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Cites

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1		-The 1AC places faith in current institutional society and assumes that they could solve for the oppression that they talk about in the 1AC, but modern politics and ethics are morally hopeless - the state currently acts as the ultimate sovereign – it decides where and when rights are applied – no solvency for the aff. The link is their claim to solvency through a government policy plan.
2		-Agamben ‘8: Giorgio Agamben writes in “Beyond Human Rights” in 2008. Giorgio Agamben (Italian: aˈɡambɛn; born 22 April 1942) is an Italian philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, 4 form-of-life (borrowed from Ludwig Wittgenstein) and homo sacer. The concept of biopolitics (borrowed and adapted from Michel Foucault) informs many of his writings. http://jstor.reed.edu/stable/pdf/40644981.pdf; AB
3		-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 they 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.
4		-THE ACT OF AFFIRMING IS AN ACT OF LINE DRAWING, SAYING THE LAW GOES TOO FAR IN THE CASE OF SPEECH CODES, BUT IS JUST RIGHT WHEN IT IS RESTRAINED ONLY BY THE CONSTITUTION, THIS FORM OF LINE DRAWING ONLY REIFIES THE STATE OF EXCEPTION, ENSNARING US IN THE TRAP OF POLITICS.
5		-Edkins and Pin-Fat 05: (Jenny Edkins, professor of international politics at Prifysgol Aberystwyth University (in Wales) and Veronique Pin-Fat, senior lecturer in politics at Manchester Universit, “Through the Wire: Relations of Power and Relations of Violence,” Millennium - Journal of International Studies 2005 34: pg. 14)
6		-One potential form of challenge to sovereign power consists of a refusal to draw any lines between zoe- and bios, inside and outside.59 As we have shown, sovereign power does not involve a power relation in Foucauldian terms. It is more appropriately considered to have become a form of governance or technique of administration through relationships of violence that reduce political subjects to mere bare or naked life. In asking for a refusal to draw lines as a possibility of challenge, then, we are not asking for the elimination of power relations and consequently, we are not asking for the erasure of the possibility of a mode of political being that is empowered and empowering, is free and that speaks: quite the opposite. Following Agamben, we are suggesting that it is only through a refusal to draw any lines at all between forms of life (and indeed, nothing less will do) that sovereign power as a form of violence can be contested and a properly political power relation (a life of power as potenza) reinstated. We could call this challenging the logic of sovereign power through refusal. Our argument is that we can evade sovereign power and reinstate a form of power relation by contesting sovereign power’s assumption of the right to draw lines, that is, by contesting the sovereign ban. Any other challenge always inevitably remains within this relationship of violence. To move outside it (and return to a power relation) we need not only to contest its right to draw lines in particular places, but also to resist the call to draw any lines of the sort sovereign power demands. The grammar of sovereign power cannot be resisted by challenging or fighting over where the lines are drawn. Whilst, of course, this is a strategy that can be deployed, it is not a challenge to sovereign power per se as it still tacitly or even explicitly accepts that lines must be drawn somewhere (and preferably more inclusively). Although such strategies contest the violence of sovereign power’s drawing of a particular line, they risk replicating such violence in demanding the line be drawn differently. This is because such forms of challenge fail to refuse sovereign power’s line-drawing ‘ethos’, an ethos which, as Agamben points out, renders us all now homines sacri or bare life. Taking Agamben’s conclusion on board, we now turn to look at how the assumption of bare life can produce forms of challenge. Agamben puts it in terms of a transformation: 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-.... 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.60
7		-The standard is demystifying the power of the state hierarchies—it’s the hope that we have for meaningful change that spills over this debate round. The judge as a critical educator has an obligation to question state biopolitical power.
8		-Gündoğdu ‘11: Ayten Gündoğdu writes in “Potentialities of human rights: Agamben and the narrative of fated necessity” on 19 July 2011. Contemporary Political Theory February 2012, Volume 11, Issue 1, pp 2–22. http://link.springer.com/article/10.10572Fcpt.2010.45; AB
9		-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 unveils 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 aim to provoke the readers and persuade them to abandon any politics centered on modern concepts such as sovereignty, 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 (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)
10		-THIS MEANS THAT 1. THE AC DOESN’T MEET ROLE OF THE BALLOT, THERE IS NO COUNTERNARRATIVE BEING OFFERED, ONLY THE SAME MECHANISM THAT HAS BEEN HISTORICALLY USED THAT DOESN’T CHALLENGE THE STATE AND 2. AC MAKES THE ISSUE WORSE. MY EVIDENCE INDICATES THAT WORKING THROUGH THE LAW IS A WAY THAT THE STATE LEGITIMIZES ITSELF.
11		-THE ALTERNATIVE IS TO ENDORSE DESTITUENT POWER. POLITICAL NIHILISM DIVEST HOPE IN THE POLITICAL, THE DISCOURSE OF THE AC SITUATES OUR SOLUTION TO THE STATE OF EXPECTION INSIDE OF THE MECHANISM THAT CREATES THAT EXPECTION, THE NC ALLOWS US TO THINK OUTSIDE OF THE STATE
12		-Refusing attempts to reform the legal system dooms it to its own nihilistic destruction. We should instead consider the emergence of whatever-singularity, an acceptance of bare life instead of reforming it.
13		-Prozorov 10. Sergei Prozorov, professor of political and economic studies at the University of Helsinki, “Why Giorgio Agamben is an optimist,” Philosophy Social Criticism 2010 36: pg. 106
14		-In a later work, Agamben generalizes this logic and transforms it into a basic ethical imperative of his work: ‘There is often nothing reprehensible about the individual behavior in itself, and it can, indeed, express a liberatory intent. What is disgraceful – both politically and morally – are the apparatuses which have diverted it from their possible use. We must always wrest from the apparatuses – from all apparatuses – the possibility of use that they have captured.’32 As we shall discuss in the following section, this is to be achieved by a subtraction of ourselves from these apparatuses, which leaves them in a jammed, inoperative state. What is crucial at this point is that the apparatuses of nihilism themselves prepare their demise by emptying out all positive content of the forms-of-life they govern and increasingly running on ‘empty’, capable only of (inflict- ing) Death or (doing) Nothing.¶ On the other hand, this degradation of the apparatuses illuminates the ‘inoperosity’ (worklessness) of the human condition, whose originary status Agamben has affirmed from his earliest works onwards.33 By rendering void all historical forms-of-life, nihi- lism brings to light the absence of work that characterizes human existence, which, as irreducibly potential, logically presupposes the lack of any destiny, vocation, or task that it must be subjected to: ‘Politics is that which corresponds to the essential inoperability of humankind, to the radical being-without-work of human communities. There is pol- itics because human beings are argos-beings that cannot be defined by any proper oper- ation, that is, beings of pure potentiality that no identity or vocation can possibly exhaust.’34¶ Having been concealed for centuries by religion or ideology, this originary inoperos- ity is fully unveiled in the contemporary crisis, in which it is manifest in the inoperative character of the biopolitical apparatuses themselves, which succeed only in capturing the sheer existence of their subjects without being capable of transforming it into a positive form-of-life:¶ Today, it is clear for anyone who is not in absolutely bad faith that there are no longer historical tasks that can be taken on by, or even simply assigned to, men. It was evident start- ing with the end of the First World War that the European nation-states were no longer capa- ble of taking on historical tasks and that peoples themselves were bound to disappear.35¶ Agamben’s metaphor for this condition is bankruptcy: ‘One of the few things that can be¶ declared with certainty is that all the peoples of Europe (and, perhaps, all the peoples of the Earth) have gone bankrupt’.36 Thus, the destructive nihilistic drive of the biopolitical machine and the capitalist spectacle has itself done all the work of emptying out positive forms-of-life, identities and vocations, leaving humanity in the state of destitution that Agamben famously terms ‘bare life’. Yet, this bare life, whose essence is entirely con- tained in its existence, is precisely what conditions the emergence of the subject of the coming politics: ‘this biopolitical body that is bare life must itself 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.’37¶ The ‘happy’ form-of-life, a ‘life that cannot be segregated from its form’, is nothing but bare life that has reappropriated itself as its own form and for this reason is no longer separated between the (degraded) bios of the apparatuses and the (endangered) zoe that functions as their foundation.38 Thus, what the nihilistic self-destruction of the appara- tuses of biopolitics leaves as its residue turns out to be the entire content of a new form-of-life. Bare life, which is, as we recall, ‘nothing reprehensible’ aside from its con- finement within the apparatuses, is reappropriated as a ‘whatever singularity’, a being that is only its manner of being, its own ‘thus’.39 It is the dwelling of humanity in this irreducibly potential ‘whatever being’ that makes possible the emergence of a generic non-exclusive community without presuppositions, in which Agamben finds the possi- bility of a happy life.¶ If instead of continuing to search for a proper identity in the already improper and sense- less 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 individual property but a singularity without identity, a common and absolutely exposed singularity, then they would for the first time enter into a community without presuppositions and without subjects.40¶ Thus, rather than seek to reform the apparatuses, we should simply leave them to their self-destruction and only try to reclaim the bare life that they feed on. This is to be achieved by the practice of subtraction that we address in the following section.¶
15		-This divestment is the only solution to the state of exception – a complete rejection of the affirmative’s political futurity to find a new place for being within the world.
16		-Caldwell 4, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Louisville (Anne, “Bio-Sovereignty and the Emergence of Humanity” https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v007/7.2caldwell.html#authbio)
17		-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). 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 without a representable condition of belonging" (Agamben 1993:85.6). 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.

EntryDate

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1		-2017-02-15 19:41:20.0

Judge

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1		-x

Opponent

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1		-x

ParentRound

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1		-30

Round

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1		-1

Team

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1		-Sunset bhat Neg

Title

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1		-Agamben K

Tournament

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1		-Stanford