Summary

• Objects (1 modified, 1 added, 0 removed)
  • Caselist.RoundClass[29]
  • Caselist.CitesClass[65]

Details

Caselist.RoundClass[29]

EntryDate

...	...	@@ -1,1 +1,1 @@
1		-2017-01-15 21:59:27.467
	1	+2017-01-15 21:59:27.0

Caselist.CitesClass[65]

Cites

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,10 @@
	1	+The affirmative labels people, whom it feels society views as less than fully human, as rendered “mummified,” “invisible,” “non-existent.” This construct, of a dichotomy between social death and biological death, separates one’s identity from the spectre of death that haunts one’s being, and in doing so, reinforces the logic that makes dehumanization possible in the first place.
	2	+Peterson 06 Christopher, “The Return of the Body: Judith Butler's Dialectical Corporealism,” Discourse, 28.2and3, Spring and Fall 2006, pp. 153-177 (Article)
	3	+In contemporary cultural studies, the body is laden with intense desires and expectations. Emerging with the eclipse of poststructuralism in the late 1980s, “the body” promised to weigh in on contemporary political debates, to give material substance to a discipline supposedly evacuated by what some felt to be the excessively linguistic or textual focus of contemporary theory. But what if the very turn to the body occasioned a certain return of the metaphysics of presence, only now bearing the name, or rather, the spirit of “the body”? Indeed, scholars in race, gender, and sexuality studies have often invoked the body as a marker of both identity and self-presence. Given the violence of erasure, invisibility, and death (both social and material) to which minority bodies have historically been subjected, it has also seemed to many that the ontology of these bodies must be insisted upon in the face of this nihilistic threat. As Sharon Holland announces in Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity, “bringing back the dead (or saving the living from the shadow of death) is the ultimate queer act.”1 And in the introduction to her seminal, 1991 collection of essays on queer theory, Inside/Out, Diana Fuss notes how “a striking feature of many of the essays collected in this volume is a fascination with the specter of abjection, a certain preoccupation with the figure of the homosexual as specter and phantom, as spirit and revenant, abject and undead.”2 Yet, queer scholarship for the most part has addressed the problem of the spectral only by way of contesting its pervasiveness in dominant representations of homosexuality. If saving us from the shadow of death names the “ultimate queer act,” such so-called “raising” of the dead relieves us of any sustained engagement with what Jacques Derrida calls spectrality, understood, in part, as an originary process of mourning that is the condition of all life, indeed, of any body. For Derrida, spectrality does not originate with one’s social or biological death. As he argues in a brief reading of Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” our “future” absence divides our present/presence from the very beginning. Derrida takes Valdemar’s catachrestic utterance-—”I have been sleeping-—and now-—now-—I am dead”3-—to make a point about the function of language: My death is structurally necessary to the pronouncing of the I. . . . The utterance “I am living” is accompanied by my being-dead and its possibility requires the possibility that I be dead; and conversely. This is not an extraordinary story by Poe here, but the ordinary story of language. . . . I am thus originally means I am mortal.4 While Derrida’s point is that the iterability of a speech act requires the possibility of one’s absence from future scenes of utterance (and thus already implies one’s absence in the present), this living death also names the experience of “being” more generally. As Heidegger puts it, being “is always already dying” in its “beingtowardits-end.”5 For Heidegger, death is not a punctual event that one might mark on a calendar; rather, death always already belongs to our being. The conventional reduction of death to a calculable moment is precisely what Poe’s story parodies. While his doctors assert that his “disease is of that character which would admit of exact calculation in respect to the epoch of its termina- tion in death,” Valdemar (aided by the magic of mesmerism) continues to live beyond the estimated moment of decease, a prolongation of dying that allegorizes how life stretches along a path marked at every step by death (51). Valdemar’s protracted dying also echoes Emily Dickinson’s poem “Because I could not stop for death,” in which death “kindly” stops for the speaker and bears her forward through each stage of life. If, as in Dickinson’s poem, death haunts our “being” from the very beginning, then the spectral condition of sexual minorities is not reducible to a problem of representation, or rather, mis-representation, as queer scholarship tends to suppose. When Holland caricatures “postmodernism” as “the attractive zombie theory of the academy, a place where the living travel through death and are reborn to utter the truths of such a journey,” she suggests that postmodernism articulates a dialectical relation between life and death, a sublation of being and nonbeing that ultimately triumphs over finitude (166). Such a dialectical view of the relation between life and death, however, opposes itself to the spectral, which is neither present nor absent. But perhaps Holland’s caricature is to be expected, for as Derrida notes in Specters of Marx, “the traditional scholar does not believe in ghosts—nor in all that one would call the virtual space of spectrality.” 6 If the traditional scholar does not believe in ghosts, that is because “there has never been a scholar who, as such, did not believe in the clear-cut distinction between the real and the unreal, the actual and the inactual, the living and the non-living, being and non-being” (34). For Derrida, a capacity to speak to “ghosts” would be the mark of a scholar.7 Although it might seem odd to yoke queer critics to the figure of the traditional scholar, so ingrained is the anti-spectral character of queer scholarship that Holland can declare the ultimate queerness of raising the dead as a “fact,” and support this claim only by referring us to ACT UP’s famous political slogan: “silence = death.” To insist on this “fact,” however, is to sidestep the problem of finitude altogether. When scholars in race, gender, and sexuality studies write about the body, what is typically invoked is the living body, the body that is present to itself, untainted by mortality. For cultural studies, spectrality is merely an effect of racism, sexism, homophobia, and other social injustices. Subtracted from such external violence, the body can be made present, its ontology no longer in question. But spectrality, as Derrida uses the term (and as I propose to track it here in the context of racial and sexual politics) does not have its origin in social inequality. Naming a process of originary mourning that animates corporeal life, spectrality has no proper beginning or end. The abjection that sexual and racial minorities endure might be better understood as a mode of redoubled ghostliness that harnesses the spectrality inherent to all life and attaches it to those on the margins of sociality: the figure of the gay man dying of AIDS functions as the “proof” of the homophobic white male’s ontological security; the representation of AfricanAmericans as “spooks” (to cite a somewhat antiquated yet illustrative racist epithet) works to ward off the death that always already haunts the ontology of the white body.8 No doubt the emergence of gay and lesbian studies in the midst of the AIDS crisis and the cruelty of those discourses that sought to invoke AIDS as further proof of the “death style” of (male) homosexuality inspired many queer critics and theorists to resist the equation of homosexuality and death. Yet, the contestation of this equation, I would argue, has also had the consequence of disavowing finitude. My claim is that the specific, historical effects of homophobia, racism, and sexism must also be thought in relation to the generalizable principle of spectrality. Certainly there are good reasons to be wary of entertaining general principles, given the risk that they might come to saturate the social and political field, to erase differences altogether. Indeed, the turn to the body has been occasioned by a renewed faith in particularity that often eschews the large claims of “theory.” Yet rejecting general principles altogether risks a certain overparticularization that fails to imagine how the general and the particular might be held in perpetual tension without either finally coming to absorb the other. If “social death” names an ontological deprivation that attends the lives of racial and sexual minorities, there is no reason why these specificities cannot and should not be brought to bear on the generalizable condition of spectrality, and vice versa. Not to negotiate this tension between general and particular, between spectrality and social death, is to miss the opportunity to interrogate how the social death of racial and sexual others is produced in and through the disavowal of the spectral. The insistence on the ontology of the socially dead, in other words, merely reverses and reinscribes the division between life and death, presence and absence, that conditions the abjection of queer lives. In a passage from The Psychic Life of Power, for instance, Judith Butler addresses how we might counter the abjection of those bodies deemed expendable, “gay people, prostitutes, drug users, among others . . . who are dying or already dead.”9 While she asks us to consider if “‘social existence’” for the majority is purchased through “the production and maintenance of the socially dead,” she does not pursue the question of how the construction of the socially dead is predicated on the fiction of social being, of being as presence (PLP 27). Dedicating her work toward expanding “a field of possibilities for bodily life,” she theorizes against the insidious means by which the abjection of minority bodies produces them as “shadowy contentless figures for something not yet made real.”10 But this invocation of ontology—intoned in the suggestion that these ghostly shadows might someday be embodied— would appear to conflate social death or abjection with what we are calling spectrality. This conflation denies the possibility of the specter, of that which is neither spirit nor body. As Derrida notes in Specters of Marx: “For there is no ghost, there is never any becoming specter of the spirit without at least an appearance of flesh. . . . For there to be a ghost, there must be a return to a body, but to a body that is more abstract than ever” (202). Although the possibility of the specter requires a certain return to the body, that body never fully returns to itself. Indeed, the return of the body to itself is forever deferred by its “hauntological” condition. Following Derrida, we might consider that all bodies live in the “shadowy regions of ontology,” all bodies are hauntological, not ontological. Only by virtue of the fiction of ontology do certain bodies appear to be more present than others. The social existence of the majority, of those white, male bodies that supposedly matter, is conditioned by a certain disavowal and projection of the body’s finitude. The socially dead are thus made to stand in for the death that haunts each and every life. While the interrogation of the body as a stable marker of identity would appear to have received its most well-known and persistent challenge in Butler’s anti-epistemological accounts of corporeality, the equation of the body with presence remains very much intact. Indeed, I would suggest that, despite the frequent characterization of her theorizations of corporeality as “deconstructive” by both her supporters and her most virulent critics (Nussbaum or ˇZizˇek for instance), they remain squarely within a metaphysical tradition of presence that disavows finitude, that is, within that very tradition that deconstruction has made it its mission to displace.11
	4	+
	5	+Disavowal of finitude is the foundational condition for all American violence—the impact is ever-escalating cycles of destruction
	6	+Peterson 07 Christopher, Kindred Specters: Death, Mourning and American Affinity, University of Minnesota Press
	7	+The popularity of Six Feet Under notwithstanding, American culture tends not to acknowledge the intimate relation among death, mourning, and kinship —no doubt because in the modern West we tend to see the barrier that separates the living and the dead as insurmountable. If we follow historian Philippe Aries on this subject, however we see that things were not always so. In contrast to the Middle Ages, in which a certain familiarity with death was displayed, a promiscuous coexistence of the living and the dead, Aries argues that the rise of modernity witnessed an effacement and interdiction of death. Death was to be put in its proper place, whether Its place" be the newly constructed cemeteries on the outside of the city walls or the hospitals where patients now came to die rather than to get well: "Mourning is thus no longer a necessary period on which society imposes respect. It has become a morbid state that needs to be nurtured, abridged, and erased.'!^ According to Aries, the interdiction of mourning is nowhere more vigilant than in the United States, where death is treated almost as an aberration of life. Indeed, the present study focuses on American culture precisely because the American disavowal of death is so vehement. Aries reads the advent of the mortuary business and the practice of embalming in the United States during the late nineteenth century as a testament to the American denial of mortality. Death could no longer be either too familiar or common, too frightening or painful: "To sell death, one must make it pleasant" (69). This transformation of death into something pleasant—in other words, something that is not death—is symptomatic of the modern segregation of the living and the dead. Following Aries, Gary Laderman traces the emergence of this peculiarly modern interdiction of death specifically to the postbellum era, which bore witness to the "birth of the death industry."^ During the Civil War, a doctor by the name of Thomas Holmes claimed to have embalmed thousands of fallen soldiers. Because most Civil War battles were fought on Southern land, the practice of embalming allowed for the preservation and repatriation of the bodies of fallen Union soldiers. Following the wartime emergence of embalming, Abraham Lincoln became the first U.S. president to have his body embalmed. Lincoln's body, as is well known, was paraded before thousands of mourning citizens on a long, cross-country journey from Washington, D.C. to Springfield, Illinois. As Laderman notes, the parading of Lincoln's body "ensured that embalming—an unacceptable treatment before the war—would change the practice of American deathways" (163). The living could now "look at the face of death and not be confronted by the gruesome details of decomposition and decay" (174). As Jessica Mitford observed in her well-known expose of the American funeral industry, The American Way of Death (1963), the undertaker "puts on a well-oiled performance in which the concept of death...plays no part whatsoever....He and his team...score an upset victory over death. While this study accords with the claim that American culture disavows mortality, I do not argue for any simple reversal of this interdiction with an aim toward affirming finitude per se. If death is beyond our experience (as Heidegger among others has observed), if I am ultimately absent from "my" own death, then strictly speaking there is nothing for me to recognize or avow. Yet dying is something that I do every day. Indeed, it might be more accurate to say that American culture disavows dying, understood as a process that extends from our birth to our biological demise.^ Even with such an amended formulation, however, it is not entirely clear whether dying can ever be fully affirmed or avowed. That "we live as if we were not going to die," as Zygmunt Bauman observes, "is a remarkable achievement," especially given the ease with which we disavow dying on a daily basis/ Some degree of disavowal would seem both unavoidable and necessary for our survival. Any effort to prolong one's life, from simply eating well and exercising to taking medications to prevent or treat illness, evidences this disavowal. For Bauman, however, the disavowal of dying often has violent political and social consequences. Noting the wartime imperative "to limit our casualties,'" for instance, Bauman remarks that ::the price of that limiting is multiplying the dead on the other side of the battleline" (34). Drawing from Freud's claim that, "at bottom no one believes in his own death," Bauman argues that death is "socially managed "by securing the Immortality" of the few through the mortalization of others (35, his emphasis).1^ The belief in my self-presence, which is also always a belief in my immortality, is thus dialectically conditioned by the nonpresence of others. Scholars in race and sexuality studies have done much to bring our attention to the ways in which American culture represents racial and sexual minorities as dead—both figuratively and literally. Indeed, this gesture both accompanies and reinforces the larger cultural dissimulation of mortality by making racial and sexual others stand in for the death that haunts every life. The history of American slavery tells a familiar story of how American consciousness disavows and projects mortality onto its ''others." Orlando Patterson has described the institution of slavery in terms of a process of kinship delegitimation that constructs slaves as "socially dead."^ For Patterson, slavery—across its various historical forms—emerges as a substitute for death, a forced bargain by which the slave retains his/her life only to enter into the liminal existence of the socially dead. As a substitution for death, slavery does not "absolve or erase the prospect of death," for the specter of material death looms over the slave's existence as an irreducible remainder (5). This primary stage in the construction of the socially dead person is followed by what Patterson refers to as the slave's "natal alienation," his/her alienation from all rights or claims of birth: in short, a severing of all genealogical ties and claims both to the slave's living blood relatives, and to his/her remote ancestors and future descendants. Although Patterson does not approach the problem of social death through a psychoanalytic vocabulary of disavowal and projection, one might say that the presumptive ontology of slave-owning, legally recognized kinship, was dependent on a deontologization of slave kinship that worked to deny the death that each life bears within itself. Building on Patterson's argument, Toni Morrison observes in Playing in the Dark that, ::for a people who made much of their newness'—their potential, freedom, and innocence—it is striking how dour, how troubled, how frightened and haunted our early and founding literature truly is."^ For Morrison, African-American slaves came to shoulder the burden of the darkness (both moral and racial) against which America defined itself. The shadow of a racialized blackness did not so much threaten the ostensible "newness" of American life as it conditioned the latter's appearance as new and free. Hence "freedom," she writes, "has no meaning...without the specter of enslavement" (56). Echoing Morrison, Russ Castronovo asserts in Necro Citizenship that nineteenth-century American politics constructed the citizen in relation to a morbid fascination with ghosts, seances, spirit rappings, and mesmerism. Taking his point of departure from Patrick Henry's infamous assertion, "give me liberty or give me death," Castronovo explores how admission into the domain of citizenship required a certain depoliticization and pacification of the subject: "The afterlife emancipates souls from passionate debates, everyday engagements, and earthly affairs that animate the political field.From Lincoln's rumored dabbling in spiritualism, to attempts by mediums to contact the departed souls of famous Americans, to a senator's introduction of a petition in 1854 asking Congress to investigate communications with the "other side"—so numerous are Castronovo's examples of what he calls "spectral politics" that we would have a difficult time contesting his diagnosis that nineteenth-century American political discourse worked to produce politically and historically dead citizens. That these citizens were constructed in tandem with the production of large slave populations— noncitizens who were urged by slavery proponents and abolitionists alike to believe that emancipation existed in a promised afterlife —would lend still more credence to the argument that nineteenth-century America propagated a dematerialized politics. One wonders, however, how Castronovo's argument sits in relation to Aries's contention that American life tends toward an interdiction of death, and if Castronovo's rejection of necropolitics, moreover, is not finally symptomatic of this very disavowal. Castronovo maintains that, 'for cultures that fear death...necrophilia promotes fascination with and helps tame an unknowable terror" (5). American necrophilia, according to Castronovo, responds to an overwhelming fear and denial of death. Castronovo thus aims to turn us away from such preoccupation with ghosts, spirits, and the afterlife toward "specific forms of corporeality," such as the laboring body, the slave body, and the mesmerized body, in order to avoid "reinserting patterns of abstraction" (17). Yet, this move away from general to specific forms of embodiment still retains the notion of "the body," and therefore of a self-contained, self-present entity. If nineteenth-century politics required that the citizen be disembodied and dematerialized, it does not follow that a move toward embodiment remedies such a spiritualized politics. Although Castronovo cautions that recourse to the body "does not automatically guarantee resistance," the overall tenor of his project pathologizes the spectral (18). Indeed, one has the sense that Castronovo would like to untether politics from death altogether—as if political life is not always haunted by finitude. Reversing the terms of political necrophilia, he offers something like a political necrophobia that sees every intrusion of the spectral as synonymous with depoliticization. If nineteenth-century spiritualism infused American political life with a familiar set of distinctions between spirit/matter, soul/body, that says nothing about how these binaries might be displaced rather than merely reversed. A binaristic approach to the subject of mortality is also legible in Sharon Holland's Raising the Dead, which asserts that "bringing back the dead (or saving the living from the shadow of death) is the ultimate queer act."^ Drawing from the activist slogan "silence=death" from the early years of the AIDS epidemic, and extending this activist imperative to address the social death of sexual and racial minorities more generally, Holland observes that the deaths of queer and racial subjects serve "to ward off a nation's collective dread of the inevitable" (38). Yet, as in Castronovo's critique of necropolitics, this imperative to "raise the dead" reverses rather than displaces the logic through which dominant, white, heterosexual culture disavows and projects mortality onto racial and sexual minorities. While we must address the particular effects that social death has on racial and sexual minorities, this social reality must also be thought in relation to a more generalizable principle of mourning. For the "shadow of death" haunts all lives, not just queer ones. The "ultimate queer act," pace Holland, would be to deconstruct rather than reinscribe the binary between life and death, to resist the racist and heterosexist disavowal of finitude.
	8	+The alternative is to vote negative to endorse the politics of spectrality. Rendering one’s identity inseverable from the finitude of one’s body destroys any illusion that death is something that only happens to others. This shatters the dichotomy between social and biological death.
	9	+Peterson 06 Christopher, “The Return of the Body: Judith Butler's Dialectical Corporealism,” Discourse, 28.2and3, Spring and Fall 2006, pp. 153-177 (Article)
	10	+A return to ontology in Precarious Life is also legible in its tendency to reduce corporeal vulnerability to the threat of external violence. Certainly the events of 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq serve as devastating reminders of the body’s mortality. But corporeal vulnerability does not have its origin in external violence. Corporeal vulnerability does not commence with our exposure to others. The body’s finitude, its spectrality, is inherent. As Freud puts it, however, “at bottom no one believes in his own death. . . . Every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.”35 The political stratification that positions the socially alive against the socially dead thus also describes the unequal distribution of mortality/immortality more generally.36 If no one believes in his or her own death, then death always “happens” to others. As Heidegger observes, the recognition that “‘one dies’ spreads the opinion that death, so to speak, strikes the they” (234). For Heidegger, however, the futural “not yet” that attends the “certain” but “indeterminate” possibility of death denies how being is always “ahead of itself” in its anticipation of death. Hence, while the move from the living body to the precarious body begins to address the problem of finitude so largely absent from Butler’s earlier work, her tendency to reduce finitude to the problem of external threat and violence does not awaken to the originary mourning that haunts all bodies. Avowing mortality and mourning might not only forestall the violent response to 9/11, but could also challenge the reduction of America’s “internal” racial and sexual others to the liminal status of social death. The construction of the Muslim other as always already dead describes but the most recent version of a long American tradition that secures the “immortality” of the “majority” at the expense of the mortalization of the nation’s racial and sexual others. 37 Indeed, the belief that “death strikes others” is most violently felt in the domain of racial and sexual politics. What I have been calling the “redoubled ghostliness” of racial and sexual minorities describes an intimate contact with both social and material death. As Karla Holloway observes in Passed on: African-American Mourning Stories, black Americans are unusually at risk for an “untimely death,” from specific forms of racial violence, such as lynching and capital punishment, to all varieties of disease.38 Given the homophobic equation of homosexuality and death that has characterized the response to the AIDS crisis, sexual minorities also bear the burden of the death that heterosexist culture denies. Without diminishing the reality of this heightened proximity to death, however, we must also recognize that finitude—as a generalizable condition of existence—always comes “before its time.” While some of us are socially dead, we are all specters. If self-presence is always tied to the belief in one’s immortality, then only a theory that dislodges corporeality from the present can challenge the unacknowledged belief that death is what happens to others. “The ultimate queer act”—to modify Holland’s assertion with which we began—would be finally to displace the dialectic of being/non-being, to resist the racist and heterosexist disavowal of spectrality through which the abjection of queers both emerges and is sustained.

EntryDate

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+2017-01-15 21:59:29.845

Judge

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+Rodrigo Paramo

Opponent

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+Chaminade JT

ParentRound

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+29

Round

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+6

Team

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+La Canada Zhao Neg

Title

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+1 Spectrality K

Tournament

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+Harvard Westlake