infrastructure network complements the
appropriation of land, water, and airspace resources. Critical to these techniques of disabling the enemy is bulldozing:
demolishing houses and cities; uprooting
olive trees; riddling water tanks with bullets; bombing and jamming electronic communications; digging up roads;
destroying electricity transformers; tearing up airport runways; disabling television and radio transmitters; smashing
computers; ransacking cultural and politico-bureaucratic symbols of the proto- Palestinian state; looting medical equipment.
In other words, infrastructural warfare.58 While the Apache helicopter gunship is used to police the air and to kill from
overhead, the armored bulldozer (the Caterpillar D-9) is used on the ground as a weapon of war and intimidation. In
contrast to early-modern colonial occupation, these two weapons establish the superiority of high-tech tools of latemodern
terror.59 As the Palestinian case illustrates, late-modern colonial occupation is a concatenation of multiple powers:
disciplinary, biopolitical, and necropolitical. The combination of the three allocates to the colonial power an absolute
domination over the inhabitants of the occupied territory. The state of siege is itself a military
institution. It allows a modality of killing that does not distinguish between the external and the internal enemy. Entire
populations are the target of the sovereign. The besieged villages and towns are sealed off and cut off from the world. Daily
life is militarized. Freedom is given to local military commanders to use
their discretion as to when and whom to shoot. Movement between the territorial cells requires formal permits. Local civil
institutions are systematically destroyed. The besieged population is deprived of their means of income. Invisible killing is
added to outright executions.
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IMPACTS - MASS VIOLENCE

The impact is massive violencesovereign power causes the evils they hope to
prevent.
Agambens radicalization of Schmitts politicization of Hobbess concept of the state of nature
carries important consequences for the reappraisal of the very logic of sovereignty in the
contemporary generalized state of exception. If, as the facile reading goes, Hobbess sovereign
saves us from the war of all against all in the state of nature and protects us by preventing any
relapse into that state in the present, then, as William Rasch notes, the political, however
temporary and flawed it may be, is cherished because it establishes the hope of civil peace. [The]
principle of sovereignty is consequently seen as a necessarily imperfect but nevertheless still
necessary solution to a perpetual problem. (Rasch 2007, 102. Emphasis original.) Recalling
Schmitts argument in the Concept of the Political (1976, 58-68), Rasch claims that every political
theory that is grounded in a pessimistic philosophical anthropology is founded on this
construction of the state of nature as spatially exterior and temporally anterior to the political
order, which is then envisioned in terms of a civilizing denaturation of the human condition
(Rasch 2007, 102-108). Indeed, if the natural condition of humanity is war, then the formation of
a political order, in which the powers of war are restricted to the sovereign, is clearly preferable to
the situation, in which these powers are equally shared by the members of the (pre-)political
community. If propensity to violence is an ineradicable feature of the human condition, then there
is little point in attempting to eliminate this violence altogether. Instead, the task is to contain and
minimize its effects, which is precisely the promise of the political order, grounded in the
incorporation of the state of nature within the nomos that renders its manifestations exceptional
and restricted to the sovereign. However, if we concur with Agamben that the problem that
Hobbes thinks he solves is in reality the product of the political space he creates (Rasch 2007,
102. Emphasis original), then the line of reasoning, espoused by the philosophers of the political,
becomes incongruous if not outright obscene: [t]his toleration of the political can be nothing but a
fatalistic acquiescence in the creation of the social nightmare called the state of nature. (Ibid.,
102-103) If the state of nature is the product of the political, then the flaws and imperfections of
the political, including the periodic or perpetual relapses into the state of exception, can by
definition no longer be justified as lesser evils in comparison with the return to the state of
nature, since they are nothing but this return itself. Agambens critique of the philosophy of the
political from Hobbes to Schmitt may thus be summed up in the claim that the lesser evil of
sovereignty is nothing less than Absolute Evil, since it is able to present itself as the Good despite
being the origin of the very evil it struggles against.
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IMPACTS - TOTALITARIANISM
Biopolitical control reduces civilians to bare life and leads totalitarianism
Muse)
While biopolitics in Foucault and Hardt and Negri addresses the relations between politics and death, biopolitics in their
views is less concerned with the primacy of death than with the production of life both as an individual and a social
category. In Giorgio Agamben's formulation, the new biopolitics is the deadly administration of what he calls "bare life,"
and its ultimate incarnation is the Holocaust with its ominous specter of the concentration camp. In this formulation, the
Nazi death camps become the primary exemplar of control, the new space of contemporary politics in which individuals are
no longer viewed as citizens but are now seen as inmates, stripped of everything, including their right to live. The uniting of
power and bare life, the reduction of the individual to homo sacerthe sacred man who under certain states of exception
"may be killed and yet not sacrificed"no [End Page 179] longer represents the far end of political life (1998, 8). That is,
in this updated version of the ancient category of homo sacer is the human who stands beyond the confines of both human
and divine law"a human who can be killed without fear of punishment" (Bauman 2003, 133). According to Agamben, as
modern states increasingly suspend their democratic structures, laws, and principles, the very nature of governance changes
as "the rule of law is routinely displaced by the state of exception, or emergency, and people are increasingly subject to
extra-judicial state violence" (Bull 2004, 3). The life unfit for life, unworthy of being lived, as the central category of homo
sacer, is no longer marginal to sovereign power but is now central to its form of governance. State violence and totalitarian
power, which, in the past, either were generally short-lived or existed on the fringe of politics and history, have now
become the rule, rather than the exception, as life is more ruthlessly regulated and placed in the hands of military and state
power.
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IMPACTS VIOLENCE
The state of exception reduces everyone to bare life and merges law with life the lines between the branches of the
government become blurred this justifies violence to the homo sacer
According to Agamben, the distinguishing feature of the state of exception is that, within this realm, law merges with life.
The state of exception is exemplified by the concentration camps of Nazi Germany (Agamben 1998: 20); Guantanamo Bay
is a contemporary example. The critical point made by Agamben is that, far from being the exception, the state of exception
has 'reached its maximum worldwide deployment' (2005: 87). In the modern configuration of the state of exception,
individual liberties are no longer protected by constitutional guarantees or constitutional norms, and the executive's powers
are significantly enhanced such that its decrees have the force of [*162] law (Agamben 2005: 5). The distinction between
legislative, executive and judicial powers becomes blurred or disappears (Agamben 2005: 7). As the state of exception
acquires an increasingly universal political relevance, 'bare life' has become a central part of the political order (Agamben
1998: 9), and the camp has become 'the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West' (Agamben 1998: 181). / Agamben
draws upon or arguably completes Foucault's work on biopolitics (1998: 9), which encompasses the 'growing inclusion of
man's natural life in the mechanisms and calculations of power' (1998: 119). In doing so, he contemplates the role and
nature of his 'protaganist', homo sacer or bare life (1998: 8). Homo sacer, originally an 'obscure figure of ancient Roman
law' (Agamben 1998: 8), is the scapegoat without legal status; excluded from the 'city of men'; abandoned by the law;
'exposed and threatened on the threshold' between life and law (1998: 28) like an unwanted foundling. This vulnerable
figure can be killed with impunity, and the violence of his killing falls outside 'the sanctioned forms of both human and
divine law' (1998: 82). Significantly, Agamben places homo sacer outside 'the mediations of the law' (Fitzpatrick 2001:
258) but, as Fitzpatrick points out, at least two of the Roman authors on which Agamben relies argued that homo sacer
could be incorporated within the legal order and judged, possibly by way of trial (2001: 256-7).
Violence is justified towards homo sacer no rights
The meaning and status of that biopolitical body is far from straightforward. Agamben translates Benjamin's mere life as
homo sacer, or bare life.8 The Roman category of homo sacer refers to someone who, having committed a particular type of
crime, can be killed without punishment, but cannot be sacrificed. Homo sacer is formed of an exclusion from both human
and divine law (p.81). That exclusion, moreover, has the form of an exception. Homo sacer is set outside the law by the law,
since anyone may kill homo sacer without falling under the law's prohibition on homicide. Sovereign power and homo
sacer share the same structure. The two are more intimately related: the object of the sovereign decision is homo sacer and
its status. "The syntagm homo sacer names something like the originary 'political' relation, which is to say, bare life insofar
as it operates in an inclusive exclusion as the referent of the sovereign decision . . . human life is included in the political
order in being exposed to an unconditional capacity to be killed" (p.85).9 Homo sacer reveals the condition of political
belonging in the West. Homo sacer is a mode of political subjectification defined not by contract or rights, but by exposure
to the sovereign decision on life or death.
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IMPACTS GENOCIDE
Producing an internal state of exception while claiming to put homo sacers under the rule of law fuels genocide
There is no doubt that legal contests between the accused terrorist and the sovereign are occurring with some frequency in
the state of exception which arguably characterises contemporary Western societies. Their very occurrence could be
perceived as an anomaly given the theoretical parameters of the state of exception as a lawless void. However, Agamben
describes a relationship of mutual dependency in which the judicial order 'must seek in every way to assure itself a relation'
with this 'space devoid of law' (2005:51). In any event, some of these 'legal' performances, for instance those staged by the
Bush administration in processing the Guantanamo Bay detainees, are quasi-legal proceedings and not necessarily
representative of the rule of law. Fleur Johns rejects this conclusion and contends that the regime at Guantanamo Bay is, in
fact, 'a profoundly anti-exceptional legal artefact' (2005: 615) with no space for option, doubt and responsibility in the legal
procedures which apply therein. This [*164] description, however, suggests bureaucracy rather than law -- the sort of
murderous bureaucracy which engendered mass genocide during the Third Reich: the 'governmental violence that -- while
ignoring international law externally and producing a permanent state of exception internally -- nevertheless still claims to
be applying the law' (Agamben 2005: 87).
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IMPACTS VALUE TO LIFE

It is imperative to rethink and abandon concepts of sovereignty to obtain and meaningful and happy life
61-3)
The concepts of sovereignty and of constituent power, which are at the core of our political tradition, have to be abandoned
or, at least, to be thought all over again. They mark, in fact, the point of indifference between right and violence, nature and
logos, proper and improper, and as such they do not designate an attribute or an organ of the juridical system or of the state;
they designate, rather, their own original structure. Sovereignty is the idea of an undecidable nexus between violence and
right, between the living and language-a nexus that necessarily takes the paradoxical form of a decision regarding the state
of exception (Schmitt) or ban (Nancy) in which the law (language) relates to the living by withdrawing from it, by
abandoning it to its own violence and its own irrelatedness. Sacred life the life that is presupposed and abandoned by the
law in the state of exception-is the mute carrier of sovereignty, the real sovereign subject. Sovereignty, therefore, is the
guardian who prevents the undecidable threshold between violence and right, nature and language, from coming to light.
We have to fix our gaze, instead, precisely on what the statue of justice (which, as Montesquieu reminds us, was to be
veiled at the very moment of the proclamation of the state of exception) was not supposed to see, namely, what nowadays is
apparent to everybody: that the state of exception is the rule, that naked life is immediately the carrier of the sovereign
nexus, and that, as such, it is today abandoned to a kind of violence that is all the more effective for being anonymous and
quotidian. If there is today a social power [potenza], it must see its own impotence [impotenza] through to the end, it must
decline any will to either posit or preserve right, it must break everywhere the nexus between violence and right, between
the living and language that constitutes sovereignty. While the state in decline lets its empty shell survive everywhere as a pure structure of sovereignty and domination,
society as a whole is instead irrevocably delivered to the form of consumer society, that is, a society in which the sole goal of production is comfortable living. The theorists of political sovereignty, such as
Schmitt, see in all this the surest sign of the end of politics. And the planetary masses of consumers, in fact, do not seem to foreshadow any new figure of the polis (even when they do not simply relapse into
the problem that the new politics is facing is precisely this: is it possible to have a political
community that is ordered exclusively for the full enjoyment of wordly life? But, if we look closer, isn't this precisely the
goal of philosophy? And when modern political thought was born with Marsilius of Padua, wasn't it defined precisely by
the recovery to political ends of the Averroist concepts of "sufficient life" and "well-living"? Once again Walter Benjamin,
in the "TheologicoPolitical Fragment," leaves no doubts regarding the fact that "The order of the profane should be erected
on the idea of happiness."! The definition of the concept of "happy life" remains one of the essential tasks of the coming
thought (and this should be achieved in such a way that this concept is not kept separate from ontology, because: "being: we
have no experience of it other than living itself"). The "happy life" on which political philosophy should be founded thus
cannot be either the naked life that sovereignty posits as a presupposition so as to turn it into its own subject or the
impenetrable extraneity of science and of modern biopolitics that everybody today tries in vain to sacralize. This "happy
life" should be, rather, an absolutely profane "sufficient life" that has reached the perfection of its own power and of its own
communicability-a life over which sovereignty and right no longer have any hold.
the old ethnic and religious ideals). However,
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TURNS CASE TERRORISM

The reaction to terrorism with the creation of the state of exception perpetuates a cycle of endless terrorism as
supporters rally around their leader against the cruel oppressive Americans
For much of the Muslim world, the U.S. is perceived as the terrorist while Osama bin Laden is the unjustly persecuted saint. To
elaborate, bin Laden has emerged as a master of effects. Appearing against the background of a rock the same day George
Bush announced the beginning of air strikes in Afghanistan, relaxed, enveloped in the imagery of the desert and speaking
softly about justice and the end of Muslim humiliation, Osama bin Laden is-as he warns the U.S.-the mirror image of George Bush at the very moment
he launches the U.S. attack on Afghanistan. The mighty military power of a world alliance bombing 143 a devastated Muslim country contrasts with the single, outdated rifle
leaning against the rock wall next to Osama bin Laden; the image of a single ana- choret facing an empire, the word "terrorism" binding them in a circular accu- sation of
phantom terror. We are
in what Derrida has called "a phantomatic mode of production" caught in the production and
actualization of mirroring phantoms: Islamist and Western terrorisms.3 Making Terrorism "To break up the superstition and breaking of legality
should be our aim. Nothing would please me more than to see Inspector Heat and his likes take to shooting us down in broad daylight with the approval of the public. Half our
battle will be won then; the desintegration of the old morality would have set in its very tem- ple. That is what you ought to aim at. "Joseph Conrad The Secret Agent For all its
proclaimed novelty,
the layout of the war has been quite conventional and follows a well known routine of American military
intervention: display of military might, surgical airstrikes and covert operations. On the part of the Taliban cum bin Laden network
the war takes the form of guerrilla warfare against Western imperialism and particularly the U.S.. This war takes place in the invisible space of
the terror imaginary of he U.S. (attacks on buildings and government, germ infection, etc.) and in the visibly impoverished
landscape of Afghanistan. If bin Laden's objective is to galvanize support for a radical Islamist movement, the medium is the spectacle created by the imbalance of
the struggle, an imbalance that evokes Western imperialism, historical humiliation and arbitrary violence. On the one hand, the war triggers outrage
and sympathy among the discontented population of the Middle East, on the other hand, it justifies (and even
demands) the suicide attacks on the American population. These two moments are bound together through the psychic mechanism of
identification, already signaled by Freud as the primary glue of social groups. First there is identification with the carefully built figure of
martyrs in the face of unjust and overpowering violence; then identification with the paladins of justice weilding the
sword of God. Of course, this process is mirrored in the U.S.: identification with the victims gives way to identification
with the warring government through the binding affective force of patriotism. At the level of public representation, the double
figure of martyr and state- like force, these two poles of identification were incarnated in the figures of Osama bin Laden
and his aide Sleiman Abou-Gheith. While the first spoke of injustice and peace for Palestinians, the second, in a more
stately appearance, threatened a continuing "storm of airplanes."4 The extreme craftiness at using modern technology to tap
and recreate anew an old cluster of religious images, contradicts the opinion that assigns to Islamic radicalism an
entrenchment in past tradition. The Taliban, like Osama bin Laden's brand of radicalism, does not represent the force of timeless tradition, but a contemporary
creation of tradition, a concomitant effect of modernity well known to students of national- ism. If the "invention of tradition"5 is not new to the students of political
movements, neither are the tactics that bin Laden is using. The use of an out- rageous attack as a provocation for massive use of force, preferably employed indiscriminately, is
State force with

its accompanying dirty wars, secret operations and special commandoes or death squads-that is, the use of terror to
combat 'terrorism'-reproduce the very terrorist practices they want to eliminate, creating a closed dynamic of
mimetic violence that can reproduce organized terror ad infinitum, narrowing if not closing the space for political
engagements of other kinds. At the level of the political imaginary we are aiding the discursive and military
construction of Terrorism with a capital T, a political figure that was in the making for some time, but which has
finally made its world debut after September 11; it as an absolutized enemy with a phantasmic character, rapid- ly
becoming, in the midst of the anthrax scare, mystery and thrill, something like the figure of the "Joker" in the film
"Batman."
typical of anti-colonial guerrilla warfare. A brutally illustra- tive example of this tactic is Gillo Pontecorvo's now classic film, "The Battle of Algiers."
Card continuesSecretive by their very nature, terrorist organizations acquire reality as a political and social force not only through the effects of their violence but also
through the production of material culture: anagrams, seals, communiques, uniforms, videos etc. But what counts as a terrorist organization for government institutions
Terrorism with capital T, however, is a fictional

reality, the object of a particular genre of popular novels and film thrillers. Thus, for example, what was initially a
faceless attack, and then an organization, has become a vast network of unknown proportions constituting what, according
to The New York Times, an intelligence officer called, "a global state"6 (a characterization that incidental- ly appeared three days after the initial
bombing and justifies what has been called "America's New War"). Similarly, we have been seeing the emergence of some of the staple
responds not to a single reality but to a variety of very different historical and socio-political realities .
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ingredients of the thriller genre of terrorism: enigmatic documents, chilly manuals, horripilating bloody videos. The
document en- countered in the luggage of Mohamed Atta, now believed to be the mastermind of the attacks might be a
guide for preparing suicide operations. Yet its language sounds stereotypical; it resonates all too much with the popular
fiction of terrorism not to appear virtual, and perhaps because of that it has the capacity to evoke a chilling terror.7
Similarly, a manual for terror is also discovered, suggesting the brainwashed character of fanatic terrorists. It is entitled: "Military Studies of the Jihad against Tyrants." The first mission stated in the
manual is "to end the godless regimes and substitute Islamic states for them."8 And in Spain, the detention of an Islamic commando uncovers 32 videotapes depict- ing bomb attacks, the slashing of throats,
and training camps. For all we know, the videos might be genuine training material, but they don't seem very different from the staple thrillers found at the average video-store. The headline of that news
report: "The Bloody Videos of the Sleepy Cell," signals the horror of a reality which is located midway between the fairy tale and the thriller movie. It is the little details, such as the date on the videos
("September 1, 1999"), or the Arabic language of the documents, that endows this fictional reality with the stamp of truth. In October 6, The New York Times published an article in its op-ed section that
drew a parallel between the war on terrorism and the Cold War against communism. The article was type-set around a large image of a book with the title "The Terrorist Manifesto by Osama bin Laden,"
thus invoking old phantoms in a new light. In the middle of the image there is the trademark of terrorism, a ski mask-even though Islamist radicals don't use ski masks.
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TURNS CASE IMMIGRATION

Extending rights to immigrants strips them of their ability to fight the state of exception only a lack of
identification leaves them invulnerable to expulsion
The exercise of sovereignty over homo sacer is ultimately contingent on the states knowledge of the individuals identity.
As John Torpey argued, individuals who remain beyond the embrace of the state necessarily represent a limit on its
penetration (1997, 224). In contemporary states, identity is the authoritative marker of exclusion and inclusion, and, in the case of illegal migrants, a
necessary condition for expulsion from the national territory. Migrants whose name and nationality is unknown to the state cannot be
issued the identity and travel documents on which lawful deportation to anothers states territory hinges. In other [End
Page 12] words, unidentifiable migrants are constitutionally rather invulnerable to expulsion (van der Leun 2003,
108).
As liberal states have stepped up their deportation efforts, migrants, in particular unsuccessful asylum seekers, have sought
to escape the states reach by destroying or hiding their identity documents. This act of resistance is far from exceptional. While the
following figures and illustrations all refer to immigration enforcement in Germany, they could easily apply to control contexts elsewhere in the advanced
democratic world. German interior officials estimate that, in the mid-1980s, immigration authorities had to obtain travel documents for about 30 to 40
percent of all asylum seekers. By the year 2000, the population of undocumented asylum applicants is estimated to have increased to 85 percent
(Bhling 2001).
The dilemma that an unknown identity poses to the state is aptly captured by a deportation officers account of the
resistance strategies of illegal migrants: People have started to realize, if they dont know who I am, they cant touch
me.1 What is important to note is that homo sacers ability to render herself unidentifiable is ultimately contingent on bare
life. The lives of illegal migrants and refugees in many ways exemplify the condition of rightlessness that marks bare life.
The territorialization of life means that the refugee is put in a position where she lacks apportioned rights but depends on the charity or goodwill of aid
workers or the police. The refugee is outside the law. Levels of innuendo and violence unthinkable to regular human beings, citizens, are regularly
perpetrated against the refugee or asylum seeker. The refugee as homo sacer describes the condition of exclusion that those exempt from the normal
sovereignty are subject to. (Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2004, 41) [End Page 13]
While much has been written on the dehumanizing consequences of the denial of membership, the absence of rights at the
same time makes possible acts of resistance such as identity-stripping. The vast majority of those who lead politicized
lives have entered into too many bureaucratic relationships with the state to have the choice to render themselves
unknowable. Liberal states infrastructurally penetrate their societies far too deeply (Mann 1984) to allow for a pervasive creation of fog (Broeders
and Engbersen 2007, 1593) by their citizens. Thus, it is the rightlessness of the illegal migrant that is the source of her capacity
for resistance by means of identity-stripping. These self-stripping strategies clearly exemplify the possibility of
resistance in the state of exception. In the words of Broeders and Engbersen, [t]he strategy of noncooperation shows that
many immigrants are not docile persons who fully cooperate with the authorities. Many of them are difficult to manage by
state officials, and they are able to very effectively frustrate the administrative processing of return programs. (2007, 1603)
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TURNS CASE DISABILITIES

The sovereign treats the disabled as sub citizens, in capable of being productive and stripped of rights the alt is a
prerequisite to solvency
Ryang 6 PhD, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Iowa [Does It Have to be hESC? A Note on
War, Embryo and the Disabled Sonia Ryang, Anthropological Quarterly, Washington, Summer 2006, pp 509-530]
Copyright Institute for Ethnographic Research Summer, Project Muse]
According to Arendt, only national citizenship can guarantee twentieth (and, by extension, twenty-first) century human rights (Arendt 2000). After WWII,
when sovereign states were inundated with stateless refugees, the fact of human rights became a mere insecurity. For, there was no category within the
citizenship repertoires in which to locate these refugees. However, when a fully national citizen is disabled, physically or mentally
handicapped, burdening society with expense and inconvenience, the disabled person may not receive entitlements equal to
those of able-bodied citizens. Martha Nussbaum's recent intervention was an attempt to morally rectify this inequality. She
suggested that to inhibit accessibility and acceptability of disabled persons in society would be tantamount to denying them equal citizenship (Nussbaum 2006). But at the same time, Nussbaum premises her
conception of human rights on citizenship and nationhood-just as Arendt feared.
Is it really so costly for societies to have members who are disabled? If so, in what sense is it costly? Is it monetary or perhaps emotional or moral? What is it that discomforts or upsets people when they
happen to see a little girl in a wheelchair? Is it because they immediately think about healthcare costs, or how their taxes might be used to treat her? Or is it a manifestation of a more fundamental,
unconscious reaction among able bodied humans? Why is it that most of us accept easily and fully that for humans to mature they need nursing, schooling, and socialization, while it is difficult to accept that
some humans may need special kinds of nursing, schooling, and socialization? Are people with severe disabilities suspect, subversive, uncanny, and disgusting, and hence, need to be eliminated?
It is these questions that I want to address when considering the relationship between stem cell research and the humanity of persons with disabilities. I rely again on Agamben's distinction between bios
(meaningful life proper to the individual in the society) and zoe (simple life universally available to all living beings).
As soon as I became the mother of a disabled child, my role as a legal guardian became a permanent one. Barring a miraculous cure, I will remain my daughter's guardian regardless of her age. Our current
legal rules assume that my daughter will, in a sense, never grow into a fully functioning citizen. Upon closer examination, however, this principle is not consistently practiced.For example, in my previous
place of employment, I had difficulty obtaining a campus handicap-parking permit because I myself am not disabled, and despite the fact that my vehicle had a state-issued handicap-parking permit. Without
this additional permit (and simply displaying the state-issued permit), my car would have been ticketed by the campus security. Since it is not easy to organize my daughter's baby-sitters due to her
complicated medical conditions and disability, I frequently found it best to take her with me to my office as long as it was only for brief periods of time. Without a handicap-parking space, I had to park far
from my office, and was forced to wheel my daughter across campus regardless of the weather. The university's parking office initially argued that my daughter's disability pertained to her and her only and
thus, her dependency on me was irrelevant to my entitlement to park on campus. In this context, my daughter was seen as an autonomous individual separate from her caretaker. Eventually, the permit was
issued, but not without a fight, and this is a point that needs to be made: society often exacerbates the burdens of a disability.
When my husband wanted to take her on an amusement park ride, the park officers insisted that my 5 year old daughter's height be measured and be at or higher than the required height, although toddlers
were permitted to ride on their parents' laps. Since she is unable to stand on her own, and would have to be held by her father, the height regulation was irrelevant for her. It would have been logical only to
measure his height. In this instance also, she was treated as an independent person (human), yet in other instances she is treated as a dependent person.
personhood and less than full human personhood for the disabled is thus drawn arbitrarily. Of
course, this kind of inconsistent and arbitrary treatment is given to many disadvantaged social and ethnic groups, but given
their extreme minority status, the disabled person often gets discriminated against conspicuously on point of contact. Their
isolated and somewhat unexpected presence in public sphere accentuates this situation by capturing the discriminator (or
discriminating institution) unprepared, thereby stripping the latter of ready-to-use political correctness, and augmenting the
improvised orchestration (or the lack thereof, as in the case of the above stated inconsistency and arbitrariness) of
"separate" treatment of the disabled.
Aristotle asserted that the bios or life proper of an individual in society consisted of life inside the polis, where men would
converse, discuss, and engage in discourse on the matters pertaining to the polis, i.e. political matters or politics. In contrast,
oikos is reserved for private life and it is here that zoe or simple life common to all living beings existed-including that of
slaves, minors, women, and animals. If human rights are conceived, by social contractarians from Kant on, on the basis of the presupposition that
The line, it seems, between full human
he who needs human rights needs political life, what about those who do not have the physical and mental capacity to participate in and enjoy political
life, that is, those who have only zoe and those who require others' constant care in order to acquire bios? And what about those who do not have
the physical capacity to speak and who, therefore, are unable to engage in conversation in a conventional, logo-centric way,
and must rely on signing, communication devices, or the blink of the eyes? Are they "not human enough" or "merely
human"? Do we assume, as social contractarians do, that only capable (read: able-bodied), independent individuals have
equality? (See Kittay 1999 for inspiring assertions.) This is a serious predicament as can be seen in the following suppositions:
1. The disabled are "not human enough": If they are sub-human, then their human rights do not exist from the outset. Their
rights should be seen as at best "animal rights" or "rights of all the simple living beings." But what are those rights? Rights
not to be killed? But, animals are slaughtered for the good of humans (for food, ritual sacrifice, leather, fur, etc.). Does this mean that the person with a
disability can be killed? Is it the fact that their life hinges on the mercy of the rest-able-bodied humans-or is the fact that they live sheer coincidence or
luck? What kind of life do they have?
2. The disabled are "merely human": If they are merely human, then their human rights have been robbed. But, according to
Arendt, only those who have citizenship/nationality have human rights . But wait: persons with disabilities have citizenship/nationality or
at least we can safely state that the chances of persons with disability to have citizenship/nationality as birth right are as large as the chances of those
without disabilities to have it. (Immigration posits an entirely different problem, as national governments have a screening process to weed out the
disabled from the pool of potential immigrants). If so, what is it that it makes them "merely human"? Typically, many of them have
been, de facto, denied the right to vote, due to the fact that voting venues have not always been accessible to the
handicapped, and it was thought that many of the disabled didn't have the mental capacity to participate in political life.
Again, what kind of life do they have?
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TURNS CASE VETERANS

The disabled serviceman is disposable to the state it would have been better for him to die honorably on the
battlefield than life as an ironic drag on society only the alternative solves for the root cause
Ryang 6 PhD, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Iowa [Does It Have to be hESC? A Note on
War, Embryo and the Disabled Sonia Ryang, Anthropological Quarterly, Washington, Summer 2006, pp 509-530]
Copyright Institute for Ethnographic Research Summer, Project Muse]
Let us now consider another, specific kind of the disabled, the disabled veteran. Ever since Afghan and Iraqi conflicts
began, we have been fed heroic sagas of veterans who sustained physical and mental disabilities in combat. Aside from
obvious cases of physical disabilities, such as loss of a limb or paralysis, a large percentage of discharged servicemen and
service woman suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental illnesses, thus disabling them. According
to the New England Journal of Medicine, fifteen to seventeen percent of Iraq vets meet "the screening criteria for major depression, generalized anxiety, or
PTSD" but only 23 to 40 percent of them seek help, partly because of the generally perceived fear of the stigma of having a mental disability (Marks
2005).
The stigma perceived even by the (supposedly) most honored group of individuals reflects a long-term and complex
process of denigrating the disabled, and inquiry into this problem would be beyond the scope of this paper. Although since the
passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990, public awareness of disabilities among the US population has grown strong, it is
undeniable that the variously disabled (including mental, physical, and multiple and combined) continue to be marginalized
socially, politically, and economically, and seen as a financial burden on the nation. Being a financial burden is opposed to
independence (financial and therefore social as well), the virtue that most Americans are taught to revere. The position of
disabled vets, who fought courageously to defend the nation yet came home disabled, is a case in point of how human
lives are seen not as autonomous and individually owned, but socially structured with arbitrary criteria: as an active
serviceman, he is a sacrificiable life and indeed, in the event that he dies in service, he would be a hero and would
live eternally in each and every one of us; as a discharged, disabled serviceman, he becomes a dependent of the
society, not fully functioning as an autonomous human person. In both instances, he is not a fully autonomous
individual. The only difference is that the first deprivation of autonomy (becoming a sacrifice for the nation) is seen as good, while the second
deprivation of autonomy (be becoming a burden for the society) is seen as bad.
Thus, the morality of non-individuality continues to exist, though in a concealed, obfuscated manner, appearing only
occasionally, in particular under the state of exception: war, most obviously. But once off the sacred land of the
battleground, the disabled veteran often receives poor treatment by his or her society and the institutions concerned . The
number of homeless Iraq veterans, for example, is rising (Marks 2005). The situation, it seems, is telling us that it is not worth surviving the war
and returning home; out in trenches, one had better die there, in order to acquire eternal life. Here, life is no longer sacred.
It is death that is sacred. The irony is that a wounded soldier who was prepared to die for his or her nation and yet happened to survive the battle,
albeit with a disability and ensuing complicated medical conditions, might be cured by future hESC discoveries. In what is a caricature of this situation,
the Bush administration opposes the creation of new hESCs, but will not give up armed intervention in Iraq and elsewhere.
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ROOT CAUSE OF POVERTY

The state of exception is the root cause of poverty impoverished people are a prime example of bare life
In fact, in an era of increasing economic globalization, it is conventional wisdom that the nation-state is disappearing and
government is left merely to administer what the market cannot. The neo-liberal dream is small government and the
increased flow of goods and capital, thus aiding the cause of progress and freedom. Nevertheless, the United States is by no
means disappearing as a nation-state. Rather, democratic activity and practices are diminishing as the state is increasingly
strengthened by its links to capitalism even as this union has inherent contradictions, too. Because of this, the domination of
the poor is increasingly possible rather than less and exploitation is not merely economic but also political. 75 If, as argued
above, the State of Nature is the conceptual location of prerogative power and those who are conceived of as occupying that
conceptual sphere become objects of prerogative power, it cannot be said that the poor or women or racial minorities are
targeted in and of themselves but due to their political condition, their de facto disenfranchisement or precarious political
status. They can easily become bare life and the objects of prerogative power in ways that an ordinary, autonomous citizen
cannot. For this reason, I contend that the states organizational principle is bare life and its ethosasceticismaround
which species thinking and bio-power developed, culminating in a spectrum of violence from genocide to oppression of the
poor to racial profiling to the close control and surveillance of poor female welfare recipients. This argument doesnt negate
materialist analyses or critiques of the nation-state, for example, but holds that their foundation is first and foremost bare
life. Second, it means that welfare prescriptions have less to do with morality, humanity or enlightenment than control,
surveillance and a molding into docile bodies. It demonstrates that prerogative power is exercised domestically and on a
regular basis, rather than in a state of emergency. Alternatively, it is a form of assimilation with no hope for citizenship,
autonomy or democracy. Indeed, those who do not fit the norms of bio-power are not viewed as moral or rational beings,
nor as human. To be worthy of humanity and the species, one must have been accepted in civil society as rational and
autonomous beings. The poor, women, exploited and oppressed racial minorities have not fallen under that rubric. Rather,
they represent the biological, irrational and thus the inhuman. Thus, the combination of capitalist demands (disciplinary
power), bio-power (ascetic demands) and political theology (the intermingling of prerogative, the baseline of bare life, and
ascetic orientation towards the human species) allows for a disturbing level of inhumanity in the treatment of individuals
who have passed beyond the pale of law. On the other hand, with the proliferation of mechanisms of power on behalf of sovereignty, the
possibility of democratic power as an active force in the United States becomes increasingly diminished. Indeed, John Stuart Mill predicts the docility and
individualization that occurs: In its horror of sensuality, it made an idol of asceticism, which has been gradually compromised away into one of legality. It
holds out the hope of heaven and the threat of hell as the appointed and appropriate motives to a virtuous life: in this falling far below the best of the
ancients, and doing what lies in it to give to human morality an essentially selfish character, by disconnecting each mans feelings of duty from interests of
his fellow creatures, except so far as a self- interested inducement is offered to him for consulting them. It is essentially a doctrine of passive obedience; it
inculcates submission to all authorities found established; who indeed are to be actively obeyed when they command what religion forbids, but who are
not to be resisted, far less rebelled against, for any moment to ourselves.76 Although Mill is critiquing Christianity in this passage, he predicts the
conditions for prerogative powers regular deployment, where the state of exception or the state of emergency becomes
permanent.
Biopolitics is the root cause of the aff Poverty is just the societal display of bare life
Giorgi and Pinkus, 6 Professors of Cultural Theory and New York University and Comparative Literature at the
University of Southern California
(Gabriel and Karen, Zones of Exception: Biopolitical territories in the neoliberal era, Summer, ProQuest)
The outside, then, although represented and materialized in spatial terms, seems to point toward to another dimension
that is not exclusively territorial, geopolitical, or cultural, but fundamentally biopolitical: the dimension or the level at
which human life is inscribed, constituted, recognized, and defined within a given sociopolitical order. What is deployed
through the rhetorics and the politics of borders and boundaries, what the media stages in the spectacle of the territorial
security and perpetual danger, be it at a transnational or an urban scale, is a split or division at which human life is
separated from the unrecognizable, the residual, life reduced to its merely biological statusbare life, to use
Agambens expression, which is in many ways identified with the diverse forms of poverty and indigence so deeply
intensified in the neoliberal era.
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CRISIS POLITICS/STATE OF EMERGENCY

The state alleges emergency and scape goats a population for the sake of public security
Burtchaell 2k Catholic priest and professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame [James Tunstead, The Review
of Politics, Vol. 62, No. 3, pp. 625-627. Review: Unpersons, Published by Cambridge University Press for the University of
Notre Dame du lac on behald of Review of Politics, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1408224]
The author, a philosopher at the University of Verona, recounts a wide and imaginative variety of ways in which unwanted classes have been so
delegitimated. In the aftermath of World War I France, Belgium, Austria, Italy, and Germany engaged in mass denationalizations, of which the Nuremberg
Laws are the only one we tend to remember. When the victorious statesmen had completed redrawing the maps of the hinterlands they created millions of
stateless White Russians, Bulgarians, Greeks, Armenians, and eventually Palestinians . The enormous pools of stateless refugees created
since then are further testimony to the impotence of humanitarianism separated from politics, and claims to human rights
which are attached to no citizenship.
The German discovery of lebensunwertes Leben, "life without value," later underwrote the Nazi extermination of Jews, Gypsies, Poles, et aliorum
istiusmodi. Human rights were not being denied as such; the standards for being sufficiently "human" to qualify for those
rights were simply changed. That program followed easily upon the "humanitarian" program of "euthanasia" whereby
60,000 handicapped children had been "mercifully" eliminated.
Following the cue of Arendt and Foucault, Agamben sees modem society dedicated to homo laborans: a being deemed
human insofar as economically productive, rather than as politically dignified. It is this turn which has made modern democratic states
able cousins of totalitarian regimes, and made the concentration camp and the structure of the great totalitarian states into "the exemplary places of modern
biopolitics" (p. 4).
It was the Nazis whose Rassenhygiene policy undertook the medical support, not of German citizens and residents, but of the hereditary health of the
Reich as a whole, thereunto coordinating politics with police and ideology with eugenics, and giving "the body politic" a sinister new sense. Only weeks
after the Nazi accession to power a string of eugenics laws was promulgated, decreeing who might or might not marry, beget, be medically treated or have
treatment withheld-all to be determined by the order of the Fuhrer. This was easily followed by Germans using concentration camp
prisoners as human test animals for "medical" experiments, while Americans were doing the same with blacks, criminal
prisoners, and the institutionally retarded. In a recent sequela to this tradition, French and American medical authorities
have been revising the legally enforced definitions of death, with the effect and perhaps the intention of making patients'
organs available earlier for transplant. Agamben's inference of conspiracy here is supported by the unreflective habit of transplant surgeons'
referring to their legally-dead donors as having really "died" a day or so afterward.
What engages the author's imagination is not man's chronic inhumanity to man, but a modern legal innovation whereby
whole victim groups are made available to misuse by being categorized out of the body politic. He claims to discover a
succession of civic "black holes" wherein the unwanted are sequestered as utterly available victims. He calls them all
"camps." Somewhat the reverse of the old Shanghai "Concessions" wherein the Western Powers maintained their mercantile and social institutions free
from intrusion by Chinese law, the "camp" is "the hidden matrix and nomos" of our moder political culture (p. 160). In their literal form the camps include
compounds where Prussians held political dissidents after 1851, the Spanish held Cubans after the 1896 insurrection, the British held refractory Boers a bit
later, the Weimar Republic imprisoned communist militants in the early 1920s, the Nazis carried out their "Twelve-year-long St. Bartholomew's Night"
from 1933 to 1945, the Vichy Government held French Jews before transporting them eastward, on down to the recent Italian internment of Albanian
refugees in the Bari stadium, and the bilateral ethnic rape camps in the ruins of Yugoslavia.
In each case a state, alleging emergency, sequesters an undesirable group of people in a no-man's land-physically
and, more importantly, definitionally-wherein all civil and human identities and rights are unavailable. It is
invariably done "for the public security," and it always creates an anomalous environment which, though created by
sovereign authority and force of law, and maintained by a close bureaucratic regimen, remains a dark zone wherein
there is neither right nor law. The inmates, citizens or not, are stripped of all civic immunities, and those who hold them in their power are
utterly unanswerable for their behavior since no act against the inmates can be treated as a crime. Quite often, in this free-fire zone maintained by but not
within the body politic, medical people seem to find reasons to arrive and ply their trade among those who are, in every sense, at their disposal. Agamben's
intuition, chronicle and meditation are fascinating. They are unfortunately inhibited by a prose which makes Husserl seem limpid and the Federal Register
seem lyrical, and seems not to have been helped by his interpreter. But this is a cud-chewer of a book. -James Tunstead Burtchaell, C.S.C. BOUND FATES
William E. Odom: The Collapse of the Soviet Military. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998. Pp. xiii, 523. $35.00.) William E. Odom
has written a superb book-one which not only deftly catalogues the collapse of the Soviet military, as the title suggests, but which masterfully unravels the
tightly wound stranglehold of ideological confusion, organizational redundance and intrigue which finally choked the life out of the Soviet Union. The
Soviet military, Odom convincingly argues, was an ideological and organizational pillar of the entire Soviet system, inextricably intertwined with the
legitimacy of the state, the command economy, the highest level of politics, and the overall health of Soviet society. The story of 627 REVIEWS
Crisis politics in the name of preserving security leads to endless depoliticized war
Agamben, 2k2 (Giorgio, Prof of Aesthetics @ U of Verona, Security aand Terror, Theory and Event 5:4, Muse, Trans by
Carolina Emcke)
Neither Turgot and Quesnay nor the Physiocratic officials were primarily concerned with the prevention of famine or the
regulation of production, but rather wanted to allow for their development in order to guide and "secure" their
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consequences. While disciplinary power isolates and closes off territories, measures of security lead to an opening and
globalisation; while the law wants to prevent and prescribe, security wants to intervene in ongoing processes to direct them.
In a word, discipline wants to produce order, while security wants to guide disorder. Since measures of security can only
function within a context of freedom of traffic, trade, and individual initiative, Foucault can show that the development of
security coincides with the development of liberal ideology.
Today we are facing extreme and most dangerous developments of this paradigm of security. In the course of a gradual
neutralisation of politics and the progressive surrender of traditional tasks of the state, security imposes itself as the basic
principle of state activity. What used to be one among several decisive measures of public administration until the first half
of the twentieth century, now becomes the sole criterion of political legitimation. Security reasoning entails an essential
risk. A state which has security as its only task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be provoked by
terrorism to turn itself terroristic.
We should not forget that the first major organisation of terror after the war, the Organisation de l'Arme Secrte (OAS)
was established by a French General who thought of himself as patriotic and who was convinced that terrorism was the
only answer to the guerilla phenomenon in Algeria and Indochina. When politics, the way it was understood by theorists of
the "Polizeiwissenschaft" in the eighteenth century, reduces itself to police, the difference between state and terrorism
threatens to disappear. In the end it may lead to security and terrorism forming a single deadly system in which they
mutually justify and legitimate each others' actions.
The risk is not merely the development of a clandestine complicity of opponents but that the hunt for security leads to a
worldwide civil war which destroys all civil coexistence. In the new situation -- created by the end of the classical form of
war between sovereign states -- security finds its end in globalisation: it implies the idea of a new planetary order which is,
in fact, the worst of all disorders. But there is yet another danger. Because they require constant reference to a state of
exception, measures of security work towards a growing depoliticization of society. In the long run, they are irreconcilable
with democracy.
Nothing is therefore more important than a revision of the concept of security as the basic principle of state politics.
European and American politicians finally have to consider the catastrophic consequences of uncritical use of this figure of
thought. It is not that democracies should cease to defend themselves, but the defense of democracy demands today a
change of political paradigms and not a world civil war which is just the institutionalization of terror. Maybe the time has
come to work towards the prevention of disorder and catastrophe, and not merely towards their control. Today, there are
plans for all kinds of emergencies (ecological, medical, military), but there is no politics to prevent them. On the contrary,
we can say that politics secretly works towards the production of emergencies. It is the task of democratic politics to
prevent the development of conditions which lead to hatred, terror, and destruction -- and not to reduce itself to attempts to
control them once they occur.
The affs crisis politics are part of an immanent state of emergency that justifies violence
Dillon and Reid 2K, Michael and Julian, Global Governance, Liberal Peace, and Complex Emergency, Alternatives:
Social Transformation & Humane Governance, Jan-Mar 2000, Vol. 25, Issue 1, Ebsco
Just as governance is a specific feature of liberalism, so also liberal peace is therefore a specific form of liberal
governmental power. Hence the peace of global liberal governance differs from other forms of liberal peace inasmuch as its liberalism differs from earlier and
other forms of liberalism in respect, specifically, of the increasing emphasis placed on its networks of global governance. It does not, for example, aspire to the ideal of world government. It does not
rely exclusively upon the juridical power of international law. Neither does it problematize the foundational question of
order by premising it exclusively on the sovereign power of states alone. It is also a combative and heavily armed peace deeply reluctant to forgo its own
military advantages in the cause of restraining the dissemination of weapons of mass destruction or the effective control of the conventional-arms economy globally. What is of primary
interest here, however, is not the historically well-documented propensity of liberal peace to make war against authoritarian
regimes. Nor are its extremely powerful military-industrial-scientific dynamics immediately at issue. We are concerned, for
the moment, with exploring theoretically the ways in which it problematizes the question of order itself, and with the
correlate strategizing of power relations, locally and globally derived from the ways in which it does so. We argue that
these depend upon notions of immanent emergency. Specifically, they depend upon its twin cognates, exception and
emergence, to which the phenomenon of complex emergency draws our attention. We argue in addition that each such
"emergency" reduces human life to a zone of indistinction in which it becomes mere stuff for the ordering strategies
of the hybrid form of sovereign and governmental power that distinguishes the liberal peace of global governance.
Interpreted this way, complex emergencies not only draw attention to the operation of a specific international political
rationality--that of global liberal governance--but also to certain key distinguishing features of it as a hybrid order of power.
The global governance of liberal peace is a composite order of power that "lies between traditional images of domestic and
international politics."[16] Combining the strategic operations of both sovereign and governmental power, this
composite order produces manifold differentiations between inside and outside that are fluid and contingent rather
than fixed and permanent. It simultaneously both territorializes and deterritorializes, producing dynamic and adaptive
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contingent assemblages as much as it does fixed systems and regimes. It thus requires theorizations of power not
exclusively bound by the now widely discredited juridical international categories of inside/outside.[17] These theorizations
of power have therefore to be ones sensitive to all the different practices by which power assemblages of many distinctive
forms are continuously generated and regenerated through various strategic operations of power. Initially, we find a critical approach to the
operation of power as a strategic phenomenon in the work of Michel Foucault. Where Foucault's sensibility to the manifold strategic ordering of power nonetheless requires supplementing, specifically in
.[18] By strategy of power we mean

with Foucault that power is an active ordering of relations in certain specific ways according to different operational
principles of organization. It is a modus operandi. It works its effects by establishing relationalities between units whose
very constitution as the units that they are is a function of the principles that govern the strategic dissemination and
organization that constitutes the operation of power itself. Moreover, all power as strategy presupposes a certain
account of life, one that will in fact bear the ordering work of power itself. It is only inasmuch as it does in fact presuppose
such a life that power as strategy institutes itself as a specific and manifest productive ordering of life. The operation of
power as strategy is therefore one that reproduces a life that is amenable to its sway. It must do so in order continuously
to be instituted as the strategic ordering of life that it is. Power as a strategic ordering of life therefore always effects its own distinctive kind of biopower.
respect of sovereignty, we draw on Giorgio Agamben's postmetaphysical analytic of sovereignty as itself another strategic ordering of power
Although we owe this insight to Foucault, we intend to show how its range of reference extends also to the operation of sovereign power as well. However, in order to do that we have to theorize sovereign
power in a way that Agamben does, and Foucault never quite did, as a strategic mode of power as well. While drawing attention to the relevance that this Foucauldian-inspired account of power has for an
analysis of the global governance of liberal peace, we do not, therefore, intend to add to the chorus of those who insist that we are witnessing the simple demise of sovereignty. Sovereignty remains an
liberal states especially, but others to the

extent also that they effect structural adjustments economically and sign-up to good governance criteria politically, are
deeply implicated as key nodes in the networks of global governance. Hence the state form--whose strategic principle of
formation is sovereignty--becomes just one form of subjectification upon which global liberal governance relies. It may not
enjoy the exclusivity that traditional accounts of international relations once said that it enjoyed, but it nonetheless remains
a key mode of subjectification. However, it is now supplemented by many others. "Thus even as the state remains the
primary actor in global politics, the results of interdependence are to create new networks and associations, many of
which are attempting to guide the state's activities in the domestic and international sphere."[19] Our interest here,
however, lies in examining how the principle of formation that governs the state form--namely, sovereignty--functions
precisely as a principle of formation and to compare that with another principle of formation that we see at work throughout
the domain of global liberal governance. For global liberal governance is a hybrid political order in which sovereignty and
governmentality are combined. Foucault himself in fact noted that there is a complex relation between different orders of power, including those of sovereignty and
important aspect of the organization and operation of international power, including that of contemporary liberal peace, because
governmentality. But he did not explore that relationship in any detail.[20] Neither did he engage in retheorizing sovereignty in ways that would allow him to do this. It served him to accept the traditional
in order to articulate an
alternative account of the biopower of governmentality as power over life that reproduces certain life forms: forms of
subjectivity that he advised we refuse. Contra Foucault, one might however say with Agamben that sovereignty, too--as a
strategy of power with its own peculiar modus operandi--is also a form of power over life. The point will be elaborated
below.
account of sovereignty, as power over death, that relied on different metaphysical fictions to underwrite the paternity of the law after the death of God.[21] He did so
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ALT WHATEVER BEING

The Alternative is to imagine Whatever Being--Any point of rejection of the sovereign state creates a non-state world
made up of whatever life that involves imagining a political body that is outside the sphere of sovereignty in that it
defies traditional attempts to maintain a social identity
Can we imagine another form of humanity, and another form of power? The bio-sovereignty described by Agamben is so
fluid as to appear irresistible. Yet Agamben never suggests this order is necessary. Bio-sovereignty results from a particular
and contingent history, and it requires certain conditions. Sovereign power, as Agamben describes it, finds its grounds in
specific coordinates of life, which it then places in a relation of indeterminacy. What defies sovereign power is a life that
cannot be reduced to those determinations: a life "that can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never
possible to isolate something such as naked life. " (2.3). In his earlier Coming Community, Agamben describes this
alternative life as "whatever being." More recently he has used the term "forms-of-life." These concepts come from the figure Benjamin proposed
as a counter to homo sacer: the "total condition that is 'man'." For Benjamin and Agamben, mere life is the life which unites law and
life. That tie permits law, in its endless cycle of violence, to reduce life an instrument of its own power. The total condition
that is man refers to an alternative life incapable of serving as the ground of law. Such a life would exist outside
sovereignty. Agamben's own concept of whatever being is extraordinarily dense. It is made up of varied concepts, including language and potentiality; it is also shaped by several particular dense
thinkers, including Benjamin and Heidegger. What follows is only a brief consideration of whatever being, in its relation to sovereign power . / "Whatever being," as described by
Agamben, lacks the features permitting the sovereign capture and regulation of life in our tradition. Sovereignty's capture of
life has been conditional upon the separation of natural and political life. That separation has permitted the emergence of a
sovereign power grounded in this distinction, and empowered to decide on the value, and non-value of life (1998: 142).
Since then, every further politicization of life, in turn, calls for "a new decision concerning the threshold beyond which life
ceases to be politically relevant, becomes only 'sacred life,' and can as such be eliminated without punishment" (p. 139). /
This expansion of the range of life meriting protection does not limit sovereignty, but provides sites for its expansion. In
recent decades, factors that once might have been indifferent to sovereignty become a field for its exercise. Attributes such
as national status, economic status, color, race, sex, religion, geo-political position have become the subjects of rights
declarations. From a liberal or cosmopolitan perspective, such enumerations expand the range of life protected from and
serving as a limit upon sovereignty. Agamben's analysis suggests the contrary. If indeed sovereignty is bio-political before it
is juridical, then juridical rights come into being only where life is incorporated within the field of bio-sovereignty. The
language of rights, in other words, calls up and depends upon the life caught within sovereignty: homo sacer. / Agamben's
alternative is therefore radical. He does not contest particular aspects of the tradition. He does not suggest we expand the
range of rights available to life. He does not call us to deconstruct a tradition whose power lies in its indeterminate status.21
Instead, he suggests we take leave of the tradition and all its terms. Whatever being is a life that defies the classifications of
the tradition, and its reduction of all forms of life to homo sacer. Whatever being therefore has no common ground, no
presuppositions, and no particular attributes. It cannot be broken into discrete parts; it has no essence to be separated from
its attributes; and it has no common substrate of existence defining its relation to others. Whatever being cannot then be
broken down into some common element of life to which additive series of rights would then be attached. Whatever being
retains all its properties, without any of them constituting a different valuation of life (1993: 18.9). As a result, whatever
being is "reclaimed from its having this or that property, which identifies it as belonging to this or that set, to this or that class (the reds, the French, the
Muslims) -- and it is reclaimed not for another class nor for the simple generic absence of any belonging, but for its being-such,
for belonging itself." (0.1-1.2). / Indifferent to any distinction between a ground and added determinations of its essence,
whatever being cannot be grasped by a power built upon the separation of a common natural life, and its political
specification. Whatever being dissolves the material ground of the sovereign exception and cancels its terms. This form of
life is less post-metaphysical or anti-sovereign, than a-metaphysical and a-sovereign. Whatever is indifferent not because its
status does not matter, but because it has no particular attribute which gives it more value than another whatever being . As
Agamben suggests, whatever being is akin to Heidegger's Dasein. Dasein, as Heidegger describes it, is that life which always has its own being as its
concern -- regardless of the way any other power might determine its status. Whatever being, in the manner of Dasein, takes the form of an
"indissoluble cohesion in which it is impossible to isolate something like a bare life. In the state of exception become the
rule, the life of homo sacer, which was the correlate of sovereign power, turns into existence over which power no longer
seems to have any hold" (Agamben 1998: 153). / We should pay attention to this comparison. For what Agamben suggests is that whatever
being is not any abstract, inaccessible life, perhaps promised to us in the future . Whatever being, should we care to see it, is all around us,
wherever we reject the criteria sovereign power would use to classify and value life. "In the final instance the State can recognize any claim for
identity -- even that of a State identity within the State . . . What the State cannot tolerate in any way, however, is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong
At every point where we refuse the distinctions sovereignty and the state would
demand of us, the possibility of a non-state world, made up of whatever life, appears.
without a representable condition of belonging" (Agamben 1993:85.6).
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The sovereign decides on the exception and cannot be localized only the alternative can break free from exception
To trace the emergence of a sovereignty bio-political rather than liberal, Agamben begins by expanding Schmitt's definition
of sovereignty as the decision on the exception into a definition of sovereignty as having the structure of the exception.
Schmitt himself does not explicitly make this claim, but it is implicit in his account. Political Theology opens with the
famous definition: "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception" (1985a: 5). Here the decision, and hence the power of
sovereignty, still plausibly appears as a limited and discrete moment. Within a few pages, Schmitt clarifies this definition.
The power to decide on the exception entails the power to decide on normal order as well. The sovereign therefore decides
on the total situation, or on order as such (p.13). / It is nevertheless Agamben who underscores the conditions necessary for
that expansion of sovereign power. While sovereignty, to establish order, must in some way separate inside from outside ,
that process is counter-intuitive. For "what is excluded in the exception maintains itself in relation to the rule in the form of
the rule's suspension. The rule applies to the exception in no longer applying, in withdrawing from it. The state of exception
is thus not the chaos that precedes order but rather the situation that results from its suspension." (1998: 17-18).
Consequently, an order born of the exception emerges not by tracing a simple line of inclusion and exclusion, but by
"including something through its exclusion" (p. 18). In that inclusive exclusion, sovereign power forms itself by creating "a
zone of indistinction between outside and inside" (p.19). / Under normal "non-exceptional" circumstances, that zone of
indistinction remains hidden. Only the effect of the sovereign decision appears. If the generative moment of sovereignty is
considered, the site of sovereignty changes. Viewed as the structure of the exception, and not only as the decision on the
exception, sovereignty does not simply decide on the limit. It is rather "the unlimited power that makes limits" (Norris
2000: para. 16). 4 More strongly, "it is the limit, and hence carries the limit with it in its movement as it carries itself"
(Norris 2000: para 17).5 Sovereignty, as the condition for any establishment of spatial differentiation, cannot itself be
localized (Agamben 1998: 19). This generative sovereignty cannot be confined to the form of a limited law that lays down
the line between power and its absence, only indirectly touching life. What then is the relationship between a sovereign
power whose very structure is the exception, and life? / The difficulty of identifying any such relation is the very feature
often criticized in Schmitt. As Schmitt's critics adeptly recognize, at least part of Schmitt's commitment to sovereignty as
the decision rests on Schmitt's interest in the authority of sovereignty to decide, not on the specific substance of the
decision. Some of his readers therefore suggest Schmitt falls back into the very neutralization of content he derided in
liberalism and neo-Kantianism. Schmitt ends up "with only an existential positivism that mirrors the logical positivism he
so intensely despises" (McCormick 1997:245). The premise of that critique is that a formal structure has no reference to
material life.6 Agamben's distinction is to insist this formal structure of power is also material; it corresponds to a specific
type of life.
The only way to break from Western metaphysics is to politicize bare life and to form our own identities the
alternative is forceful subjugation by the government
As Agamben says: If anything characterizes modern democracy as opposed to classical democracy, then, it is that modern
democracy presents itself from the beginning as a vindication and liberation of zoe, and that it is constantly trying to
transform its own bare life into a way of life and to find, so to speak, the bios of zoe. Hence, too, modern democracy's
specific aporia: it wants to put the freedom and happiness of men into play in the very place-"bare life"-that marked their
subjection. (1998:9-10)
If for Agamben we stand today at the final threshold beyond which we cannot pass without unleashing disaster, and if this
situation has been produced by the conclusion and exhaustion of thought as much as if not more than of politics,12 he
does offer us an alternative to crossing this threshold. The categories of Western thought, whether in the form of metaphysics or of various
disciplines such as medicine, politics, and jurisprudence, have reached their limit in confronting the biopolitical situation of today, and herein lies the
promise of renewal. "If life, in modern biopolitics," Agamben writes, "is immediately politics, here this unity, which itself has the form of an irrevocable
decision, withdraws from every external decision and appears as an indissoluble cohesion in which it is impossible to isolate something like a bare life.
In the state of exception become the rule, the life of homo sacer, which was the correlate of sovereign power, turns into an
existence over which power no longer seems to have any hold" (p. 153). A "new politics," that is, is possible, starting
from a break with the metaphysical tradition of the West and its politicization of bare life.
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The Alternative is to strip yourself of identity and engage in guerilla war resistance must be on the individual level
the judge doesnt have anything to lose, and only in that world is resistance successful
*** This evidence has been gender modified
What is the nature of resistance in the state of exception? Rarely do acts of noncompliance by those reduced to bare life
amount to collective acts of civil disobedience. Homo sacer exists in a state of abjection where the scope of resistance falls
far short of the resource-demanding standard of organized political action. Instead, the cases of resistance explored in this
paper constitute individual acts of desperation that resemble what James Scott aptly termed the weapons of the
weak. These everyday forms of resistance include acts of passive noncompliance, sabotage, subtle evasion, and
deception (1985, 31). By contrast to institutionalized politics, then, everyday resistance distinguishes itself by its implicit
disavowal of public and symbolic goals and is concerned with immediate, de facto gains (1985, 33). In [end page 5]
other words, the nature of resistance in the state of exception is individualized, rather than collective, oriented toward
short-term, rather than systemic change, and fought by means that present an indirect, rather than direct, challenge
to sovereign power. For illegal migrants, acts of resistance range from the extreme of hunger strikes and suicide attempts
to acts of physical resistance and escape, to the destruction of identity documents.
Resistance as an act of desperation only constitutes a viable course of action once the individual has nothing left to lose. In
the state of exception, resistance arises from the circumstance that the individual already has lost all claims against the state
and thus has little to fear from defying state orders. In other words, the power of resistance lies in the freedom from
constraints that limit the scope of noncompliance for those who still have sufficient standing to fear the loss of rights.
Ironically, then, it is homo sacers extreme political powerlessness that is at the root of resistance and thereby
presents a potential threat to sovereign power.
Another way of conceiving of the basic position of homo sacer is to think of bare life as existing outside of the social
contract. As the illegal migrant is not party to the contract between the citizen and the state, [HE OR] she is both deprived
of citizenship rights and freed from the obligations that tie the citizen to the state. In the words of John Locke, It is certain their laws,
by virtue of any sanction they receive from the promulgated will of the legislative, reach not a stranger: they speak not to him, nor, if they did, is he bound
to hearken to them. The legislative authority, by which they are in force over the subjects of that common-wealth, hath no power over him. I see not
how the magistrates of any community can punish an alien of another country; since, in reference to him, they can have no more power than what every
man naturally may have over another. (1764, Chapter II, Of the State of Nature, Paragraph 421) [End Page 6]
While today few would dispute the legitimate authority of states to extend their control to noncitizens within their territory
nor is it the case that the stranger may do as [HE OR] she pleases and escape punishmentLockes basic notion that the
state-alien relationship operates outside of the social contract remains valid. Its significance for our understanding of the role of
resistance in the state of exception is the contracts nexus of rights and obligations. The social contract is constituted as a fundamentally
reciprocal relationship: the states granting of rights is contingent upon the individualss compliance with certain rules.
Before returning to the notion of life outside the social contract I will examine how states ensure the obedience of their citizens.
When it comes to enforcing the social contract, the state faces two basic choices: it can either coerce individuals into
obedience or it can seek to secure voluntary compliance. Max Weber reminds us that all state regulation is underpinned by the threat of
coercion. And yet, the state rarely employs coercion as a strategy of first choice. Not only is it a resource extensive use of state power, coercion also risks
to unleash social opposition and resistance (Levi 1988). There is much at stake for states to find ways to elicit compliance that does not require the direct
use of coercion. Fortunately for states (and their citizens), compliance is regularly forthcoming even in the absence of coercion. Regardless of how we
conceive of human motivation, voluntary compliance rests upon the reality of reciprocity, or exchange (Fjeldstat 2001).
For those who conceive of individual action as driven by instrumental calculus, compliance occurs where individuals
consider the benefits of compliance to outweigh its costs (Stover and Brown 1975; Meier and Morgan 1982). Individuals
comply because they do not [End Page 7] want to incur the costs of punishment, or because they value the gains accruing
from regulation. In a similar vein, Margaret Levis concept of quasi-voluntary compliance denotes behavior that is shaped by the deterrence effect of
sanctions, on the one hand, and the trust that others will equally comply, on the other. To use the common example of taxation, taxpayers comply either
because they consider the likelihood of being audited and the punishment associated with tax evasion as sufficiently high to compensate for its fiscal costs,
or because they recognize that their tax payments will provide them with the benefits of public goods and services.
A second approach to the study of compliance conceives of individual behavior as essentially norm-driven. Whether or not
individuals comply with a state order depends upon what they consider moral and appropriate, rather than whether its
expected utility exceeds the expected utility of noncompliance. To the extent that individuals consider laws and their enforcement
legitimate, they will comply with state orders (Tyler 1990; Kuperan and Sutinen 1998). A related approach which has been advanced by historical
institutionalist scholars focuses on the behavioral implications of rules and routines. These scholars emphasize the power of routines in
shaping individual behavior. Accordingly, compliance can be captured in the image of citizens running on a treadmill to
create viable strategies of survival (Migdal 2001, 255).
Instrumental and norms-driven approaches are not mutually exclusive, of course. Odd- Helge Fjeldstats (2001) study of taxation in Tanzania, for instance,
shows that individual compliance depends both on normative judgments about the perceived fairness of taxes, and on
instrumental calculations about the potential tangible benefits of compliance. Despite their [End Page 8] conceptual
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differences, both interest-based and norms-driven approaches would lead us to expect that individuals in the state of
exception will be unlikely to voluntarily comply with state orders. Instrumental cost-benefit explanations hinge on the
assumption that individuals face positive incentives for compliance. The state of exception, by contrast, distinguishes itself
by a dearth of claims the individual can bring against the state. Regardless of what course of action homo sacer chooses to pursue, [HE
OR] she stands little chance of improving [HIS OR] her standing vis--vis the state. In other words, because the state already has revoked all
rights and benefits from homo sacer, the sovereign no longer can offer positive incentives to secure compliance. Significantly,
the absence of positive incentives also renders problematic the threat of sanctions as a way of enticing individuals into compliance. The deterrence effect
of sanctions relies upon the imposition of costs that can outweigh the benefits of non-compliance. This condition is unlikely to be met where
compliance does not stand to be rewarded.

In a similar vein, individuals in the state of exception are unlikely to comply with state orders out of normative principle.
The very notion of norms-driven compliance presupposes membership in a community that is bound by shared norms.
Thus, citizens who comply with tax laws for normative reasons do so because of a commitment to the welfare of their
subnational and national communities. By contrast, bare life in the state of exception represents the individuals expulsion
from the national community. Banished from society and stripped of the rights of membership, homo sacer is unlikely to let
[HIS OR] her behavior be guided by concern for the communitys welfare or respect for its legal order. [End Page 9]
Limits to Sovereign Power
Individuals in the state of exception, I have argued, have little reason to voluntarily submit themselves to the sovereign will.
Because the sovereign cannot count on homo sacer to comply voluntarily, we should expect the state to resort to coercion
instead. In State of Exception, for instance, the scope of the states coercive power appears to be unbounded precisely
because it is constitutive of sovereignty.
The alternative is whatever beingthe disavowal of identity deactivates the machinery

of sovereign power and offers the only possibility for peace.
(Sergie, The Appropriation of Abandonment: Giorgio Agamben on the State of Nature and the Political, February 15 th,
This vision of politics leads to the third aspect of Agambens strategy of reappropriating the state
of nature that concerns the abandonment of identity as a relevant political category. Similarly to
the approaches of Alain Badiou (2001) and Jean Luc Nancy (1991), Agambens work is radically
heterogeneous to identity politics, which has become popular in critical circles in the aftermath
of the Cold War. Starting from the early 1980s, Agamben has repeatedly affirmed a vision of
political community modelled on his notion of the experimentum linguae. This coming
community is not grounded in any presupposition of identity, norm or value but is rather entirely
contained in its being- in-language: [T]here can be no true human community on the basis of a
presupposition - be it a nation, a language, or even the a priori of communication of which
hermeneutics speaks. A true community can only be a community that is not presupposed.
(Agamben 1999a, 47) Agambens community strips itself of all identitarian predicates and
historical vocations and is finally able to dwell freely in its whatever being or being thus (1993,
1-4, 89-105). In Agambens concept of being thus, the anaphora no longer refers back to any
meaning or any referent, [being an] absolute thus that does not presuppose anything but is
completely exposed (Agamben 1993, 93). What is at stake here is the appropriation of belonging
itself while rejecting any condition of belonging (ibid., 87), which paves the way for a genuinely
universal and non-exclusive community. A whatever life, stripped of all predicates, is certainly a
bare life, yet no longer in the sense of a degraded or destroyed positive form of life, but rather in
the sense of a form of life that affirms in every being solely its manner of being, its inoperative
and hence irreducibly potential being thus. Being engendered from ones own manner of being
is, in effect, the very definition of habit (this is why the Greeks spoke of a second nature). That
manner is ethical that does not befall us and does not as a habitual form of life (second nature)
from its very abandonment as bare life in the generalized state of nature that has befallen it in
the condition of nihilism while renouncing any project of its re-foundation as bios on the basis of
new principles, identities or norms. While the natural being of bare life produced in the state of
exception is attained by the destruction of past identities, the second, happier nature (ibid.) is
engendered by the exposure of the being-in-common of singularities that no identity can exhaust
(see Edkins 2007). The political stakes of this affirmation of whatever being are made explicit in
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Tiananmen, the concluding fragment of The Coming Community (1993): Whatever singularity,
which wants to appropriate belonging itself, its own being-in-language, and thus rejects all
identity and every condition of belonging, is the principal enemy of the State. Wherever these
singularities peacefully demonstrate their being in common, there will be a Tiananmen, and
sooner or later tanks will appear. (Ibid., 86) For Agamben, what the state cannot tolerate in any
way is not any particular claim for identity, which can always be recognised, but rather the
possibility of human beings co-belonging in the absence of any identity: A being radically devoid
of any representable identity would be absolutely irrelevant to the State. (Ibid., 85) As opposed
to the Hegelian emphasis on the struggle for recognition as the quintessence of political praxis,
the problem for Agamben is not the recognition of every identity, but rather the affirmation of
non-identity within the identitarian structure of the state. Against the universalist political designs
that aspire to the attainment of universal recognition and thus remain tied to the statist logic,
Agamben suggests that identities must not be recognized but rather rendered inoperative or
deactivated, in the same manner as the pure experience of language deactivates signification. It
is this deactivation that conditions the possibility of a state of (second) nature that would no
longer be a state of war: Every struggle among men is in fact a struggle for recognition and the
peace that follows such a struggle is only a convention instituting the signs and conditions of
mutual, precarious recognition. Such a peace is only and always a peace amongst states and of
the law, a fiction of the recognition of an identity in language, which comes from war and will end
in war. Not the appeal to guaranteed signs or images but the fact that we cannot recognise
ourselves in any sign or image: that is peace [] in non-recognition. Peace is the perfectly empty
sky of humanity; it is the display of non-appearance as the only homeland of man. (Agamben
1995, 82) The idea of peace as constituted by non-recognition marks the most extreme
departure of Agamben from the Hobbesian logic of the political and the contractarian tradition
more generally (Agamben 1998, 181). If every peace ensuing from a convention or covenant
that institutes and secures the conditions for mutual recognition is always precarious and bound
to end in the same war (the state of exception) from which it allegedly emerged (the state of
nature), then the solution to the problem of war consists not in establishing more effective, just or
inclusive covenants, but in deactivating the very identities whose recognition these covenants
attempt to ensure. Agambens vision of a reappropriated state of nature may thus be described
as a form of life that has overcome its separations, relieved itself of all historical tasks and
dispensed with all identitarian predicates in favour of a universal and non-exclusive whatever
being, a life abandoned to itself and for this reason capable of happiness. The state is powerless
against the alternative in the face of the individual, all of the nations coercive and violent power is eliminated
*** This evidence has been gender modified
While the effective use of state power in society firmly rests upon voluntary compliance, the sovereign in the state of
exception finds himself deprived of its soft coercive powers. Unable to offer meaningful incentives to those who have been
deprived of the rights of membership, the sovereign is powerless to elicit the compliance of homo sacer. Having backed
[End Page 11] himself into a corner where soft coercion is no longer a viable option, the sovereigns use of physical
violence is equally limited. Having nothing left to lose, homo sacer is no stranger to denial and may withhold [HIS OR] her
cooperation even when deprived of physical freedom. By contrast, the state is constrained from employing its full arsenal of
coercive powers.
Only by rejecting identity can we open up a space to escape the metaphysics of politics
Norris 2k - Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Univeristy of Pennsylvania [Andrew Agamben and the Politics
of the Living Dead Diacritics, Vol 30, No 4, Winter 04, pp. 38-58, Published by the John Hopkins University Press,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1566307]
If Agamben's analysis and description of this dilemma of the formation of the political and of political identity is strikingly original, the nonmetaphysical
alternative toward which he gestures in response is more familiar. In an earlier discussion of the politics of the sacred, he argues that the
sacred bears within itself subversive potential, in that as a marginal supplement of political identity, it itself lacks identity.
This opens up the possibility of a mode of being that escapes the metaphysics of politics, and hence of thana- tology. "In
the final instance the State can recognize any claim for identity.... What the State cannot tolerate in any way, however, is
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that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without an representable
condition of belonging." The Allied response to the Nazi extermination of the Jews is instructive in this regard. Rather than acknowledge the
sacred character of the Jewish people (as a people whose extermination "was not conceived as a homicide by [either] the executioners [or] the judges"),
they "tried to compensate for this lack of identity with the concession of a State identity, which itself became the source of new massacres" [Coming
Community 87-88; cf. Homo Sacer 114]. To break out of this vicious cycle, Agamben follows Jean-Luc Nancy in attempting to "think"
community without unity.30 In so doing, both will follow Heidegger (though hardly without criticism) in his attempt to develop a poetic mode of
speech beyond metaphysics. What Agamben adds to this is his emphasis upon bare life: [end page 53]
Only a reflection [una rifflessione] that . .. thematically interrogates the link between bare life [nuda vita] and politics, a
link that secretly governs [govema] the modern ideologies seemingly most distant from one another, will be able to ...
return thought to its practical calling [restituire il pensiero alla sua vocazione practica]. [Homo Sacer 4-5]
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ALT WHATEVER BEING IMMIGRATION SOLVENCY

The hands of the state are tied when the individual cannot be recognized the inability of the state to react against
the elusive migrant means that the immigrant can never be deported because he cannot be identified
What are the implications of identity-stripping for the exercise of state sovereignty? Confronted with the challenge of
expelling an unidentifiable non-citizen across international borders, the hands of the liberal state are tied. International law
only obliges states to readmit their own nationals while recognizing the right of states to refuse entry to any non-national.
Unless a state seeks to transport individuals surreptitiously to a foreign territory, it simply cannot expel individuals with
unknown identities. For the state, the inability to render legible [End Page 14] those within its custody presents a
significant threat to sovereignty. Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere, from the perspective of immigration officers, the
inability to execute deportation orders because of missing documents is particularly frustrating because it presents the last
in a lengthy chain of administrative actions. Being unable to bring deportees across the border turns the administrative
successes of identifying, locating, apprehending, prosecuting, and detaining deportable immigrants into sunk costs.(2008,
172). It is important to recognize that the states inability to secure travel documents is directly linked to the
individuals refusal to cooperate. Presumably the only effective way for states to induce voluntary compliance would be
to grant the migrant residence rightsin which case travel documents would of course no longer be needed. Unable to secure
voluntary compliance, state officers are forced to go embassy-shopping in the vague hope of identifying the migrants nationality.
We need to get papers for a Sudanese national. we apply for an interview with the Sudanese embassy. Finally we get an interview. The embassy
employee tells us, hes not from Sudan, hes from Liberia. Then we go to the Liberian embassy, they tell us, hes not Liberian, hes from the Gambia.
The Gambians, in turn, argue, if he is Gambian hell have to confirm that hes applying for papers voluntarily. But maybe hes not Gambian, he could be
from Nigeria. We go to the Nigerian embassy, and they say, there is a good chance that hes from Nigeria. However, you need to provide us with clear
evidence. (Author interview, deportation officer, district Ostprignitz-Ruppin, Brandenburg, November 27, 2001) Significantly, the diplomatic
representatives of the countries of origin of most undocumented migrants face few incentives to actively cooperate with
the identification efforts of deporting states because they only stand to lose from the return of their nationals. Not only does
return migration represent the loss of vital remittances, it often is accompanied by enormous problems in the area of social
and economic reintegration. While the deporting states of the [End Page 15] Global North have pursued various diplomatic strategies to improve
bilateral cooperation to facilitate the issuing of documentsmost prominently the conclusion of readmission agreementssuccess has rarely been
forthcoming (Ellermann, 2008). The paper will now examine a number of identification strategies pursued by the German state that target the
undocumented migrant herself. These strategies can be distinguished both by the extent to which they rely on the migrants cooperation and by the degree
of coercion involved.
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ALT WHATEVER BEING A/T: BIOMETRICS

Biometrics wont solve officials will be tied up, the state relies on cooperation of the individual and the denial of
rights will constrain state power
In the absence of official identity documents, state officers are forced to seek out alternative objective means of
documenting identity. One potential source of identification is to secure a match between a migrants fingerprints and a law
enforcement database. This strategy, of course, is contingent upon the individual having been apprehended in the past and data having been entered
into a system that immigration officers are authorized to access.
Moreover, all of this must have taken place in the not too distant past, as data protection regulations prohibit the indefinite storage of biometric data. To
use the example of Eurodac, the EU-wide database that collects fingerprints of asylum seekers and illegal entrants: fingerprints of asylum seekers can be
stored for up to ten years, while the fingerprints of migrants apprehended at the border are erased after two years.
Still, even if these conditions are met, the availability of biometric data is not always sufficient for authoritative identification. Writing in the context of
identity-stripping, Broeders and Engbersen caution that with more and more new methods of identification being employed, it
will become difficult for irregular migrants who have gone through a formal [End Page 16] asylum procedure or who were
registered through their tourist visas to keep evading detection and identification by the state (2007, 1603). I partially
disagree with this assessment. Where, as is often the case, migrants cross the border without identifying papers and
subsequently file for asylum, state officers will struggle to convince diplomatic personnel to issue documents should the
individual contest the name and nationality they provided for their (unsuccessful) asylum application. On the other hand,
Broeders and Engbersen are correct to point out that where migrants entered the country with authorization such as a tourist visa, state officers are in a
position to establish their identity because the data are based on official documentation.
These limits to the use of biometric data illustrate two important aspects that shape the relationship between the state and homo sacer. First, even in the
state of exception, the state relies upon the cooperation of those under its control in order to exercise its full sovereign
powers. Second, the denial of rights begets resistance and, ultimately, constrains state power. States have the capacity to
establish the identity of individuals to whom they have granted certain benefitssuch as a tourist and work visas. Those
who have always been forced to live in the realm of illegality, by contrast, often succeed in frustrating state efforts of
control
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ALT WHATEVER BEING AT: IMPOSSIBLE/UTOPIAN

The alternative is neither utopian nor impossible embracing whatever being is key to emancipation.
In his analysis of contemporary world politics (1993; 63-65, 79-86; 2000, 73-90, 109-120), which
goes beyond the critique of sovereignty to address the wider context of global capitalism from a
post-Marxist perspective of e.g. Walter Benjamin and Guy Debord (see Passavant 2007, 149-153),
Agamben offers a somewhat similar diagnosis of the dissolution of sovereignty in the global
society of the spectacle, with three important caveats that arise from the features of his postsovereign politics addressed above. Firstly, his non-identitarian and anti-statist politics does not
seek control of the state but rather the deactivation of its powers and its expulsion from the
domain of social life, which permits the rearticulation of zoe and bios in the figure of the integral
form-of-life. Secondly, while the indirect powers of Schmitts lifetime were animated by a certain
positive project of transformation, Agambens ethics of inoperosity brackets off the teleological
dimension of politics and instead focuses on the free use of the ruins of the sovereign order rather
than the reconstruction of a new order upon these ruins. Thirdly, these indirect powers are no
longer defined in particularistic terms of class, race, ethnicity, etc. but in the neo-universalist
terms of whatever singularity, which wagers on the attainment of peace not through the
reciprocity of mutual recognition under a better covenant but in the cessation of the struggle for
recognition as such. What Agamben proposes is the radicalization of the dismantlement of
sovereign statehood by whatever powers that are indiscernible in identitarian and statist terms.
Concurring with Schmitts critique of the nihilistic and depoliticizing tendencies of global
liberalism, Agamben nonetheless finds in this very degradation of politics that all over the planet
unhinges and empties traditions and beliefs, ideologies and religions, identities and communities
(1993, 83) the possibility of a radically new form of political praxis. Whereas utopian thought
easily provides us with elaborate visions of a better future, to which it can never lead us, since its
site is by definition a non-place, Agambens post-sovereign politics draws its austere resources
from the very degradation of historical forms of life in the contemporary global state of exception
and thus does not require the articulation of a new emancipatory project. While the conversion of
the disastrous scene of contemporary nihilism into the ethos of integral life is not predetermined
within history as its telos and rather requires a radical interruption of the historical process as
such (see Prozorov 2009), any possible obstacles to such a conversion are presently removed by
the process of the dissolution of particularistic communities, the emptying out of traditions and
the liquidation of identities. It is for this reason that despite the bleak and even morbid character
of the subject-matter of Agambens writings, he is able to claim that he is far less pessimistic than
his critical interlocutors (see Smith 2004). [The] planetary petty bourgeoisie is probably the form
in which humanity is moving towards its own destruction. But this also means that the petty
bourgeoisie represents an opportunity unheard of in the history of humanity that it must at all
costs not let slip away. Because if instead of continuing to search for a proper identity in the
already improper and senseless form of individuality, humans were to succeed in belonging to this
impropriety as such, in making of the proper being- thus not an identity and an individual property
but a singularity without identity, then they would for the first time enter into a community
without presuppositions and without subjects. (Agamben 1993, 65)
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ALT INDIVIDUAL RESISTANCE

We should resist the state of exception through individualized action
Ellerman, 9 Professor of Political Science
(Antje, Undocumented Migrants and Resistance in the State of Exception, March 19th, All Academic,
What is the nature of resistance in the state of exception? Rarely do acts of noncompliance by those reduced to bare life
amount to collective acts of civil disobedience. Homo sacer exists in a state of abjection where the scope of resistance falls
far short of the resource-demanding standard of organized political action. Instead, the cases of resistance explored in this
paper constitute individual acts of desperation that resemble what James Scott aptly termed the weapons of the weak.
These everyday forms of resistance include acts of passive noncompliance, sabotage, subtle evasion, and deception
(1985, 31). By contrast to institutionalized politics, then, everyday resistance distinguishes itself by its implicit disavowal
of public and symbolic goals and is concerned with immediate, de facto gains (1985, 33). In other words, the nature of
resistance in the state of exception is individualized, rather than collective, oriented toward short-term, rather than systemic
change, and fought by means that present an indirect, rather than direct, challenge to sovereign power. For illegal migrants,
acts of resistance range from the extreme of hunger strikes and suicide attempts to acts of physical resistance and escape, to
the destruction of identity documents.
Individualized resistance to biopower solves poverty
Muse)
Any viable attempt to challenge the biopolitical project that now shapes American life and culture must do more than
unearth the powerful antidemocratic forces that now govern American economics, politics, education, media, and culture; it
must also deepen possibilities of individual and collective struggles by fighting for the rebuilding of civil society and the
creation of a vast network of democratic public spheres such as schools and the alternative media in order to develop new
models of individual and social agency that can expand and deepen the reality of democratic public life. This is a call for a
diverse "radical party," following Stanley Aronowitz's exhortation, a party that prioritizes democracy as a global task, views
hope as a precondition for political engagement, gives primacy to making the political more pedagogical, and understands
the importance of the totality of the struggle as it informs and articulates within and across a wide range of sites and sectors
of everyday lifedomestically and globally. Democratically minded citizens and social movements must return to the
crucial issue of how race, class, power, and inequality in America contribute to the suffering and hardships experienced
daily by the poor, people of color, and working- and middle-class people. The fight for equality offers new challenges in the
process of constructing a politics that directly addresses poverty, class domination, and a resurgent racism. Such a politics
would take seriously what it means to struggle pedagogically and politically over both ideas and material relations of power
as they affect diverse individuals and groups at the level of daily life. Such struggles would combine a democratically
energized cultural politics of resistance and hope with a politics aimed at offering workers a living wage and all citizens a
guaranteed standard of living, one that provides a decent education, housing, and health care to all residents of the United
States.
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ALT UMASK THE FICTION

Unmasking the fiction solves the fracture between life and law It becomes possible to open a space for human
action.
Brophy, 9 Professor at York University
(Susan Dianne, Lawless Sovereignty: Challenging the State of Exception, Sage Publishing, Social Legal Studies, Vol 18.,
No. 2)
Describing the ction that constitutes the state of exception, Agamben (2003/2005: 88) writes, Life and law ... result from
the fracture of something to which we have no other access than through the ction of their articulation and the patient
work that, by unmasking this ction, separates what it had claimed to unite. The ction of the state of exception is also
characterized by the idea that the relation of inclusive exclusion, that is, the force-oflaw, represents the dissolution of law
and a diminution of juridical order with respect to sovereign power. The state of exception, however, regularizes and
depends upon the tension that dwells within the zone of indistinction or the proximal relation of life and law; the
separating of life and law, or using Agambens term, the fracture, is a strategy of governing that secures sovereign power
in the state of exception. As the discussion in previous sections explains, this notion of separation or fracture does not
symbolize the nonrelation of life and law. In fact, it is in separating the two that they can become violently united in the
state itself as points of relation that can be simultaneously essentialized and negated. It is this fracture and subsequent
unication that make the threat of dehumanization such a real possibility in the state of exception. When Agamben writes of
unmasking this ction as a way of separating what this fiction claims to unite, he speaks of exposing the problematic
nature of the states relationship to life and law. To this end, he contends that to show law in its nonrelation to life and life
in its nonrelation to law means to open a space between them for human action, which once claimed for itself the name of
politics, eventually coming to claim that the only truly political action ... is that which severs the nexus between violence
and law. And only beginning from the space thus opened will it be possible to pose the question of a possible use of law
after the deactivation of the device that, in the state of exception, tied it to life. (p. 88) Based on these assertions, it is clear
that an effective challenge to the state of exception must expose this ctional relation between law and life, not by clinging
to law as the means of revealing its misappropriation, but by appealing to a sphere of constituting power wherein law and
life are not assumed to be essentially related. With this understanding, it is now possible to begin to appreciate how
lawlessness is central to the inversion of power that aims to rescue life from law. What is universal about the universalized
justice claim is the experience of exteriority in response to the form of state authority that appeals to justice as a strategy of
legitimating its laws towards perpetuating its sovereignty. What is also universal about the universalized justice claim is
that it develops in relation to violence experienced as a result of the measures of inclusion that have been exercised towards
this perpetuation of state sovereignty. Correspondingly, to carry the emergent conception of lawless sovereignty further,
tacit consent is granted to an authority that is not wed to any given state; the lawlessness of this form of sovereignty
necessitates its disjuncture from the nation-state as the grounds for its force, it of course is not to say that this form of
challenge may not proceed according to a different set of laws.
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EPISTEMOLOGY FIRST
The liberal lens of the affirmative blinds them to understanding the full extent of the sovereigns power
Agamben brings this out nicely in a discussion of Bruno Bettelheim's argument that the Muselmann has passed beyond the
limit of the human and the moral by renouncing his freedom and by losing sight of the limit beyond which his life would
have to be sacrificed in defense of that freedom. For Bettelheim, regardless of the conditions, a human being can avoid becoming a
Muselmann by "accepting death as a human being." But Agamben argues that "Simply to deny the Muselmann's humanity would be to
accept the verdict of the SS and to repeat their gesture." The Muselmann "does not merely embody a moral death," rather he
"is the site of an experiment in which morality and humanity are called into question," he is "a limit figure of a special kind,
in which not only categories such as dignity and respect but even the very idea of an ethical limit lose their meaning." To
acknowledge the Muselmann's compromised humanity, Bettelheim's limit of the human is denied; to avoid the moral barbarism of an imagined
confrontation with a Muselmann in which one judges his "character and habits," one renounces ethical terminology. With the Muselmann we
find
the limit of limits: clear boundaries can no longer be drawn here [Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz 56, 63].26
The point is not that the liberal refusal to consider the camp as threshold rules out a solution to this dilemma from the start.
The very idea of a solution here seems offensive. The point is rather that the liberal response can make no sense of its own
confusion. The camp is simply evil and incomprehensible. The person condemned to a camp is neither capable of morality
nor incapable of it. As for the difficult questions this emerging limit of the moral might raise, they too are set aside in favor
of a respectful silence.27 In contrast, Agamben's conception of the threshold at least promises to more precisely delineate these confusions: the
camp both is and is not a legal, political, and moral space. Hence, we should hardly be surprised to find ourselves torn,
wanting both to affirm and to deny that these categories apply here.
Finally, the liberal strategy reveals its limitations when we recognize that the notion of the threshold is in fact
expanding into areas where we will not have the luxury of refusing to consider the inner logic of phenomena we
should like to reject as evil and incomprehensible. What, for instance, are we to do when we are dealing with agents or
things that have not already been recognized as the bearers of rights? Here the reassertion of rights is simply not an option. We must
decide whether a neomort-a body whose only signs of life are that it is "warm, pulsating, and urinating"-is in fact a human being at all, an agent or a thing.
In such cases, "life and death [cease to be] properly scientific concepts [and become] political concepts, which as such acquire a political meaning
precisely only through a decision" [Homo Sacer 164]. Ironically, such decisions are increasingly made by scientists, and not by politicians: "In the
biopolitical horizon [orizzonte biopolitico] that characterizes modernity, the physician and the sci- entist move into the no-man's-land
[terra di nessuno] into which at one point the sovereign alone could penetrate" [159]. These are still marginal figures in our current
political life. But if Agamben is right, the concept of the margin is itself being swept away. It is this that leads him to conclude that
the camp is the as-yet-unrecognized paradigm of the modern. As the logic of the sovereign exception comes unraveled (or
is realized- this paradox being a necessary function of that logic), and the impossibility of categori- cally distinguishing
between exception and rule is made manifest, the distinction between bare life and political life is hopelessly confused.
"When life and politics-originally divided, and linked together by means of the no-man's land of the state of exception that is inhabited [abita] by bare
life [la nuda vita]-begin to become one, all life becomes sacred and all politics becomes the exception" [148].28 [End page 52] In the end, the attempt to
resist this through the assertion of human rights ignores the connection between the humanism that undergirds the concept of rights and the events that
seem to conflict with it. Agamben's argument is not that Aristotle's or Locke's reflections on politics carry with them an implicit commitment to the
substantive racist policies of National Socialism; nor does he claim that they "caused" the Holocaust (a term to which he objects [114]). What he does
argue is that there is a deep affinity between such contemporary horrors and the tradition of political philosophy to which we might turn in an effort to
understand and combat such phenomena. The practical implication would not be that there is no difference between Aristotle or Hitler, but that Aristotle
will not provide a stable point from which to critique those who follow after him, or from which to construct an alternative.29 There is no Archimedean
point outside biopolitics. Politics is always a matter of the body, and "The 'body' is always already a biopolitical body" [187].
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AT: PERM
The affirmatives defense of sovereignty makes liberation impossible their lesser

evil logic culminates in absolute evil.
In order to understand this claim let us consider Agambens criticism of Schmitts use of the notion
of the katechon in his defense of state sovereignty. In Schmitts political theology, sovereign
power is analogous to the figure of the katechon in the Catholic tradition, the force that delays the
advent of the Antichrist, which in turn would eventually lead to the messianic redemption (Schmitt
2003, 59-60). It is as this delaying force, as opposed to a direct agent of the Good, that the state
must be appreciated. In contrast, Agambens interpretation of the famous passage in St. Pauls
Second Letter to the Thessalonians on the katechon asserts that rather than grounding something
like a Christian doctrine of State power (Agamben 2005b, 109), this passage harbours no positive
valuation of the katechon whatsoever. Instead, the katechon (every form of constituted power)
merely conceals the absence of law that already characterizes the messianic present and thus
does nothing other than defer or hold back the moment of the messianic suspension of the law
(see ibid., 95-107). Instead, in the Pauline messianic logic the semblance of the law, maintained by the katechon,
must be stripped off and all power revealed as the absolute outlaw (Agamben 2005b, 111). As Agamben (2005b, 110)
claims, every theory of the State, including Hobbess which thinks of it as a power to block or delay catastrophe can be
taken as a secularization of this [traditional] interpretation of 2 Thessalonians 2. Indeed, in the Schmittian reading, which
characterizes most contemporary political theories, including those extremely hostile to Schmitt, the secularized katechon
is legitimized as the only force that wards off the Antichrist [the anomie of the state of nature] and thus the end of the
social order as we know it. On the contrary, Agambens reading of Paul posits the katechon as an obstacle
to the advent of the messianic kingdom and thus accuses the proponents of the Christian
doctrine of state power of a thinly disguised nihilism. [T]he katechon is the force the Roman
Empire as well as every constituted authority that clashes with and hides katargesis, the state of
tendential lawlessness that characterizes the messianic, and in this sense delays unveiling the
mystery of lawlessness. (Agamben 2005b, 111)
It is as if the erstwhile champions of a Christian doctrine of power have forgotten their creed and
embraced the imperfection of humanity as all there is. Their valorization of the katechon obscures a simple
question: if we longed for parousia, should we not be impatient with the interference of the katechon? (Rasch 2007, 106)
This, as Agamben shows, is precisely Pauls attitude, which is diametrically opposed to the attitude of the philosophers of
the political, for whom the katechon has assumed an autonomous value:
What if, after two thousand years and untold promises, we have lost our faith in the parousia and grown weary of waiting
for the arrival of divine violence? Then would not delaying the Antichrist be what we should hope for? [...] The katechon, as
a figure for the political, rejects the promise of the parousia and protects the community from the dangerous illusions of
both ultimate perfection and absolute evil. (Rasch 2007, 107)
In Raschs view, what the defenders of the katechon fear is not so much the Antichrist but the
Messiah himself, who, moreover, might well appear to them indistinct from the Antichrist: both are
figures who promise us perfection, figures who offer us redemption and bestow upon us the guilt
of failing perfection or rejecting their offer. (Ibid., 107) There is certainly a certain irony in the Christian
doctrine of state power ultimately coming down to the apostasy of any recognizable Christianity in vision of an exhausted
humanity that can no longer distinguish between the Antichrist and the Messiah. However, Agambens reading of Paul
leads us to a different case of indistinction. If the katechon conceals that all power is absolute outlaw and thereby defers
the reappropriation of this anomie by the messianic community, then would it be too much to suggest that the katechon is
the Antichrist, who perpetuates its reign by concealing the fact of its long having arrived? Absolute Evil would thus
attain domination precisely by pretending, as a lesser evil, to ward off its own advent. By
converting the seekers of redemption into the guardians of its perpetual inaccessibility, the
katechon ensures the survival of greater evil in the guise of the lesser one. Thus, Agamben argues
that [it] is possible to conceive of katechon and anomos [Antichrist] not as two separate figures,
but as one single power before and after the final unveiling. Profane power is the semblance that
covers up the substantial lawlessness of messianic time. (2005b, 111) As Rasch sums up
Agambens claim about the insidious manner of the self-perpetuation of sovereign power,
embracing the political is equivalent to building concentration camps while awaiting the
Antichrist (Rasch 2007, 106).
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The relation to the katechon indicates nothing less than ones stand on the possibility of the
transcendence of the political. While for the Schmittian orientation the political is all there is and
its disappearance is only thinkable as the self-destruction of humanity (cf. Laclau 2007, 20-22),
Agambens messianic approach welcomes the demise of the katechon as the condition of
possibility of life beyond sovereignty that remains concealed only until the person now holding it
back gets out of the way (2 Thessalonians 2, 7; cited in Agamben 2005b, 110). In Walter Benjamins messianic
politics (1986), this demise of the sovereign takes the form of divine violence that is neither law-preserving nor lawmaking and transforms the fictive state of exception, inscribed within the legal order, into a real state of exception that
has severed all links to the law and the state form. Agambens work from his earliest writings onwards may be viewed as
an engagement with this admittedly arcane and disconcerting idea of divine violence: Only if it is possible to think
the Being of abandonment beyond every idea of the law (even that of the empty form of laws
being in force without significance) will we have moved out of the paradox of sovereignty towards
a politics freed from every ban. (Agamben 1998, 59. See also Mills 2004; Kaufman 2008) Prior to
addressing the specific features of Agambens post-sovereign politics, let us consider this idea of a
politics freed from every ban in relation to the figure of state of nature.
Negative actions by the state do not resolve the state of exceptiontheir attempt to
solve bare life by reigning in government only reentrenches sovereign power.
On the other hand, neither is it a question of returning to a pre-political state of nature, not yet
contaminated by the sovereign exception. If the state of nature were temporally antecedent to
sovereignty, then it could at least be envisioned, in a naturalist or essentialist gesture, as a site of
possible redemption. However, there is no passage back from bios to zoe and any attempt at such
passage only throws us back into the state of exception and the production of bare life, which,
contrary to numerous misreadings, is not identical to zoe but is rather a destroyed or degraded
bios, from which all positive determinations have been subtracted (see Ziarek 2008; Ojakangas
2008; Mills 2004, 2005). There are not first life as a natural biological given and anomie as the
state of nature and then their implication in law through the state of exception. On the contrary,
the very possibility of distinguishing life and law, anomie and nomos, coincides with their
articulation in the biopolitical machine. (Agamben 2005a, 88) Bare life has nothing natural about
it; instead it is nothing but a degraded life, a life reduced to survival (Agamben 1999b, 132-35). If
bare life were identical to zoe qua natural life, then Agambens critical project would be reduced to
a banal affirmation of bios over zoe, political life vs. animal existence, which would simply
reproduce the constitutive opposition of the Western ontopolitical tradition rather than transcend
it as Agamben certainly attempts to do.
In contrast to such simplifications, Agamben asserts that the human being is constitutively
separated from its natural or animal existence by virtue of its subjectification in language. In his
early book Infancy and History (2007a, 50-70), he argues, following Benveniste, that the entrance
of the human being into language necessarily traverses the stage of the expropriation of all its
pre-linguistic experience as a living being so that any subjectification in language always
correlates with a correlate desubjectification (see also 1999b, 115-123). Similarly, Agambens
inquiry into the event of language in Language and Death (1991), which, as Mika Ojakangas
(2008) aptly demonstrates, is structurally homologous to the theory of the state of exception in
Homo Sacer, treats human speech as conditioned by the removal of natural or animal voice
(phone) that makes possible the passage to logos. In exactly the same manner, the political
existence of humanity is from the outset accompanied by the removal or crossing out of zoe,
whose inclusive exclusion as a negative foundation of the political order makes impossible any
return to nature, other than in the obscene and degrading manner practiced in the concentration
camps and other loci of the state of exception.
One invocation of the state of exception leads to an endless cycle of intervention
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Theoretically, the invocation of the state of exception may have been justified for the actual
continued existence of the state. Yet, because the executive can decide when and where to claim
the exception, it may often be enacted in cases short of emergency. Thus, the exceptional
becomes increasingly permanent and normal as there is no legal way to overturn it; the
emergency becomes the perpetual state of affairs. The decree, issued by a body of the
constitutional order, the executive, thus is law even though law was created by its own
suspension. With this power to decide on the state of exception, the executive becomes
dictatorial, or according to Schmitt's conception, the sovereign itself. However, Agambens work
on this subject differs from some earlier statements on the exception. Whereas Rossiter (2002)
and Schmitt (2006) describe the suspension of the legal order as an act of constitutional
dictatorship or as a temporary deviance from the normal operation of the juridical apparatus to
ensure the long term survival of this very order, Agamben argues that the exception itself, in its
very nature, prevents a return to the old normal and thus, ushers in a new one. If this is the case,
any hope of restoring the constitution, as previously understood, is lost. Therefore, the power to
suspend the law permanently threatens all legal norms deeply held or otherwise, making any legal
system with an executive body inherently unstable.
Particularized approaches to resistance fails the universal contestation of the alternative is key.
No. 2)
What ensues is a form of the boomerang effect: the constituting power of justice, which was once ctitiously held by the
state, lies not in the states juridical order but in the universalized externality represented in the act of dissent itself. This
stands to undo, at least partially, the paradox of sovereignty by placing the limiting and limited version of state sovereignty
alongside and in opposition to a form of sovereignty that lies extra-juridically, and therefore, outside state. In that case, state
sovereignty cannot claim that there is nothing outside the law because, as this article has come to demonstrate, justice itself
is outside the law and it thereby presides as the constituting force that substantiates the sovereign power of the (lawless)
universalized standpoint. The references to colonialism have helped to demonstrate (a) the degree to which the state of
exception gets normalized at the expense of life and justice, and (b) the importance of challenging the state of exception
from outside the juridical order so as to expose the ctional quality of the relations between law and life from a
universalized standpoint. In the capitalist colonial sense, acts of dissent against the state of exception can be similarly
conceptualized as having to emerge from the universal externality that upholds lawlessness. There are numerous distinctive
experiences of the state of exception as the limit-gure on life, which is a mode of governance that is highlyconducive to
reckless capitalist growth (hence the term capitalistcolonialism), and has deep afnities with the ever-expanding war on
terror. Whether these universalizable distinctions are experienced at the level of class, gender, race and/or ethnicity, they
nonetheless stand to represent a shared externality that can never truly be included in the juridical order of any given
sovereign power. The compromised form of consent that characterizes these externalities in relation to the state of
exception makes it such that the excluded, despite short-term attempts at inclusion, will always nd their footing in the
constituting power of universal justice. If the sovereign power of state lies in indistinction, meaning in the power of
inclusive exclusion, then challenges to the state of exception must appeal to universalized distinctions, to that which is
always external and must always be external to state insofar as universality itself can never be included in the juridicopolitical operations of any given state. The state will always choose the state; it exists for itself, and the state of exception is
an extreme example of the truth of this fate.
Transcending the state of exception through better laws and policies is impossible
only a fundamental reconsideration of politics can solve.
Agambens understanding of the state of nature as a product of sovereign power rather than the
precondition of its institution entails a reconsideration of its ontological status. While for Hobbes
the state of nature is an ideologem, a fiction deployed to gain adherence to the sovereign, for
both Schmitt and Agamben, the state of nature, insofar as it is present within the sovereign order
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in the mode of the state of exception, is no longer a fiction but a reality. Both Schmitt and
Agamben affirm precisely that which Hobbes, according to Foucault, attempted to efface: the
historical reality of (civil) war as the origin of all constituted authority. While Schmitt affirms this
reality in his exaltation of the political and indeed valorizes it as the instance of reality that
ruptures the simulacra of normative systems, Agamben clearly abhors it. However, his own
analysis makes it remarkably difficult to see how it can be escaped. On the one hand, it is obvious
that the state of exception cannot be transcended by perfecting the legal system in order to
banish every trace of exception from it. The legal positivist argument that characterizes the
liberalism of Schmitts time as well as many of its contemporary descendants is clearly refuted by
Agambens radicalization of Schmitts decisionism, which demonstrates the dependence of the
rule on the exception, whereby every positive right is conditioned by the sovereigns
preservation of the right to punish. The state of exception and its product, the bare life of homo
sacer, are not a political problem to be resolved within the normative system, but rather a
problem of the political itself (Rasch 2007, 102). Any search for a more effective, exception-proof
legal system is entirely in vain, especially in todays condition of nihilism, in which the vacuity of
historical forms of life has brought the sovereign ban to the foreground as the sole substance of
politics. We cannot hope to evade the state of nature by a denaturalizing gesture of the closure
of the normative system into self-immanence, if only because the state of nature is always already
immanent to it (Agamben 2005a, 87).
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The permutation fails The plan is inevitably tapped in the logic of the state
Hussain, 2000 Professor in History at the University of California Berkeley
(Nasser, Thresholds: Sovereignty and the Sacred, Law and Society Association, University of Massachusetts, JSTOR.)
In a significant passage in The Concept of Law, Hart attempts to show how the notion of sovereign orders virtually
disappears in the rule-bound format of a modern electoral democracy. Framing the explanation in the vocabulary of a
historical Bildung, a developmental schema that unself-consciously subtends much of the text, Hart argues that in the case
in which the sovereign is identifiable with a single person, it may be possible to concede that the rules of governance (for
instance, the requirement that orders must be declared and signed by the monarch) exist in a descriptive mode. But in the
more disseminated form of the electorate-indeed, in the case of procedures that members of a society must follow in order
to function as an electorate in the first place-rules "cannot themselves have the status of orders issued by the sovereign, for
nothing can count as orders issued by the sovereign unless the rules already exist and have been followed" (pp. 74-75).
Such a circularity of logic and process effectively occludes the possibility of action outside the circle.
The permutation fails Soft dissent from within the state is ineffective at challenging the sovereign.
No. 2)
Unlike Agamben, Arendts account of tacit consent strives to appreciate the varied manner of laws application through an
understanding of the degree to which valid law presumes equal representation and consent. In her description of the tacit
agreement or consensus universalis that underpins the American Constitution, Arendt (1969) explains that the civil rights
movements of the 1960s were to be expected because of the simple and frightening fact that [Negroes and Indians] had
never been included in the original consensus universalisof the American republic (p.90). This insight precisely reects that
nuance that forms the foundation of laws applicability or even its non-applicability. The force-of-law/ law is
differentiated by the degree to which the state itself can claim legitimate authority, which is dictated in part by the extent to
which it is seen to be representative of the community unto which it exacts its power. In all instances where the law that is
in place is the result of a colonial imposition, the realm of externality not only threatens the legitimacy of that states
authority, but also become essentialized through mechanisms of governance inherent to the state of exception. The
distinguishing feature of the type of dissent that is being conceptualized in this article is that it is representative of a
standpoint that is always and already external to the juridico-political order of the sovereign; in an important sense, it is
always outside state and state control. That this standpoint is already external to the sovereign suggests an immediate
nullication of the suspension mechanism that the sovereign employs as a strategy of rendering the exception for the
purposes of juridical order. Correspondingly, that this standpoint is always external to the sovereign means that the failed
attempts to exclude the standpoint also ensures that it cannot be included in the juridical order through non-application. As
such, those acts of dissent that imply consent by virtue of their originary position within the order itself stand a weaker
chance of constituting legitimate, and therefore effective, challenges to the state of exception. Acts of dissent which
originate from a proximal relation that is always external to the state, despite sovereign attempts at the taking of the
outside, represent a standpoint that is necessarily always already universalized, as the remainder of the article explains.
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Its impossible to combine individualized action and that of the sovereign

No. 2)
The only form of consent that can be presupposed by acts of dissent which originate from this universalized standpoint is
one wherein it is a mutual consent in the form of a compromise, which holds that one party remains external to the juridicopolitical order. In the colonial context, this notion of consent as compromise is by no means a happy or easy compromise
from the perspective of either adversary. As Fanons chronological account in Wretched(1961/2004) illustrates, in the
process of the sovereigns initial attempts to include the colonized in its order for the purposes of expanding the scope of its
jurisdiction, such a compromise is everywhere implied and concretized, but at the same time, such a compromise is
everywhere violently under threat from the colonizer. Insofar as the colonized and colonizers are always external to each
other, the hostile compromise is implied in the colonizers constant underlining, by means of exception, the externality of
the colonized as a substratum of humanity. The colonized agree to this externalized standpoint, certainly not because they
view themselves as lesser, but rather on the grounds of their conceptualization of the colonizer as the outsider, which
expresses itself in the way that the colonized externalize the universal values of the colonizer, as evidenced by Fanons
(1961/2004: 9) commentary on the concept of human dignity. At the apex of the dehumanization of the colonized, the
extent to which both parties have entrenched their positions of externality in relation to the other comes to be represented
by a reversal of roles, wherein the colonizer comes to be the target of dehumanization tactics. Csaire (1955/2000: 36)
refers to this reversal as the boomerang effect, when the sovereign-colonizer is one day surprised to have its own
dehumanizing tactics, which are generally reserved for use against what it views as the substratum of humanity, used
against it by those it thought were lesser. This concept of the boomerang effect represents, at least in part, the foundation
of the inversion of power that results from the act of dissent that upholds a universalized justice claim, and it involves a
reconstituting of sovereign power from a position of lawlessness that is external to the state of exception.
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AT: POLITICS
The alternative breaks with the politicization of bare life
Hussain, 2000 Professor in History at the University of California Berkeley
(Nasser, Thresholds: Sovereignty and the Sacred, Law and Society Association, University of Massachusetts, JSTOR.)
If for Agamben we stand today at the final threshold beyond which we cannot pass without unleashing disaster, and if this
situation has been produced by the conclusion and exhaustion of thought as much as if not more than of politics,12 he does
offer us an alternative to crossing this threshold. The categories of Western thought, whether in the form of metaphysics or
of various disciplines such as medicine, politics, and jurisprudence, have reached their limit in confronting the biopolitical
situation of today, and herein lies the promise of renewal. "If life, in modern biopolitics," Agamben writes, "is immediately
politics, here this unity, which itself has the form of an irrevocable decision, withdraws from every external decision and
appears as an indissoluble cohesion in which it is impossible to isolate something like a bare life. In the state of exception
become the rule, the life of homo sacer, which was the correlate of sovereign power, turns into an existence over which
power no longer seems to have any hold" (p. 153). A "new politics," that is, is possible, starting from a break with the
metaphysical tradition of the West and its politicization of bare life. What are we to make of such a possibility? Agamben
has in mind a politics that would begin from the indistinguishability today of life and law, of zoe and bios, and from the
impossibility of returning to a time when any such distinction could be maintained, to a time, that is, when bare life could
be "separated and excepted, either in the state order or in the figure of human rights" (p. 134). This new politics would be a
politics without relation, for, as we recall, it is as relation that the politics of the West (or the West as politics) are (or is)
destined to exhaustion in the ever-present potentiality of (bio)politics for totalitarianism. For all that, though, this "new
politics" and the promises it enfolds remains obscure. There is in this regard something disappointing about the final
paragraph of Homo Sacer, in which, after the frequently brilliant exegesis that led up to it, Agamben concludes that just as
the biopolitical body of the West cannot be simply given back to its natural life in the oikos, so it cannot be overcome in a
passage to a new body-a technical body or a wholly political or glorious body-in which a different economy of pleasures
and vital functions would once and for all resolve the interlacement of zoe and bios that seems to define the political
destiny of the West. This biopolitical body that is bare life must itself instead be transformed into the site for the
constitution and installation of a form of life that is wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoe....
Today bios lies in zoe exactly as essence, in the Heideggerian definition of Dasein, lies (liegt) in existence. Yet how can a
bios be only its own zoe, how can a form of life seize hold of the very haplos that constivery haplos tutes both the task and
the enigma of Western metaphysics? If we give the name form-of-life to this being that is only its own bare existence and to
this life that, being its own form, remains inseparable from it, we will witness the emergence of a field of research beyond
the terrain defined by the intersection of politics and philosophy, medico-biological sciences and jurisprudence. First,
however, it will be necessary to examine how it was possible for something like bare life to be conceived within these
disciplines, and how the historical development of these very disciplines has brought them to a limit beyond which they
cannot venture without risking an unprecedented biopolitical catastrophe. (p. 188) It is difficult, given what has preceded, to understand
how "[i]n the state of exception become the rule, the life of homo sacer, which was the correlate of sovereign power, turns into an existence over which
power no longer seems to have any hold" (p. 153). But the reference to Heidegger is crucial. In his discussion of the overlaps of Nazism and Heideggerian
philosophy, Agamben determines the point of divergence to be the former's attachment of values to what are posed as facts: Nazism determines the bare
life of homo sacer in a biological and eugenic key, making it into the site of an incessant decision on value and nonvalue in which biopolitics continually
turns into than a to politics and in which the camp, consequently, becomes the absolute political space. In Heidegger, on the other hand, homo sacer-whose
very own life is always at issue in its every act-instead becomes Dasein, the inseparable unity of Being and ways of Being, of subject and qualities, life
and world, "whose own Being is at issue in its very Being." (p. 153) Whether we find this resolution to the problem of a (dangerous) proximity between
Nazism and Heidegger's thought to be adequate cannot be decided here. The point is that the alternative to "unprecedented biopolitical
catastrophe" that Agamben offers depends upon the ability to maintain precisely such a distance between homo sacer and
Dasein. Beyond the issue of the difficulties that may or may not attend the maintenance of this distance, we might also ask
whether Dasein in this sense is truly able to resist the exercise of power, to except itself from the sovereign's decision on the
value or nonvalue of life as such-and, if not, whether this very inability is important to Agamben's sense of the "new
politics." And finally, how is this distance and its maintenance less problematical than the maintenance of the distance
supported by the liberal position as essential to its sense of politics or the maintenance of the distance demanded by Arendt
as requisite for her view of the political? Agamben's resolution of the problem is in fact reminiscent of his description of
modern democracy. Should we conclude, then, that the new politics is different from modern democracy in that the new
politics subjects us to our "freedom and happiness?" This is a very real possibility (one that we see at work everywhere
around us), but it is not so new after all and not necessarily political in any important way. It is perhaps unlikely that this
would be Agamben's view, but here we simply note that the answer to the question of what the "new politics" is about
awaits a fuller treatment from Agamben and that such treatment is eagerly anticipated.
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The alternative moves beyond the current way of conceptualizing the relationship
between zoe and bios this creates a new politics necessary to avoid the crises
produced by the sovereign
Strathausen, 6 Associate Professor of German and English at the University of Missouri at
Columbia
(Carsten, A Critique of Neo-Left Ontology, Postmodern Culture, Project Muse)
Agamben contends that these human "objects" that have been reduced to bare life posit a basic
ontological challenge to political philosophy. If the twentieth century has indeed witnessed the
gradual ascension of the state of exception to the overall paradigm of Western government, as
Agamben claims,14 then the very distinction between inside and outside can no longer be
maintained. Instead of trying to reestablish these classical distinctions, one needs to think beyond
categories and distinctions in general:
Every attempt to rethink the political space of the West must begin with a clear awareness that we
no longer know anything of the classical distinction between zoe and bios, between private life
and political existence, between man as a simple living being at home in the house and man's
political existence in the city. This is why the restoration of classical political categories proposed
by Leo Strauss . . . can have only a critical sense. There is no return from the camps to classical
politics. In the camps, city and house became indistinguishable, and the possibility of
differentiating between our biological body and our political body . . .was taken from us forever.
(187-88)
On the basis of this premise, Agamben calls for a new or "coming politics" that moves beyond the
state of exception as the contemporary paradigm of governance. Such a new politics, however,
can only emerge in the context of a new metaphysics and a new way of thinking that "return(s)
thought to its practical calling" (5). Why? Because, in Agamben's view, the current dilemma of a
global state of exception is not a perversion of the classical Greek distinction between zoe and
bios, but its logical conclusion. Only because political philosophy was, from its very beginning,
based upon this life/politics distinction was it possible for the gradual erosion of the latter to lead
to a crisis of the former.15 For once Greek philosophy had stipulated the separation between life
and politics, it was merely a question of time before this entire scheme would come undone and
self-de(con)struct. Today, the damage is done and there is no turning back. Instead, Agamben
suggests that we seize upon the contemporary fusion of life and politics as an opportunity to think
about community differently so as to move beyond its classical metaphysical framework. This
task, however, "implies nothing less than thinking ontology and politics beyond every figure of
relation" (47). Again and again, Agamben returns to this notion of a "non-relationship" and his
effort "to think the politico-social factum no longer in the form of a relation" at all (60).
The alternative is post-sovereign politics--this re-appropriation of the state of nature is vital to radically transform
social praxis.
In this paper we shall attempt to illuminate the affirmative aspect of Agambens philosophy at the site, where its critical
drive is most intense, i.e. the state of exception as the topos of sovereign power. While Agambens argument about the
structure of the sovereign ban, which reduces the objects of sovereignty to a bare life, exemplified by the disconcerting
figure of homo sacer, is well-known, his vision of a post-sovereign politics, of a life over which sovereignty and right no
longer have any hold (Agamben 2000, 114) appears rather ambiguous. The difficulties of understanding the affirmative
aspect of Agambens work have to do with his determination to find possibilities of redemption within the very same space
where the logic of sovereignty operates, rather than introduce normative principles transcendent in relation to this domain.
In the manner that also characterizes the work of Heidegger, Derrida and other late-modern philosophers Agamben grants
his affirmation no other content than an apparently minor displacement within the very same terrain that is to be
transcended, a reappropriation or a different use of the very same condition that we find violent or oppressive. Thus,
Agambens post-sovereign politics has no other content than the reappropriation of the state of exception by the subjects
caught in its operation and a different use of the condition of abandonment, to which they are resigned by the logic of
sovereignty. In order to understand this strategy of reappropriation, it is necessary to engage with Agambens reading of
Hobbes that deconstructs the classical distinction between the state of nature and the civil state of the Commonwealth. As
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we shall argue below, what is reappropriated in Agambens post-sovereign politics is nothing other than the Hobbesian state
of nature as a space of social praxis with no relation to the law or sovereignty. Yet, for this reappropriation to become
possible, the figure of the state of nature must be restored to its proper place within the order of the Commonwealth as its
negative foundation. Radicalizing Schmitts criticism of Hobbes, Agamben argues that the state of nature does not precede
the institution of sovereign power but is rather the product of the latter and it is only as such a product that it may
eventually be reappropriated as an ethos (dwelling place) of a post-sovereign community that has severed all ties with state
power.
Analyzing the states relationship with life is intrinsic to political thinking
Panagia, 99 Ph.D. in Political Theory at Johns Hopkins University,
(David, Theory and Event V3, I1, The Sacredness of Life and Death: Giorgio Agambens Homo Sacer and the Tasks of
Political Thinking, Project Muse)
It is perhaps one of Agamben's great achievements in Homo Sacer to pose to his readers the question of the task of political
thinking in the manner in which he does. The structure of the book itself (it is divided into three separate and distinct
sections) parallels this call to thinking. The first section entitled "The Logic of Sovereignty" is heavily theoretical and
presents the questions with which Agamben will be dealing throughout in complex albeit lucid articulations of what he
understands the paradox of sovereignty to be. The second section ("Homo Sacer") is not only an explication of the term but
further, presents a discussion of the figure of homo sacer as an event that emerges from the logic of sovereignty previously
articulated. The final section on the political status of the camp in modern life presents us with an actualization of the
instance of bare life. In this regard, both in its form and content, Homo Sacer is a call to thinking the political realities of
our day as they appear at both the conceptual and material level. What this involves is a turn towards an understanding of
thinking that coincides with the material register of the body as the bearer of life and death. If, according to Agamben, there
is the very real possibility that we may all be homo sacers, then thinking cannot take place without a consideration of the
very real experience of life, death and the zone of indistinction wherein this experience lies. In light of this, Agamben
stands in contrast to many contemporary Anglo-American political thinkers who present the task of political thinking in
purely operational terms as an instance of a procedural rationality that (ought to) take place within the parameters of a
thoroughly cognitive public sphere. Agamben would reject the assumptions of American liberal proceduralism that require
the bracketing of metaphysical questions (including questions of sacredness, religion, ideology and the pursuits of the good
life) by placing them outside the gambit of the political. For Agamben, it is precisely these questions (abandoned, if you
will, by political thinking) that are at the heart of the issue. It is for this reason that he prefaces his entire discussion by
claiming that the relationship between life and sovereignty - the political question par excellence - has always required a
metaphysical impulse. "Politics," he asserts, therefore appears as the truly fundamental structure of Western metaphysics
insofar as it occupies the threshold on which the relation between the living being and the logos is realized. In the
"politicization" of bare life - the metaphysical task par excellence - the humanity of living man is decided. In assuming this
task, modernity does nothing other than declare its own faithfulness to the essential structure of the metaphysical tradition.
(Agamben, p.8) The task for political thinking, then, is not to bracket those 'hard questions' because they are, in fact, hard
and perhaps irresolvable. It is, rather, to see how it is precisely those questions that allow for the possibility of the events
that compose the contemporary political order. Why is life sacred? How is sacredness sustained? What is the relationship
between the sacredness of life and the proliferation of death? These are the questions that Agamben pursues without the
fear of being either too metaphysical or too political.
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The affs claims that they are assumptive of the sacredness to life are bankrupt they only serve as another way for
the sovereign to exert power
It might be argued in response to Agamben that the numerous demands for the protection of life, which we hear today
with increasing frequency, and from many corners, and which are premised on an assertion of the sacredness inherent to life
as such, are attempts precisely to close the spaces of exception. Agamben likely would counter that it is telling that such demands are attempts to compel the sovereign to decide on the exception. Thus, whatever their intention, they work to
establish that "new and more dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power" that is disputed; they work, in the end,
therefore, to expand the space of exception so that the exception increasingly becomes the rule. Indeed, it could be asked what
these various movements register if not the infinite violability of life as such, of bare (or sacred) life. As Agamben says of the crisis in Rwanda:
It takes only a glance at the recent publicity campaigns to gather funds for refugees from Rwanda to realize that here human
life is exclusively considered (and there are certainly good reasons for this) as sacred life-which is to say, as life that can be killed
but not sacrificed-and that only as such is it made into the object of aid and protection. The "imploring eyes" of the Rwandan
child, whose photograph is shown to obtain money but who "is now becoming more and more difficult to find alive," may
well be the most telling contemporary cipher of the bare life that humanitarian organizations, in perfect symmetry with state
power, need. (pp. 133-34, our emphasis.)
These remarks could be applied, mutatis mutandis, to other contemporary efforts to protect life.
Agamben's concern is with the relationship of "sacred" life to the supremely unspectacular violence to which this life as such is ever-increasingly
threatened. "What confronts us today," as he says, "is a life that as such is exposed to a violence without precedent precisely
in the most profane and banal ways" (p. 114). Such an exposure, he maintains, owes nothing to the operations of sacrifice,
however loosely we construe the meaning of sacrifice. Agamben's comments on sacrifice, however, are not altogether
clear and at times appear contradictory.
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Their authors have it backwards the state of nature is produced, not replaced, by sovereign authority.
In contrast to Hobbess mythologization of the state of nature, Agambens goal is to restore the
state of nature to its status of the product of sovereign power, a contingency that is an effect of
sovereign decision as opposed to a contingency that calls for sovereign decision. Thus, what
Agamben does is not dehistoricise Hobbess state of nature, but rather restore reality to this
ahistorical figure by dismantling the spatiotemporal distinction between the state of nature and
the Commonwealth and recasting the state of nature as a principle internal to the City. The
political does not replace nature; it creates it. The state from which Hobbess sovereign rescues us
is the state into which Agambens sovereign plunges us. (Rasch 2007, 101) The state of nature is
constituted by the sovereign decision that, by treating the civil state as dissolved, suspends the
operation of its internal laws and norms that define it as bios and thereby reduces the existence of
its population to bare life, which differs from the natural zoe that human beings have irrevocably
left behind precisely because it only comes into existence by being stripped of all positive
attributes of its bios (Cf. Agamben 1998, 181. See also Mills 2005, 219; Ziarek 2008, 90).
In this condition, the Covenant is treated as void and the subject is simultaneously abandoned by
the sovereign, i.e. left without his protection, and abandoned to the sovereigns unlimited exercise
of violence. Homo sacer is thus in a strict sense the remnant not of the state of nature but of the
covenant that is no longer in force by the decision of the sovereign. Rather than being prejuridical, the state of nature is then graspable as an instance of the non-juridical within the
juridical, a constitutive outside of a juridical order or its inherent transgression (see Ojakangas
2004, 23-29; Rasch 2000). In Foucaults terms (2003, 93), instead of being spatially and
temporally transcended in the establishment of the Commonwealth, the state of nature remains a
permanent backdrop of every constituted authority. Let us now address the way in which this
anomic backdrop enters and survives in the nomos of the Commonwealth.
The State isnt the problem in this context the production of bare life is.
Dillon and Reid 2K1, Professor and PhD Student IR University of Lancaster 2001 Millennium 30.1
Although Foucault did not use the term governance he explored similar practices under the terms governmentality and this biopower, he
also noted, has its own biohistory.23 Its early modern expression arose in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe but its
antecedents were to be found in the pastoral power of the Christian Church.24 In the eighteenth century, it became
intimately related both to liberal opposition to police, or policy, and to the advent of a novel understanding of society
as a complex and independent reality that has its own laws and mechanisms of disturbance.25 Liberal forms of biopower
thus entered early modern discourse on the problems of government in the form of a critique of rival cameralist and
mercantilist solutions to the problematic of government. The Liberal problematisation of government was distinguished by
its concern with striking the balance between governing too much and governing too little as well as with governing
through encouraging the autonomous existence and selfregulating freedoms of populations. It was also concerned to keep
its own regimes of governance under continuous and critical review.26 Whereas sovereign power is distinguished by its
reliance on instituting the law and threatening death, for Foucault,27 governmentality or, as we will now refer to it,
governance, operates on populations and seeks to promote life by commanding detailed knowledge of it. It thus establishes
what he called the biopolitics of the population.28 In the biopolitical discourse of global liberal governance without
government, the term governance does not refer to seizing or ruling the State according to some legitimating principle,
such as that of representative and accountable government. Biopolitical governance is less concerned with States and nongovernmental organisations as pre-formed political subjects, than it is concerned with the detailed knowledgeable strategies
and tactics that effect the constitution of life and the regulation of the affairs of populations, no matter how these are
specified. It is also concerned with the discursive economies of power/knowledge through which people in their individual
and collective behaviour are analysed and subject to selfregulatory freedoms and methods of control.29
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The liberal lens of the affirmative blinds them to understanding the full extent of the sovereigns power
Agamben brings this out nicely in a discussion of Bruno Bettelheim's argument that the Muselmann has passed beyond the
limit of the human and the moral by renouncing his freedom and by losing sight of the limit beyond which his life would
have to be sacrificed in defense of that freedom. For Bettelheim, regardless of the conditions, a human being can avoid becoming a
Muselmann by "accepting death as a human being." But Agamben argues that "Simply to deny the Muselmann's humanity would be to
accept the verdict of the SS and to repeat their gesture." The Muselmann "does not merely embody a moral death," rather he
"is the site of an experiment in which morality and humanity are called into question," he is "a limit figure of a special kind,
in which not only categories such as dignity and respect but even the very idea of an ethical limit lose their meaning ." To
acknowledge the Muselmann's compromised humanity, Bettelheim's limit of the human is denied; to avoid the moral barbarism of an imagined
confrontation with a Muselmann in which one judges his "character and habits," one renounces ethical terminology . With the Muselmann
we find
the limit of limits: clear boundaries can no longer be drawn here [Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz 56, 63].26
The point is not that the liberal refusal to consider the camp as threshold rules out a solution to this dilemma from the start.
The very idea of a solution here seems offensive. The point is rather that the liberal response can make no sense of its own
confusion. The camp is simply evil and incomprehensible. The person condemned to a camp is neither capable of morality
nor incapable of it. As for the difficult questions this emerging limit of the moral might raise, they too are set aside in favor
of a respectful silence.27 In contrast, Agamben's conception of the threshold at least promises to more precisely delineate these confusions: the
camp both is and is not a legal, political, and moral space. Hence, we should hardly be surprised to find ourselves torn,
wanting both to affirm and to deny that these categories apply here.
Finally, the liberal strategy reveals its limitations when we recognize that the notion of the threshold is in fact
expanding into areas where we will not have the luxury of refusing to consider the inner logic of phenomena we
should like to reject as evil and incomprehensible. What, for instance, are we to do when we are dealing with agents or
things that have not already been recognized as the bearers of rights? Here the reassertion of rights is simply not an option. We must
decide whether a neomort-a body whose only signs of life are that it is "warm, pulsating, and urinating"-is in fact a human being at all, an agent or a thing.
In such cases, "life and death [cease to be] properly scientific concepts [and become] political concepts, which as such acquire a political meaning
precisely only through a decision" [Homo Sacer 164]. Ironically, such decisions are increasingly made by scientists, and not by politicians: "In the
biopolitical horizon [orizzonte biopolitico] that characterizes modernity, the physician and the sci- entist move into the no-man's-land
[terra di nessuno] into which at one point the sovereign alone could penetrate" [159]. These are still marginal figures in our current
political life. But if Agamben is right, the concept of the margin is itself being swept away. It is this that leads him to conclude
that the camp is the as-yet-unrecognized paradigm of the modern. As the logic of the sovereign exception comes unraveled
(or is realized- this paradox being a necessary function of that logic), and the impossibility of categori- cally distinguishing
between exception and rule is made manifest, the distinction between bare life and political life is hopelessly confused.
"When life and politics-originally divided, and linked together by means of the no-man's land of the state of exception that is inhabited [abita] by bare
life [la nuda vita]-begin to become one, all life becomes sacred and all politics becomes the exception" [148].28 [End page 52] In the end, the attempt to
resist this through the assertion of human rights ignores the connection between the humanism that undergirds the concept of rights and the events that
seem to conflict with it. Agamben's argument is not that Aristotle's or Locke's reflections on politics carry with them an implicit commitment to the
substantive racist policies of National Socialism; nor does he claim that they "caused" the Holocaust (a term to which he objects [114]). What he does
argue is that there is a deep affinity between such contemporary horrors and the tradition of political philosophy to which we might turn in an effort to
understand and combat such phenomena. The practical implication would not be that there is no difference between Aristotle or Hitler, but that Aristotle
will not provide a stable point from which to critique those who follow after him, or from which to construct an alternative.29 There is no Archimedean
point outside biopolitics. Politics is always a matter of the body, and "The 'body' is always already a biopolitical body" [187].
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Each individual resistance to opposing sovereignty establishes the base for emancipatory politics
Hardt and Dumm, 00 Professor in the Literature Program and Romance Studies Department at Duke University,
Professor at Amherst College
(Michael and Thomas, "Sovereignty, Multitudes, Absolute Democracy: A Discussion between Michael Hardt and Thomas
Dumm about Hardt and Negri's Empire, Harvard University Press, 2000, Theory & Event, Volume 4, Issue 3, Project
Muse)
TD: How are people to be convinced that the relevant opposition is to sovereignty, though? That is, to put it maybe too
simplistically, beyond the call for the end of big government, a call which has its ironies, through what communicative
means do you see the constituent power of the multitude realizing itself against the nation-state?
MH: It is not a matter of convincing anyone to oppose sovereignty. It is natural to refuse authority and the refusal of
authority is going on every day at all levels of society. And all of the various forms of modern and contemporary liberatory
politics are at base a refusal of servitude, a refusal to accept as natural our subordination to rulers. I see the opposition to
sovereignty as a way to name the generality of all these activities.
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We must focus on the universal aspect of sovereignty not its state centered manifestation.
No. 2)
This leads to the question of the inversion itself, which has long been alluded to in this article, but never directly
formulated. In bowing to Agambens conception of sovereign power as it relates to the state of exception which is
necessary to do in order to understand externality thus conceived, particularly in the colonial context the potential to
formulate a version of non-state sovereignty also presents itself as the basis for challenging state authority. By formulating a
version of lawless sovereignty, the concept of sovereignty itself is necessarily under dispute by virtue of nullifying the
very notion that there could be such a thing as an ultimate power that can call itself sovereign. In Agambens text, there is
at most a subtle questioning of the states given right as sovereign power but this never seems to develop into any deep
inquiry as to the possibility that sovereignty can exist in a lawless capacity outside of the state. The constituting power of
this always already externalized universal standpoint rests in the fact that it is not intricately related to any one state, but
rather all states and no states simultaneously, as illustrated in the aforementioned bridging of historical distinctiveness (the
particular) and universalized externality (the general). Sovereignty, as the instance of supreme power within a given state,
remains unchallenged as long as the concept of sovereignty itself is never questioned. A universalized perspective of
sovereignty must therefore be brought to bear on the state-centered version in a way that not only challenges the state of
exception by exposing the ction of law and life from the perspective of lawlessness, but also supplants the state as the
ultimate sovereign power by breaking the ctitiousness of the relationship between state law and justice.
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AT: NO SOVEREIGNTY NOW

The state of exception dominates government in contemporary politics Gitmo proves
The world Sewell describes, in which legal rights have been superseded by acts of brutality orchestrated by the executive,
and individuals have no recourse to the protection offered by fundamental human rights, resembles the exception or
emergency situation first investigated by German theorist and Nazi supporter Carl Schmitt. Schmitt's work is 'experiencing
a timely or untimely renaissance' (Sharpe 2006: 97) in a political environment characterised by loss of liberties, an
unprecedented level of executive control and a perceived erosion of the rule of law . A number of theorists, including
Georgio Agamben, believe that this political landscape is best characterised as a state of exception, which now prevails as
'the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics' (Agamben 2005: 2). According to such reasoning, the state
of exception described in Myth is not, therefore, merely a work of fiction. In particular, Guantanamo Bay is portrayed as a
contemporary state of exception, a legal black hole which is 'entirely removed from the law and from judicial oversight'
(Agamben 2005: 4), although this view is not universally held. Fleur Johns has argued, for instance, that the regime at
Guantanamo Bay displays an 'over-abundance of legal procedures, and regulatory [*161] effects' (2005: 614) and is far
from being representative of 'Schmittian exceptionalism' (2005: 631).
Sovereignty shapes international politics today
The nature of this relationship between humanity and sovereignty has been the subject of the recent work of the Italian
philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Agamben's depiction of sovereign power and bare life can be read as an account of how
sovereignty and humanity operate in tandem in international politics today. Asserting those who still use the terminology of
modern liberalism, such as "sovereignty, right, nation, people, democracy, and general will by now refer to a reality that no
longer has anything to do with what these concepts used to designate -- and those who continue to use these concepts
uncritically literally do not know what they are talking about," Agamben offers a forbidding analysis of human rights
(Agamben 2000: 109.0). His own focus is primarily on national sovereignty and citizenship. But the liminal concepts of
sovereignty and homo sacer he portrays can also be understood as accounts of international entities. They point to a more
qualified assessment of the relation between rights and power than cosmopolitanism. Humanity, rather than serving as a
limit on sovereignty, appears as its medium and product. / Expanding the analyses of Foucault, we might say that much as
early modern states addressed themselves to an equal, free, rational individual while producing a docile trained body,
contemporary claims to enforce human rights grounded in individual dignity instead produce and depend upon a "raw
spectacle of humanity" (Malkki 1996: 390). To understand this alliance we must separate sovereignty from the liberal
vision of power as formed of consent and limited by law and rights. As sovereignty expands beyond the nation state form, it
increasingly operates as bio-sovereignty: a form of sovereignty operating according to the logic of the exception rather than
law, applied to material life rather than juridical life, and moving within a global terrain now almost exclusively
biopolitical.
Sovereignty hides itself
Recent attention to Schmitt's cause celebre, the definition of sovereignty in terms of the decision on the exception, is not
surprising. Interest in the sovereign exception historically occurs at moments of systemic crisis when the basis and form of
political authority become uncertain. Today, intensified forms of political and economic globalization are rendering the
source and limits of sovereignty opaque. International military interventions are increasing that opacity. Often justified by
the demands of humanity and a language of exception, such interventions undermine any simple definition of sovereignty
as control over one's own territorial boundaries and respect for the boundaries of others. The extent to which sovereignty
operating with reference to the exception predominates today, and the consequences for the life subject to that power is the
focus of Agamben's Homo Sacer.
Sovereignty is not declining it has just transformed into an international arena
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Agamben emphasizes homo sacer as a domestic figure grounding citizenship, and sovereignty as a power over domestic
citizens. For the most part, he conceives the world outside or around bare life and sovereign power as a generic outside.
However, his presentation of homo sacer and sovereignty as creatures straddling inside and outside suggests neither can be
conceived in domestic terms alone. The space of indeterminacy characterizing sovereign power must touch upon another
community or the international space where different political groups interact. Those crossings open up a space in which
sovereignty can no longer be anchored to the territory of the nation state, nor to one political community . / The increasing
difficulty of localizing sovereignty in its former areas is one reason sovereignty is often seen as declining. Agamben's
account of sovereignty as a space of indeterminacy is an important counter to those assumptions. The concept of biosovereignty lets us recognize the presence of sovereignty where older concepts built around the nation-state find only its
disappearance. Insofar as sovereignty is a general power of regulating boundaries, whose only ground is homo sacer, it has
no necessary tie to particular territories or peoples. The impossibility of locating sovereignty in a precise territory or group
does not signal a collapse of sovereignty, but its transformation. Agamben's depiction of sovereignty as a moebius strip (p.
37), where the perpetual twisting of inside and outside forecloses any possibility of their separation, is particularly pertinent
for an ever more internationalized world.
Homo sacer links natural and political life, even if it is not apparent the international sovereign decides the status
of humanity proven by refugees
As Agamben teaches us, wherever natural life and political appear, so too will appear the figure linking them: homo sacer.
The complex mixture of these categories were not particularly visible so long as life was wholly defined by nation-state
belonging. The refugee, however, indicates contemporary political belonging, and the power regulating it, can no longer be
coded by domestic categories alone. Nor can the distinctions between natural and political life be limited to the field of the
nation-state. The refugee is the most explicit indication of this impossibility. The refugee exists in a transnational space
made of an awkward separation and mixture of domestic life and international life. By definition, the refugee cannot appeal
to its own state, or to national citizenship, for protection. The refugee must therefore appeal to some other power to
recognize it not as a national citizen, but as a figure of an international life or human belonging meriting protection solely
on that basis. A power that offers such protection can no longer be adequately classified under the heading of nation-state
sovereignty. / A sovereign power that acts in the name of and for a life defined solely by its belonging to humanity is a
power that has become global. To take these emerging global dimensions of sovereignty and life as straightforward
indications of an all-inclusive humanity would be a mistake. New forms of global sovereignty and global human life remain
defined by the categories of natural life, political life and homo sacer defining the Western tradition. In the classical world
and the modern world, natural and political life once included and excluded one another to constitute local or national
forms of being. Today, those same patterns reappear in global relationships between national life and international life,
which constitute and exclude one another as the ground of the sovereign exception. In an international world, the ground of
the sovereign decision is humanity as such. And what sovereignty decides is the status of that humanity.
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Agamben argues differently from Foucault he treats sovereign and biopower as the same
Homo Sacer is a curious book, subject to mixed reviews. Agamben's classification of the concentration camp as a
contemporary paradigm has been well noted (Norris 2002; Hussain 2000; Fitzpatrick 2001; Edkins 2000b). But his naming
of the book's "protagonist" as homo sacer, combined with his strong ties to Benjamin, indicate an equally central focus on
the way the sacralization of life conveyed in human rights discourse allies itself with sovereign power. That concern is not
immediately evident. Agamben himself presents the book as an effort to clarify the relation between the individualizing
techniques of bio-power meticulously described by Foucault and the less meticulously described power of the state. This
presentation is surprisingly misleading; it captures neither the efforts of Foucault, nor the efforts of Agamben himself. In
suggesting Foucault ignored the state and did not fully develop its relation to the individual, Agamben ignores both
Foucault's work on governmentality and his ambiguous post-History of Sexuality treatment of sovereign power.3 From this
standpoint, Agamben's effort to "carry out" the work Foucault did not is unnecessary. Agamben's claim, however, is not
wholly misleading. Foucault's analysis of the relation between the state and individuals in terms of governmentality as the
shaping of the conduct of citizens is not Agamben's primary interest. Nor is Foucault's presentation of sovereignty and biopower as opposing forces the one Agamben adopts. / Agamben's ultimate concern is with the type of broader questions
Foucault distanced himself from. In contrast to his analyses of the human sciences, which uncovered specific "epistemes"
shaping different orders of knowledge, Foucault made no similar effort to identify the basic parameters under which biopower could emerge. Agamben does. His inquiry leads him to more desultory conclusions than Foucault. For the two fields
of sovereign power and bio-power that Foucault treated as separate, and hence as potential limits upon one another, are
treated as parts of the same power by Agamben. Refusing to identify sovereignty with liberalism, Agamben shows that
sovereignty operates within the bio-political field of life before it takes the form of a juridical power.
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Biosovereignty is supplanting nation-state sovereignty distinctions between war and peace no longer exist and
war has turned into an action aimed at maintaining order
Arendt's account of the fate of those caught in such institutional arrangement remains decisive. As she observes,
"contemporary history has created a new kind of human beings -- the kind that are put in concentration camps by foes and
in internment camps by their friends" (1978: 56). Such permanent "ad hoc" arrangements indicate the extent to which states
of exception are increasingly interwoven with law. Nothing has become more "normal" than the creation of internment
camps for refugees and displaced persons. Those arrangements have the desired effect of placing camp inhabitants outside
the framework of international law and domestic law so as to avoid obligations of asylum and legal rights to refugees
(Hyndman 2000: xxv). / The shift from standing law to exception evident in the treatment of refugees also appears in
humanitarian military interventions. Those interventions increasingly take place as exceptions to both domestic and
international law, exposing "the allied face of human war" (Dillon and Reid 2000: 5). The American led NATO intervention
into Kosovo, for example, was carried out as an exception to the U.S. Constitution, the NATO Charter and the UN.13 The
new American doctrine of pre-emptive strikes has made the decision on the exception official policy. Indeed, new forms of
post-Cold War warfare are having the general effect of internationalizing the exception. Modern wars typically occurred
between two or more legally equal sovereigns. Contemporary conflicts are more akin to police actions. They take the form
of a "diffuse and continuous" violence seeking to guarantee order rather than control territory (Guehenno 1995:119). One of
the clearest signs of this change in conflict is the growing difficulty in distinguishing between civil and international wars,
and between intranational and international wars (Meron 2000: 261; Kaldor 1998: 102). Modern distinctions "between 'war'
and peace', 'internal' and 'external' . . . associated with the autonomy of the nation-state, seem to be breaking down" (Kaldor
1998:91). As a result, interventions into what might once have appeared independent nation-states no longer involve
"independent juridical territories." They appear rather as "actions within a unified world," aimed "at maintaining an internal
order" (Hardt and Negri 2000: 35, 38). The effect is to place the rights of humanity in "the hands of the international
community police" (Ranciere 1999: 127).14
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Friend-enemy distinctions arent true the world is in terms of exclusion and inclusion
What Agamben makes clear is that these distinctions never simply suppress or exclude natural life. They incorporate it as
the excluded ground of political life. That excluded life does not disappear, but remains present as the excepted ground of
politics. The Western tradition now appears grounded in bare life, the hybrid category that results from the separation and
mixture of natural and political life. Only on this basis can Agamben insist the "fundamental categorial pair of Western
politics is not that of friend/enemy but that of bare life/political existence, zoe/bios, exclusion/inclusion" (1998: 8). Given
the origins of our tradition, the twentieth century's discovery of a category of "life unworthy of life," is, if not tantamount to
the Aristotelian distinction of natural and political, not outside it either. As Schmitt recognized in the context of eighteenth
century debates over the status of humanity, the division of the human and the inhuman could be traced back to Aristotle
(2003: 104). / The most visible political expression of this schism appears in the main object of modern politics: the
sovereign people who once grounded nation-state sovereignty. As soon as the sovereign people appeared, Ranciere notes,
"so does its name sake (which it in no way resembles): denial or derision of sovereignty, that pre-political or beyondpolitical people known as the population or populace -- a toiling, suffering population, the ignorant masses, the rabble,
chained or unchained, whose existence undermines or contradicts the attainment of sovereignty." (80-81). Agamben
remarks on the same phenomena. "[I]n the concept of people we can easily recognize the conceptual pair identified earlier
as the defining category of the original political structure: naked life (people) and political existence (People), exclusion
and inclusion, zoe and bios. The concept of people always already contains within itself the fundamental bio-political
fracture . . ." (2000: 20.1-21.2). In contemporary politics, the same fracture appears within humanity. If humanity appears at
first to include all, it turns out ultimately to divide the secure and the endangered, the empowered and the rabble.20
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Agamben offers no realistic alternative that has the potential to be successful against the sovereign
Babias, 7 Director of the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein
(Marius, Zones of Indiferrence, Eurozine, http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-11-15-babias-en.html)
What are the consequences now of the state of exception having become a long-term provisional measure that threatens
democracy or of the emotionalisation of politics by means of populism as a social state of nature? How can the public
sphere be separated from the ideological clinch of the community, to be recharged with resistance and made capable of
conflict management? The war on terror appears to be ringing in a long state of exception in the early twenty-first
century; the major cities of Western democracies are turning into temporary high-security zones for survival. Political
analysts predict a period of increasing military actions over the next thirty years; future forms of domination will not,
however, be based exclusively on military power and economic strength but increasingly on cultural soft power. The wars
in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq that appear to be territorially limited, as well as the conflicts in Kashmir and the
Caucasus, will extend to the Western democracies in the form of terrorist attacks; the world finds itself in a state of war,
even if for now there will be no open military actions on western soil in the near future, at least in the form of soldiers
standing eye to eye. The state of exception has been institutionalised in Colombia, Chiapas, Guatemala, Afghanistan,
Indonesia, Angola, Congo and Turkey. In the former Yugoslavia the normal state of affairs has turned from war to conflicts
between warlords, in which political and military aspects, as well as mafia-like and entrepreneurial ones, have come
together. The European military presence in the Balkans ensures that the state of exception will become the rule, which
benefits above all the hegemonic ambitions of the leading European states, Germany and France. The controversial
discussion of recent years about the basic conflict between politics and morality, which briefly threatened the material
interests and cultural-ideological hegemonic ambitions of the elites, has since died down; instead, the politics of security
have been promoted to the central focus of action in the democracies. The conservative zeitgeist shocked by the world
bestseller Empire by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, which inspired again the worldwide movement of the critics of
globalisation longs for a biopolitical order for the world that Agambens political conception of the state of exception
provides by asserting the primacy of a sovereign philosophy for politics. Whether referring to refugee camps in Australia,
sans papiers in France, the torture of immigrants on the borders of the European Union or the torture of Taliban and Al
Qaeda prisoners, Agambens analyses may comprehend the increasing loss of rights and degradation of human beings
today, but he refrains from a call for resistance and rebellion, and seems to argue for the irreversible historical necessity of
injustice and oppression. The difference between law and justice, however, remains, now as ever, the basis for a
political critique of violence. Continuing to recognise this difference is synonymous with a battle against injustice and
oppression.
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Agambens alternative is de-politicizing His thesis neglects another form of bare life that leaves them trapped
within the sovereigns control forever
Protevi, 6 Professor of French Studies at Louisiana State University
(John, The Terri Schiavo Case: Biopolitics and Biopower: Agamben and Foucault, March 7th, 6th Annual Foucault Circle
Conference, JSTOR)
My second point in criticism of Agamben is that its not just judgments as to braindeath authorizing organ harvesting or
inferior quality of life authorizing euthanasia that concerns us in biopower (again, any such judgment in this case was
Terri's own, and so it was a matter of assisted suicide rather than euthanasia), but also the construction of an inescapable
State interest in fostering the life of the favored group, those graced with an implicit politicizing predication. While it is true
that the politicizing predication is part of Agamben's conceptual system, virtually all of his analyses in Homo Sacer and
Remnants of Auschwitz concern the way in which bare life is exposed, excluded from law, threatened, while bios,
politically-informed life, is protected. But in the Schiavo case we are concerned not with exclusion of zoe, but with its
inclusion, with a bare life that the law holds close. A total sphere of protected bare life, a biosphere, into which the outgroup cannot penetrate its bare life is exposed via a de-politicizing predication and from which the in-group can never
escape. Again, the relative neglect of the notion of trapped bare life is not so much a conceptual problem for Agamben as it
is a matter of emphasis. The limits that exclude the out-group that create exposed bare life are currently formed by the
state of exception regarding the "enemy combatants" (so that the Guantanamo camp is the state of exception become rule,
the spatialization of the state of exception), while the limits of the in-group trapped bare life are formed by the two
versions of Terris Law. (Technically speaking, these were not sovereign decisions, as they were laws, but the federal
version could have provoked a constitutional crisis regarding federalism, just as the state version impacted Florida's
doctrine of separation of powers.) More precisely, the bodies of those in the out-group are excluded from the protection of
law so that the bare life inherent therein is exposed, while the bodies of those in the in-group are subjected to the most
intense medical interventions.
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Agamben fails to articulate an alternative that can effectively oppose the sovereign we should view bare life as
cooperative and productive power.
Neilson, 4 Professor at the University of Western Sydney
(Brett, Potenza Nuda? Sovereignty, Biopolitics, Capialism Contretemps 5, December)
How then can Negri maintain that constituent power and sovereignty are opposites, separate even in the absoluteness to
which both lay claim? Already in Il potere constituente, three years before the publication of Homo Sacer, Negri fends off
the argument that reduces constituent power to an infinite void of possibilities or the presence of negative possibilities. For
him, the crucial question is the relation between potentiality (potenza) and power (potere). He recognizes in the definition
of potentiality that runs from Aristotle and the Renaissance and from Schelling to Nietzsche a metaphysical alternative
between absence and power, between desire and possession, between refusal and domination.8 Far from opening a zone
of indistinction, Negri believes this alternative to open a choice, at least when it is not closed off by the dogma that reduces
power to a pre-existing physical fact, finalized order, or dialectical result. And the philosophical conduit of this opening is
the great current of modern political thought, from Machiavelli to Spinoza to Marx, which understands constituent power as
an overflowing expression of desire, an absence of determinations, and a truly positive concept of freedom and democracy.
For Negri, the danger of Agambens thought lies not in its Aristotelian rigour or formal elegance but in its inability to open
a panorama of revolutionary struggle that can oppose the modern order of sovereignty and the transcendental ideal of power
that backs it up. As long as constituent power remains caught in the paradox of sovereignty and the constituted order
produces bare life as the limit condition of an exception that has become the rule, there can be no hope of questioning the
transcendentalism of sovereign power or imagining a form of political conduct that remains free of the impositions of the
modern state. Thus it is the concept of bare life that becomes the primary object of Negris critique of Agambens
understanding of sovereignty. This much is clear in Empire, where Negri and his co-author Michael Hardt distance
themselves from the notion of bare life. Like Agamben, Hardt and Negri take as a point of departure the Foucauldian
account of biopolitics as a system of rule that emerges at the beginning of the modern era with the exercise of power over
life itself. Importantly, however, they extend Foucaults argument by drawing on Gilles Deleuzes Postscript on the
Society of Control. Foucault describes the modern system of disciplinary rule that fixes individuals within institutions
(hospitals, schools, prisons, factories, and so on) but does not succeed in consuming them completely in the rhythm of
productive practices or productive socialization. By contrast, Hardt and Negri trace the emergence of a new mode of power
that is expressed as a control that extends throughout the consciousness and bodies of the populationand at the same
time across the entirety of social relations.9 In so doing, they combine the Deleuzian emphasis on free-floating and mobile
logics of control (data banking, risk management, electronic tagging, and so on) with an attention to the productive
dimension of biopower (living labour) derived from the work of exponents of Italian operaismo like Paolo Virno and
Christian Marazzi. While Hardt and Negri question the tendency of these thinkers to understand all contemporary forms of
production on the horizon of communication and language, they are clearly indebted to their notions of immaterial labour
and general intellect (which in turn derive from a reading of the famous Fragment on Machines from Marxs
Grundrisse). It is this emphasis on the productive aspect of biopower that places Hardt and Negri at odds with Agamben on
bare lifea concept that, for them, excludes the question of labour from the field of theoretical observation. Thus, in a
footnote, they comment critically on a line of Benjamin-inspired interpretations of Foucault (from Derridas Force of
Law to Homo Sacer itself): It seems fundamental to us, however, that all of these discussions be brought back to the
question of the productive dimension of the bios, identifying in other words the materialist dimension of the concept
beyond any conception that is purely naturalistic (life as zo) or simply anthropological (as Agamben in particular has a
tendency to do, making the concept in effect indifferent).10 With this identification of what Agamben calls indistinction as
indifference (indifference to productive power of cooperation between human minds and bodies), Hardt and Negri voice
their most severe reservations about the concept of bare life. For them, Agambens philosophical specification of the
negative limit of humanity displays behind the political abysses that modern totalitarianism has constructed the (more or
less heroic) conditions of human passivity.11 The apparatus of the sovereign ban condemns humanity to inactivity and
despair. By contrast, Hardt and Negri claim that bare life must be raised up to the dignity of productive power. Rather than
reducing humanity to mere living matter, the exceptional power of the modern state becomes effective at precisely the
moment when social cooperation is seen no longer the result of the investment of capital but an autonomous power, the a
priori of every act of production.12 Try as it may to relegate humanity to minimal naked life (or zo), the modern
constituted order cannot destroy the enormous creativity of living labour or expunge its powers of cooperative production.
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The alternative will inevitably fail Agamben does not provide a coherent and positive political vision that is
necessary to solve.
Negri and Casarino, 4 Italian Moral and Political Philosopher and Associate Professor Of Cultural Studies And
Comparative Literature At The University Of Minnesota
(Antonio and Cesare, "Its a Powerful Life: A Conversation on Contemporary Philosophy," Cultural Critique, No. 57,
Spring, Project Muse)
AN: I am not really sure. Giorgio has always tried to show how juridical categories as well as the juridical as a category
cannot be raised or made to answer to coherent metaphysical criteria. His critique, in other words, is a purely negative
critique: what I mean by this is not that he criticizes the substance of what I say about constituent power; what I mean,
rather, is that he does not want to solve this problem, that he believes it is not even advisable to look for a solution to this
problem at all. In the end, I find this type of critique to be rather banal.
CC: Could you be more specific?
AN: Giorgio's main critique of my positions consists of arguing that constituent power and constituted power cannot be
distinguished from each other according to any juridical-political criterion. Well, thank you very much! That's entirely
obviousand, in fact, my analysis of constituent power begins precisely from this problem. All jurists argue that
constituent power does not exist unless it is codified, that it ruptures the juridical system and its continuity, that it cannot
come into being unless it has been recognized and validated by constituted power. According to such arguments, therefore,
constituent power paradoxically can take two forms at once: on the one hand, it lives outside the Law, and, on the other
hand, it lives inside the Law, that is, in the form of the Supreme Court's power to innovate the legal system [ordinamento
giuridico].
CC: And in the latter case constituent power is already part and parcel of sovereign power. So, if I understand you correctly,
you are suggesting that this problemnamely, the problem of ascertaining, defining, and containing the existence of
constituent poweris not at all constituent power's problem; it is, rather, a problem for constituted power.
AN: Yes, precisely! Constituent power does not need to ask itself whether or not it exists: it does exist, and it leads a
parallel life with respect to constituted power. The enormous social phenomena that are in the process of determining
themselves now-adayssuch as the antiglobal movementsbear witness not only [End Page 177] to the fact that
constituent power exists but also to the fact that constituent power makes its influence felt on constituted power: these
movements, in fact, express extremely powerful juridical as well as political aspirations that inevitably affect the legal
system and that hence will end up having to be acknowledged in some way or other. These new movements, in other words,
always contain a constituent function. Such a reply to his critique, however, is completely beside the point, because it does
not address what is most problematic about his critique in the first place. Giorgio's most serious problem ultimately is that
he does not allow for any kind of constitution of the political whatsoever. And this is why his critique remains external to
my arguments, foreign to my way of reasoning: more than a critique, it constitutes an opposition, a counterpoint.
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The alt doesnt solve Agamben does not take into account the whole society and the global world in which the
camp is created
Mesnard, 4 Associate Professor of Sociology and Literature at the Haute Ecole de Bruxelles
(Philippe, "The Political Philosophy of Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Evaluation," Translated from the French by Cyrille
Guiat, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Volume 5, Number 1, Summer, All Academic Search Elite)
This deliberate lack of an historical outlook 33 is the source of other errata and misinterpretations by Agamben. For
instance, his interpretation of politics in terms of all or nothing stems from a specific period characterised by the unrivalled
rule of a state of terror, which has become the sole articulation between the law and the norm. It is a period in which the law
is no more than its own ideological falsification (the rule of racial laws and criminalisation), and the norm has assumed the
caricatured appearance of the law. The repressive Nazi regime, built upon the SS apparatus, strengthened by its
administrative and legal institutions and cemented by an overwhelming propaganda machine, steered German society
through a radical period which was exacerbated by the war and the total war. Exceptional procedures were widespread
throughout the Reich, but no one even tried to pretend that these were the norm.34 By striving to locate in the camp what
he calls the very paradigm of political space, Agamben erects an insurmountable frontier around concentration camps
which become, in fact, isolated from their surrounding society, and turns them into an exclusive outside. Consequently,
Agamben fails to envisage the global system which surrounded the camps, and included numerous social and economic
interfaces present on the entire territory of the Third Reich. Agambens attempt to locate a paradigm in the camp is
seriously flawed, because any paradigm must be conceived and constructed from the viewpoint of a whole society. In an
echo to a remark made by Martin Broszat to Saul Friedlnder, even Auschwitz cannot account for the vast apparatus,
established on a European level, which gave birth to the concentration and extermination systems. Agambens vision of the
camp as an absolute space is also flawed: camps were in fact the sordid, random conjunction of selective, unrivalled power
and absolute relativity.
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AFF STATE OF EXCEPTION TURN

Not everyone is bound to the state of exception Agambens characterization of bare life makes it inevitable.
AN: I believe Giorgio is writing a sequel to Homo Sacer, and I feel that this new work will be resolutive for his thoughtin
the sense that he will be forced in it to resolve and find a way out of the ambiguity that has qualified his understanding of
naked life so far. He already attempted something of the sort in his recent book on Saint Paul, but I think this attempt
largely failed: as usual, this book is extremely learned and elegant; it remains, however, somewhat trapped within Pauline
exegesis, rather than constituting a full-fledged attempt to reconstruct naked life as a potentiality for exodus, to rethink
naked life fundamentally in terms of exodus. I believe that the concept of naked life is not an impossible, unfeasible one. I
believe it is possible to push the image of power to the point at which a defenseless human being [un povero Cristo] is
crushed, to conceive of that extreme point at which power tries to [End Page 173] eliminate that ultimate resistance that is
the sheer attempt to keep oneself alive. From a logical standpoint, it is possible to think all this: the naked bodies of the
people in the camps, for example, can lead one precisely in this direction. But this is also the point at which this concept
turns into ideology: to conceive of the relation between power and life in such a way actually ends up bolstering and
reinforcing ideology. Agamben, in effect, is saying that such is the nature of power: in the final instance, power reduces
each and every human being to such a state of powerlessness. But this is absolutely not true! On the contrary: the historical
process takes place and is produced thanks to a continuous constitution and construction, which undoubtedly confronts the
limit over and over againbut this is an extraordinarily rich limit, in which desires expand, and in which life becomes
increasingly fuller. Of course it is possible to conceive of the limit as absolute pow-erlessness, especially when it has been
actually enacted and enforced in such a way so many times. And yet, isn't such a conception of the limit precisely what the
limit looks like from the standpoint of constituted power as well as from the standpoint of those who have already been
totally annihilated by such a powerwhich is, of course, one and the same standpoint? Isn't this the story about power that
power itself would like us to believe in and reiterate? Isn't it far more politically useful to conceive of this limit from the
standpoint of those who are not yet or not completely crushed by power, from the standpoint of those still struggling to
overcome such a limit, from the standpoint of the process of constitution, from the standpoint of power [potenza]? I am
worried about the fact that the concept of naked life as it is conceived by Agamben might be taken up by political
movements and in political debates: I find this prospect quite troubling, which is why I felt the need to attack this concept
in my recent essay. Ultimately, I feel that nowadays the logic of traditional eugenics is attempting to saturate and capture
the whole of human realityeven at the level of its materiality, that is, through genetic engineeringand the ultimate result
of such a process of saturation and capture is a capsized production of subjectivity within which ideological undercurrents
continuously try to subtract or neutralize our resistance.
CC: And I suppose you are suggesting that the concept of naked life is part and parcel of such undercurrents. But have you
discussed all this with Agamben? What does he think about your critiques?
AN: Whenever I tell him what I have just finished telling you, he gets quite irritated, even angry. I still maintain,
nonetheless, that the conclusions he draws in Homo Sacer lead to dangerous political outcomes and that the burden of
finding a way out of this mess rests entirely on him. And the type of problems he runs into in this book recur throughout
many of his other works. I found his essay on Bartleby, for example, absolutely infuriating. This essay was published
originally as a little book that also contained Deleuze's essay on Bartleby: well, it turns out that what Deleuze says in his
essay is exactly the contrary of what Giorgio says in his! I suppose one could say that they decided to publish their essays
together precisely so as to attempt to figure this limit that is, to find a figure for it, to give it a formby some sort of
paradoxical juxtaposition, but I don't think that this attempt was really successful in the end. In any case, all this incessant
talk about the limit bores me and tires me out after a little while. The point is that, inasmuch as it is death, the limit is not
creative. The limit is creative to the extent to which you have been able to overcome it qua death: the limit is creative
because you have overcome death.
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Agambens description of the state of exception leaves no potential for change.

Amoore, 6 Professor of Geography at the University of Durham
(Louise, Homeland Security/Borderland Insecurity: Contesting Border Governance in Everyday Life, International
Studies Association, March 22nd, http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p99812_index.html)
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The second intervention I wish to make in this paper concerns the tightly drawn finality that Agamben brings to the
intersection of biopolitics and culture. As William Connolly suggests, Agamben encloses political culture within a tight
logic such that nowhere in the book is a way out actually proposed (2005: 137). Connolly calls up a world of
ambiguities and ambivalences that are more littered, layered and complex than Agamben allows. If you loosen
Agambens logic of paradox without eliminating it altogether, he writes, you express more appreciation for the
materialization of culture and locate more space to manoeuvre within the paradoxes he delineates (p.140). For Connolly,
within the state of exception there is a perpetual and contingent interplay between the authorities that decide the
exception and the plural cultural forces that insert themselves irresistibly into the outcome (p.141). Governing via,
through and against ways of life, then, is a significant feature of contemporary micropolitics. But the outcome is not
entirely, perhaps even not partially, knowable there are spaces within the state of exception precisely because it is
declared, sustained and contested by multiple forces. The state of exception deploys a singular way of life as its means of
rescuing civil political life from bare life, but as it does so it confronts plural ways of life in the sense intended by
Raymond Williams, as a lived culture that is always in part unknown, in part unrealized (1962: 320). Agambens
explanation of the state of exception is too ambiguous this makes it impossible to identify the difference between
democracy and totalitarianism
Babias, 7 Director of the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein
(Marius, Zones of Indiferrence, Eurozine, http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-11-15-babias-en.html)
As fundamental the arguments and as well read the historical analyses may be (even if he uncritically follows on the work
of Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, whose affinity to National Socialism is obvious), Agambens comments on the
political consequences to be drawn are unclear. If just and unjust derive from the same state sovereignty, then ultimately it
becomes equally impossible to distinguish between democracy and dictatorship. Precisely because of this justified criticism
of Agambens Homo sacer, his State of Exception has been eagerly awaited, as it was hoped it would provide clear answers
rather than apocalyptic prophecy. However, State of Exception too is ambiguous and polarising in its core statements and
only of limited use for everyday political use; although the slim volume does contain a justification based on the philosophy
of law for the suspension of the legal system in order to retain order, from antiquity to the present, once again the authors
attitude towards the object under discussion is ambiguous. As he had already done in Homo Sacer, Agamben locates the
origin of the state of exception which was originally intended to suspend the law only briefly and then return to the old
order once the crisis had been successfully normalised in the camp. Agambens basic thesis is that the state of
exception is proving increasingly to be the dominant paradigm of government. In State of Exception Agamben refrains
from any commentary on the politics of our time, but in newspaper articles and interviews he leaves no doubt whom he sees
as todays primary champion of the state of exception: the United States and the security policies of the Pax Americana.
Shock and rejection were reserved in particular for his comparison between Nazi concentration camps and the American
base at Guantnamo Bay in Cuba, where alleged Islamic terrorists are held in a provisional arrangement outside of the law:
The situation of the prisoners in Guantnamo is indeed, from a legal point of view, comparable to that of the Nazi camps.
The detainees of Guantnamo do not have the status of prisoners of war; they no longer have any legal status. They are
subject only to a de facto rule; they have no legal existence. This analogy clearly shows where Agambens generalisations
and abstractions can lead: reducing Auschwitz to a metaphor, blurring the difference between perpetrators and victims, but
also denying the worsening relationship of oppression and exploitation between rich and poor, between north and south.
Despite all the contradictions and ambiguities for example, the philosopher Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky accuses him of
having taken over anti-Semitic polemical concepts from Carl Schmitts theory of sovereignty Agamben struck a sore
point; after the attacks in New York and Madrid his concept of the state of exception makes it possible to understand
politically how authoritarian forms of government that suspend law can be institutionalised over the long term,
undermining democratic legal principles and oppressing life itself.
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Agamben over simplifies the relationship between sovereignty and subjectivity this destroys any possibility for real
world change
Vaughn-Williams, 7 Professor of International Politics at the University of Wales
(Nick, The Generalised Border: Re-Conceptualising the Limits of Sovereign Power, International Studies Associations,
Although Butler, is highly indebted to Agamben, she argues that this universality exposes an area of weakness in his
understanding of subjectivity. Butlers chief criticism of Agamben is that the claim we are all (virtually) homines sacri67
does not tell us how power functions differentially among populations.68 Focusing on issues of race and ethnicity Butler
argues that the generality of Agambens claim fails to appreciate the ways in which the systematic management and
derealization of populations function to support and extend the claims of a sovereignty accountable to no law.69 For Butler
certain populations are more likely to be produced as bare life than others. Although security warnings issued to citizens do
not involve racial profiling Butler suggests that the creation of an objectless panic all too often translates [] into
suspicion of all dark-skinned peoples, especially those who are Arab, or appear to look so to a population not always versed
in making visual distinctions.70 As such Butlers criticism presses Agambens thesis on its tendency to generalise and
over-simplify the relationship between sovereignty and subjectivity: a charge that other critics such as William Connolly
have also recently made. Connolly advances similar critiques of Agambens account of the logic of sovereignty.71
Connollys main objections are twofold. First, according to Connolly, Agamben assumes that there was once a separation
between zo and bios: what a joke [] [e]very way of life involves the infusion of norms, judgements, and standards into
the affective life of participants at both private and public levels.72 Hence, whilst Connolly accepts the way in which new
technologies of infusion have intensified biopolitical life, he maintains that the shift is not as radical as Agamben makes
it out to be.73 Second, Agambens answer to the problem of sovereignty is to transcend it altogether. For Connolly,
Agambens approach to the problem of sovereignty is incommensurable with that problem: biocultural life exceeds any
textbook logic because of the non-logical character of its materiality [] [it] is more messy, layered, and complex than any
logical analysis can capture. On this basis Connolly arrives at the damning conclusion that Agamben displays the hubris
of academic intellectualism when he encloses political culture within a tightly defined logic.75
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AFF ALT CAUSES POWERLESSNESS

Agambens critique results in a devastating form of powerlessness that prevents bottom-up resistance to oppression.
Hardt and Dumm, 00 Professor in the Literature Program and Romance Studies Department at Duke University,
Professor at Amherst College
(Michael and Thomas, "Sovereignty, Multitudes, Absolute Democracy: A Discussion between Michael Hardt and Thomas
Dumm about Hardt and Negri's Empire, Harvard University Press, 2000, Theory & Event, Volume 4, Issue 3, Project
Muse)
MH: Our argument in Empire does share some central concerns with Agamben's Homo Sacer, particularly surrounding the
notions of sovereignty and biopower. Agamben brilliantly elaborates a conception of modern sovereignty based on Carl
Schmitt's notions of the decision on the exception and the state of emergency, in which the modern functioning of rule
becomes a permanent state of exception. He then links this conception to the figure of the banned or excluded person back
as far as ancient Roman law with his usual spectacular erudition. The pinnacle and full realization of modern sovereignty
thus becomes the Nazi concentration camp: the zone of exclusion and exception is the heart of modern sovereignty and
grounds the rule of law. My hesitation with this view is that by posing the extreme case of the concentration camp as the
heart of sovereignty it tends to obscure the daily violence of modern sovereignty in all its forms. It implies, in other words,
that if we could do away with the camp then all the violence of sovereignty would also disappear.
The most significant difference between our projects, though, is that Agamben dwells on modern sovereignty whereas we
claim that modern sovereignty has now come to an end and transformed into a new kind of sovereignty, what we call
imperial sovereignty. Imperial sovereignty has nothing to do with the concentration camp. It no longer takes the form of a
dialectic between Self and Other and does not function through any such absolute exclusion, but rules rather through
mechanisms of differential inclusion, making hierarchies of hybrid identities. This description may not immediately give
you the same sense of horror that you get from Auschwitz and the Nazi Lager, but imperial sovereignty is certainly just as
brutal as modern sovereignty was, and it has its own subtle and not so subtle horrors.
But still none of that addresses the passivity you refer to. For that we have to look instead at Agamben's notions of life and
biopower. Agamben uses the term "naked life" to name that limit of humanity, the bare minimum of existence that is
exposed in the concentration camp. In the final analysis, he explains, modern sovereignty rules over naked life and
biopower is this power to rule over life itself. What results from this analysis is not so much passivity, I would say, but
powerlessness. There is no figure that can challenge and contest sovereignty. Our critique of Agamben's (and also
Foucault's) notion of biopower is that it is conceived only from above and we attempt to formulate instead a notion of
biopower from below, that is, a power by which the multitude itself rules over life. (In this sense, the notion of biopower
one finds in some veins of ecofeminism such as the work of Vandana Shiva, although cast on a very different register, is
closer to our notion of a biopower from below.) What we are interested in finally is a new biopolitics that reveals the
struggles over forms of life.
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AFF RIGHTS DISCOURSE GOOD

The rejection of rights is a strategic loss for present political struggles Agambens totalizing form of critical theory
increases oppression.
Deranty, 4 Associate Lecturer in Philosophy at Macquarie University (Australia)
(Jean-Philippe, Agambens challenge to normative theories of modern rights, borderlands e-journal, Volume 3, Number
1, http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm)
11. In the case of empirical examples, the erasure of difference between phenomena seems particularly counter-intuitive in
the case of dissimilar modes of internment. From a practical point of view, it seems counter-productive to claim that there is
no substantial difference between archaic communities and modern communities provided with the language of rights,
between the lawlessness of war times and democratic discourse. There must be a way of problematising the ideological
mantra of Western freedom, of modernitys moral superiority, that does not simply equate it with Nazi propaganda (Ogilvie
2001). Habermas and Honneth probably have a point when they highlight the advances made by modernity in the
entrenchment of rights. If the ethical task is that of testimony, then our testimony should go also to all the individual lives
that were freed from alienation by the establishment of legal barriers against arbitrariness and exclusion. We should heed
Honneths reminder that struggles for social and political emancipation have often privileged the language of rights over
any other discourse (Fraser, Honneth 2003). To reject the language of human rights altogether could be a costly gesture in
understanding past political struggles in their relevance for future ones, and a serious strategic, political loss for
accompanying present struggles. We want to criticise the ideology of human rights, but not at the cost of renouncing the
resources that rights provide. Otherwise, critical theory would be in the odd position of casting aspersions upon the very
people it purports to speak for, and of depriving itself of a major weapon in the struggle against oppression.
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The struggle for equality through rights is vital we should rethink rights without undermining political struggles
Deranty, 4 Associate Lecturer in Philosophy at Macquarie University (Australia)
(Jean-Philippe, Agambens challenge to normative theories of modern rights, borderlands e-journal, Volume 3, Number
1, http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm)
47. If, with Rancire, we define politics not through the institution of sovereignty, but as a continual struggle for the
recognition of basic equality, and thereby strongly distinguish politics from the police order viewed as the functional
management of communities (Rancire 1999), then it is possible to acknowledge the normative break introduced by the
democratic revolutions of the modern age without falling into a one-sided view of modernity as a neat process of
rationalisation. What should be stressed about modernity is not primarily the list of substantive inalienable and
imprescriptible human rights, but the equal entitlement of all to claim any rights at all. This definition of politics must be
accompanied by the parallel acknowledgment that the times that saw the recognition of the fundamental equality of all also
produced the total negation of this principle. But this parallel claim does not necessarily render the first invalid. Rather it
points to a tension inherent in modern communities, between the political demands of equality and the systemic tendencies
that structurally produce stigmatisation and exclusion.
48. One can acknowledge the descriptive appeal of the biopower hypothesis without renouncing the antagonistic definition
of politics. As Rancire remarks, Foucaults late hypothesis is more about power than it is about politics (Rancire 2002).
This is quite clear in the 1976 lectures (Society must be defended) where the term that is mostly used is that of "biopower".
As Rancire suggests, when the "biopower" hypothesis is transformed into a "biopolitical" thesis, the very possibility of
politics becomes problematic. There is a way of articulating modern disciplinary power and the imperative of politics that is
not disjunctive. The power that subjects and excludes socially can also empower politically simply because the exclusion is
already a form of address which unwittingly provides implicit recognition. Power includes by excluding, but in a way that
might be different from a ban. This insight is precisely the one that Foucault was developing in his last writings, in his
definition of freedom as "agonism" (Foucault 1983: 208-228): "Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar
as they are free" (221). The hierarchical, exclusionary essence of social structures demands as a condition of its possibility
an equivalent implicit recognition of all, even in the mode of exclusion. It is on the basis of this recognition that politics can
sometimes arise as the vindication of equality and the challenge to exclusion.
49. This proposal rests on a logic that challenges Agambens reduction of the overcoming of the classical conceptualisation of potentiality and actuality to
the single Heideggerian alternative. Instead of collapsing or dualistically separating potentiality and actuality, one would find in Hegels modal logic a way
to articulate their negative, or reflexive, unity, in the notion of contingency. Contingency is precisely the potential as existing, a potential that exists yet
does not exclude the possibility of its opposite (Hegel 1969: 541-554). Hegel can lead the way towards an ontology of contingency that recognises the
place of contingency at the core of necessity, instead of opposing them. The fact that the impossible became real vindicates Hegels claim that the
impossible should not be opposed to the actual. Instead, the possible and the impossible are only reflected images of each other and, as actual, are both
simply the contingent. Auschwitz should not be called absolute necessity (Agamben 1999a: 148), but absolute contingency. The
absolute historical necessity of Auschwitz is not "the radical negation" of contingency, which, if true, would indeed
necessitate a flight out of history to conjure up its threat. Its absolute necessity in fact harbours an indelible core of
contingency, the locus where political intervention could have changed things, where politics can happen. Zygmunt
Baumans theory of modernity and his theory about the place and relevance of the Holocaust in modernity have given
sociological and contemporary relevance to this alternative historical-political logic of contingency (Bauman 1989).
50. In the social and historical fields, politics is only the name of the contingency that strikes at the heart of systemic
necessity. An ontology of contingency provides the model with which to think together both the possibility, and the
possibility of the repetition of, catastrophe, as the one heritage of modernity, and the contingency of catastrophe as logically
entailing the possibility of its opposite. Modernity is ambiguous because it provides the normative resources to combat the
apparent necessity of possible systemic catastrophes. Politics is the name of the struggle drawing on those resources.
51. This ontology enables us also to rethink the relationship of modern subjects to rights. Modern subjects are able to
consider themselves autonomous subjects because legal recognition signals to them that they are recognised as full
members of the community, endowed with the full capacity to judge. This account of rights in modernity is precious
because it provides an adequate framework to understand real political struggles, as fights for rights. We can see now how
this account needs to be complemented by the notion of contingency that undermines the apparent necessity of the progress
of modernity. Modern subjects know that their rights are granted only contingently, that the possibility of the impossible is
always actual. This is why rights should not be taken for granted. But this does not imply that they should be rejected as
illusion, on the grounds that they were disclosed as contingent in the horrors of the 20th century. Instead, their contingency
should be the reason for constant political vigilance.
52. By questioning the rejection of modern rights, one is undoubtedly unfaithful to the letter of Benjamin. Yet, if one
accepts that one of the great weaknesses of the Marxist philosophy of revolution was its inability to constructively engage
with the question of rights and the State, then it might be the case that the politics that define themselves as the articulation
of demands born in the struggles against injustice are better able to bear witness to the "tradition of the oppressed" than
their messianic counterparts.
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The critique undermines political responsibility Agamben ignores the intersubjective nature of ethics
Mills, 3 Lectuurer in philosophy at the Australian National University
(Catherine, "Review Essay: An Ethics of Bare Life: Agamben on Witnessing," borderlands e-journal, Volume 2, Number 1,
http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol2no1_2003/mills_agamben.html)
21. As provocative as this formulation is, the figure of apostrophe also helps bring into focus several important silences
within Agamben's text. First, given the centrality of the rhetorical figure of apostrophe in Agamben's ethics, there does seem
to be a sense in which Agamben overemphasizes the theoretical need to move away from the terms of responsibility in his
selective etymology of the term, since apostrophe brings out the sense of responsibility as response that subtends
Agamben's argument. While Agamben bases his rejection of the term of responsibility on its juridical origins in the Latin
root of 'spondeo', he neglects that responsibility can also be traced to the term 'responso', meaning to give an answer, to
reply or respond to another (Oxford English Dictionary; Oxford Latin Dictionary).
22. This alternative etymology of responsibility as a kind of capacity for response is of course central to the Levinasian
precedent of Derrida's formulation of an ethics of hospitality. It is also given articulation in Kelly Oliver's recent account of
an ethics of witnessing (2001), in which she strives to overcome the perceived problems of recognition-based theories of
subject-formation such as those of Axel Honneth and Judith Butler. Oliver argues that 'response-ability' must be central to
an account of witnessing, as it brings to light the fundamental dependence of the subject on the dynamic of address and
response entailed in bearing witness for its own emergence and survival. In this light, the ethical confrontation with legally
delimited concepts of responsibility that Agamben suggests also seems to require a conception of response, which in turn
presupposes a prior capacity for response.
23. The alternative sense of responsibility suggested here also highlights Agamben's theoretical neglect of the
intersubjective foundation of ethics, or the sense in which ethics always entails 'being-with' others (Nancy, 1991). Oliver
also makes a similar point in her account of witnessing, where she claims that the problems of testimony and bearing
witness are central to subjectivity. For Oliver, the dependency of the subject on the possibilities of address and response
means that witnessing appears as the dilemma at the heart of the subject. The dynamic of address and response in testimony
means that the subject is necessarily in relation with others, a condition that indicates that subjectivity itself entails a
fundamental responsibility to and for others (Oliver, 2001: 88-91). Similarly, in Agamben's account, the taking place of
enunciation can itself be seen as always a matter of 'being-with' others, insofar as grammatical shifters do not simply
indicate the double movement of subjectification and desubjectification, but also indicate the position of the subject in
relation to others. That is, the living being's entering into language through the designation of pronouns does not simply
indicate the position of the individual vis--vis language, but also necessarily indicates the position of the individual in
relation to other living and speaking beings. Pronouns such as 'I', 'you' and 'we' necessarily position the speaking subject in
relation with those being addressed or discussed (cf. Irigarary, 1993).
24. Furthermore, the figuration of apostrophe as a call to ethical 'non-responsibility' raises questions of historical
responsibility and representation that are not sufficiently addressed by Agamben. Agamben claims at one point that 'a mute
apostrophe [is] flying through time to reach us, to bear witness' to those who died in the camps. This suggests that the
affective force of apostrophe is not lessened by time and reaches us unmediated by the successive transmissions of
testimony and historical record. But it is unclear that that is the case, particularly given the aporia of testimony that
structures Agamben's argument: the true witnesses are not the survivors, but the remnants, those who exist between the
drowned and the saved. There are thus questions of representation that must be taken up, since testimony appears to be selfreinforcing insofar as an ethics of witnessing presupposes a witness and a prior testimony through which that apostrophe
might be borne. Further, questions of historical responsibility begin to emerge, for what hold does that apostrophe have on
us today? What does it call for and to whom does it call? These questions seems to be redoubled if Agamben's apparent
rejection of the sense of responsibility as response is taken at face value, for here, what is the force of apostrophe if not a
call for response? Given these silences within Agamben's argument, it appears that his text ultimately betrays that which he
is attempting to establish: the unassumable yet unavoidable responsibility of ethics.
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Agamben conceives bare life as a negative limit of biopolitics instead we should identify it as a productive element
CC: I would like to return to the question of biopoliticsbut this time as a way to begin investigating the uncanny
similarities as well as the crucial differences between your work and the work of Giorgio Agamben. On the one hand, the
two of you share several specific concernssuch as, for example, the question of biopolitics. And in more general and
fundamental terms, you seem to share in an attempt to produce a philosophy of immanence centered around an ontology of
potentiality. On the other hand, the two of you think about these common concerns and articulate such a shared project in
strikingly different ways. Unlike Agamben, for example, you always emphasize the question of production, of the
productivity of being. Such an emphasis leads you to critique Agamben's articulation of biopolitics and especially his
concept of naked life: in Empire, you and Michael argue that Agamben turns naked life into the negative limit of
biopolitics, whereas you would rather conceive of it as the productive element par excellence in biopolitics. Agamben, for
his part, critiques your concept of constituent power in Homo Sacer.
AN: Agamben is one my best friends, one of my most intimate friends. I have known him for roughly two decades: we
often spend summer vacations together; we get together for Christmas every year; we are basically family. In short, we love
each other very much. I am older than he is. And, unlike myself, he was never involved in political struggles, for which he
has an incredibly voracious curiosity, as they constitute a great lack in his lifeand he very much regrets not having had
such experiences. He is quite limited when it comes to understanding politicsand in his work this limitation takes the
form of a radical Heideggerism. He is absolutely convinced that the human is a being-for-death. Such a conception of the
human lends a paradoxical rhythm to his research, which is then founded on the idea that the world is continuously and
miraculously reborn precisely at the limit of life, namely, on that threshold which is death. In a sense, one can already find
such arguments in Rosenzweig or in Benjamin. In Agamben, however, this problematic gets terribly complicated, [End
Page 171] because all in all he is also very much a materialist. Unlike Rosenzweig, Agamben has no interest in the problem
of the individual. Unlike Benjamin, Agamben has no interest in the ambiguous relation between truth and eschatology. In
the end, the questions he poses are historical questions concerning the nature of institutions: in his work, the fundamental
questions have always been political questions. My polemics with Giorgio always have had to do with this tension in his
thought: this is a tension precisely in the sense that he tends and stretches towards the extreme limit of being so as to extract
from it some kind of new and purified language. Much like him, I, too, believe it is extremely important to analyze such a
limit. As I was suggesting earlier, it's not a question of pitting the power [potenza] of life and the power [potenza] of the
nothing against each other, as if in some sort of Manichean agon; rather, it's a question of capturing the relation between
these powers [potenze]intended as the relation between life and its real limitsin each singular nexus. If one looks at it
from a subjective standpoint, such a relation becomes also our relation to deatha relation that is lived in each and every
instant, since we can never be sure we shall live to the next instant. But it's one thing to give this limit the name of "death"
and to believe that things signify only thanks to their contact with it, and it's something quite different to focus not on this
limit but on our power [potenza] continuously to overcome it and to believe, in other words, that such a power [potenza]
produces the world thanks not to its contact with such a limit but to its capacity to expand each and every time beyond it, to
its ability to leave it behind over and over again. I am very often in agreement with Giorgio. But it's as if we looked at the
same things from two different standpoints: we posit and engage with the same grand metaphysical-ontological schema
but he apprehends it from one side while I do so from the other side.
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AFF VICTIMIZATION TURN

Agambens identification of himself and ourselves with the camps survivors conflates literal and metaphorical
survival and denies victims the uniqueness of their subject-positions and the horrors they experienced. Agambens
application of the camp as an ethical paradigm conflates victim with perpetrator and creates an environment of
infinite victimhood.
Sanyal, 2 Associate Professor in the Department of French at the University of California-Berkeley
(Debarati, A Soccer Match in Auschwitz: Passing Culpability in Holocaust Criticism, Representations, Volume 79,
Number 1, Summer, JSTOR)
Agamben's claim for the continuing relevance of Levi's gray zone transforms the aberrant event of a soccer match played in
Auschwitz-and the complex web of complicity between victims and executioners such a game reveals-into the allegory for
a recurrent, unlocatable and transhistorical violence, one contaminating the civilian world of even a liberal democracy and
its daily rituals and spectacles. The analogy drawn between the soccer match in Auschwitz and its ongoing rehearsal in
stadiums and television broadcasts is at once compelling and perplexing, for it seems to conflate several incommensurate
and undefined forms of violence. Perhaps the spectacles of everyday life distracting us from the "massacres" that surround
us may be seen as replicating the horrifying production of normalcy at the gates of the crematoria. Yet such a transhistorical
deployment of the soccer match as figure suggests that the extreme, eliminationist violence masked by a game in Auschwitz
is fundamentally the same as the violences masked by contemporary mass culture. It is also unclear whether the ambitious
metaphor of the soccer match designates our distraction from or our participation in the massacres repeated "not far away
from us." Indeed, Agamben obscurely suggests that "the true horror of the camps" is woven into the very normalcy of daily
sociopolitical life, a nameless violence circulating between specator and spectacle, consumer and product, like the shifting
dynamic between victim and executioner staged in the soccer match. The collective "we" interpellated by Agamben are
cast as baffled and complicit witnesses to, if not consumers of, sanctioned maskings of a violence that remains a "perfect
and eternal cipher." Even more troubling than the loss of context, definition, and specificity in this allegorical treatment of
the soccer match is Agamben's conflation of literal and metaphorical survival. "We" secondary witnesses and spectators of
athletic events and television broadcasts are identified with the camps' survivors (or primary witnesses) and made to share
their anguish and shame ("hence the anguish and shame of the survivors. ... but hence also our shame").14
To imagine that our actions and beliefs may inadvertently participate-even by distraction-in the violences around us is a
seductive point. Few have articulated it with more power than Albert Camus, in his postwar novel La peste. Tarrou, one of
the characters participating in the resistance to the plague that overtakes the city, claims that we are all pestiferes, plagueridden, that each one of our daily acts and choices may end up colluding in unforeseen, hidden ways with the workings of
violence. In a similar context, Alain Resnais and Jean Cayrol's documentary, Nuit et brouillard, concludes with a powerful
interpellation, beckoning its spectators to acknowledge their past and continued implication within the ideology of
extermination deployed in the camps.15 Yet Camus, Resnais, and Cayrol legitimately appealed to historically concrete
instances of complicity between victims, perpetrators, and witnesses during the occupation and collaborationism. By
contrast, Agamben's plea that we recognize our continued implication within the indeterminate zone of ethics produced in
the extermination camps proposes an unexpectedly normative reading of the Shoah. Erasing the specific circumstances of
an event such as Nyiszli's soccer match, and the nexus of conditions that it reveals about moral life in the concentration
camp, he transforms a key moment in Levi's testimony into a "perfect and eternal cipher," an undefined and omnipresent
allegory whose players and spectators are interpellated into both complicity and victimization. The infernal conditions of
the gray zone's emergence undergo a sort of spatiotemporal erasure. What the death camps reveal, it would seem, is no less
than the human condition, one "which knows no time and is in every place."
We should reject this political move because it erases the specific historical reality produced by trauma and robs the
past of its uniqueness. In this way, Agamben privileges the replay of the trauma over the trauma itself.
At the intersection of these two claims-that history is a structure of displacement and repetition, and that history is a
structure of entanglement-lies an ethical investment in the unrepresentability of both history and subjectivity. For it is the
gap both within the event and the experiencing subject that opens up selfhood to otherness. What the experience of trauma
reveals, then, is a lack, a difference, a departure from oneself that is the condition of all subjects positing themselves as "I."
Thus, a history of trauma is not a diachronic record of events aligned along a readable narrative axis. It is a structure of
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entanglement between self and other, past and present, constituting a web of interwoven traumas resisting representation:
"we could say that the traumatic nature of history means that events are only historical to the extent that they implicate
others. 21
It is precisely the unmooring, or dislocation, of the traumatic event, that leads to its repetition and its implication of self
with other, since those who experienced trauma were in some sense never there. This is where potential problems arise in
the theorization of history as trauma. First, it situates "history within a representational crisis produced by trauma, and
presents it both as a rupture (from the past) and as a repetition. In doing so, it erases the spatiotemporal location of the past
event and potentially robs this past of its singularity and particularity. Since to approach history as trauma is to posit a
missed encounter with the reality of an experience, or history, what is valorized and invested with specificity is not the
initial occurrence of the event, but rather, its displaced and symptomatic replay in the traumatized psyche. The valorization
of displacement, repetition, and unpresentability is neatly captured in Agamben's conception of an infinitely recurring yet
unfathomable gray zone, a "perfect and eternal cipher. . . which knows no time and is in every place."
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Agambens representation of the camp creates confusion among the relations of power between the perpetrators and
the victim this causes endless violence
What we must question, then, is the impulse toward identification enabling Agamben to posit himself as survivor-witness
("I, like the witnesses, instead view this match, this moment of normalcy, as the true horror of the camp"), thereby
assimilating the positions of primary and secondary witnessing. To conflate his own stance with that of the "witness" in
this instance is particularly problematic, for it is Nyiszli, and not Primo Levi, who reports the soccer game. Further, the
ambiguities of Nyiszli's position as pathologist to Dr. Mengele's experiments make it difficult to transparently assume his
place. 16 Agamben's extension of shame, guilt, and trauma, of responses to the affective and bodily experiences occurring
in the extreme conditions of the camps to "us" and "now" disregards the irreducible particularity of the gray zone. It also
erodes the very real differences between those who inhabited that zone (the distinction, for example, between Miklos
Nyiszli and Primo Levi) as well as the multiple gaps separating "us" (readers of testimonies, spectators of a continuous
figurative soccer match) and the survivor-witnesses. 17
Beyond the problems inherent in a transhistorical treatment of shame and complicity, Agamben's radicalization of Levi's
gray zone has even more disturbing consequences for understanding the relations of power within the camps. The unstable
boundary between oppressor and oppressed in the gray zone is radicalized in Agamben's account such that the two positions
appear to be reciprocal and convertible: "It seems, in fact, that the only thing that interests him [Levi] is what makes
judgement impossible: the gray zone in which victims become executioners and executioners become victims" (Remnants,
17). 18 While Agamben nowhere suggests that perpetrators and victims truly did exchange positions, his emphasis on the
camps as sites for a potentially endless circulation of guilt nevertheless takes the convertibility of victims and executioners
as a structural given. Primo Levi, however, was at pains to emphasize that this convertibility was a politically expedient
fiction designed to erase the difference between victim and executioner by forcing Jews to participate in the murder and
cremation of their own. He also stressed the singular, unimaginable strain such a predicament must have exerted upon the
SK. To transform such a charged, ambiguous lived reality into a formal conception of convertibility has disturbing ethical
consequences. It suggests that the perpetrators, too, by virtue of occupying this zone of radical inversion and participating
in the traumatic conditions of camp life, could be perceived as victims. The fallacy of this structural reciprocity, however,
is refuted by Levi in a cautionary preface to his discussion of the Sonderkommando:
This mimesis, this identification or imitation or exchange of roles between oppressor and victim, has provoked much
discussion. ... I do not know, and it does not much interest me to know, whether in my depths there lurks a murderer, but I
do know that the murderers existed, not only in Germany, and still exist, retired or on active duty, and that to confuse them
with their victims is a moral disease or an aesthetic affectation or a sinister sign of complicity; above all, it is a precious
service rendered (intentionally or not) to the negators of truth. (Drowned, 50)
The conceptualization of the gray zone as a transhistorical and trans-subjective site of culpability, "in which victims become
executioners and executioners become victims," thus conflates the positions of Muslims, Prominents, Kapos, and SS in a
gesture that reaches beyond the concentration camp experience to include "us" in a general condition of traumatic
culpability. This blurring of subject positions leads to a vision of inescapable guilt, in which we are always already
collectively steeped in the eliminationist logic that led to the concentration camp and continue unknowingly to perpetuate
its violence. But just as this vision posts an ever-encroaching web of complicity, it also, paradoxically, proposes an
infinitely elastic notion of victimhood. If we are obscurely complicit with the logic of the soccer match, the irrealization of
violence in daily life, we are also comparably violated by the historical trauma of the camps. The generalization of
complicity and victimization not only dismantles the historical specificity of the camps and the survivors' testimonies. It
also, more disturbingly, coopts the figure of the victim as an "other" who is but an avatar of ourselves, a point I will address
in a moment.
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Agambens distinction about those individuals in state of exception lacks historical evidence and is dangerously
reversible this risks a violent transformation of roles.
Mesnard, 4 Associate Professor of Sociology and Literature at the Haute Ecole de Bruxelles
(Philippe, "The Political Philosophy of Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Evaluation," Translated from the French by Cyrille
Guiat, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Volume 5, Number 1, Summer, All Academic Search Elite)
Building on Foucaults work on biopower, Agamben splits the notion of life in two, thus making a clear distinction
between zo, the natural life of man, and bios, which refers to mans existence in a collective body. This distinction marks
yet another distortion by Agamben: whereas Foucault sees in biopower the major orientation of modern politics, the
Italian philosopher postulates that this concept is the bare essence of politics as such. Thus, according to Agamben, the
concept of biopower means that, at the political level, what is at stake is the life itself of the citizen, and not just his
existence. In other words, moving beyond the distinction between public and private spheres, political power aims to
control the deepest dimension of its subjects, the very dimension which escapes it in principle: lespace de la vie nue, situ
lorigine en marge de lorganisation politique, finit progressivement par concider avec lespace politique, o exclusion et
inclusion, extrieur et intrieur, bios et zo , droit et fait, entrent dans une zone dindiffrence irrductible. 15
The binary nature of this thought renders it dangerously reversible, because it can lead one to confuse the roles of the
couples constructed by Agamben. For example, in Ce qui reste dAuschwitz , Agamben insists on ce qui rend le jugement
impossible, cette zone grise o victimes et bourreaux changent leurs rles. 16 Further on, he writes: dominateur et
esclave se confondent irrmdiablement, 17 and lindistinction de la discipline et de la jouissance, o lespace dun
instant les deux sujets concident. Such assertions, echoing the clichs of sadomasochism, do not really hold water when
confronted with the reality of the concentration camps. It is, as we argue below, when his discourse is confronted with an
empirical reality that Agambens thought starts to become problematic to the extent that it is open to a fierce challenge. In a
sense, this raises the issue of the rhetorical value of Agambens texts. Indeed, can language express what escapes it,
especially when this rest is subtracted from language and enables man to become human? This is an interrogation shared
by both negative theology and metaphysics, a legacy which Agamben replays constantly. How can we define not the gap
itself, but what lies within the gap, this negativity which, despite its entrenchment, can be heard but escapes
comprehension? Here again, one has to acknowledge the extreme internal coherence of Agambens thought.
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The plan is key to stop discrimination motivated by xenophobia their totalizing explanation of violence and
exclusion prevents effective political engagement.
Astor, 9 PhD from the University of Michigan
Agamben's argument does, however, suffer from several shortcomings. The most serious is that it is overly teleological,
attributing essentially all atrocities committed against those at the margins of the political community to the actualization of
the logic inherent to the foundational principles of nation-states. Consequently, Agamben's ideas are not especially useful
for explaining why xenophobic sentiment and discriminatory practices crystallize during some periods and not others, or
why they target certain collectives but neglect others similarly situated economically and socially. This shortcoming results,
in part, from Agamben's overemphasis on political and legal exclusion, and his neglect of the important role of social
processes and practices in determining which populations become marked as excluded and targeted by discriminatory
policies, and when this tends to occur.
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The control over deportation by the Congress on the grounds of plenary power is the ultimate control of the body by
the sovereign
Ngai 3 - Assistant Professor of History at the University of Chicago [Mae M., The Strange Career of the Illegal Alien:
Immigration Restriction and Deportation Policy in the United States, 1921-1965, Publiched by the Univeristy of Illinois
Press for the American Society for Legal History , http://www.jstor.org/stable/3595069]
These questions had been answered with relative ease in the late nineteenth century, when illegal aliens comprised Chinese and other marginalized
persons (such as criminals, the insane, and prostitutes) who could be summarily expelled from the United States. Upholding Chinese exclusion, the
Supreme Court in the 1880s and 1890s located Congress's power to regulate immigration outside of the Constitution, in the nation's sovereignty, which
power it deemed was absolute. The Court considered this necessary to protect the nation from foreign invasion, whether from armies during wartime or
from foreign migrants during peacetime. The doctrine of plenary power privileged the nation's sovereignty absolutely over the
rights of individual persons. Thus the Court declared that aliens have no right "to be and remain in this country, except by
the license, permission, and sufferance of congress." In the era of numerical restriction, the exercise of this sovereign
power over immigrants, especially those illegally present, gave rise to complex and troubling issues.3
This essay examines the advent of mass illegal immigration and deportation policy under the Immigration Act of 1924 and
how these trends al- tered meanings of inclusion in and exclusion from the nation. It argues that numerical restriction
created a new class of persons within the national body-illegal aliens-whose inclusion in the nation was at once a social
reality and a legal impossibility. This contradiction challenged received notions of sovereignty and democracy in several ways. First, the increase
in the number of illegal entries created a new emphasis on control of the nation's contiguous land borders, which emphasis had not existed before. This
new articulation of state territoriality reconstructed national borders and national space in ways that were both highly visible and problematic. At the same
time, the notion of border control obscured the policy's unavoidable slippage into the interior.
Second, the application of the deportation laws gave rise to an opposi- tional political and legal discourse, which imagined
deserving and undeserv- ing illegal immigrants and, concomitantly, just and unjust deportations. These categories were
constructed out of modem ideas about social desirability, in particular with regard to crime and sexual morality, and values
that esteemed family preservation. Critics argued that deportation was unjust in cases where it separated families or
exacted other hardships that were out of proportion to the offense committed. As a result, during the 1930s deportation policy became
the object of legal reform to allow for administrative discretion in deportation cases. Just as restriction and deportation "made" illegal
aliens, administrative discretion "unmade" illegal aliens.
Taken together, these trends redefined the normative basis of social desirability and inclusion in the nation. That process
had an important racial dimension because the application and reform of deportation policy had disparate effects on
Europeans and Canadians, on the one hand, and Mexicans, on the other hand. But, the disparity was not simply the result of existing
racism. Rather, the processes of territorial redefinition and administrative enforcement informed divergent paths of immigrant racialization . Europeans
and Canadians tended to be disassociated from the real and imagined category of illegal alien, which facilitated their
national and racial assimilation as white American citizens. In contrast, Mexicans emerged as iconic illegal aliens. Illegal
status became constitutive of a racialized Mexican identity and of Mexicans' exclusion from the national community and
polity.
The illegal immigrant cannot be constituted without deportation-the possibility or threat of deportation, if not the fact. The
possibility derives from the actual existence of state machinery to apprehend and deport illegal aliens. The threat remains in the
temporal and spatial "lag" that exists between the act of unlawful entry and apprehension or deportation (if, in fact, the illegal alien is ever caught). The
many effects of the lag include the psychological and cultural problems associated with "passing" or "living a lie," community vulnerability and isolation,
and the use of undocumented workers as a highly exploited or reserve labor force. Examining the policy and practice of deportation
provides us not only with an understanding of how illegal immigration is constituted but also a point of entry into the
experience of illegal immigrants, which, by its nature, remains largely invisible to the mainstream of society.4
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AFF IMMIGRATION LINK TURN

The illegal alien exists in the no mans land as a human without rights plan reverses this
Ngai 3 - Assistant Professor of History at the University of Chicago [Mae M., The Strange Career of the Illegal Alien:
Immigration Restriction and Deportation Policy in the United States, 1921-1965, Publiched by the Univeristy of Illinois
Press for the American Society for Legal History , http://www.jstor.org/stable/3595069]
The illegal alien that is abstractly defined is thus something of a specter, a body stripped of individual personage, whose very presence is troubling,
wrong. Moreover, this body stripped of personage has no rights. It is no coincidence that the regime of immigration restriction emerged with World War I.
The war, by simultaneously destroying the geopolitical sta- bility of Europe and solidifying the nation-state system, also created millions of refugees and
stateless persons, as well as denationalized and denaturalized persons during the postwar period.22 Recalling Hannah Arendt, philosopher Giorgio
Agamben tells us, "In the system of the nation-state, the so-called sacred and inalienable rights of man show themselves to
lack every protection and reality at the moment in which they can no longer take the form of rights belonging to citizens of
a state." Certainly the illegal alien appears in the same historical moment and in the same juridical no-man's- land that was
created when the war loosened the links between birth and nation, human being and citizen.23
Second, the mere idea that persons without formal legal status resided in the nation engendered images of great danger. In
1925 the Immigration Service reported with some alarm that 1.4 million immigrants-20 percent of those who had entered
the country before 1921-might already be living illegally in the United States. The service conceded that these immigrants had lawfully entered the country, but because it had no record of their admission, it considered them illegal. It
warned,
(I)t is quite possible that there is an even greater number of aliens in the country whose legal presence here could not be established. No estimate could
be made as to the number of smuggled aliens who have been unlawfully introduced into the country since the quota restrictions of 1921, or of those who
may have entered under the guise of seamen. The figures presented are worthy of very serious thought, especially when it is considered that there is such
a great percentage of our population ... whose first act upon reaching our shores was to break our laws by entering in a clandestine manner-all of which
serves to emphasize the potential source of trouble, not to say men- ace, that such a situation suggests.24
Positive law thus constituted undocumented immigrants as criminals, both fulfilling and fueling nativist discourse. Once
nativism succeeded in leg- islating restriction, anti-alien animus shifted its focus to the interior of the nation and the goal of
expelling immigrants living illegally in the country. The Los Angeles Evening Express alleged that there were "several
million foreigners" in the country who had "no right to be here." Nativists like Madison Grant, recognizing that deportation was "of great
importance," also advocated alien registration "as a necessary prelude to deport on a large scale." Critics of nativism predicted that "if every man who
wears a beard and reads a foreign newspaper is to be suspected unless he can produce either an identification card or naturalization papers, we shall have
more confusion and bungling than ever." 25
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AFF CIVIC ENGAGEMENT LINK TURN

Civic engagement can undermine neoliberal ideals
Zehle 2002 Degrees in comparative literature, philosophy, and political sciences
(Soenke Civil Society as a Transnational Project http://www.france.attac.org/spip.php?article2922)
The vision of a "lean" and "enabling" state along with a self-organizing dynamic of mutual support is part of what has
generally been described as "neoliberalism." In analogy to a self-regulating market, a self-organizing civil society emerges
that assumes responsibility for the majority of tasks now associated with the welfare state. Under the banner of subsidiarity,
an autonomous practice of solidarity is turned into a general social obligation, structural requirement of a self-organizing
citizenry. The "lean" state will focus primarily on issues of domestic and national security along with economic
development. New social policy projects are acceptable only in so far as they improve the attractiveness of a location - city,
state, or nation - for development and investment. The elaboration of the concept of a "civic" society is thus also a matter of
legitimating the transformation of the welfare state.
Whenever "state" and "society" are thought to be independent entities, civil society appears as neutral terrain of conflict
resolution, and its material constitution - the conditions and principles of its operation - remains obscure. According the the
philosopher Antonio Gramsci, civil society as a specifically bourgois form of self-organization serves to establish cultural
hegemony: the concept of a "civic" or civil society itself turns into a terrain of social conflict and counter-hegemonic
contestation. The question is whether the concept of a "civic" or civil society can be shifted from its neoliberal connotations
toward a more radical reappropriation of the political.
This applies to the concept of self-organization as well. Borrowed from the natural sciences, the metaphor becomes the
vehicle of a biologization of the social: self-organization becomes a "natural" mode of social being. Because its
compatibility with the imperatives of a general deterritorialization and flexibilization is rarely questioned, critics see in the
grand concept of "self-organization" little more than the fetish of an apolitical rhetoric of adaptation.
And yet, anti-neoliberalism doesn't always do justice to the general ethos of self-actualization and -organization that
influences the debate over a "civic" society. The desire for autonomy and self-determination is actually profoundly at odds
with statist traditions that reduce citizens to mere objects of bureaucratic management. There is general support for an
opening of the state through the extension of grassroots mechanisms of participation (plebiscites), the need to codify a
"freedom of information" in the sense of free access to public documents is widely recognized. The autonomy of individual
actors could be greatly enhanced through new forms of labor organization or childcare services. There is an abundance of
creative examples on what a different division of labor between state, economy, and society might look like - the political
controversy over the role the structures of civil society could play is, after all, just beginning.
Civic engagement can undermine neoliberal ideals
The national vision of the symbiosis between a self-regulating economy and a self-organizing civil society obscures the
transnational dynamic of globalization. National and international activities of civil society actors, corporations, and above
all the state have become deeply intertwined: the "lean" state, for instance, is one of the main protagonists in an accelerating
deterritorialization of the global economy. States have yet to establish effective mechanisms of regulation on the
transnational level to offset the destabilizing effects of deregulation on the national level. But the lament of a "loss of state
sovereignty" is still more common than the sober acknowledgment that states themselves are, to a large degree, responsible
for this development. In the meantime, the regulatory vacuum is being filled by others, primarily corporate institutions like
the World Trade Organization or the World Economic Forum initiated and supported by global business elites.
The question of the possible elements of a future international civil society, including mechanisms of corporate
accountability and non-military conflict resolution, might be made available to a transnational public, has moved to the
center of the controversy around neoliberal globalization. Even within the limited context of the European Union, it
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remains unclear which forms of federalism and subsidiarity might be most effective in advancing civil and human rights.
Movement activists have at least succeeded, however, in making these questions the topic of international debate.
Transnational Civil Society as Network Society
In 1998, a study published by the RAND Corporation, a think tank close to the US Department of Defense, warned that
"social net wars" might constitute an important security threat in the future, not easily understood through traditional
paradigms of national security. The analysis is based on the Mexican movement of the Zapatistas, who created international
pressure on local governments through the transnational mobilization of civil society actors. The national vision of a civil
society leaves no room for such a "trans-localism." On the contrary, the hope that increased civic activism will make up for
social services no longer provided by the state seems animated by the assumption that the immediacy of social contact is
the primary, if not exclusive source of authentic community and solidarity.
The idea of civic engagment encourages citizens to mobilize
The analysis of various forms of "self-organization" ultimately aims at a new division of labor between state, economy, and
society. The key concepts of the report suggest what such a new social order might look like: the vision of an "enabling
state" reduced to its "primary" responsibilities is central to its argument. Measures to improve the "efficiency" of public
administration are accompanied by a valorization of self-organization. Through the "openness" of its institutions, the state
facilitates self-organization in the name of "participatory justice." Add to this the commitment of corporations encouraged
to assume civic responsibilities as "corporate citizens." The principle of subsidiarity serves as main criterium of this
reordering of responsibilities: once a new "culture of the social" has been established, the state will only have to intervene
whenever the "resources" of civil society have been exhausted.
Outside of the traditional mechanisms of acculturation and social integration like churches, schools, political parties, or
labor unions, alternative forms of mobilization and organization have emerged. The vision of a "civic society" is, therefore,
trying to identify new mechanisms that might build a sense of mutuality and solidarity within an increasingly
heterogeneous citizenry. In addition to affirming the complementary principles of solidarity and subsidiarity, the report
introduces the notion of "social capital" to describe the knowledge of structures of cooperation and accountability, but also
experiences of commonality and mutuality. Both result and prerequisite of self-organization, "social capital" becomes the
most important resource of a "civic" society that can no longer count on extensive public support.
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AFF AT: HUMANITARIANISM LINK

Agamben ignores the duality between humanitarian law and human rights preventing the impacts
The political/humanitarian divide is indeed a real one, but Agamben is inaccurate when he holds (a) that humanitarian law
and human rights are essentially the same thing, and (b) that human rights are apolitical in the sense of being outside the
scope of serious political conflicts or unenforcable outside the domestic jurisdiction of states. While Agamben places civil
rights within the political realm, he simultaneously seems to attribute the acceptance of presumably apolitical human rights
not to the salience of transnational legal norms, but to the contingency of humanitarian feelings. Even Hannah Arendt
indicted in her own day the harmlessness of human rights groups and discovered "an uncanny similarity" between their
language and that of certain "societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals."[8] Today, however, we have good reasons
to reject this rigid dualism of enforcable civil rights versus merely declaratory human rights as outdated.
Agamben is certainly right to draw a broad analogy between humanitarianism and human rights law, although he skips the
important issue of how the two relate to each other. Both bodies of law share the objective of protecting individuals under
any circumstances. As Agamben seems to realize, the classic separation between the law of war and law of peace, which
limited the applicability of human rights to the latter, was gradually replaced after 1945 by legal opinions and treaties
containing clear stipulations regarding basic human rights obligations which cannot be suspended even in times of war or
other public emergencies. Thus, both Article 27 of the American Convention on Human Rights (ACHR) and Article 15 of
the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR) list a number of "nonderogable" human rights, including the rights to life and the right of belief, which are to be applied without exception in all
circumstances.[9]
However, while we may say that to some extent humanitarian law and human rights law tend to converge in their common
pursuit of protecting the "bare life" and other rights of individuals, they clearly differ in terms of implementation and
enforcement. Compared to international human rights, it is much more difficult to ensure compliance with humanitarian
law. This is even more true when lawyers and policy-makers have to deal with armed nonstate groups which are not
susceptible to the same pressures as governments and are also immune against public "shaming" by NGOs. Furthermore,
individuals have no way of requesting national courts to assess the compatibility of certain acts with international
humanitarian law or to sue countries for alleged violations. To the present, charges filed by war victims or their relatives
against individual countries have always been rejected.[10]
Humanitarianism is not a field used to strip people
The distinction between politics and humanitarianism and its corollary of neutral, impartial assistance to victims of
disasters and wars are in no way historical constants, but rather subject to considerable change. Even intellectuals close to
the Red Cross movement have identified such a distinction as itself politically grounded and hence negotiable.[46]
Agamben's premise that humanitarian action is directed towards a single and carefully demarcated field of a "bare life"
stripped of attributes is thus highly debatable. In reality, humanitarianism is not a distinct field at all, but rather a point of
view from which intricate political crises can be assessed and judged. In this sense, humanitarian organizations will
periodically engage in making sure that certain crises that are largely being interpreted as "humanitarian" are also
understood and treated as "political." Western governments, on the other hand, are inclined to judge the human suffering
produced by strategically insignificant regimes in faraway regions from a "humanitarian" point of view in order to delegate
responsibility to private or international aid agencies. While we should refrain from objectifying the political/humanitarian
divide as distinct fields of real world phenomena, we should nonetheless accept it as a methodological principle of
investigation that identifies and makes visible the human costs of otherwise legal political or military endeavors.
Agamben is not interested in such weighing of costs and benefits because he assumes from the outset that taking care of the
survival needs of people in distress is simply the reverse side of the modern inclination to ignore precisely those needs and
turn life itself into a tool and object of power politics. By way of conclusion, I will indicate briefly how his view differs
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from two other, often no less shattering critiques of modern humanitarianism. Martti Koskenniemi warned that
humanitarian demands and human rights are in danger of degenerating into "mere talk."[47] The recent crisis in Darfur,
Sudan, can be cited as an example for a situation in which the repeated invocation of human rights standards and jus cogens
norms, like those articulated in the Genocide Convention, might ultimately damage those norms themselves if states are
unwilling to act on them.[48] This criticism implies that human rights should be taken seriously and applied in a reasonable
manner.
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AFF BROADBAND LINK TURN

Human rights are necessary to counter the reactive forces of the globalization of knowledge in the context of the
internet
Nethersole 1 - Professor of English at the University of Richmond [Reingard, Modern Language Association: Models of
Globalization published by Modern Language Association, Vol 116, No 3, pp 638-649, ttp://www.jstor.org/stable/463504]
On the one hand, the commercially induced variety of cultural options dislodges places from the specificity of history and
locale in order to serve homogenizing commodification, which now extends into ageographic cyburbs of instant, morereal-than-real palaces. On the other hand, genuine cultural contrasts arising from differently evolved mentalities, different institutional histories,
and different attitudes toward genres of knowledge were opened up by the unprecedented population shifts that have created present-day multicultural
and multiethnic societies. The slave trade until the nineteenth century, demographic shifts due to war, and economic migration, in which people from
relatively disadvantaged sectors of the globe move to relatively advantaged ones, have brought previously separated customs, belief systems, traditions,
and practices into close proximity with one another, creating social and political tensions in nation-states and regions. Such tensions, as Castells notes,
have led to a widespread surge of powerful expressions of collective identity that challenge globalisation and cosmopolitanism, on behalf of cultural
singularity and people's control over their lives and environment. These expressions are multiple, highly diversified, following the
contours of each culture, and of historical sources of formation of each identity. They include proactive movements,
aiming at transforming human relationships at their most fundamental level, such as feminism and envi- ronmentalism. But
they also include a whole array of reactive movements that build trenches of resistance on behalf of God, nation, ethnicity,
family, locality, that is, the fundamental categories of millennial existence now threatened under the combined,
contradictory assault of techno-economic forces and transformative social movements. (2: 2)
The postmodern, postcolonial world today recognizes, not least because of the work of poststructuralist ethnographers like Clifford Geertz,10 the equality
of cultural practices as well as the equality of systems of representation and self-representation. Yet the countless inves- tigations into cultural
difference and how to deal with diverse cultural articulations at their interface testify to the complex issues that have
surrounded the notion of multiculturalism since [End Page 643] its emergence in Canada in the sixties. Obeying
admonitions of tolerance, recognition, and all the other behavioral niceties and politically correct applications appropriate
to multiculturalism does not encourage symmetry among cultures, a symmetry that may allow for equal exchange among them; nor do
recognition and tolerance ensure communicability among cultural practices." Rather, the ensemble of pluralities that is acknowledged
in multiculturalism requires the installation of a new universal-human rights- before incompatible cultural
paradigms can engage one another. The fervently discussed contemporary issue of human rights as an overarching
regulating principle-like all claims to cultural identity-finds itself caught, though, among three intermingled modern
discourses: that of the rights of human beings, which was born in the West during the Enlightenment; that of the dominant
culture, which is irremediably linked to the (mainly economic) interests of the wealthier nations; and that of a "savage"
difference between civilizations.
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AFF NO LINK/NO IMPACT

The liberal order that the affirmative engages in already acknowledges the paradox between the norm and exception
and doesnt link to your impacts
Here once again we are forced to question Agamben's teleological mode of thought. Is this sovereign power represented in the concentration camps really
a constitutive feature of sovereignty tout court? Even limiting ouselves to the remarks above, we can imagine a liberal critique of this
position that asks from where come the limitations that Agamben concedes previous Weimar governments had observed.
Surely, one does not have to accept in its entirety a normative liberal conception of sovereign power in order to appreciate
that the demand for a factual accounting for the decision on the exception, and institutional checks upon the totalization of
the space of exception, can nonetheless-at least in certain instances-be effective. Indeed, one could go further and
suggest that a liberal theory of sovereign power understands full well the paradoxical relation between law and fact,
norm and exception; and, precisely in light of such an understanding constructs an institutional system that cannot
resolve the paradox but nonetheless attempts to prevent it from reaching an intensified and catastrophic
conclusion. Given that Agamben is a nuanced and fair-minded thinker, one must won- der about why he largely ignores such a system. We think that
one possible answer is that, just as for Agamben the source of the problem is not the institutional operation of sovereign power, but its object-bare life-so
too the solution is not a proliferation of institutional safeguards but a rethinking of that mode of being. In this regard, we find his concluding musings on
Heidig- ger to be suggestive.
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AFF NO IMPACT
No impact the state has an obligation to prevent death the sovereignty of the state is self limited
*** this evidence has been gender modified
Yet, looking at the coercive acts performed by liberal states against homo sacer, it is evident that, even in the state of
exception, state power is not free of constraint. As Christian Joppke has argued in the context of judicial constraints on
immigration control, the sovereignty of liberal states is self-limited (1998). Most fundamentally, liberal states are bound
by the duty to preserve life. Michel Foucault captured the life-preserving quality of contemporary state regulation in the
concept of biopower which he contrasts with traditional modes of power that were based on the threat of death (1976).
Thus, even when confronted with the depoliticized life of homo sacer a life stripped of all membership rights the
sovereign is not free to act on the individuals body as he pleases. Human rights norms such as the right to life and the
prohibition of torture constrain the sovereigns scope of action over those within his [OR HER] custody. While the state
may be deprive the individual of physical freedom, it may not deprive [HIS OR] her of food and basic shelter nor may the
state violate [HIS OR] her physical integrity. The power of these fundamental norms are apparent even in situations where
they are violated, as is evident in the U.S. governments treatment of detainees in Guantanamo Bay. Responding to international
concerns about the Administrations decision to force-feed hunger [End Page 10] strikers in violation of international law, assistant secretary of defense for
health affairs William Winkenwerder responded: There is a moral question. Do you allow a person to commit suicide? Or do you take steps to protect
their health and preserve their life? The objective in any circumstance is to protect and sustain a persons life. (The New York Times February 9, 2006)
Thus, when violating medical ethics and engaging in what the Declaration of Malta on Hunger Strikers condemns as
inhuman and degrading treatment (Article 21), the American state sought to justify its coercive interventions by pointing
to its moral obligation to preserve life. In doing so, the Administration inadvertently recognized a limit to state action.
While the treatment of enemy combatants in Guantanamo Bay presents us with the outer confines of sovereign power, the
limits of state coercion become even more apparent when we examine contexts where sovereignty hinges upon the
willingness of homo sacer to cooperate with the sovereign. Whether officers seek to determine a deportees nationality or elicit a confession
from a criminal suspect, the states use of physical coercion is limited by liberal norms, statutes, and conventions. Whereas the use of torture to
elicit confessions was once widespread and widely condoned, under the influence of liberalism it lost its status as a
legitimate form of state violence. More recently, research on policing practices has shown a gradual evolution of information gathering techniques
from relying on direct coercion to resting on manipulation and deception instead (Leo 1992).
We only need to maintain distinguishability engaging in the alt destroys the political sphere
If we accept Agamben's general thesis, however, we must ask what consequences necessarily flow from it: "When life and
politics-originally divided, and linked together by means of the no- man's-land of the state of exception that is inhabited
by bare life-begin to become one, all life becomes sacred and all politics becomes the exception" (1998:148). The issue is
whether or not it is possible to deny that questions of law are becoming indistinguishable from questions of fact, that death
(as in the case of the "overcomatose" patient) is becoming indistinguishable from life, and so on. If, in fact, it is not possible to
deny this, the issue becomes whether or not we can maintain that this indistinguishability has less to do with the blurring of previously dis-tinguishable
objects (and with what specifically these objects are) and more with a general inability to delimit clear boundaries that attends the modern "condition." In
other words, a liberal critique such as we have just discussed would demand simply that distinguishability be maintainedif necessary, reestablished-as the sufficient response to the situation Agamben describes. At its most basic level, beyond
being directed against Agamben's understanding of potentiality, this criticism asks how the constitution of the political
realm could operate otherwise than either through the separation of bare life at the margins of the polis as the condition of
any political life as such, or through the placing of life as such at the center of the political sphere as the bearer of
politically meaningful characteristics. Yet another version of this same question would ask if the citizen is really a fiction, as Agamben asserts
(1998:131), or rather a precarious reality that grants (even if the fiction, perhaps necessarily, describes this as a preservation of) our "natural" rights.
Nonetheless, if we follow Agamben, we are confronted with (ourselves as) "a new living dead man, a new sacred man" (p. 131). This is the logical and
seemingly unstoppable logic of democratization.
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AFF NO IMPACT TECHNOLOGY

No Impact New Technologies and ideas are linking sacredness to the sovereign Agamben never answers or
assumes this
The architecture of Homo Sacer consists of three parts ending with transitive chapters that are each entitled "Threshold" (we will return to the question of
the "final threshold"). The first and second parts, as we have already shown, deal with a rethinking of sovereignty and sacredness, respectively. As Homo
Sacer moves into its third and final part-"The Camp as Biopolitical Para- digm of the Modern"-Agamben's central insight into the production of bare life
comes to focus on the intensification and proliferation of bare life within a series of new and varied situations. The power-and perhaps the flaw-of
Agamben's analysis lies in how it grasps, as part of a single movement, phenomena seemingly as disparate as the Holocaust, the situation of Karen
Quinlan, and even the high rate of holiday highway deaths. In relation to this, Agamben fails to explore, though he does at one point
note in passing, the role of technological development in linking what may be contingently but not necessarily (still less
teleologically) connected; namely, the increasing sacredness of life and the increasing power of the sovereign. A distinct
and, we think, valid criticism of Agamben's diverse speculations in Part Three relates to his curious reticence to elaborate
on what, if anything, is distinctively modern about our contemporary structure of sovereign power and bare life. Even if
we agree with Agamben's teleological, even messianic,9 mode of thinking, in which contemporary politics only unfolds a
relation and a structure that were there from the very beginning, we are still forced to ask, What is the importance of new
conditions, such as technology, that facilitate such an unfolding? Be this at it may, however, in his general thesis that biological life in
the form of bare life has become the object of politics in the modern world and that, perhaps more provocatively, the political realm constituted by
sovereignty has as its originary-and thus continuous-aim the very production of this bare life, the scope and suggestiveness of Agamben's analysis are
nothing short of stunning.
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AFF CEDES THE POLITICAL

Engaging in the alternative abandons Western metaphysics and forecloses the possibility for research beyond
modern politics, science and philosophy.
What are we to make of such a possibility? Agamben has in mind a politics that would begin from the indistinguishability
today of life and law, of zoe and bios, and from the impossibility of returning to a time when any such distinction could be
maintained, to a time, that is, when bare life could be "separated and excepted, either in the state order or in the figure of
human rights" (p. 134). This new politics would be a politics without relation, for, as we recall, it is as relation that the
politics of the West (or the West as politics) are (or is) destined to exhaustion in the ever-present potentiality of (bio)politics
for totalitarianism. For all that, though, this "new politics" and the promises it enfolds remains obscure. There is in this regard
something disappointing about the final paragraph of Homo Sacer, in which, after the frequently brilliant exegesis that led up to it, Agamben concludes
that just as the biopolitical body of the West cannot be simply given back to its natural life in the oikos, so it cannot be overcome in a passage to a new
body-a technical body or a wholly political or glorious body-in which a different economy of pleasures and vital functions would once and for all resolve
the interlacement of zoe and bios that seems to define the political destiny of the West. This biopolitical body that is bare life must itself
instead be transformed into the site for the constitution and installation of a form of life that is wholly exhausted in bare life
and a bios that is only its own zoe.... Today bios lies in zoe exactly as essence, in the Heideggerian definition of Dasein, lies
(liegt) in existence. Yet how can a bios be only its own zoe, how can a form of life seize hold of the very haplos that constitutes both the task and the enigma of Western metaphysics? If we give the name form-of-life to this being that is only its
own bare existence and to this life that, being its own form, remains inseparable from it, we will witness the emergence of a
field of research beyond the terrain defined by the intersection of politics and philosophy, medico-biological sciences and
jurisprudence. First, however, it will be necessary to examine how it was possible for something like bare life to be conceived within these
disciplines, and how the historical development of these very disciplines has brought them to a limit beyond which they cannot venture without risking an
unprecedented biopolitical catastrophe. (p. 188)
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AFF AT: TERRORISTS ARE HOMO SACER

No link terrorists are not homo sacer they can mount legal challenges against the state
Agamben asserts that 'we are all virtually homines sacri' (1998: 115), but it is easier to discern the characteristics of homo
sacer in a more discrete group: the individuals accused of terrorist offences or suspected of involvement in terrorism-related
activities. These individuals, stripped of basic rights, surveilled by the state, subjected to house arrest or even more extreme
forms of violent detention by the state, can be readily identified as the contemporary incarnation of homo sacer. However,
since such individuals are able to mount legal challenges against these forms of surveillance and control by the state, they
do not share the central defining characteristic of homo sacer: that of being outside the law.
131

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AT: WE CHALLENGE PARTICULAR ABUSE.....................................................................................................................95

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

a politics of witnessing combined

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

LINKS HUMAN RIGHTS

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

LINKS NATURAL DISASTERS

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

LINKS NEEDLE EXCHANGE

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

LINKS WOMENS RIGHTS

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

LINKS DRUG WAR

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

LINKS TERRORISM COURT SPECIFIC

In most cases, however, in which challenges to executive power have

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

LINKS POPULATION MANAGEMENT

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

LINKS ECONOMIC CRISIS

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

LINKS POVERTY REFORM

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

INTERNAL LINKS STATE OF EXCEPTION

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

IMPACTS STATE OF EMERGENCY

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

IMPACTS - MASS VIOLENCE

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

IMPACTS VALUE TO LIFE

Nick, Tej, Sam, Stephanie, Ben, J Choi, Michael, Pablo, Vivian

TURNS CASE TERRORISM