Summary

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  • Caselist.RoundClass[14]
  • Caselist.CitesClass[21]

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Caselist.RoundClass[14]

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1		-2017-05-10 19:34:14.776
	1	+2017-05-10 19:34:14.0

Caselist.CitesClass[21]

Cites

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	1	+====Social death and social life are constructs that deny our constant ontological state of simultaneous life and death. Abjection of social death affirms a white ontology of social life and the Other is cast as dead—their project is a projection of white spectrality====
	2	+**Peterson ’7** (Christopher Peterson visiting assistant prof. of literature @ Claremont McKenna College Kindred Specters: Death, Mourning, and American Affinity pg 9-10 //DOA 9/5/16 GK)
	3	+The political question then becomes: how does one resist the reduction of one’s existence to the liminal status of social death? In Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, Judith Butler provides a familiar answer to this question in a discussion that considers how the transgressions of Sophocles’ eponymous heroine deprive her of the "ontological certainty" reserved for those who fall within the norms of kinship (78). Situating Antigone’s ontological deprivation in the realm of contemporary politics, Butler argues that the socially dead "remain on the far side of being, as what does not quiet qualify as that which is and can be."19 In another context, Butler describes her work, in part, as an effort to "endow ontology to precisely that which has been systematically deprived of the privilege of ontology,"20 For Butler, social death correlates directly to a form of ontological deprivation. Although Butler seeks to displace kinship from the biological model in order to imagine a vast array of social arrangements, this reorganization of kinship remains no less ontological. Critiquing the abjection of the socially dead, Butler fails to question the ontological certainty of the "socially alive." What makes the ontology of the socially alive any more secure than that of the socially dead? Are not the socially alive themselves specters? While the conflation of social life with a presumptive heterosexual ontology may indeed condition the production of the socially dead, that says nothing of how the fiction of the former might itself be exposed and stripped of its ontological conceit. That the kinship relations of the so-called socially alive are also negotiated "between life and death" is a possibility that eludes Butler’s reading of Antigone, and has important implications for her effort to rethink kinship beyond the structure of the normative family. For if the assumption of self-presence begins by disavowing the death that haunts any life, then the production of the socially dead describes the process by which the hauntological condition of the socially alive is disavowed and projected onto those who transgress the norms of kinship. I borrow the term "hauntology" from Derrida, whose coinage in Specters of Marx means to displace the binary opposition between the presence and absence, being and nonbeing, life and death. Hauntology is thus another name for the spectrality that conditions all life. No kinship relations—even those of the socially alive—can claim immunity from the spectral. And this is neither to say that we are all socially dead in one form or another, nor to affirm the spectrality of kinship as an alibi for not addressing the alienation of slaves and other abject populations. What Patterson calls social death or what Butler (following Kristeva) understands as social abjection is not synonymous with what I am calling spectrality.21 For the latter is implicated in—but not fully reducible to—the social effects of racism, sexism, and homophobia that engender a field of unlivable, abject beings. The abjection and social death of racial and sexual others is initiated by the white, male, heterosexual’s denial of this own being-toward-death. While this spectrality is a generalizable condition of all "beings," this is not to say that its effects homogenize the social field: the social deaths of slaves, racial minorities, women, and queers are the effects of incommensurate—yet often intersecting—sociohistorical forces. To be socially dead, then, is in some sense to be doubly ghosted: for an African-American, this may mean that one’s lived experience is one being both a specter (in the generalizable sense) and a spook (to invoke the familiar racist trope of utter disembodiment). The presumptive ontology of whiteness is thus purchased precisely through the construction of the racial other as spook.22
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	6	+====The attempt to bring the excluded into the ontological field is a logic of reversal that maintains the ontological differentiation which recognizes some as dead and others as alive. Imbuing the ballot with the power to give life also gives it the power to take it away.====
	7	+**Peterson ’7** (Christopher Peterson visiting assistant prof. of literature @ Claremont McKenna College Kindred Specters: Death, Mourning, and American Affinity pg 11-12 //DOA 9/5/16 GK)
	8	+Wright’s account of Bigger’s betrayed presence prefigures the famous opening passage in Ellison’s The Invisible Man where the narrator remarks upon what it is like to be "bumped against by those of poor vision," that is, by those who can see the black male only as a "spook" or a "phantom."24 Angered by the blindness of white eyes, the narrator begins to "bump people back" (4). Rather than demonstrating that he is a "man of substance," however, his violent, bodily confrontation with a white man in the street only seems to affirm his ghostliness (3): In my outrage I got out my knife and prepared to slit his throat, right there beneath the lamplight in the deserted street, holding him in the collar with one hand, and opening the knife with my teeth—when it occurred to me that the man had not seen me, actually; that he, as far as he knew, was in the midst of a walking nightmare! And I stopped the blade, slicing the air as I pushed him away, letting him fall back to the street….He lay there, moaning on the asphalt; a man almost killed by a phantom. (4, his emphasis) Whereas Bigger’s violence makes him menacingly present, almost overly corporeal, the invisible man’s violence fails to materialize his body. But if Bigger becomes the "man of substance" that the invisible man endeavors to be, he does so only to experience the betrayal of that corporealization. When the invisible man asserts that he is "not a spook like those how haunted Edgar Allan Poe," this rejection of the racist stereotype demands to be read other than has a move from the incorporeal to the corporeal (3). That he is not a "spook" would seem irrefutable. But this refusal of pure disembodiment does not preclude the possibility of this spectralization. Spectrality, as I use the term, is inclusive of the material while not being reducible to corporeality. As the narrator informs us, "I did not become alive until I discovered my invisibility," which suggests a move from spook to specter that displaces the racist construction of the black male as both all and no body, as both menacingly present yet irrevocably absent (7). In promoting a move from spook to specter (rather than from spook to body), this study contends that political and theoretical responses to the social death of racial and sexual others too often sustain the ontological presumptions through which the binary between social life and social death emerges. From Butler’s effort to endow the socially dead with ontology, to Castronovo’s substitution of necrophobia for necrophilia, to Holland’s raising of the dead, these political moves rely on a logic of dialectical reversal whereby the excluded are imagined as coming to inhabit the ontological field. But if the ontological emerges through the suppression of the hauntological, then reanimating the socially dead through a logic of reversal only preserves the ontological differentiation that recognizes some lives as present and others as "dead."
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	10	+====Justice towards the other is the only non-deconstructable impact. Justice is the foremost concern for the policymaker, to pay respect to the otherness of the haunted Other. ====
	11	+**McQuillan 08** (Martin McQuillan, "Derrida and Policy: Is Deconstruction Really a Social Science?" Derrida Today, 2009, //DOA 9/8/16 GK)
	12	+Again to be for Justice is to be in favour of breathing and given the way that this term is routinely abused and appropriated it is no doubt necessary to take care around this word. However, Derrida is moved to tell us that 'justice is the undeconstructable condition of any deconstruction' (Derrida 1994, 28). This is a syntagm with which I have wrestled for some time, given that any metaphysical concept can in principle be deconstructed and that 'justice' is surely a metaphysical concept politically and philosophically inscribed. To be too hasty in my commentary, the notion of justice that Derrida is invoking here is of course catachrestic and quasi-transcendental, whereby the idea of 'justice' refers to the act of deconstruction which does justice to the otherness of the event by enabling that otherness to speak, the undeconstructable (irreducible) condition of any deconstruction would be to articulate such otherness. The present importance of this is that in doing justice to policy one must take account of the difficulty of what is referred to by Derrida by the twin names of the 'undecideablity' and 'responsibility' of such an event. One the one hand, the policy maker should take account of the injustice of his/her own policy formation, which as a textual inscription, will inevitably fail to do justice to the possibilities of otherness within itself and will simultaneously and constantly be in the process of disarticulating itself from within as a consequence of this otherness, rendering itself unstable and radically undecideable. Taking account of this scenario will require the self-aware policy maker to act responsibly with respect to the task of policy making by taking time to reflect judiciously on the event of alterity (which will be forever undecideable) and at the same time acting responsibly with the respect to the other by doing justice to that other and acting quickly (or formulating policy quickly) which will respond to the immediate urgency in the here and now of the needs of the other. This is to say, once again that policy, properly understood, is beginning to look more and more like an untenable prospect from a "deconstructive" point of view. Some would say that it would be entirely typical of 'the Derrida Party' to have a policy of having no policies. However, this would be a crude reduction. I think the more considerable difficulty here is that it may not be possible for deconstruction ever to produce an inaugural or generative political discourse outside of an act of reading or critical intervention. From the point of view of a faithfulness to a certain manner of reading the world, there could be no political discourse worthy of the name of deconstruction which was generated outside of or anterior to a singular act of 'reading' a unique event. This is not to say that deconstruction would be for ever condemned to read and reread the texts of the political canon as a route to articulating the alterity repressed within them by the logocentric model of western political discourse (as if this were merely or simply a secondary, supplementary or weaker task than, say, policy making). Rather, with the reading (as critical intervention) of singular events comes the requirement to affirm a position with respect to that event and in so doing negotiate between that necessarily material and institutional position (counter-institutions are also institutions) and the risk to that position incurred by the affirmation of the unpredictable effects of otherness. Every policy then needs to be open to the risk of its own deconstruction by the very political conditions it puts in play. It is of course not the role of deconstruction to offer reassuring and easily appropriable policies to policy-makers. However, risk and policy are uneasy companions; we live in an age of 'risk management', in which policies are formulated to predict the unpredictable consequences of risk. Risk can be neutralised by techne, such is the dream of the death cult of contemporary managerialism.
	13	+
	14	+====The alternative is a juxtaposition—the only ethical response that fosters openness and refuses to impose order, containment, and domination onto such others. It problematizes the current order of politics by blurring the lines of identification. This aporia is the only way to move towards justice.====
	15	+MacDonald ‘99 Department of Political Studies, Queens University 1999 Eleanor Science and Society 63.2 proquest
	16	+In an unusually direct moment in his article, "Force of Law: The `Mystical Foundation of Authority'," Derrida makes the statement, "deconstruction is justice" (Derrida, 1992, 15). The question of the relationship between deconstruction and politics returns continuously to this claim. It also, of necessity, begs the question of what then is "deconstruction." In Spectres of Marx, Derrida describes deconstruction as "a motif." As well, in a comparison with Marxist philosophy he suggests that what he is doing is "a performative interpretation": "An interpretation that transforms what it interprets is definitive of the performative as unorthodox with regard to speech act theory as it is with regard to the 11 th Thesis on Feuerbach ( `The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however is to change it')" (Derrida, 1994, 51). Elsewhere, in the same text, Derrida uses the term "infinite critique" to describe his approach: A deconstructive thinking, the one that matters to me here, has always pointed out the irreducibility of affirmation and therefore of the promise, as well as the undeconstructibility of a certain idea of justice.... Such a thinking cannot operate without justifying the principle of a radical and interminable, infinite (both theoretical and practical, as one used to say) critique. This critique belongs to the movement of an experience open to the absolute future of what is coming, that is to say, a necessarily indeterminate, abstract, desert-like experience that is confided, exposed, given up to its waiting for the other and for the event. (Derrida, 1994, 90.) What this experience of "infinite critique" or this "motif" of deconstruction appears as, is a series of maneuvers performed on texts. These maneuvers seem designed to interrupt our confidence in meaning, and in the categories through which we organize meaning, by making these apparent, by playing with them, and by indicating the arbitrariness of their boundaries or oppositions. Deconstructive practices consist in a combination of wordplay, of play on metaphors, of taking things "to extremes," of introducing apparently unrelated texts as parallel to the central one and reading them alongside it, interweaving the multiple texts until meanings become jumbled, and new and unexpected meanings begin to emerge. The overall effect is to unsettle a text, to disturb any straightforward reading of it, to eventually abandon questions about authorial intention, to set the text adrift, as it were. And why is this "justice"? First, because of the "aporia" that it introduces - the sense of confusion that is in fact the "true" or "honest" and "ethical" response to and perception of the world. I use the word "honest" because what is other is truly other, and therefore finally unknowable - one is only being honest in an acknowledgment of this. And second, this is "ethical" because categories of meaning, it would seem, are imposed by us, onto others and otherness as a way of ordering, containing, and therefore dominating what is "other to ourselves." Language is a necessary violence for which deconstruction is the just or ethical response. What is true, then (in the understanding of the world that Derrida provides through deconstruction), is inadequation, non-commensurability, disjointedness. The ethical response is a recognition of this unknowability, a suspicion of all self-certainty. The political response is one of a corresponding openness, a promise of "democracy-tocome" (a promise which Derrida also assures us can never be wholly realizable in the present, in any present). At stake here is the very concept of democracy as concept of a promise that can only arise in such a diastema (failure, inadequation, disjunction, disadjustment, being "out of joint"). That is why we always propose to speak of a democracy to come, not of future democracy in the future present, not even of a regulating idea, in the Kantian sense, or of a utopia - at least to the extent that their inaccessibility would still retain the temporal form of a future present, of a future modality of a living present (Derrida, 1994, 64-5.)

EntryDate

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	1	+2017-05-10 19:34:16.912

Judge

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	1	+na

Opponent

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	1	+na

ParentRound

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	1	+14

Round

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	1	+1

Team

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	1	+Lake Travis Ehresman Neg

Title

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	1	+0 - Spectrality K

Tournament

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	1	+na