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  • Caselist.CitesClass[85]
  • Caselist.CitesClass[86]

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Caselist.CitesClass[85]

EntryDate

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1		-2017-03-10 15:49:12.430
	1	+2017-03-10 15:49:12.0

Caselist.CitesClass[86]

Cites

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	1	+Rights are means of exclusion and naïve security. Rights are a legal construct that can’t exist outside the state. However, the law controls itself; there is no higher control than the state itself. The state is its own sovereign, withholding the ability to strip anyone of rights to bare life at any time. Rights are just a method for integrating people into the biopolitical sphere in which they depend on the state.
	2	+David M. Seymour 13 (legal scholar). “The Purgatory of the Camp: Political Emancipation and the Emancipation of the Political”. Google Books, 2013. RC
	3	+The idea of political sovereignty creating order ‘behind the backs’ of formal equality expressed through the praxis of rights, is a familiar trope in much recent thinking.25 However, Agamben’s treatment of this idea appears in a more radical guise. For Agamben, rights are presented as unmediated expressions of the ordering of the biopolitical administrative nature of political sovereignty and, as such, they are no more than the vehicle through which the sovereign decides decision on the exception (who is to be included within and excluded from the body politic) is given form. In this context Agamben treats rights as playing a vital role in sovereignty’s capture of life and the decision made or inscribed upon it. Rights become not challenges or limits to sovereign power (as expressed in liberal political thought), but expressions of the biopolitical decision itself:26 It is almost as if, starting from a certain point, every 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 an 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.27 At the centre of this discussion is the manner in which rights articulate modern sovereignty’s capture of (natural) life: Declarations of rights represent the originary figure of the inscription of natural life in the juridico-political order of the nation-state. The same bare life that in the ancient régime was politically neutral and belonged to God as creaturely life and in the classical world (at least apparently) clearly distinguished as zoé from political life (bios) now fully enters into the structure of the state and even becomes the earthly foundation of the state’s legitimacy and sovereignty.28 Modern declarations of rights, therefore, are said to draw together and express in unmediated biopolitical fashion almost all the revolutionary concepts of modern political emancipation: state, nation, citizen and subject: The fiction implicit here is that birth immediately becomes nation such that there can be no interval of separation between the two terms. Rights are attributed to man (or originate in him) solely to the extent that man is the vanishing ground (who must never come to life as such) of the citizen.29 This depiction of rights, therefore, directly places them within the armoury of administrative biopolitical sovereign ordering. Rights serve only as a means of deciding on inclusion within and exclusion from the political category of political life, the nation, (bios). In capturing (natural) life within an unmediated connection with ‘nature’ through the concept of rights, biopolitical administrative sovereignty captures the (natural) world. Nature, the world, comes under the domination of a sovereignty, an emancipation of the political from within the ascendancy of political emancipation.
	4	+Rights are always conditional. The state holds the power to strip rights and give rights to those deemed fit—the aff can literally never happen since the state can’t guarantee a right.
	5	+Giorgio Agamben 12 (Italian continental philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, form-of-life and homo sacer. The concept of biopolitics informs many of his writings). “Beyond Human Rights”. 2012. http://novact.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Beyond-Human-Rights-by-Giorgio-Agamben.pdf RC
	6	+“The reasons for such impotence lie not only in the selfishness and blindness of bureaucratic apparatuses, but also in the very ambiguity of the fundamental notions regulating the inscription of the native (that is, of life) in the juridical order of the nation-state. Hannah Arendt titled the chapter of her book Imperialism that concerns the refugee problem ‘The Decline of the Nation State and the End of the Rights of Man’. 2 One should try to take seriously this formulation, which indissolubly links the fate of the Rights of Man with the fate of the modern nation-state in such a way that the waning of the latter necessarily implies the obsolescence of the former. Here the paradox is that precisely the figure that should have embodied human rights more than any other – namely, the refugee – marked instead the radical crisis of the concept. The conception of human rights based on the supposed existence of a human being as such, Arendt tells us, proves to be untenable as soon as those who profess it find themselves confronted for the first time with people who have really lost every quality and every specific relation except for the pure fact of being human. 3 In the system of the nation-state, so called sacred and inalienable human rights are revealed to be without any protection precisely when it is no longer possible to conceive of them as rights of the citizens of a state. This is implicit, after all, in the ambiguity of the very title of the 1789 Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, in which it is unclear whether the two terms are to name two distinct realities or whether t
	7	+hey are to form, instead, a hendiadys in which the first term is actually always already contained in the second. That there is no autonomous space in the political order of the nation-state for something like the pure human in itself is evident at the very least from the fact that, even in the best of cases, the status of refugee has always been considered a temporary condition that ought to lead either to naturalization or to repatriation. A stable statute for the human in itself is inconceivable in the law of the nation-state.”
	8	+The alternative is t0 play with the law—when the law asks us to engage, we should “prefer not to”. We take the potentiality of the law and render it inoperative.
	9	+Arne De Boever 06 (PhD Columbia, 2009, teaches American Studies in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts). “Overhearing Bartleby: Agamben, Melville, and Inoperative Power”. PARRHESIA. RC
	10	+In “Bartleby, or On Contingency,” Agamben reads Bartleby as “the last, exhausted figure” of what Avicenna refers to as “a complete or perfect potentiality that belongs to the scribe who is in full possession of the art of writing in the moment in which he but does not write.”9 Later on in the essay, it becomes clear what Bartleby’s ending or exhaustion consist in: the scrivener’s potentiality is at the same time potentiality for the opposite. The formula “prefer not to” does not consent; but it doesn’t simply refuse either. According to Agamben, it refers to something “whose opposite could have happened in the very moment in which it happened.”10 Bartleby is ultimately not a figure of potentiality, but of a specific mode of potentiality – potentiality that is, at the same time, potentiality for the opposite. Agamben refers to this potentiality as contingency. In the final pages of the essay, he characterizes Bartleby as a messianic figure who has come “to save what was not.” He emphasizes, however, that unlike Jesus, “Bartleby comes not to bring a new table of the Law but … to fulfill the Torah by destroying it from top to bottom.”11 The essay on contingency shows Agamben struggling with ideas that he will express much more clearly later on, in his commentary on Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans, The Time that Remains 2000.12 In this book, but also for example in his State of Exception 2003,13 it becomes clear that Agamben’s thought is not a thought that aims to destroy the law. What opens up a passage towards justice in these works, is rather the law’s “deactivation and inactivity inoperosità – that is, another use of the law emphasis mine.”14 But what does Agamben mean by this other use of the law? Can this inoperativity (“inoperosità”) fully be understood within the limits of legal thought or political science? I want to address these questions by having a closer look at Agamben’s argument on human rights.
	11	+This is not a rejection of the law—it is the inoperability of the law. We remain under to law but at the same render it inoperative. This is the only appropriate use of the law.
	12	+Arne De Boever 2 (PhD Columbia, 2009, teaches American Studies in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts). “Overhearing Bartleby: Agamben, Melville, and Inoperative Power”. PARRHESIA. RC
	13	+Once again, Bartleby’s subversion of the space of the law office becomes particularly interesting when it is articulated politically. In the end, the problem that Bartleby poses to the narrator is a magnified version of his invitation to go beyond the horizon of communication; he would like to remain within the protective realm of the law-office without giving the office anything in return other than the mere, material fact of his life, his being. Bartleby’s demand, an appeal to an extraordinary generosity on the side of the narrator, is to be allowed to remain unconditionally within the protective space of the law-office. Bartleby interrupts the service economy of the law-office, not in order to destroy the law-office but to invite another use of it. As I’ve pointed out above, Agamben suggests something along similar lines: in his recent discussion of Benjamin’s reading of Franz Kafka, he argues that for Benjamin, “what opens up a passage toward justice is not the annulling of the law, but its deactivation and dereliction – which is to say, another use of the law.”30 Although the narrator may not have learned Bartleby’s lesson as a lawyer, I would argue that he did learn it as a narrator: the prologue and epilogue to the story push the text precisely toward the kind of deactivation and dereliction that Benjamin is talking about. Melville’s story He reveals itself here as another use of the law, as an inoperative use of the law.
	14	+Instead the judge should use their ballot as a means of pushing counter-narratives to unveil and demystify the power of the sovereign—it’s the hope that we have for meaningful change that spills over this debate round.
	15	+Ayten Gündoğdu 12 (Department of Political Science, Barnard College-Columbia University). “Potentialities of human rights: Agamben and the narrative of fated necessity”. 2012. http://www.palgrave-journals.com/cpt/journal/v11/n1/full/cpt201045a.html RC
	16	+“In his analysis of biopolitical sovereignty, Agamben provides us with what might be called a counternarrative of Western politics with the explicitly stated goal of ‘unveiling’ or ‘unmasking’ what has become mystified, hidden, secret or invisible, particularly with the prevalence of contractarian accounts of political power (1998, p. 8; 2005, p. 88). Agamben describes this critical task in terms of ‘disenchantment’, or the ‘patient work’ of unmasking the fiction or myth that covers up and sustains the violence of sovereignty (2005, p. 88). What underlies this urge to demystify and unveil is a particular understanding of myth as a deceptive narrative naturalizing and legitimizing violence in the name of the preservation of life. I use the term ‘counternarrative’ to call attention to what Agamben's account aims to do6: This is a critical analysis, as Agamben himself insists, that does not offer ‘historiographical theses or reconstructions’ but instead treats some historical phenomena as ‘paradigms’ so as to ‘make intelligible a broader historical-problematic context;’ to do this, it proceeds at ‘a historico-philosophical level’ (1998, p. 11; 2009, p. 9). In that sense, it is not an account that claims historical accuracy or factual verifiability. This is a crucial point that is sometimes overlooked by Agamben's critics who call into question his inaccurate treatment of historical phenomena such as the concentration camps.7 In addition, ‘counternarrative’ draws our attention to the inventive dimensions of Agamben's endeavor; as one of his critics aptly (though disapprovingly) puts it, ‘Agamben does not discover a concealed biopolitical paradigm stretching back to fourth-century Athens; rather he invents one’ (Finlayson, 2010, p. 116). The invention of a counternarrative of Western politics involves literary devices (e.g. hyperbole), which aims to provoke the readers and persuade them to abandon any politics centered on modern concepts such as sovereignty, and rights and citizenship (LaCapra, 2007; cf. de la Durantaye, 2009). In analyzing Agamben's account as a ‘counternarrative’, I aim to attend to the goals that it sets for itself. It is these goals – particularly the goal of freeing human potentialities from myths that render the contingent necessary and mask other possibilities – that provide the starting point for my critical engagement with Agamben. Instead of resorting to an ‘outside’ – whether this be an alternative historical account or another theoretical tradition – I aim to read Agamben on his own terms, and suggest that as he tries to free human potentialities from contractarian myths, he might be entrapping them in another myth that ends up casting the contingent as necessary. Agamben's counternarrative of Western politics aims to uncover what has become hidden or invisible with ‘our modern habit of representing the political realm in terms of citizens’ rights, free will, and social contracts’ (1998, p. 106). Its main target is the contractarian accounts of sovereign power. As he identifies the production of bare life as the originary or foundational activity grounding sovereign power (1998, pp. 6, 83), he particularly aims to question the social contractarian ‘myth’ that covers up sovereign violence (1998, p. 109). After unveiling the foundational myths of Western politics, Agamben concludes that we cannot effectively respond to ‘the bloody mystification of a new planetary order’ if we let these myths continue to obstruct our political imagination
	17	+
	18	+ (1998, p. 12). With his counternarrative presenting a catastrophic view of the historical present – a view that emphasizes how exception has become the rule, camp has become the paradigmatic structure organizing political space, and we have all virtually become homines sacri (1998, pp. 38, 176, 111) – Agamben aims to convince his readers of the need to think of a ‘nonstatal and nonjuridical politics and human life’ (2000, p. 112). This new politics requires the renunciation of concepts associated with sovereignty – for example, state, rights, citizenship. The contemporary predicament cannot be remedied by a return to conventional political categories and institutions, Agamben suggests, since these are deeply involved in the creation of this catastrophe in the first place. Almost anticipating his critics who would be puzzled by his renunciation of rights and rule of law at a time when the problem of legal dispossession increasingly threatens populations around the world, he explicitly states that the response to the current permanent state of exception cannot consist in confining it within constitutional boundaries and reaffirming the primacy of legal norms and rights (2005, p. 87).8 As legal norms and rights are ultimately grounded in the originary violence of separating a bare life, legal dispossession is already inscribed in them as an inescapable condition. Neither the liberal remedy of reasserting the rule of law, nor the Derridean strategy of ‘infinite negotiations’ with a law that is in force without any significance, are viable options (2005, p. 87; 1998, p. 54). Both are futile, if not lethally dangerous, endeavors.9 The only politically tenable option, Agamben contends, is to move out of sovereignty with ‘a complicated and patient strategy’ of getting the ‘door of the Law closed forever’ (1998, pp. 54, 55)

EntryDate

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	1	+2017-03-10 15:49:13.425

Judge

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	1	+Aisha Bawany

Opponent

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	1	+McNeil PV

ParentRound

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	1	+45

Round

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	1	+5

Team

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	1	+Strake Jesuit Chen Neg

Title

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	1	+MA - K - Agamben

Tournament

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	1	+TFA