1AC

Contention 1 is AnxietyFirst the surveillance method of counter-terrorism in the status quo fails to recognize the impossibility of complete security ndash our desire for infinite pleasure means that the war on terror becomes infinitely sustained We have come to enjoy the war because it symbolizes the retaking of the American Identity and a satiation of the anxiety we experience as a result of loss This makes the war and conflict a self-fulfilling prophecyMcGowan 2013Todd McGowan Associate Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Vermont Enjoying What We Donrsquot Have A Psychoanalytic Politics University of Nebraska 2013 pg 160-163

Nowhere is the retreat from enjoyment to pleasure more evident than in the American response to the attacks of September 11 2001 The attacks immediately reinvigorated the social bond for a majority of Americans The loss that they occasioned brought subjects back to the shared sacrifice that defines their membership in American society Even as they were horrified by the image of the towers burning and then falling most Americans in the strict psychoanalytic sense of the term enjoyed the attacks insofar as the attacks allowed them to experience once again their social bond with great intensity This is a bond that one suffers just as one suffers from a terrorist attack Even though it followed from an attack this bond was not one formed through the male logic of friendenemy which is why the headline in Le Monde on September 122001 could proclaim ldquoNous sommes tous Americainsrdquo27 The bond formed around the September 11 attacks was not initially a bond of exclusivity with a clear outside and inside Any subject willing to accede to the experience of loss could become apart of American

society at that moment The not-all of the social bond occurs through the experience of loss but the recognition of this type of bond is unbearable One enjoys it without deriving any pleasure from it It is in fact painful Not only is it painful but it also entails complete humiliation The society experiences the shame of being a victim and enduring trauma mdashthe shame of enjoyment itself In order to disguise this shameful enjoyment the United States quickly turned to an assertion of power that would carry with it the promise of a restored wholeness mdash the recovery of an imaginary perfect security The attack on Afghanistan brought pleasure to most members of American society This pleasure had the function of rendering the enjoyment that emerged through traumatic loss bearable but it could not fulfill its inherent promise Enjoyment satisfies and pleasure always disappoints The disappointing nature of the attack on Afghanistan paved the way to the subsequent attack on Iraq in a further attempt to find an actual pleasure equal to what we anticipated In terms of American society these foreign wars serve as alibis for the enjoyment of the traumatic attacks themselves Because we seek respite from the loss that binds us we flee from the social bond despite our purported desire for it The authentic social bond exists only in the shared experience of loss mdashthat is only according to the female logic of not-having But the attack on Iraq also illustrates the inescapability of the enjoyment attached to loss The Iraq War clearly follows from the male logic of having and aims at producing the pleasure resulting from possession the United States would conquer a recalcitrant dictator and obtain a firm ally in a globally significant region This is both the stated justification for the war and the explanation offered by critics who see it as an exercise in American imperialism For both the perpetuators of the war and its critics the war concerns having despite the different inflections they give this idea But the result of the war is the failure of having and the renewed experience of loss The pursuit of the pleasure involved in having returns American society to the traumatic loss involved in the September 11 attacks Of course no one fights wars with the express intention of losing them but every war brings with it sacrifice and loss which is ultimately the substance of the social bond and the source of our ability to enjoy that bond The pursuit of the pleasure of having leads to the loss that inevitably accompanies this pursuit Imperial powers do not attempt to stretch their military and economic reach to the point that it breaks because of an inescapable will to power or a biological urge for infinite expansion The conquering drive of empires has its roots in the search for what no amount of imperial possession can provide mdashthe enjoyment of the experience of loss Empires conquer increasing quantities of territory in order to discover a territory that they canrsquot conquer In this same way the Afghanistan War disappointed the American leadership because it didnrsquot provide even the possibility for loss Donald Rumsfeldrsquos lament that the country didnrsquot have any targets to bomb points in this direction Iraq in contrast promised a possible defeat and if it hadnrsquot Syria or Iran would surely have come within the sights of the Bush administration Whatever the proffered justification or hidden motivation powerful societies ultimately go to war in order to reenact a constitutive loss and facilitate the enjoyment that this loss entails28 This is the case not just with war but with any positive project that a social order takes up Building a monument like the Eiffel Tower provided French society with a possession that allows for collective identification But the work involved with the building involved a great sacrifice in time and in money When we think of the Eiffel Tower we rarely think of the sacrifice required for its construction instead we think of the sense of identity that it offers It provides a positive point of identification for France itself as a nation and French subjects can find pleasure through this identification Nonetheless the enjoyment of the Eiffel Tower in contrast to the pleasure that it offers stems from the sacrifice required to construct

it Every finished societal product mdashsuch as victory in Iraq the beauty of the Eiffel Tower smooth roads on which to drive mdashpromises pleasure but this pleasure primarily supplies an alibi for the enjoyment

that the sacrifices on the way to the product produce These sacrifices allow us to experience the social bond by repeating the act of sacrifice through which each subject became a member of the social order It is not so much that the pursuit of pleasure backfires (though it does) but that it is never done simply for its own sake We embark on social projects not in spite of what they will cost us but because of what they will cost us29 The dialectic of pleasure and enjoyment also plays itself out in the relationship that subjects in society have to their leader According to Freud all group members install the leader in the position of an ego ideal and this ego ideal held in common furthers the bond among members of society But the identification with the leader has two sides to it on the one hand subjects identify with the leaderrsquos symbolic position as a non castrated ideal existing beyond the world of lack but on the other hand subjects identify with the leaderrsquos weaknesses which exist in spite of the powerful image30 Both modes of identification work together in order to give subjects a sense of being a member of society but they work in radically different ways The identification with the leaderrsquos power provides the subject with a sense of symbolic identity and recognition whereas the identification with the leaderrsquos weaknesses allows the subject to enjoy being a part of the community The identification with the leaderrsquos strength provides the pleasure that obscures the enjoyment deriving from the identification with the leaderrsquos weaknesses The weaknesses indicate that the leader is a subject of loss that shehe enjoys rather than being entirely devoted to ruling as a neutral embodiment of the people The weaknesses are evidence of the leaderrsquos enjoyment points at which a private enjoyment stains the public image By identifying with these points subjects in a community affirm the association of enjoyment with loss rather than with presence But at the same time the leaderrsquos weaknesses cannot completely eclipse the evidence for the leaderrsquos strength The strength allows subjects who identify with the leader in herhis weakness to disavow this would-be traumatic identification and to associate themselves consciously with strength rather than weakness The trajectory of Bill Clintonrsquos popularity during his presidency illustrates precisely how identification with the leader unfolds When accusations of sexual impropriety with Monica Lewinsky first appeared Clintonrsquos public approval rating reached its highest levels Most thought that Clinton was probably guilty of some private wrongdoing but they also felt that his sexual peccadilloes should remain private Though they infuriated his Republican accusers his sexual weaknesses had the effect of enhancing his overall popularity This trend continued until it became undeniably clear that Clinton really was guilty when it became impossible to disavow his weakness At this point identifying with Clinton became inescapably apparent as identifying with Clinton in his weakness which rendered it more difficult to sustain The American populace could enjoy Clintonrsquos weakness and form a social bond through this weakness only as long as it remained partially

obscured The fundamental barrier to the establishment of an authentic social bond is the resistance to avowing the traumatic nature of that bond We use the pleasure that accompanies the bombing of Afghanistan to disguise the shared enjoyment we experience through the traumatic experience of loss But this pleasure inevitably disappoints us and triggers the belief that someone has stolen the complete pleasure that we expected to experience This is why there can properly be no end to the War on Terror no end to the list of countries that the United States plans to

invade to attain complete security no end to the number of terrorist leaders executed31 Complete security like complete pleasure is mythical It attempts to bypass the one experience that cannot be bypassed mdashthe foundational experience of loss mdash and it is this experience that holds the key to an authentic social bond

The paranoid anxiety of the status quo results in the projection of threats onto the other in an effort to suture the Lack ndash this type of politics mobilizes the population toward fascismMcGowan 2013Todd McGowan Associate Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Vermont Enjoying What We Donrsquot Have A Psychoanalytic Politics University of Nebraska 2013 pg 44-49

While nostalgia locates the ultimate enjoyment in the subjectrsquos own past paranoia locates it in the other Paranoia thus offers the subject not just the image of the ultimate enjoyment (like nostalgia) but also an explanation for its absence Nostalgia and paranoia usually operate side by side in order to provide the subject a way of figuring its missing enjoyment On its own nostalgia as a mode of subjectivity seems to have limited political consequences Groups may use nostalgia as a political weapon but its political weight is diffused to some extent because it involves the subjects relation to itself rather than to an other The same cannot be said for paranoia which is why finding a way to counter paranoia represents an urgent political task Paranoia is political in its very structure It views the other as a threat and produces hostility toward the other The paranoid subject usually adopts one of two possible attitudes toward the other According to the first paranoia serves to explain the loss of the privileged object If I take up a paranoid attitude toward the other I see her his enjoyment coming at the expense of mine The other enjoys the lost object that is rightfully mine The other having stolen my enjoyment bears responsibility for my existence as a

subject of loss This type of paranoia removes the burden of loss from the subject and places it onto the other

and in addition it functions like nostalgia to convince the subject that having the object is a possibility According to the

second attitude however paranoia represents an attempt to convince ourselves that we have not lost the privileged object We are paranoid not that the other has stolen the privileged object but that it plans to do so The imagined threat that the other poses reassures us that we have the ultimate enjoyment and that this is what the other targets By imagining a threat we fantasize the privileged object back into existence despite its status as constitutively lost At first glance it is difficult to see how paranoia might function as an attractive attitude for subjects to take up The paranoid subject must endure a constant menace that has no tangible or definitive

presence Everyone that this subject meets is a potential enemy in disguise threatening to steal or already having stolen the subjects privileged object In terms of the subjects own identity paranoia does not provide security or stability In fact it uproots all sense of security that the subject has concerning its identity But its appeal does not lie in how it transforms subjectivity its appeal stems from its ability to close the gap in the social field of meaning its ability to be a guarantor that authorizes our social interaction Paranoia develops in response to the inherent inconsistency of social authority There are authorities but no Authority and a decisive Authority would be necessary to provide subjects a sense of foundation a sense that there is solid ground underneath their feet Social proclamations and regulations place the subject in an impossible position one simply cannot believe and obey every edict emanating from social authorities without being torn apart in the effort These contradictions occur on all levels of social pronouncements One hears for instance about the dangers of eating too much fat and then one hears about the cancer-preventing power of chocolate Parents tell their children not to fight and at the same time tell them to stand up for themselves George W Bush claimed that the Iraq War was waged to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction and later claimed that its purpose was to liberate the country from a cruel dictator Such inconsistencies are not merely contingent developments within our particular society but necessarily follow from the ultimate groundlessness of the social order itself There is no final authority that calls all the shots in society and guarantees the consistency of the social order It is instead a structure in charge and this structure functions through its very misfiring The inconsistency of social authority- the gap in the social field of meaning - provides it with an openness to difference If social authority was a closed circuit that operated without a hitch it would have no way of incorporating the subject into its fold The subject invests itself in social authority precisely because this authority gives the subject contradictory demands Faced with these incongruous imperatives the subject cannot readily decipher what the social authority wants from it Beneath the inconsistency the desire of the authority remains a mystery The subject begins to desire in response to this unknown desire of the social Other the inconsistency of the social authority has the effect of attracting the subject and constituting the desire of the subject as the desire of the Other A thoroughly consistent social authority while logically unthinkable would not draw the desire of the subject in this way It might force individuals into obedience but it would not create the investment in the social order that the inconsistent social authority creates Confronting the inconsistency of social authority is not an easy task for the subject Many try to sustain a belief in its consistency through an imaginary construction that represses contradictory ideas The problem with this solution is that these ideas become more powerful through their repression and the result is some form of neurosis Another possibility is the paranoid reaction Rather than trying to wrestle with the problem of the gap in authority the paranoid subject eliminates it by positing an other existing in this gap an other behind the scenes pulling the strings As Slavoj Zizek explains it Paranoia is at its most elementary a belief into an Other of the Other into an Other who hidden behind the Other of the explicit social texture programs what appears to us as the unforeseen effects of social life and thus guarantees its consistency beneath the chaos of market the degradation of morals and so on there is the purposeful strategy of the Jewish plot The comfort that paranoia provides for the subject derives solely from this guarantee For the paranoid subject the surface inconsistency of social authority hides an underlying consistency authorized by a real authority whom most subjects never notice Paranoia simultaneously allows the subject to sense its own superiority in recognizing the conspiracy and to avoid confronting the horror of an inconsistent social authority As with nostalgia

paranoia is primarily aligned with a right-wing political agenda Its suspicion of the other nourishes a nationalistic politics and energizes

the call for a return to traditional social arrangements Just as much of the investment in the Cold War struggle derived from paranoia it fuels

the contemporary war on terror The exemplary right-wing political formation Fascism has its basis in paranoia

seeing the Jew or some equivalent as secretly controlling the social order to the detriment of all law-abiding citizens The idea of an other operating behind the scenes serves to justify restrictions on civil liberties racism police violence and so on A paranoid populace is a populace ready to embrace a Fascist regime Despite the inherent link between paranoia and conservatism leftists employ paranoia to a vast extent far more than they do nostalgia Paranoid theories about the secret brokers of power who decide the fate of the capitalist world are widespread on the Left It is common sense among leftists that big oil companies have suppressed the development of alternative energies that the CIA assassinated Kennedy and that major drug companies control the Food and Drug Administration just to name a few of the more well known conspiracy theories The truth or falsity of these theories has nothing to do with their function for the subject who accepts them The paranoid subject is often correct in its various speculations but paranoia nonetheless provides a way for the subject to avoid confronting the inconsistency of social authority For the paranoid subject conspiracy theories dont simply explain a single event they solve the problem of the social order as such According to this thought process all loss stems from the conspiracy which has derailed the social order and upset its balance The paranoid subject cannot accept the necessity of loss and the conspiracy theory works to render loss empirical rather than ontological This is evident in Oliver Stones JFK (1991) a film in which Stone posits a vast conspiracy that resulted in the death of Kennedy Of course Stone is probably correct that this conspiracy existed but the film goes astray primarily through its apotheosis of Kennedy an apotheosis that reveals whats at stake in all paranoia According to the film had he remained in power Kennedy would have prevented the horror of the Vietnam War and thus spared the United States the psychic wound that this war created With Kennedy one can imagine an American social order existing without strife and loss The conspiracy theory allows Stone this image which testifies to the avoidability of loss But Stone is not the only leftist to turn to paranoia Many do so in order to confront forces that they otherwise couldnt identify Among those who suffer from political oppression paranoia and conspiracy theory serve as vehicles for thinking through systems of control and even mobilizing action against those systems As Peter Knight points out Conspiracy thinking has played an important role in constituting various forms of African American political and cultural activism38 When it directly produces activism the political valence of paranoia seems to tilt more clearly to the left than it does in the case of Stones film In Marxist Fredric Jameson focuses on a related aspect of paranoia as he analyzes the paranoid film in The Geopolitical Aesthetic In this work Jameson aligns conspiracy theory with what he calls cognitive mapping- the attempt to think the global capitalist system in its totality The diffuseness of global capitalism prevents the kind of cognitive mapping that was possible in earlier epochs Today in order to think the totality at all subjects must resort to the idea of a conspiracy As Jameson points out in his analysis of All the Presidentrsquos Men The map of conspiracy itself suggests the possibility of cognitive mapping as a whole and stands as its substitute and yet its allegory all at once40 Jamesons statement reflects his ambivalence about conspiracy theory and paranoia - even though it allegorizes cognitive mapping it also substitutes for it - but he nonetheless sees its usefulness as a strategy for the Left especially when facing the global capitalist leviathan

The problem is that even when it works to mobilize subjects to fight against an oppressive system paranoia has the effect of depriving subjects of their agency By eliminating the gap in social authority and filling in this gap with a real authority who effectively runs the show paranoia deprives subjects of the space in which they exist as subjects The subject occupies the position of the gap in social authority it emerges through and because of internal inconsistency in the social field of meaning The extent to which paranoia allows the subject to experience social authority as a consistent field is the extent to which it works against the subject itself Even if it manages tangible political victories emancipatory politics that relies on paranoia undermines itself by increasing the power of authority in the thinking of subjects and

decreasing their freedom Whats more it doesnt actually work Like nostalgia paranoia can never constitute a successful strategy for the subject dealing with its fundamental condition It will never provide the enjoyment that it promises the subject Uncovering and eliminating the hidden real authority will bring not the ultimate enjoyment but horrible disappointment This is why the paranoid mindset cannot admit to itself that the hidden other has been vanquished

The enjoyment that paranoia does provide requires the continuing existence of the threat even though it imagines an enjoyment that would come with the threats disappearance Paranoia runs aground due to its failure to admit the connection between enjoyment and loss It allows the subject to imagine that loss is the contingent result of a secret malevolent force that we might conquer By implicitly positing the avoidability of loss paranoia leaves subjects unable to locate and recognize the nature of their own enjoyment

This anxiety is the core problem of the psyche Our inability to come to terms with this void is a fate worse than death Our anxiety functions as the condition for the possibility of Hiroshima and Auschwitz In attempts to master this emptiness we project our weakness through conflict This projection provides us the unrestrained power to bombard the other with pure suffering and destruction in an attempt to control the contingencies that constitute existence Davis 2001Walter A Davis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative Pg 103-108

We begin with an effort to describe what is the deepest experiencemdashthe one most deeply denied Catastrophic anxiety is that fear that haunts us from within the fear that one has already been annihilated that like Beckett one has never been born properly and never will be because inner paralysis is the psyches defining conditionmdasha truth attested each time when lining to cohere as a subject one collapses before the tidal wave of an Regression against oneself that rises up from within An

unspeakable dread weds the psyche to terror All other forms of anxiety are pale after-thoughts There is a threat worse than extinction The deepest self-knowledge we harbor the knowledge that haunts us as perhaps our deepest

self-reference is the fear that our inner world is ruled by a force opposed to our being Death is the icy wind that blows through all we do This is the anxiety from which other anxieties derive as displacements delays and vain attempts to deny or attenuate our terror before a dread

that is nameless and must remain so lest despair finalize its hold on us In catastrophic anxiety the destruction of ones power to be and the ceaseless unraveling of all attempts to surmount this condition is experienced as an event that has already happened That event forms the first self-reference the negative judgment of an Other on ones beingmdashinternalized as self-undoing Postmodern posturing before the phrase I am an other here receives the concretization that shatters free play There is a wound at the heart of subjectivity a self-ulceration that incessantly bleeds itself out into the world The issue of the wound is a soul caked in ice in a despair that apparently cannot be

mediated the nightmare state of a consciousness utterly awake alone and arrested all exits barred facing inner paralysis as the truth of ones life We ceaselessly flee this experience because if it ever comes down full upon us an even more terrifying process begins an implosion in which ones subjective being is resolved into fragments of pure anxiety that leave one incapable of existing as subject except in the howl to which each suffered state descends in a final chilling recognitionmdashthat everything one has done and suffered is but sound and fury signifying nothing One has become a corpse with insomnia Identity and self-reference thereafter ceaselessly circle about that void This is the hour of the wolf where one is arrested before the primary fact at the deepest register of the psyche one finds a voice of terror Fear of psychic dissolution is the ground condition of our being as subjects Subjectivity is founded in anguish before the dread of becoming no more than bits and pieces of pure horror fleeing in panic a voice that has already overtaken us resolving our subjective being into traumatic episodes of pure persecution At the heart of inwardness a malevolent spirit presides To put it in nuclear metaphors catastrophic anxiety is the threat of implosion into the others unlimited destructiveness To complete the picture we need only add Winnicotts point people live in dread of this situation projecting fear of a breakdown into the future because the breakdown has already occurred

B Exorcism through Evacuation And so a crypt is built to contain this anguish and repress the experience that is its cause We organize a life of identities and stabilities to give ourselves the illusion of escape Unable to reverse our condition we take up the only alternative We try to evacuate the whole thing to blow it out into the world and invest it in objects that are fitted to receive the full brunt of ones discontent and powerless to reply Projection the egos priest is founded in identification with an internal aggressor That is the complex that informs the effort to lodge our disorders and forbidden desires in others so that we can wage an attack on our inner conflicts then watch the ensuing spectacle from a safe distance Evacuation thus finds in projection a prime agent of human perception and the secure base for the perpetual mutual defeat that Sartre finds in all concrete

relations with others Were always on the lookout for a chance to make someone else bear our discontents But its never enough Satisfaction eludes us We keep erupting bleeding from within in a leukemia of soul that rages whenever we see those who have in their daily lives a beauty that makes us uglyFor then the projections return with the force of the furies Envy and resentment erupt as the assault within our inner world of the truth of our charactermdasha truth we deny by reinvesting it externally This grows apace over the years and then we long for a listing deliverance a final solution in the dim recognition that when projection proceeds from the register of catastrophe it requires and longs for a grand exorcism What we seek incessantly is a total evacuation of all inner discord a complete and lasting externalization in an ideal victim one in whom all that haunts us will stay outside lodged in the world in what Hegel calls a standing negation9 Our need is for a subject who is destroyed and lives on proof of a sublime aggression sculpted in time The Bomb provides such

an opportunity The criteria required to exorcize catastrophic anxiety finds in it the conditions for expelling the most primitive anxieties in the perfect objective correlative The subject voids itself of its core

anxietymdashthe inability to reverse inner destructivenessmdashby becoming the power to destroy unbound raining judgment down on a mass of subjects who are indifferently bound together as fragments of pure suffering unable after that action to ever form any identity except as walking corpses hibakusha deadened affect delivered over to the condition of death-in-life10 Projection here succeeds because in that shattered mirror one sees oneself reflected as the equal

of the power within that originally proclaimed ones utter worthlessness Malign reversal has grown to the event All inner anxiety about ones power to be resolves itself in the power to act free of restraint We have become the thing we feared Its destructiveness is now ours and nothing else has being The Contradiction The SublimemdashFrom the Crypt The mediation

traced above is driven by a contradiction about which it circles endlessly That is what the sublime object of the ego-ratio reveals when read from its crypt Sublime action seeks an absolute reversal of catastrophic anxiety in the absolute affirmation of unshakable guarantees Catastrophe must be reversed because it is that experience of contingency that underlies the horror of contingency in all its forms the lone driving the search for the guarantees needed to contain it In

catastrophe contingency is the others will as unbounded unlimited destructiveness The threat of extinction is the restraint here placed on subject This restraint is prior to the dialectic of desire restrained and checked on which Hegel grounds his phenomenology Desire here isnt restrained and checkedmdashit is turned back against itself in torment The other requires my destruction for their pleasure and assures that end by colonizing the psyche with an aggression that renders impotent every effort to make a beginning a tentative move toward independence or self-cohesion There is no exit but one apparently identification with the aggressor I become a self by turning someone or something else into an object delivered over to the true golden rule do onto others what was once done onto you This logic maintains because catastrophic anxiety internalized is death-work as the self-

mediation whereby we enact the command of the Other The only way out the only way to finalize this process is evacuation through a lasting exorcism It alone confers on the psyche a certitude beyond all cogitos It is also the mediation that finds it in flight forward already in its primitive imaginary one with the Bomb In its inner world the catastrophic subject experiences itself as full of death disease corruption The Bomb alone has the power to cast all nuclear waste outside and beneath oneself in a way that indefinitely extends the temporality of that act Radiation disease is a death that works inwardmdashinvisibly yet inexorably Death thereby breeds itself forth into an indefinite future omnipresent in a working a differance that begets delayed effects as further insurance against Nachtraglichkeit The extension of deaths dominion attained in the Bomb serves one grand function to prevent the return of projections by extending the temporality of the deed into a future that is lived by its victims as a judgment that is inevitable irreversible the antithesis of Benjamins messianic time tickingmdasha plea to delay death that can only be answered by death The Bomb thus serves as felix culpa to

an inner necessity To do its job a sublime event must exorcize everything within the subject that makes it an object of its own contempt What better way than Orwells boot brought down in an act of splitting that magnifies the distance between the terror

on the ground and the view from above Catastrophe is now fully outside oneself located in an other who has become nothing but matter body become spectacle of pain frozen forever in charred sculptures strewn across a devastated landscape Laocoon Munched but with the Howl silenced and deferred until it erupts later from within the survivors in a semiosis that can only be read by the scientists who planted it there and have now come (as biopowerknowledge) to study their handiwork as it blooms and bursts from deep within the body of the hibakusha as further testimony of ones powerjouissance Evacuation is complete Death-work has been lodged securely in the Other In the hibakusha one gets to see ones Thanatos as a narrative principle a force in history One gets to see over time what it is like to live death Soul-murder as the innermost reality of the crypt produces and finds in the

hibakusha its dialectical image As the expressive figura of death incarnate a terrifying verveilledoch here attains its objective correlative To purge oneself of catastrophic anxiety an utterly dehumanized object is not enough Neither the Sartrean look nor the Nazi act suffice The disorder of the psyche is deeper prior to desire (Sartre) and demand (Nazism) The projection of death-work can never rest by simply investing ones self-contempt in another For evacuation to work the

object must become something one can study inspect perform operations upon Catastrophic anxiety is the a proiri that gives Auschwitz and Hiroshima their necessity in the genocidal imagination The Bomb constitutes an Event because the psyche

reverses its core conditionmdashits cardiac arrest in inner self-loathingmdashthrough a projection that is total and irreversible If the evacuation of trauma is the abiding motive atop the crypt there is nothing abstract or Lacanian about the Real that results from its projection Evacuation is that malevolent reversal that condemns one to endless repetition One blows ones self-hatred and ones rage over that state fully out into the world but is thereby rendered powerless to do anything but gape in rapt amazement at ones creation That is perhaps why for over fifty years now whenever given the opportunity Paul Tibbets has proudly repeated the declaration that he has not had a moments remorse or regret Death-work externalized leaves one a spent and reified subject lacking any power other than the endless repetition of ones deed The wheel thus comes full circle in the only justice granted such subjects When catastrophic anxiety is only mediated by death-work the affects that compose subjectivity are rent assunder and scattered in pockets of pure persecution With each attempt to compose an inner self-cohesion death-work as internal saboteur rises up in a renewed attack on the effort to be Using the Bomb to reverse this disorder produces as its result a perfect attic justice Guilt and remorse are denied the doers of the deed because to feel such things is to renew a process of self-unraveling What the Bomb was meant to deliver one from has become the guardian

of untroubled sleep With the call of conscience rendered impossible the subject becomes overtly psychotic and must cling ever more desperately to an untroubled memory of the sublime event The subject thereby pronounces without being able to comprehend or mediate it the truth about itself in the ravaged landscape of Hiroshima the founding inner world of the psychotic-a world of utter fragmentation and the obliteration of every term of reference-has finally found a home to which it must say stay thou art so fair a home in which nothing inhuman is unheimlich

The moralization of anxiety manifests itself in our inability confront evil To displace this anxiety we make ourselves ldquogoodrdquo to protect ourselves from danger Failure to confront this psychical conflict reifies the original trauma and makes the destruction of the self meaninglessDavis 2001Walter A Davis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative Pg 86-87

No wonder resistance becomes the key term in the first stage of the unfolding drama This time however Kant canrsquot shift everything onto a plane of conceptual defenses and controls Affect weighs too heavily Intermediate moves immanent within that register are required Opposing affects must be created and marshaled as a first line of defense For the first time in Kant rationalistic mediation gives way to dramatic self-mediation Kant will finally attempt an agon that moves solely within the medium of affect To resist psychic unraveling he must

establish a countervailing force within the order of affect itself For Kant however affective self-mediation is equivalent to bending everything in a moral direction In doing so the author of the ethic of pure duty gives us the true genealogy of morals

That dubious ascent begins once the force threatening destruction is characterized as ldquoevilrdquo Anxiety is thereby transformed into a moralizing fear that we lack the power to resist ldquoevilrdquo Moralizing then structures the subsequent discourse but without exorcizing the psychological subtext that will undercut it This contradiction is in fact what ethics will here reveal about itselfIn making ourselves ldquogoodrdquo subjects we make ourselves beings unworthy of destruction That

transformation also requires the resources of rhetoric since we must ldquopersuaderdquo a tough audience The true goal in remaking ourselves is to tame the power that threatens us by tapping its conscience To do so we create within ourselves a new agency one that recognizing our virtue promises protection We thereby create the illusion that the threatening force has been softened and then transformed into a voice that warmly supports the good intentions of the nascent ego The superego as ego-ideal has been created So ends the founding self-mediation in the genealogy of an ethical ration By staging this internal drama the psyche has taken the action within required to create the space needed to assert control over affect The necessary act follows ndash the attempt to affect a complete reversal of the psychersquos initial condition Kant asserts repeatedly that we can only judge the sublime and experience its proper ldquopleasurerdquo if we view things from ldquoa safe placerdquo But in the psyche as opposed to mind the safe place doesnrsquot exist a priori It has to be invented and with it the most revealing picture of the genesis of what we now call the ldquoegordquo It is a difficult birth to a dubious and troubled function The problem of the ego is one of generating a transformation from impotence to power within affect itself through an agon immanent to that register But Kant is unable to sustain such an agon We get instead a displacement toward concepts through a use of the defensive mechanism known as splitting Ego and inner world divide in an unbridgeable rift thus establishing this condition as the true ldquoidentityrdquo of the ego The ego is the effort to repress the conflicts in the psyche from which it derives But while displacement and intellectualization offer a handle the egorsquos work is far from done The continuing pressure of inner conflicts requires a further battle In that struggle moralizing interpretations do yeoman service by splitting the psychersquos original trauma into a longed-for reificationmdashthe opposition of the ego to the drives

We have become creatures full of instincts The crucial task of the aff is to open up the unconscious counter narrative to provide a mirror to reflect upon the presupposed American identitySucharov 2005Mira M Sucharov assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli Palestinian Peacerdquo Pg 27-28

Just as individuals and groups possess consciousness and an unconscious I argue that every society maintains not only a dominant (conscious) narrative but an unconscious counternarrative as well which

the former has in part arisen to conceal As the counternarrative represents the role that society most fears adopting it resides in the unconscious where it will not interfere with the day-to-day transmission and fulfillment of the dominant narratives and the dominant roles For instance a defensive states counternarrative would encapsulate the view that we are not only defensive but sometimes we can be aggressive 35 Narratives and counternarratives can coexist in two waysmdash either with the counternarrative being simply an unactualized fear or with the counternarrative corresponding to an actual role being enacted alongside the dominant role-identity Thus while an actor may consciously be aware of a counterrole that she abhors (eg the good student who avoids cheating on exams) the unconscious reminds us that the cheater is latent in the self-portfolio of the good student In the event that this student cheats radical change can only come about once the self has

been reconciled with its unconscious opposite Actors will not become aware of the divergence from their dominant identity without the aid of a mirror however Only with the help of outside forces drawing attention to the clash between the two narratives will elites experience a cognitive dissonance necessitating a realignment between actions and role-identity One of the most salient transmission belts for the creation of state narratives is collective memory Memorymdashactive or latent recall of things occurring in the pastmdashhas begun to be understood as not solely a private activity but as representing a group phenomenon as well 36 On the collective level memory can be either experience-near-active one-step removed or distantly removed Active memory would be represented by Holocaust survivors in Israel and the Diaspora for instance One step removed would be the surrogate memories that their immediate Offspring carry with them37 and distantly removed would be exemplified by the Rabbinic injunction that Jews experience the annual telling of the Exodus from Egypt as if they were there While a case could be made for discounting the importance of actual experiences in favor of the way

those experiences arc remembered both of these are crucial for ascertaining role identity Just as traumatic events in a persons life may be repressed in memory but still shape that persons identity the international observer needs to account for actual experiences yet view these as embedded within a narrative context Similarly some historical events undergo a process of memory revision in these cases the observer must be sensitive to the effect that the new discourse has on the societys perception of these events whether or not these stories accord with fact The clinical parallel in psychoanalysis is that while the analysands relationship with her parents is considered crucial to uncovering the contours of her psychology the analyst as a rule does not attempt to meet the parents firsthand rather the patients recounting of these experiences is considered to be the most important channel of investigationmdash and hence transformation Since we are talking about collections of individuals memory needs to be actively transmitted to the societys members in order for it to influence the citizens sense of collective identity One of the ways this can be done is through ritual Being repetitive while symbolically imbued ritual gains meaning only through the symbols attributed to it by the group and is a collective process that serves to link actors to a series of past events for which they may not have been physically present Moreover private rituals that are collectively prescribed such as prayer serve to bind the individual to the collective particularly when there is a formalized liturgy Most collective rituals occur according to the calendar and therefore can encompass regular ceremonies that come to act as markers for the individuals personal time cycle38Sometimes particular collective memories that have been sustained over time are ruptured with citizens contemplating new facts about their countrys past Revisionist history is an example of an attempt to bring forth these sorts of new facts When history is reinterpreted the society can either shun the dissenting voices or else gradually reevaluate the original narratives When this reevaluation occurs society is more apt to uncover the hitherto unconscious counternarratives a discovery that can

lead to the realization that the states behavior might be contradicting the states role-identity In other words revisionist historians and other domestic dissenters can serve as the mirror referred to later

Vote affirmative to give up hope in the face of guarantees - only holding yourself completely open in the face of the promise of a sustainable status quo can open space for self-overcoming that allows us to engage in new forms of praxisDavis 2006 Walter A Davis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deathrsquos Dream Kingdom Pg 63

To know this situation for what it is challenges what is finally the deepest and most fundamental of the guarantees The principle of Hope To appropriate Eliot After such knowledge what forgiveness There is perhaps nothing that can be done to change the situation Ive described But then what is the purpose of knowing such things if they only produce meaningless suffering Is despair the end result of a life shorn of the guarantees Or are we finally like the drunks in ONeills The Iceman Cometh knowing that in order to sustain the illusions required to go on living they must pronounce Hickey mad and reject everything he revealed to them about

their lives as a product of that madness Perhaps its time to admit what the need for Hope really signifies Denial of responsibility for certain situations under the assumption that knowing them correctly would lead to despair Raising that specter is of course the rhetorical ploy invoked to prematurely terminate inquiry lest it impinge on

emotional and psychological needs Despair thus remains an empty concept We dont know what it is and never will as long as we use the need for hope to prevent discovery of our capacities to endure Whether despair is what we will find on the other side of hope is something we cant know For all hope really signifies is a testament to our weakness and our fears Perhaps we are called to something beyond it What Shakespeare called tragic

readiness For in opening ourselves to the possibility of despair we also open ourselves to the possibility of self-overcoming and through it the discovery of a praxis that lies on the other side of the conceptual and existential paralyses created by the guarantees We cant know what is to be done as long as we continue to respond to our situation by invoking ahistorical values and guarantees that are grounded in an essentialistic and ahistorical theory of human nature

PlanThe United States federal government should substantially curtail its domestic surveillance by ceasing all domestic surveillance

Contention 2 is FramingAn ethics of existence forecloses the tragic struggle in which we never confront our inner trauma- only our affirmative can open new ways of relating to ourselves that can overcome these limitations- the 1AC is a precondition for any meaning to our livesDavis 2006 Walter ADavis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg238-240)

In her critique of Kantian ethics Alenka Zupancic often refers to the Lacanian idea that there is a loss deeper than ones life The loss of ones reason for living The apostle of duty offers a heroic example of how one escapes the threat of that loss What Im suggesting here is that ethics actually begins on the other side of it With the possibility that first exists when one discovers that one has already lost or violated or fatally compromised ones reason for living because the values one thinks one honors and the actual truth of ones life are thoroughly at odds The traumatic event that brings one to this recognition is the origin of ethics This is the ethical task it establishes to see if one can pay the price for having violated oneself by assuming the full burden of the situation one has thereby createdThe ethical situation accordingly confronts the subject with the necessity to choose to be in a radically new way or die inside Nothing less is demanded than a totally new way of relating to oneself for the guilt one experiences in such a situation is existentializing One is guilty toward oneself for having failed to honor the duties that one bears to oneself for having so thoroughly lied to oneself about ones life As Hamlet learns it is through that recognition that one first discovers that one has tragic responsibilities toward oneself that can no longer be evaded because one with this situation is the even deeper discovery that there are failures that can be irreversible That is the possibility defining the situation one is now in What one does will reveal the truth of who one is Guilt toward oneself has overtaken all possibilities of displacement and denial Fail now and one dies within Most people will of course do just about anything to avoid guilt or to get cleansed of it as quickly as possible That is why so many fail the test when it comes to them shrinking inside rather than expanding to the demands of our innermost possibility the one defining our humanity An ethics of existence begins with the traumatic experience in which everything weve tried to escape about ourselves catches up with us One then knows that ones prior life has been a flight And all ones brave ideas and bright ethical claims airy nothingmdashthe indulgence in comforting and self-alienating lies But now one

is finally like Hamlet in the situation from which there is no exit An ethics grounded in the possibility of freedom depends on the actions one performs within oneself when one finds oneself in a crisis that can no longer be denied This is precisely the kind of situation Kant is unable to consider which is why he constructs in Duty the principle of choice that renders it impossible In serving Duty one is delivered from the repressed thought that now can never arise that ones whole life and all its choices especially the ethical ones may be no more than a flight from things in oneself that one flees because one fears that if one is ever forced to face oneself one will suffer a destruction worse than death Destruction within An existentializing ethic begins on the other side of all the things we do to delay that event For it is when the thing one fears happens that one first discovers the truth of ones life the depth of ones inauthenticity The trauma that will measure ones humanity has arrived Nothing else now exists but the lonely struggle of the psyche with itself Suicide (including the primary form of suicide inner death) is one term of that situation Ethics is the other An ethics of existence is what one does when one finally finds oneself in the traumatic situation that brings one before oneself There is one lesson in this a lesson that probably cant be learned Rather than running from the trauma we should plunge toward it since it is only through it that we can discover both the truth about ourselves and what we are able to do in the face of that truth To activate that possibility all thats needed perhaps is to drown out the noise and chatter one keeps running in ones head Perhaps the truth is that the truth about ourselves is not deeply repressed and unknown Its closer than we think available to introspection if we but dared But thats what makes the kind of impassioned reflection Hamlet engages in so terrifying It exemplifies everything we know and dont want to know about ourselves18 Here is an attempt to offer an image that describes in depth the existential-psychoanalytic condition from which the possibility of ethics derives In George Orwells 1984 Winston Smith when tortured with the thing he most fears betrays the thing he loves To save his life he sacrifices what gives it meaning He capitulates before an inner torment that reduces the psyche to a condition of catastrophic anxiety (The image of the cage of rats placed over the head they will raven externalizes in a perfect objective correlative the terror that has the power to dissolve the psyche What is a phobia after all but an inner condition displaced into an external fear) What I want to suggest here is that Winston Smiths phobia describes the inner condition that defines any subject traumatized by itself Such a subject lives tortured by the struggle not to betray the thing one loves the thing that could give ones life meaning But one saves it only if one is willing to sacrifice everything to the

acceptance of the suffering and inner torment that service to it entails This is the ethical act whereby a subject attains tragic agency Becoming an existentially autonomous agent is the process of engaging the disorders of ones psyche in the effort of active reversal The wish to escape that effort to soften it or to insist that suffering must always have a happy resolution is the voice of self-betrayal If one gives in to it one loses with Winston the thing one has finally found the thing one can love more than ones life but only by suffering all that it demands That thing more precious than life is the tragic struggle that gives life perhaps the only meaning it can have

The ethic of the aff is key - only an ethical act that confronts our inner trauma with a constant and inner openness can we create the conditions for self-overcoming necessary to open ourselves to a meaningful existence - the only ethical choice is to fully confront contingencyDavis 2006 Walter A Davis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg235-238

What follows attempts to distill the ethic of existence in to its fundamental principles I also try here to present those thesis in a way that will engage the readers psyche and emotions at precisely the place within us where each of us makes a basic decision about ourselves Thats the only self that matters The others are selfreifying defenses The argument thus constitutes both an appeal to the readers freedom and an attempt to impinge on that freedom to bring each reader before him or herself by challenging defenses with the power that some ideas have to light a fire in the soul (1) We concur with Kant that if a choice is not free its not moral The possibility of freedom depends however on an in-depth analysis of ones psyche Such an analysis leads from the destruction of ego identity to the need to bring about a complete reversal in ones relationship to oneself by deracinating the voice of the other Thinking is ethical insofar as it engages one thing the battle of a subject with itself over the meaning of its being (2) There is no way to abridge that process nor to provide guarantees that will secure a safe outcome To sustain the psychoanalytic turn the psyche must continually throw itself into question and root out the emotions that bind it to a pattern of lies An ethic of the existential subject depends on maximizing what Keats termed negative capability the ability to be in uncertainties Mysteries doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason Rather than resolving doubts the purpose of thought and action is to deepen them An act is ethical insofar as it deepens the conflict of the subject with itself (3) One acts ethically only when all symbolic and ideological supports have collapsed Only then can one take on responsibility for oneself because only then is one at issue and at risk The ethical act must radically open itself to contingency in a situation where one must create values yet where those values can derive from nothing but the depth of ones engagement in the situation By the same token such values cannot be a final solution but must open themselves to later contingencies Ethics must always allow itself to be measured by contingency because contingency is precisely what calls up ethical responsibility The primary ethical situation is not one where there is a clear course of duty but where a subject trembles before its responsibility to create new values in a situation that reduces received values to rubble (4) Ethics begins when there is a genuine crisis of values even perhaps the need for a re-valuation of all values For Kant there was not nor could there be such a crisis The values were known immutable and generally agreed upon The only question was what kind of principle they would be grounded in which meant for Kant and the Aufklarung how could they be grounded in Reason For us in contrast the primary fact is a historicity that bites into the very possibility of the ethical Every ethical value must be willing to historicize itself That recognition entails the following considerations The desert grows Under the guise of fundamentalist crusades herd moralities dominate The extent of inhumanity is appalling So many values that once seemed so solid have been so thoroughly debunked The possibility of ethics now begins with a systematic exposure of all superego pathologies all the ethical ideologies that societies use to introduce a fundamental passivity into subjects while convincing those same subjects that they are good in a goodness that depends on willed ignorance An existential ethic is radically destructive of received beliefs radically disruptive of the desires of the normal subject Refusing and exposing all Symbolic supports it seeks in the struggle of the psyche with its disorders the source of value (5) Ethics is a matter of extremity It begins in the most extreme actmdashthe act of radical individuation in which one opens ones psyche to an interrogation that must be sustained in its extremity Ethics is about a choice in which a subject risks the value and meaning of its existence not about those choices that assure it of that meaning Moreover it is only when one does this that one experiences for the first time the

terror implicit in the oft-quoted Sartrean statement existence precedes essence (6) Ethics must engage and derive from the dread that defines choice Let me illustrate this proposition by contrasting Hamlets choice with the situation in Styrons Sophies Choice The horrifying choice Sophie facesmdashto choose which of her children will be sent to the gas chambermdashis a forced choice and thus extreme and exceptional in a way that deprives it of the possibility of being normative17 Hamlets choice in contrast is a free one that issues from nothing but his freedom and the readiness with which he accepts the selftorture that existence entails Sophie is tortured from without by the madness of the other and the inhuman logic that madness requires in order to know itself (Styron calls the officer who forces the choice on Sophie a genius of the Reich) Hamlet is tortured from within by the logic of self-criticism and self-overcoming that informs the existentializing process We are fortunate if we never face a situation like Sophies nor suffer the death-in-life that is the result of such choices But insofar as we have a psyche Hamlets situation is the general one that defines us Or to put it in properly ethical terms engaging the kind of situation he faces is the act that activates the inherent possibility that defines us The choice that founds such an ethic must therefore be distinguished both from the a priori choice made by the apostle of duty and Sophies forced choice All three refer to extreme choices and situations In only one however is guilt toward oneself both the origin of the choice and its result That is only one of the three choices is the ground of its own possibility and thereby the source of an existentialization that issues in values bound to the tragic contingencies of our situatedness

2AC

A2 ndash Realism

We control the internal link to their impacts The psychoanalysis of the affirmative forces an internal investigation of the ways in which the subjectrsquos subconscious desires rationalize what we would consider self-interest This means that we can only make sense of realism through a lens of psychoanalysis Sucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 17-18)

The psychological turn that international relations took with the rise of behavioralism in the 1960s has begun to expand beyond focusing on cognitionmdashhow individuals thinkmdashto a wider appreciation of the role of emotional determinants of action one of many factors that were long dismissed as unscientific Part of the reason for this hesitant courtship is no doubt the long strides that international relations theory has taken toward refining its investigative lenses such that less easily observable phenomena can be more confidently incorporated into the solid theoretical infrastructure that the discipline has now adopted A central example of this evolution is the analytical watershed inaugurated by neorealism which fashioned a conceptual playing field where little had existed before Neorealism a theoretical school that views international relations as taking place within an anarchical state system with no overarching authority in turn spawned the constructivist turn in international relationsmdashthe approach that stresses the importance of social identity in determining international outcomesmdashand subsequent counterarguments that built on yet other social and psychological preceptsmdash all of which agree that there is such a thing as an international systemmdashthough they understand the effects of anarchy differently Introducing psychoanalysis to international relations can therefore be seen as the next logical step for a relatively young discipline that seeks to understand why political actors behave the way they do While all psychoanalysts draw on Freuds unique contribution subsequent approaches have altered many of his assumptions This trend has kept pace with the embracing of new epistemological and ontological perspectives by other scientific and social scientific fields such as the quantum revolution in physics -a paradigm shift that has since influenced other disciplines The form of psychoanalytic theory that I use here is the contemporary relational strand one that analysts have alternately termed relational-model theorizing a dyadic systems perspective and intersubjectivity theory This approach shares an ontology basic to constructivism in international relations the psychology (identity) of the person (state) is not hard-wired into the unit but develops in part from the actions of other actors in the social environment (the family the therapeutic setting the international system) and in part through the shared assumptions that permeate that system As an approach centered on the individual mind contemporary psychoanalysis takes into account the broader social context within which actors act Psychoanalysis also provides a coherent theory of behavior incorporating three elements that have mostly been invisible in international relations theory but that provide a fuller understanding of how states and nonstate actors interact emotion the unconscious and the possibility for actors own cognitive and emotional insight to be a source of behavior change In drawing on these principles perhaps the most significant contribution that psychoanalysis can make to international relations is in improving on prevailing theories of identity which in turn illuminate questions about international action Within international relations constructivism has been criticized for neglecting the question of how identity is in fact created Cognitive psychologymdashwhich international relations has begun to draw on liberallymdashin part helps to fill this gap Yet with its assumption that the emotional legacy of early interpersonal relationships is essential in shaping personality and subsequent behavior psychoanalysis offers a more comprehensive model of identity creation than those put forth by cognitive theorists Recognizing these explanatory benefits contructivists have recently called for exploring the potential that psychoanalysis holds for understanding international politics Thus unlike the prevailing psychoanalytic approaches in international relationsmdashnamely psychohistories of individual leaders and the focus-group potential of micro-level conflict resolution the psychoanalytic approach I use here is meant to coexist happily alongside other streams of systemic theory in international relations

Forcing the state away from what it considers a core tenet of national defense in the exact opposite way it desires creates the conditions necessary for reflection of the efficacy of the initial policies of surveillance which changes future policySucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 32-)

Like most individuals states possess a complex arsenal of motivations that are not all palatable to the politys sense of self mdashnot least of which is due to the discrepant voices vying for influence in any society Yet the dominant self mdashthat overarching group ethos that does not necessarily reflect each single (sub)voicemdashimplicitly prescribes a set of normatively acceptable behaviors Should a state adopt a policy course that contradicts the states role-identity we can expect some sort of cognitive dissonance to arise leading to a radical realignment between actions and identity Just as a man who once struck his wife might offer the apologetic plea that I dont know what got into me it is up to the analyst to help the subject come to terms with the aggression that has evidently been very much inside of him all along The policy shift therefore results from the force of the role-identity prodding the self back into behavioral consistency However acting in contradiction to ones role-identity does not necessarily result in a behavior shift The dissonance between role-identity and behavior must be both unbearable and experienced at an emotional level in order for such a shift to result If the dissonance remained at a cognitive level it is likely that the subject would employ one of a number of cognitive biases in order to rationalize the discrepancy42 The dredging up of the unconscious counternarrative assures that the dissonance is experienced deeply enough to result in the taking of radical action to realign actions with identity 43 This hypothesis of cognitive-emotional realization is grounded in the clinical findings of psychoanalytic theory that suggest that under certain conditions actors may become consciously aware of previously unconscious processes44 The classic understanding of cognitive dissonancemdashas articulated by Leon Festingermdashis that inconsistency between behavior and belief results in psychological discomfort that leads to activity oriented toward dissonance reduction just as hunger leads to activity oriented toward hunger reduction45 In line with psychoanalysis the actual cognitive-emotional realization brings to light what had previously been stored in the unconscious areas of the states subjective world In actuality the assumption here is that the role-challenging behavior (paired with domestic challenges) causes elites to reflect on the states role- identity Moreover my use of cognitive-emotional realization imbues the concept with a distinctively emotional component as well Whereas pure cognitive dissonance refers to the challenging of an individuals worldview (ie the revelation of new facts)46 I am introducing the more ontologically powerful notion of challenges to the self47 When this behavior undermines the very legitimacy buttressing the states raison detat the dissonance is particularly acute Catalysts for Realization Once decision-makers come to realize that the states foreign-policy actions have contradicted the states role-identity a policy shift may result The important question that remains is what contributes to this realization Numerous sources may act as the mirror necessary for the state to reflect on its behavior For clarity I have divided them into three categories domestic elements (including the military the peace movement revisionist historians artists and the domestic media) other states (including allies and adversaries as well as those states news media) and international structures (including international organizations norms and regimes) Domestic Elements The Military If the military acts in a way that the populace sees as contradicting the states self-image (even if the military is merely carrying out governmental policies) society can experience a corresponding cognitive

dissonance In a democracy the military takes its directives from the government however military culture is instrumental in shaping the broader strategic culture encompassing foreign-policy decisions mdashand role-identitymdashmore generally Most of the time the relationship between the civilian and military spheres resembles a symbiosis commands are given by civilians and implemented by the military which in turn will advise and reshape subsequent policies In some cases ex-military personnel will pursue a career in government on being discharged However it is possible for the military to experience a sense of dissonance between a particular policy and its overall defense doctrine or ethic Soldiers might articulate discomfort in carrying out a particular mission or the number of conscientious objectors may rise In a country in which conscientious objection is previously unheard of the founding of such a movement will therefore signal an even higher degree of dissonance between behavior and institutional role-identity In examining foreign-policy shifts the role of the military is crucial in representing the degree of concordance between national role-identity and foreign policy In states where the military has particular salience for establishing national identitymdashthose states with mandatory and universal conscription for instancemdashthat institution will be particularly salient

Their dependence on pragmatism to justify unrealistic internal link chains and counter psychological methods creates the worst type of moral tunnel vision in which we become incapable of understanding the carnage of our ideology ndash this makes ethics impossibleDavis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg47-48)

But its always a good idea when seeking an explanation of the human motives behind actions to stick with the empirical With stated intentions and official rationales Otherwise we give ourselves over to psychobabble Despite official denial by the Department of Defense that DU is harmful a series of explanations are now in place to account for the development and use of DU weapons DU is cost-effective militarily efficient and turns to productive use a waste product wed otherwise have to dispose of at great cost In a variety of ways for the past two days We who leave here in sorrow know that we will one day be reunited with her in joy My concern here is not with the ontological status of this preposterous belief but with its psychological function as a guarantee that offers human beings a way to deprive death of its finality And the terror that prospect entails The function of guarantees is to enable human beings to bear events and contingencies that would otherwise be too traumatic There is much that we can face apparently only by denying Such perhaps is one accurate estimation of what it means lo be a human being to remain a child of ones needs and desires disguising that fact in the form of beliefs and ideas The primary purpose of religion philosophy and culture has been to provide conceptual psychological and emotional guarantees so I hat traumatic events become part of a larger framework that assures the realization of our hopes and dreams Without such supports most people supposedly would find life unlivable Through the ministry of the guarantees we banish those thoughts and feelings that we are convinced would deprive life of meaning plunging us into despair Experience accordingly becomes the movement from and to the affirmation of the guarantees through their imposition on events The main line of Western philosophy can most profitably be seen as I series of efforts to provide a ground for the guarantees That effort achieves one of its culminations in Hegel who defined the purpose of philosophy as the elimination of the contingent As father of the philosophy of history he offered that new discipline a single goal to demonstrate that the rational is real and the real rational that history is the story of progress liberty the realization of a universal humanity Or to put it in vulgar terms democracy and civilization are on the march and will soon sweep the entire Middle East In order to triumph over the contingencies of existencemdashdoubt about oneself ones place in the world and ones final endmdashmany guarantees are needed Moreover they must form a system of reinforcing beliefs such that if one guarantee is threatened other guarantees come in to fill the breach Thereby the function of the system as a whole is assured Within the system of guarantees one guarantee however is superordinate The belief that human nature is basically good As animal rationale we are endowed with an ahistorical essence that cannot be lost Evil is an aberration Consequently I heres always reason for hope and the belief that no matter how bad things get well always find a way to recover everything that I lie guarantees assure Psyche Its all a matter of pragmatic efficiency with a little capitalist profit motive thrown in for good measure Theres only one thing wrong with this explanation It leaves out the basis for the calculus Theres every reason to use DU and no reason not to use it if and only if one rationale informs all decisions How to maximize death regardless of consequences or alternatives Introduce any countervailing motives and the entire chain of decisions becomes questionable Conscious stated intentions then reveal themselves as functions of something else that

has been conveniently rendered unconscious What looks like a purely pragmatic matter devoid of psychological motives now reveals the opposite the fact that Thanatos so inhabits the system that the absence of anything opposed to it goes without saying Thanatos has become what Wittgenstein called a form of life7 a way of being so deeply rooted that it operates automatically habitually and of necessity It has become a collective unconscious And as such it is no longer accessible to those whose intentions conceal and reveal it The reason for sticking with the empirical is now clear There is something insane in the empirical That is what the historian must uncover Before we ask ourselves how this situation came to pass we need to ask another question For its easy to claim we dont know about such things because the media refuses to tell us about them Theres another reason for our ignorance however and its the one we need to confront I refer to the possibility that we choose our ignorance because otherwise wed lose the system of guarantees we depend on for our identity and our understanding of history As Barbara Bush put it in telling Diane Sawyer why she doesnt watch the news Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many what day its gonna happen and how many this or what do you suppose Or I mean its its not relevant So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that8 It would be easy to deride Mrs Bush to congratulate oneself on not sharing her attitude What I hope to show however is that on an essential level one determinative in the last instance we are in full agreement with her and delude ourselves as long as we think otherwise

IR SPECIFIC ndash The method of the affirmative best supplements our understanding of international relations by including elements that are absent in normal policy examinations of international relations Sucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 18-20)

It has long been argued that even within the confines of rational-choice approaches the nature of a decision-makers preferences cannot be assumed a priori and indeed their distinctiveness derives from factors ranging from emotions to personality to the selective use of historical analogies Emotion in short can be considered the sine qua non of social life a realization that has recently begun to permeate international relations theory Moreover the concept of the unconscious that anchors psychoanalysis can illuminate the question of why an individual experiences a sense of dissonance when her actions do not conform to her identity the mechanism by which the dissonance between action and identity can become unbearable and therefore why humans experience the need to match the two The unconscious is that aspect of the self that remains the most untapped yet potentially the most satisfying determinant of action coming as it does early in the causal chain At its most basic the unconscious is simply the repository for those characteristics that an actor fears adopting in other words action fantasies that the actor despises but can plausibly entertain This fundamental tension between the feared and the imaginable is what normally keeps these fantasies in check and is what makes the unconscious so potentially powerful as an explanatory tool And while the unconscious is an admittedly contested concept scholars from various fields have issued tentative calls for its exploration and convincing deductive and empirical research certainly justify its consideration One theoretical perspective that has been criticized for ignoring the unconscious is sociologys symbolic interactionism an approach that underpins constructivism in international relations Part of the reason for the tension between sociology including symbolic interactionism and psychoanalysis arguably lies in an antiquated understanding of psychology the false belief that to employ psychology as an explanatory approach one must ignore the impact that ones social environment has on ones personality self-image and behavior However contemporary psychoanalysis presents a view of the self that is more relational than what Freudian drive theory had suggested A psychoanalytic approach does not have to assume that unconscious or otherwise emotional factors arise from the actor independent of the shared understandings that define the social environment Admitting an explanatory role for the unconscious therefore does not imply a rejection of intersubjectivity mutual-constitution or any of the other organizing principles of sociology and constructivism Rather it simply means that ideas held in the unconscious serve as one filter through which actors interpret social interaction The unconscious therefore may be understood either as one element of agency that the actor brings to interpreting his social script or as itself the product of social forces that interpret and constrain action The first perspective assumes that agency does not have to be conscious to be meaningful agency at its most basic can simply imply action and intentionality can therefore encompass an unconscious component The second view means that the unconscious does not have to be understood as a pre-wired component of the unit that in turn shapes behavior rather it can be viewed as an emergent and mediating phenomenon We can therefore understand cognition as being inherently situated within social processes This is consistent with a relational view of social life and yet it is an important theoretical addition to the prevailing wisdom in international relations about how social understandings

ultimately shape behavior A final contribution that psychoanalysis can make to our understanding of international relationsmdashand conflict resolution in particularmdashis its assumption that entrenched behavior patterns can be altered through cognitive and emotional insight In addition to challenging the static conception of human nature that underpinned classical realism (arguably the first theory of international relations) and that provided a rather pessimistic view of human affairs this assumption is a valuable addition to any theory of international relations in which the prevailing theories of actionmdashmaterial power in the case of states polarity in the case of state systemsmdashare difficult if not impossible to manipulate As a result many of the most prominent international relations theories have lacked meaningful policy implications Conversely psychoanalytic theory suggests tools for ameliorating some of the most pressing global problems including protracted conflict and war While some psychoanalytically based conflict-resolution approaches use the focus-group format to simulate the healing function of the therapy setting this book demonstrates that the gaining of conscious insight into ones role deviationmdasha prerequisite for policy changemdashcan come about through real-life international interaction that requires neither a skilled conflict practitioner nor the willingness of elites to participate in such an exercise Rather under certain conditions role conflict can prompt domestic and international elements to hold a mirror to the face of elites resulting in a collective cognitive dissonance that can lead to policy change This mirror can take a number of formsmdashacts of protest by domestic groups media coverage and actions by allies adversaries or international structures These sources will be discussed further

IR SPECIFIC ndash What their internal links consider to be ldquoself-interestrdquo for a state doesnrsquot actually exist States are not sentient Instead they are composed by a collection of minds that act in self-interest which means that psychoanalytic evaluation of the self is a prior question to understanding the interests of the state Sucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 21-22)

Rather than referring to a notion of collective selfhood that is shared by multiple states- as some constructivist theorists of collective identity would maintainmdashthe title of this book the international self is meant to suggest not only that each state possesses a distinctive identity but that this identity develops out of the states relationship with other international actors This concept also implies that decisions emanating from the polity are derived from a process not simply the sum of the states parts Yet while we have already shown that psychoanalysis can accommodate a role for environmental processes in shaping behavior we still need to be aware of the risks of anthropomorphizing the state a practice that gets to the heart of the debate between two analytical positions that cut across the social sciences methodological individualism and holism While methodological individualism views social life as the product of actions taken by individuals holism understands the group to be a meaningful unit in and of itself Yet to an extent the debate between the two perspectives is already fixed While the holists have in their favor a precedent of semantic habitmdash we tend to anthropomorphize the state in everyday speech more often than not (eg Washington decided to wage war against al-Qaeda)mdashmethodological individualism is allied with the rich literature of rational choice and more prosaically the commonsense discomfort that arises when we ascribe human characteristics to things including groups Groups do not have minds any more than do other social facts and group behavior is after all the product of individuals acting on the groups behalf Finally given the presence of disparate individuals and subgroups constituting any society it can be misleading to attribute a single group consciousness to a political entity In a foreign-policy context accordingly adherents of this view would focus on elite attitudes bureaucratic politics andor interest group activities to tease out the causal relationship between Intentions and outcomes Yet a strong case can be made for the emergent properties of states and their policy processes something happens between the point at which citizens articulate preferences and those preferences are translated into policies Insofar as elite decisions do not always reflect the opinion of the majority there remains some degree of independent agency that may very well accrue to the state as a whole Under this reasoning it would be plausible to assert the existence of an overarching group self as Alexander Wendt does when he claims that states are people too In addition to the views of significant strands of psychoanalytic thought (which would not necessarily be expected to assume that units other than the individual can be psychoanalyzed) the idea of a group self enjoys far-reaching support across the social sciencesmdashinternational relations included This includes neorealisms assumption that the state is a unitary actor the Collective self hood implied by social identity theory the concept of political culture early psychoanalytic assumptions about the group as well as studies on obedience group-think and the crowd phenomenon There is a reason why scholars are drawn to the group as a unit of analysismdashwitness anthropologists concern with tribes and civilizations sociologists focus on street gangs and societies and political scientists emphasis on states and

transnational actors Group behavior and individual behavior are not necessarily identical Nor can an individual be expected to behave the same way in the context of a group as he or she would alone Moreover constructivism goes so far as to assume the possibility of shared norms across states a claim that has enjoyed much empirical support during the first active decade of constructivist research It is much more defensible to argue the existence of a collective identity within a state the boundaries of which contain degrees of centralized media language and other discursive channels for cultural dissemination and which prescribe the roles that the groups members are expected to perform within the context of that group And if different subgroups within the state disseminate disparate narratives we can assume that the most dominant group within society (as defined by some combination of ethnicity class or gender) has custody over a single consequential dominant narrative Finally even if we choose to ascribe a states national ethos to its elites we need to remember that state leaders are the product of the society in which they were reared This view would effectively mitigate the tension between elite- and mass-level phenomena in international relations since both elites and masses are socialized by the overarching structure of the collective

A2 ndash DisadvantagesThe internal linkrsquos dependence on rationality only serves to protect us from the unknown that the future holds This ultimately reduces all forms of knowledge to something that can be calculated which ensures violence The only way to reverse this trend is to force a confrontation with tragedy and the unknownDavis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg51-52)

Emotional The innermost need of human beings is to feel good about themselves Whatever threatens that feeling must be exorcised Health normalcy and productivity depend on avoiding negative feelings Hope and optimism arent just healthy attitudes they are requirements of our nature Biologically wired We cannot remain for long in trauma Recovery moreover must restore our faith in the guarantees and our hopes for the future The need for hope is In fact the capstone of the entire system of guarantees Yet it too apparently has a history Today over 10 million of our children are on prescription drugs to prevent depression and anxiety Informed of this fact by Bill Maher the French actress Julie Delphy spoke the spontaneous wisdom of an archaic culture Dont they know that depression is a good thing that its something you have to go through in order to grow Not anymoreThe key to understanding the power of the guarantees is to understand the fears that they exorcise Thanks to religion death suffering and evil are deprived of their power Through the attainment of reason all other forms of consciousness and what they might reveal are put in their place Poetic knowing is deprived both of its legitimacy and its terror Science as fulfillment of reason assures us of domination over nature What Heidegger termed technoscientific rationality becomes the measure of what is real Belief in historical progress banishes the recurrent suspicion that history may lack direction or even worse move to the darkest of ends The condition is thereby set that makes it impossible for us to experience traumatic events such as 9-11 except as occasions to take whatever actions are needed to reaffirm our goodness and restore our guarantees It is in the personal order however that the guarantees do their deepest work Psychologically belief in the self or self-identity exorcises the most frightening contingency that there is a void at the center of the American psyche with panic anxiety and its corollary compulsive consumption the expression of a desperate non-identity That specter brings us before the greatest fear that our psyche not our conscious deliberative intentions is the author of our actions an author who will do anything in order to feel safe secure and righteous All of our emotional needs then stand forth under the rule of a single necessity the need to feel good about oneself at whatever cost and to sustain hope by banishing anything that would trouble us Resolution catharsis (ie the discharge of painful tensions or awareness) and renewal emerge as the needs that bind us with an iron necessity to the guarantees and all that they make it impossible for us to know It is easy to deprecate Dubya and apparently to hold onto the idea that hes a temporary aberration But the problem goes deeper To revive a battle cry from the 1960s insofar as one is wedded to any one of the guarantees one is part of the problem and not the solution For the grandest function of the system of guarantees as a whole and in each one of its parts is to blind us to historyAnd so to take up again the question stated previously how did the situation now being created in Iraq come about The next three sections constitute an attempt to answer that question by constructing for America a repressed history

The negative is attempting to apply reason to ethics and psychology This only creates a hard understanding of our inner psyche which is a loss of the self that outweighs every other impact Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg174-175)

This recognition implies a primary question What is the nature and extent of the ethical responsibility human beings have for such a condition To what extent can evil and the actions that flow from it be said to be chosen in the exercise of a freedom for which one bears ethical responsibility Traditionally ethical responsibility only applies to actions that are taken after deliberation and with full knowledge of the consequences actions where choice is a function of our ability to reason where the moral law is known and where one chooses to violate it for motives that can be specified as functions of a self- interest that overrides all other motives and considerations Mitigate any of these factors and one mitigates ethical responsibility Ethical responsibility is compromised or eliminated for example if ones action is determined by forces outside ones control if one acts without premeditation under duress in blind obedience to customs or authorities as the result of a pathology because of some limitation in the ability to think or to understand the consequences of ones action or because one acted without any conscious intention to do wrong However deplorable their deeds the mad for example are not evil Evil requires consciousness choice freedom If evil is to be a human possibility on a par with the possibility of goodness it must be something that is determined within the order of freedom The trouble with the traditional understanding of these conditions however is the effort to confine them within the limits of rationalism and a purely cognitive model of the mind Rationality is noble but single-minded devotion to it leaves the true life of the psyche undetected Focusing on it prematurely shifts discussion to a rarefied mode of mentation that is then cut off from the rest of the personality To sustain and deny that split reason is then given disproportionate weight in determining what we are and do But the dream of reason is precisely that A dream a desiremdashto bring ones being into correspondence with reason and thereby eliminate everything else especially in determining the questions of ethics No one brought this dream to bear on moral experience more rigorously than Immanuel Kant That effort is the sublime beauty of his thought But experiencing oneself in terms of a priori rationality comes at a terrible cost Life becomes a process in which we sleepwalk our way through most of what we do because weve cut ourselves off from the actual bases of our actions Our psyche becomes a stranger to us We fixate on giving rational accounts of ourselves and in the process alienate ourselves from everything else Emotions become irrationalities breaks with reason things we must overcome or worse things we can only acknowledge when they are good proper and in tune with reason The rest of our being becomes brute inclinations frailties of our nature desires that disrupt an otherwise rational identity As a result in terms of ethics whether we know it or not under the guise of reason weve made an offer that most human beings cannot refuse Claiming not to consciously intend what one does has become the grand excuse Traditional definitions of the three cardinal categories of ethics are a monument to that motive Restricting intention motive and choice to the canons of rationality fashions them to the designs of human mendacity For if by intention we mean a deliberate rational choice with full knowledge of the consequences evil as Ive described it is not chosen If along the same lines we restrict motive lo purposes for which we bear responsibility because they issue not from frailties of our nature or the force of circumstances but from an explicit knowledge of what one is doing and why evil as thus far described does not exist within the order of human motivation One can identify self-interest careerism and happiness as motives but to say that many agents act in order to advance Thanatos is hard to fathom Unless that is we expand the category of motive to include purposes that derive from the psyche in all its inherent conflictedness But once posit such a possibility choice becomes a concept that must be rethought in a radically new way

Their internal links are symptoms of the fantasy that we strive to maintain This logic becomes used to justify atrocity The affirmativersquos rejection of attempting to control the future allows alternate practices to emerge Vote affirmative to traverse the fantasy of their internal link chains Even if you donrsquot think we can solve the 1AC is a more productive through experiment than their disad Davis 2006(Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg63-65)

Is there anything more evil than shooting children in a school yard or flying planes into buildings One hears this rhetorical question often today Getting it firmly implanted in our minds seems to be one of the current ideological functions of the media A correct response requires careful reflection on the circumstance that underlies the knee-jerk response thanks to the power of the image it conjures up The promise inherent in Technoscientificrationality is deliverance from images Killing for it like everything else occurs at a distance In the inaugural moment Tibbets in the cockpit of the Enola Gay unable to imagine what he has just done as a human act It was all impersonal12 And today in the silent secret midnight ways that radiation poisoning works from within like a deed without a doer separated in space and time from its absent cause Perhaps killing at a distance is the greater evil precisely because it abrogates the image and the human connection between slayer and slain If I kill another man with my bare hands my deed is immediate to my embodied consciousness To kill that way you have to feel hate fear anguish remorse etc whereas to kill from a distance or through an invisible contamination is to render the whole thing impersonal With the desired result the ability for example of the man who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima incinerating 600000 people in a second and condemning another 300000 to the condition of hibakusha the walking dead to boast for over 59 years now that he has never felt a moment of regret or remorse Tibbets lack of moral imagination is one with his representative status as precursor For now its easy to litter a landscape with DU while denying that the stuff has any long-term medical or environmental effects13 The evil of killing at a distance is that it makes death unreal Protected from the image all who participate in the deed are delivered over to a pure and impersonal calculus (An aside if we really want to support our troops we must achieve for them a new Bill of Rights No one should ever be ordered to use weapons without being given a full knowledge of the long-term human and environmental consequences of those weapons To do otherwise is to deprive our soldiers of the choice that makes them human) The powers that be learned one lesson from Vietnam No more images The mistake was to let us see the carnage up close every night on TV The news as image entered our consciousness at the register where genuine change begins Where horror is felt free of the tyranny of the concept and the hypnotic power of the guarantees Desert Storm was the corrective the Nintendo war a war broadcast to look just like one of the video games wed been programmed to love Prohibition of the image is now a fundamental article of faith No images are allowed to come back to us from Iraq II (Michael Moores real crime was to give us a brief glimpse at what the mainstream media proscribe) Abolition of the image is one of the primary conditions of ecocide Everything must be rendered abstract invisible unreal No image can be allowed to trouble our sleep to lacerate our soul For then we might begin to know that there is indeed an evil far worse than shooting children in schoolyards or flying airplanes into buildings To move us toward that knowledge let me end with the forbidden which I must here attempt to convey solely through the more abstract medium of words since Ive not yet gained permission to reproduce a photograph I saw not long ago Its the picture of an Iraqi baby a victim of DU who was born with no nose mouth eyes

anus or genitals and with flipper limbs a common result of radiation exposure in utero That childs body full of red open ulcers is twisted in knots its ulcerated face contorted in a look of unspeakable suffering An authentic image of the sacredness of human life Of the preciousness of every breath To look at that child is to realize ones duty to mourn it to give voice to its right to invade Our consciousness and expose the evil of those who prate on about being pro-life while refusing to let us see what theyve reduced life to Luke 171-2 The image of that child must become the force in our minds that motivates us to deracinate all guarantees that shield us from the reality of that childs situation Or to put it another way every time one demands catharsis resolution and renewal that child is born again condemned to its writhing That is why its image must embolden us to question the most hallowed of the guarantees the one Ive refrained from discussing until now In the face of such evil what is to be done Is resistance ever justified in resorting to violence No we are told because if we do so we become just like them This ethical principle supposedly applies universally and atemporally It does so however because it assures t he guarantee that no matter what happens well never get our hands dirty History cant intrude on the categorical imperative Whatever action one takes one must maintain ones ethical purity Even if that means there is nothing one can do and after its been demonstrated I hat there are no non-violent ways to change the situation Perhaps we can no longer allow ourselves the luxury of such an ethic Bush did the moral imagination one favor His pre-emptive unilateralism made official what has been clear for so long but denied due to its implications There is no body to which we can turn for Justice not the UN the World Court or any other framework of international law The US will flaunt its contempt for such bodies whenever it suits its purpose And thus another mode of peaceful non-violent praxis is deprived of its guarantee

A2 ndash CounterplansTheir counterplan still attempts to maintain some type of guarantee for the future Their obsession with security and the future fail to force a confrontation with the trauma of the unknown - this means that only the aff can solve Anything else results in a return to the ideology of security Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg38-39)

But to undertake that task we must purge ourselves of the thing in ourselves that stands in the way I have termed it the guarantees By that term I refer to all those assurances we set up a priori to protect ourselves from the reality of historical trauma The significance of eventsmdashthe Shoah Hiroshima 9-11mdash is their power to call such guarantees into question by exposing cherished beliefs to the claims of darker views and by forcing us to think in radically new ways considering things about the human being that weve persistently denied or marginalized One dimension of any traumatic event is the shock it brings to traditional ways of thinking Thats why the dominant response to any historical trauma is the attempt to restore the guarantees by finding a way t o impose them on the event in order to contain and interpret it The ideological function of the guarantee is thereby demonstrated A way has been found to limit the impact of the event by picturing it as an aberration a temporary departure from values and beliefs that can always be recovered because they constitute something essentialistic or universal about human nature Something trans-historical History may disrupt our essence but it cannot destroy it The concept of human naturemdashin all t h e variants constituting the philosophic and psychological history of that idea from Plato and Aristotle through American self psychologymdashis the primary way in which we endeavor to deny history An event is traumatic precisely because it suggests that history occurs beyond the limits we want to impose on it and therefore may move in directions that have nothing to do with human nature or the cherished beliefs and values we derive from that concept Events put us as subjectsmdashand as thinkersmdash into a traumatic relationship to both ourselves and our world The anxiety at the center of thought is revealed Ideologists rush in to fill that void and restore the guarantees Our effort must be t o do the opposite and thereby sustain the vital possibility implicit in an event That possibility is to sustain a break with the guarantees and thereby find for history a radically different way of thinking To put it concretely a trauma cannot be resolved until its been constituted The Western Logos is a monument to t he effort to avoid t h a t task indeed to render it impossible a priori To reverse that tradition the things above all we must rid ourselves of are the desire and demand for resolution The recycling of the guarantees must give way to a n existentializing imperative to constitute and work within trauma in a way that addresses the psyche at the same register as Gibson and Abu Ghraib do by creating images symbolic actions and emotions that are of equal depth but that move us in an antithetical directionmdashtoward the inner transformation needed to purge ourselves of Thanatos Such an effort however cannot itself be yet another variant of the guarantees as happens when Love and Eros are posited as ahistorical values If anything the possibility of Love is far more difficult and exacting than death because it can only arise by reversing the prior force that death has within us The following two sections offer a brief picture of the kind of agonistic process such an effort entails in order to whet our appetite for something that should by now be evident The critique of ideology cannot be a merely intellectual exercise It must be the activation within our psyche of a countervailing drama

Any risk of ldquosolvencyrdquo for the counterplan is a reason to vote aff because it is an attempt to guarantee the future by pre-emptive action Even claims of a ldquonet-benefitrdquo are a link to the affirmative criticism Only the aff forcibly confronts the unknownDavis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg51-52)

Emotional The innermost need of human beings is to feel good about themselves Whatever threatens that feeling must be exorcised Health normalcy and productivity depend on avoiding negative feelings Hope and optimism arent just healthy attitudes they are requirements of our nature Biologically wired We cannot remain for long in trauma Recovery moreover must restore our faith in the guarantees and our hopes for the future The need for hope is In fact the capstone of the entire system of guarantees Yet it too apparently has a history Today over 10 million of our children are on prescription drugs to prevent depression and anxiety Informed of this fact by Bill Maher the French actress Julie Delphy spoke the spontaneous wisdom of an archaic culture Dont they know that depression is a good thing that its something you have to go through in order to grow Not anymore The key to understanding the power of the guarantees is to understand the fears that they exorcise Thanks to religion death suffering and evil are deprived of their power Through the attainment of reason all other forms of consciousness and what they might reveal are put in their place Poetic knowing is deprived both of its legitimacy and its terror Science as fulfillment of reason assures us of domination over nature What Heidegger termed technoscientific rationality becomes the measure of what is real Belief in historical progress banishes the recurrent suspicion that history may lack direction or even worse move to the darkest of ends The condition is thereby set that makes it impossible for us to experience traumatic events such as 9-11 except as occasions to take whatever actions are needed to reaffirm our goodness and restore our guarantees It is in the personal order however that the guarantees do their deepest work Psychologically belief in the self or self-identity exorcises the most frightening contingency that there is a void at the center of the American psyche with panic anxiety and its corollary compulsive consumption the expression of a desperate non-identity That specter brings us before the greatest fear that our psyche not our conscious deliberative intentions is the author of our actions an author who will do anything in order to feel safe secure and righteous All of our emotional needs then stand forth under the rule of a single necessity the need to feel good about oneself at whatever cost and to sustain hope by banishing anything that would trouble us Resolution catharsis (ie the discharge of painful tensions or awareness) and renewal emerge as the needs that bind us with an iron necessity to the guarantees and all that they make it impossible for us to know It is easy to deprecate Dubya and apparently to hold onto the idea that hes a temporary aberration But the problem goes deeper To revive a battle cry from the 1960s insofar as one is wedded to any one of the guarantees one is part of the problem and not the solution For the grandest function of the system of guarantees as a whole and in each one of its parts is to blind us to history And so to take up again the question stated previously how did the situation now being created in Iraq come about The next three sections constitute an attempt to answer that question by constructing for America a repressed history

Any net benefit to the counterplan links to the criticism of the affirmative and is a reason that the counterplan cannot solve the affirmative We must confront the unknown to solve Davis 2001Watler A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative Pg 38-39

One upshoot of that act is a recovery of the dialectic of Eros and Thanatos as a way of thinking about history In anticipation of later developments (chapter 4 part 2) I only present the basic lines of this idea here The depth-charge sounded by an Event is its ability to reveal that the relationship of Eros and Thanatos is not eternal but historical to the core with the end of that dialectic entailing the possible extinction of one of the terms This is the spectre Freud exorcized by establishing a dualistic way of conceptualizing the two categories The alternative is an immanent dialectic one where history as contingency subjects everything to irreversible change with Thanatos a force in culture dedicated to the extinction of Eros and with the power to bring about that closure to the eternal dialectic Traumatic events constitute an abrupt and painful reversal of the eternal dialectic because in them we fund Eros deprived of all assurances Contra Freud there is nothing universal biological or ahistorical about the eternal battle Both terms are fully implicated in history caught up in processes Capable of producing irreversible transformations Forces in the psyche opposed to life which we have persistently marginalized in proclaiming our humanism rise up in the Event to challenge all we believe about human nature and history Rather than a world grounded in love the primacy of goodness in human nature the achievement of rationality and the ameliorative virtues of the social process the Event reveals a world in which envy and hate stalk life seeking a final solution that can only come with the extinction of the antagonist After such knowledge we can never begin again cleansed of history restored through its narration to some essential humanistic identity with all our fundamental beliefs in essential goodness reaffirmed Eros again pristine and empowered Feeling the pressure of death as it weighs upon and works within us becomes the gauge that measures the depth of our participation in history The Event rends all the masks that enable us to conceive evil as an aberrance Existential contingency unseats all essentializing views of human nature revealing historicity as a process in which Thanatos may be the drive informing the reality principle There is nothing in human nature that protects us from this eventuality Positing an essential and always recoverable nature outside history is not the solution but part of the problem the way we blind ourselves a priori to our situation

Only a complete withdrawal from psychological guarantees can force us to confront trauma The counterplanrsquos insistence that there is something tangible that can be manipulated or solved for is a link Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg38-39)

But to undertake that task we must purge ourselves of the thing in ourselves that stands in the way I have termed it the guarantees By that term I refer to all those assurances we set up a priori to protect ourselves from the reality of historical trauma The significance of eventsmdashthe Shoah Hiroshima 9-11mdash is their power to call such guarantees into question by exposing cherished beliefs to the claims of darker views and by forcing us to think in radically new ways considering things about the human being that weve persistently denied or marginalized One dimension of any traumatic event is the shock it brings

to traditional ways of thinking Thats why the dominant response to any historical trauma is the attempt to restore the guarantees by finding a way t o impose them on the event in order to contain and interpret it The ideological function of the guarantee is thereby demonstrated A way has been found to limit the impact of the event by picturing it as an aberration a temporary departure from values and beliefs that can always be recovered because they constitute something essentialistic or universal about human nature Something trans-historical History may disrupt our essence but it cannot destroy it The concept of human naturemdashin all t h e variants constituting the philosophic and psychological history of that idea from Plato and Aristotle through American self psychologymdashis the primary way in which we endeavor to deny history An event is traumatic precisely because it suggests that history occurs beyond the limits we want to impose on it and therefore may move in directions that have nothing to do with human nature or the cherished beliefs and values we derive from that concept Events put us as subjectsmdashand as thinkersmdash into a traumatic relationship to both ourselves and our world The anxiety at the center of thought is revealed Ideologists rush in to fill that void and restore the guarantees Our effort must be t o do the opposite and thereby sustain the vital possibility implicit in an event That possibility is to sustain a break with the guarantees and thereby find for history a radically different way of thinking To put it concretely a trauma cannot be resolved until its been constituted The Western Logos is a monument to t he effort to avoid t h a t task indeed to render it impossible a priori To reverse that tradition the things above all we must rid ourselves of are the desire and demand for resolution The recycling of the guarantees must give way to a n existentializing imperative to constitute and work within trauma in a way that addresses the psyche at the same register as Gibson and Abu Ghraib do by creating images symbolic actions and emotions that are of equal depth but that move us in an antithetical directionmdashtoward the inner transformation needed to purge ourselves of Thanatos Such an effort however cannot itself be yet another variant of the guarantees as happens when Love and Eros are posited as ahistorical values If anything the possibility of Love is far more difficult and exacting than death because it can only arise by reversing the prior force that death has within us The following two sections offer a brief picture of the kind of agonistic process such an effort entails in order to whet our appetite for something that should by now be evident The critique of ideology cannot be a merely intellectual exercise It must be the activation within our psyche of a countervailing drama

A2 ndash KritiksOur ethics come first -- Discovery of the unconscious is crucial to the recognition of responsibility by every subject- only our framework opens space for agency and recognition of our choices- our ethics are crucial to understand the historical contingencies that make up the status quo and open space for change Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg182-185)

Freud discovered more than the Unconscious He discovered our responsibility for it for becoming aware of how what we repress rules our life and therefore our duty to gain knowledge of our unconscious as the precondition for becoming an ethically responsible agent In terms of ethics theres a quick way to summarize the significance of the Unconscious What we dont know about ourselves is what we domdashto the other In calling us to such a reflection on ourselves Freud also taught us a new way to reflect one that forces us to move beyond the rational world of conscious deliberations and intentions Once make the psychoanalytic turn and the sources of self-knowledge increase exponentially Every time one understands a dream a paraphraxis an aesthetic experience a fantasy one suffers in principle a revolution in ones life For such experiences put one in touch with the deep conflicts that define the psyche A dream for example does not tell us about something outside the realm of our conscious grasp though this view of repression typifies how a convenient misunderstanding blunts the force of psychoanalysis A good dream reveals the desires and conflicts structuring our life It thereby opens our quotidian life to an in-depth exploration Listen to a dream rightly and one finds that one must confront something one has been avoidingmdashor doing Such is what it would mean to assume responsibility for ones dreams One would start to live from an awareness of ones psyche rather than in a continued attempt to escape that awareness Freud doesnt abolish intention he expands it by showing how often consciousness is defense mechanism and rationality the cover that conceals the actual motives on which we act and how often accordingly insistence on conscious intentions is the lie we cling to in order to deny our responsibility The seductive or prohibitive way of relating that a parent adopts toward a child for example may carry as its primary repressed intention the desire to wound that child in their sexuality This is why its so necessary at a later point in time for such parents to deny that they ever harbored let alone acted on such an intention And yet our actions do indeed speak louder than words in conveying our actual intentions Action is concrete intentionality because it is through it that we live out our feelings desires and conflicts And they are what the other invariably receives as a message that is often sharply different from what we say especially when through the exercise of intentionality we reassure ourselves about what good loving human beings we are The psyche is a lonely hunter avid in the pursuit of purposes it carefully conceals from itself The ethical greatness of Sigmund Freud is the crisis he introduced into that practice Rather than getting us off the hook psychoanalysis sticks it far deeper in us than any previous ethic Intentionality is convenient because it absolves us of the greatest responsibilitymdashresponsibility for who we are Everything stays in the safely guarded space of deliberative discursive quasi-judicial rationality as if this were the primary way we relate to ourselves or to turn the screw a peg further as if when we arent relating to ourselves this way we arent fully moral agents fully responsible for our actions But once let responsibility expand into the inner life of the psyche and we take on a new ethical burden to know oneself in depth and not recoil in horror from what one learns or persist in virtuous denial of the hidden motives one must confront in order to become responsible for ones psyche Indeed deliberation is itself transformed by l he psychoanalytic turn Freud shows that to deliberate correctly one must focus the inquiry on those motives that one tries to conceal from oneself since they are where the truth of ones conduct may lie

In terms of the problem of evil this line of thought has an obvious implication Our primary responsibility which we continually shirk is to find the evil in ourselves Theoretically and emotionally the same thing prevents that discovery the desire to uphold the idea that human nature is inherently or basically good with evil an aberration a fall a break with the natural order of things an exception to the rule of human decency Psychoanalysis like history renders such sentiments questionable at best And irrelevant to where inquiry must beginmdashwith psychological conflict the primary fact that defines us To be human is to live denned by wounds and disorders that are prior to the mediations (themselves rare) that result in a moral character that can be termed good Goodness is not something essentialistically guaranteed in a nature its an achievement that comes through the overcoming of ways of being that have a foothold in us long before some human beings take up the effort to reverse them Psychoanalysis from this point of view is neither pessimistic nor relativistic It is humanistic in the deepest way seeing the human as an achievement and valuing it by demonstrating what that achievement requires Psychoanalysis doesnt point to ethical relativism It points instead to an order of rank among human beings based on the degree to which a knowledge of ones psyche has become the basis of ones actions Ethically to know ones psyche is of necessity to engage in an effort to transform it since inner change is the only way to halt the projection of what otherwise does harm to others Psychological change is the primary task ethics the result

Their alternative misses the point In lieu of a criticism of the affirmative it is a much better act to internalize our anxiety and explore the effects within the psyche This allows us an uncastrated interaction with reality Davis 2001Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative pg xviii-xix

Virginia Woolf said that in or about December 1910 human nature changed She would have recorded a similar shock in August of 1945 The change Woolf witnessed has now of course been safely domesticated and has a local habitation and a name modernism The second change also has a namemdashpostmodernismmdashbut the ideologies most closely associated with its development remain mired in the first moment of an arrested dialectic12 Irony and aporia dominate the postmodern sensibility because its considerable energies are devoted to a displacement of the Event that remains at the center of our collective historical Unconsciousmdashthe referent that serves as the motive behind the denial of reference Reference must be continually deferred then rendered impossible because anxiety and flight from that anxiety define our actual response to the one referent that will continue to weigh on our consciousness until we restore the proper dialectical direction and move from the delights of skeptical play to a recovery of the demands of unhappy consciousness Einstein said the Bomb changed everythingmdashexcept the ways we think As such it is the inwardness of our inwardness never more so perhaps than when we use deconstructive irony as the master trope that delivers us from the burden of a historically situated subjectivity or at that opposite extreme that amounts to the same thing when we reassert an essentialist humanism as the fixed and universal system of understanding and explanation that washes us clean of history and its contingencies What if we broke with both strategiesmdashand rather than deconstructing the Bomb or containing it we tried to internalize it and then trace the ways it explodes and implodes within the psyche Such an effort would take as its goal a reconstitution of the tragic as the dialectical category that provides the only adequate idea for comprehendingmdashand existingmdashin the present Such a humanism however confronts as its prior and primary task a deracination of the system of guarantees on which previous humanisms have depended For the function of that system with respect to history has been to establish as canons of research and explanation a set of essentialistic concepts of meaning logic and human nature that function to insulate historians and their

audiences so that horror can never be more than the temporary aberration from which we always of necessity recover The narration of History thereby becomes yet another occasion for deployingmdashand thereby reinforcingmdashthe central beliefs and Values of the humanistic tradition That tradition thus provides the ego or identity-principle that we (the community of humanistic interpreters) move from and to in dealing with events that challenge our certainties13 We love to read and write histories because such stories tell us who we already know we are while conveniently exorcizing the threat of those accounts that would hold up a different mirror to our nature History is indeed a fiction the corpse over which we warm ourselves so that we may rise cleansed catharted the system of needs beliefs and guarantees restoredmdashwith existence the self-reference perpetually deferred What if instead we approached history as a realitymdashand a disciplinemdash in which we must risk ourselves utterly One in which to know is to suffer irreversible change in ones beliefs values and even in ones identity with nothing in the logos of thought able to protect us from that possibility The reign of the a priori would thereby come to an end the principle of hope a category wed risk not one wed need to renew at whatever cost Could such an engagement constitute the true force and signification of Hiroshima16 and thereby evidence that events in history are the true Absolute that abide with usmdashthe gift of the past to the future as that call of conscience requiring of us no less than a fundamentally new understanding of the human psyche and the human condition

The permutation solves ndash psychoanalytical evaluation of our anxiety and our reliance on stability and security are prior questions to the alternative and the framework of the criticism The alternative is still castrated by desire which means that it does not access proper historical contextDavis 2006Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative pg 1-3

In August 1945 Elias Canetti writes the following in his journal A tormenting thought as of a certain point history was no longer real Without noticing it all mankind suddenly left reality everything happening since then was supposedly not true but we supposedly didnt notice Our task would now be to find that point and as long as we didnt have it we would be forced to abide in our present destruction1 What Canetti cant see is that the point he refers to is the one he inhabits He cant see it because it is too close and blinds him (as it would soon the inhabitants of two cities) with a light not of this world The proliferation of new theories of history in recent decades is itself a response to a historical situationmdashthat defined by the Bomb That connection is also what these theories cannot know about themselves and ceaselessly displace in teaching us all the new ways we can know and write about the past What they do know is that the assumptions and guarantees on which historians have traditionally relied in constituting their subject and the needs that histories fulfill in offering us an account of events structured by these guarantees are no longer adequate to a contemporary awareness of history and historicity2 To cite the major developments (though in no necessary order of importance)3 1 Foucaults concept of genealogical history and the archeology of knowledge and its creative extension in the new historicist methodologies developed by Stephen Greenblatt and his circle 2 The hermeneutic theories of history and historical explanation developed by Gadamer Habermas and Ricoeur with special note given to Ricoeurs development of a complex theory of time and narrative 3 Derridas recent work on Marx and Benjamin and his continuing effort to expose the Hegelian assumptions about history progress and the logos which structure the way history is narrated by historians who know little or nothing of Hegel 4 Althusser Sartre Gramsci and the many often sharply opposed approaches to history developed in recent years by Marxists as different as Frederic Jameson G A Cohen Perry Anderson and Stuart Hall 5 The recovery of Kants speculations on history and its recent extension in Lyotards theory of the differend 6 The attempts by Slavoj Zizek Joan Copjec and Teresa Brennan to articulate the theory of history implicit in Lacan 7 The massive significance of Walter Benjamins speculations the continued vitality of Adorno and the Frankfurt school and the renewed interest in the thought of Kenneth Burke 8 The work of Louis O Mink Hayden White Dominick LaCapra Roy Schafer and others on the narrative and tropological principles that shape the writing of history To this list one can add Collingwood and McKeons earlier theorizing about history the work of Braudel Baudrillard deCerteau Calinescu and Bourdieu and the new modes of historical writing and historical investigation developed by anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz James Clifford and Natalie Zemon Davis The list is by no means complete because one must add to it two developments that may be of

greater significance and that complicate the issue of the historical I refer first to the number of alternative histories that have emerged in recent years thanks to feminist multicultural postcolonial subaltern and queer studies Such works have contributed more than new knowledge to our understanding of the past They have broken with the logic the procedures and the ruling assumptions of traditional historical methodologies by showing how that logic has as its primary function the exclusion (or marginalization) of voices that challenge its hegemony and the motives that inform its explanations Such studies are not merely of local interest They entail a theoretical crisis the recognition that the principles of historical explanation that we regard as true rational objective and universal are cultural conventional ideological and deeply implicated in power and the repressions required for its maintenance Ways of thinking derived from other cultures or voices silenced by the dominant culture may provide precisely the critical handle required to understand what is really at work in the privileging of certain canons of reasoning and explanation as scientific and objective and the rejection of other experiences and ways of thinking as illegitimate and unfounded The true bite of the multiculturalmdash seldom honored because it cuts in every directionmdashis the idea that none of us are locked into privileging our own culture and subject position(s) We can gain distance from our frameworks by immersing ourselves in other ways of thinking We can then use that experience to become aware of things that our culture and its dominant interest groups do not want to know about themselves The implication of such an orientation for history is considerable since historical explanation is perhaps the primary way in which a community establishes the structures of belief mind and feeling on which it depends in giving an identity to its members4 Thanks to the explosion of the multicultural we now have a way to internally distance ourselves from such beliefs and practices even perhaps following Nietzsche to touch all that goes without saying with the hammer as with a tuning fork

Case Stuff

War on Terror BadThe myth of effective security fosters a violent project that necessitates the creation of terrorists to be sacrificed on the altar of societyMcGowan 2013Associate Professor at the University of Vermont (Todd Enjoying What We Donrsquot Have Project Muse)

The fundamental barrier to the establishment of an authentic social bond is the resistance to avowing the traumatic nature of that bond We use the pleasure that accompanies the bombing of Afghanistan to disguise the shared enjoyment we experience through the traumatic experience of loss But this pleasure inevitably disappoints us and triggers the belief that someone has stolen the complete pleasure that we expected to experience This is why there can properly be no end to the War on Terror no end to the list of countries that the United States plans to invade to attain complete security no end to the number of terrorist leaders executed 31

Complete security like complete pleasure is mythical It attempts to bypass the one experience that cannot be bypassed mdash the foundational experience of loss mdash and it is this experience that holds the key to an authentic social bond The structure of society (which is the result of the structure of signification) is such that it blinds the subject to the possibility of shared sacrifice and the social bond that results from it No matter how often children hear the ideology of sharing or how many times we repeat to them the gospel of fairness they will inevitably believe that their sacrifice has enabled others to enjoy more than their proper share or unfairly

Loss of the SelfSurveillance devastates the gap between the Self and our informaticized bodies ndash the total knowledge it provides deprives one of the ability to function as a subject eradicating onersquos identity ndash this results in complete annihilationFriesen et al 2012 Dr Norm Friesen is Canada Research Chair in E-Learning Practices at Thompson Rivers University His academic credentials include a PhD in Education from the University of Alberta Andrew Feenberg School of Communication Simon Fraser University Grace Smith Arapiki Solutions Inc (Norm Friesen Andrew Feenberg Grace Smith and Shannon Lowe 2012 ldquoExperiencing Surveillancerdquo pp 82-83 (Re)Inventing The Internet httplinkspringercomchapter1010072F978-94-6091-734-9_4)

Students of surveillance have been so impressed by the ever-growing completeness of this data image that they animate it as though it were an actual person Identity is seen as coeval with an assemblage of traces rather than with actual presence Thus van der Ploeg writes of ldquothe

inability to distinguish between rsquothe body itselfrsquo and rsquobody informationrdquorsquo (van der Ploeg 2003 p 69) Haggerty and Ericson similarly write the surveillance assemblage standardizes the capture of fleshinformation flows of the human body It is not

so much immediately concerned with the direct physical relocation of the human body (although this may be an ultimate consequence)

but with transforming the body into pure information such that it can be rendered more mobile and comparable (Haggerty amp Ericson 2000 p 613) There is something right about this turn in surveillance theory and yet it is obvious that we are still able to distinguish the real person from the traces that person leaves behind The trace is bound to us by its origin and often by internal signs of various sorts so we do not quite leave it behind after all And yet we do not want to drag along every trace of our passage through life We count on the erasure of most traces It is this erasure that enables us to face the world afresh each day and to face it with a self-image we

construct at least partially anew for each new situation in which we find ourselves In existentialndashphenomenological terms privacy and secrecy are centrally constitutive of self and selfhood Holding something private or secret emphasizes the difference between self and other and confirms the autonomy of onersquos interiority and individuality ldquoSecrecy secures so to speak the possibility of a second world alongside of the obvious worldrdquo as Simmel (1906 p 462) puts it In contemporary conditions of surveillance and dataveillance subjectivity itself is dependent on maintaining the gap between our embodied selves and our informaticized bodies It would be intolerable for everyone to have full access to our salary the details of our relations to our family our medical histories sexual proclivities and so on Such knowledge would completely objectify us and force us to live up to (or down to) the image of ourselves implied in this knowledge Like Sartrersquos spy at the keyhole

himself espied we would be evacuated of those aspects of identity and interiority concealed within us frozen in the objectifying gaze of the other and essentially deprived of our ability to function as a subject We could no longer choose to project an identity appropriate to our inclination and situation as everything having to do with our identity would have been pre-empted Truly to be completely ldquooutedrdquo is to be annihilated

The gaze of surveillance invades and traps one psychologically rendering one enslavedVaz 1995 (Angelina Fall 1995 Dalhousie French Studies Vol 32 Mises en scegravene du regard (Fall 1995) pp 37-38 ldquoWhos Got the Look Sartres Gaze and Foucaults Panopticismrdquo JSTOR httpwwwjstororgstable40837004)

This grand formula is even applicable at the level of an encounter between two individuals where the theme of ldquosubjection by exposurerdquo is

dominant As Sartre says ldquobeing-seen constitutes me as a defenseless being for a freedom which is not my freedom [hellip] I am a slave to the degree that my being is dependent at my center of a freedom which is not mine and which is the very condition of my beingrdquo (Being p 358) In this sense the gaze does not just create and invade physical spaces there is a sense in which the gaze invades and traps me psychologically As a temporal-spatial object in the world being locked at forces me to apprehend myself as the

Contention 1 is AnxietyFirst the surveillance method of counter-terrorism in the status quo fails to recognize the impossibility of complete security ndash our desire for infinite pleasure means that the war on terror becomes infinitely sustained We have come to enjoy the war because it symbolizes the retaking of the American Identity and a satiation of the anxiety we experience as a result of loss This makes the war and conflict a self-fulfilling prophecyMcGowan 2013Todd McGowan Associate Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Vermont Enjoying What We Donrsquot Have A Psychoanalytic Politics University of Nebraska 2013 pg 160-163

Nowhere is the retreat from enjoyment to pleasure more evident than in the American response to the attacks of September 11 2001 The attacks immediately reinvigorated the social bond for a majority of Americans The loss that they occasioned brought subjects back to the shared sacrifice that defines their membership in American society Even as they were horrified by the image of the towers burning and then falling most Americans in the strict psychoanalytic sense of the term enjoyed the attacks insofar as the attacks allowed them to experience once again their social bond with great intensity This is a bond that one suffers just as one suffers from a terrorist attack Even though it followed from an attack this bond was not one formed through the male logic of friendenemy which is why the headline in Le Monde on September 122001 could proclaim ldquoNous sommes tous Americainsrdquo27 The bond formed around the September 11 attacks was not initially a bond of exclusivity with a clear outside and inside Any subject willing to accede to the experience of loss could become apart of American

society at that moment The not-all of the social bond occurs through the experience of loss but the recognition of this type of bond is unbearable One enjoys it without deriving any pleasure from it It is in fact painful Not only is it painful but it also entails complete humiliation The society experiences the shame of being a victim and enduring trauma mdashthe shame of enjoyment itself In order to disguise this shameful enjoyment the United States quickly turned to an assertion of power that would carry with it the promise of a restored wholeness mdash the recovery of an imaginary perfect security The attack on Afghanistan brought pleasure to most members of American society This pleasure had the function of rendering the enjoyment that emerged through traumatic loss bearable but it could not fulfill its inherent promise Enjoyment satisfies and pleasure always disappoints The disappointing nature of the attack on Afghanistan paved the way to the subsequent attack on Iraq in a further attempt to find an actual pleasure equal to what we anticipated In terms of American society these foreign wars serve as alibis for the enjoyment of the traumatic attacks themselves Because we seek respite from the loss that binds us we flee from the social bond despite our purported desire for it The authentic social bond exists only in the shared experience of loss mdashthat is only according to the female logic of not-having But the attack on Iraq also illustrates the inescapability of the enjoyment attached to loss The Iraq War clearly follows from the male logic of having and aims at producing the pleasure resulting from possession the United States would conquer a recalcitrant dictator and obtain a firm ally in a globally significant region This is both the stated justification for the war and the explanation offered by critics who see it as an exercise in American imperialism For both the perpetuators of the war and its critics the war concerns having despite the different inflections they give this idea But the result of the war is the failure of having and the renewed experience of loss The pursuit of the pleasure involved in having returns American society to the traumatic loss involved in the September 11 attacks Of course no one fights wars with the express intention of losing them but every war brings with it sacrifice and loss which is ultimately the substance of the social bond and the source of our ability to enjoy that bond The pursuit of the pleasure of having leads to the loss that inevitably accompanies this pursuit Imperial powers do not attempt to stretch their military and economic reach to the point that it breaks because of an inescapable will to power or a biological urge for infinite expansion The conquering drive of empires has its roots in the search for what no amount of imperial possession can provide mdashthe enjoyment of the experience of loss Empires conquer increasing quantities of territory in order to discover a territory that they canrsquot conquer In this same way the Afghanistan War disappointed the American leadership because it didnrsquot provide even the possibility for loss Donald Rumsfeldrsquos lament that the country didnrsquot have any targets to bomb points in this direction Iraq in contrast promised a possible defeat and if it hadnrsquot Syria or Iran would surely have come within the sights of the Bush administration Whatever the proffered justification or hidden motivation powerful societies ultimately go to war in order to reenact a constitutive loss and facilitate the enjoyment that this loss entails28 This is the case not just with war but with any positive project that a social order takes up Building a monument like the Eiffel Tower provided French society with a possession that allows for collective identification But the work involved with the building involved a great sacrifice in time and in money When we think of the Eiffel Tower we rarely think of the sacrifice required for its construction instead we think of the sense of identity that it offers It provides a positive point of identification for France itself as a nation and French subjects can find pleasure through this identification Nonetheless the enjoyment of the Eiffel Tower in contrast to the pleasure that it offers stems from the sacrifice required to construct

it Every finished societal product mdashsuch as victory in Iraq the beauty of the Eiffel Tower smooth roads on which to drive mdashpromises pleasure but this pleasure primarily supplies an alibi for the enjoyment

that the sacrifices on the way to the product produce These sacrifices allow us to experience the social bond by repeating the act of sacrifice through which each subject became a member of the social order It is not so much that the pursuit of pleasure backfires (though it does) but that it is never done simply for its own sake We embark on social projects not in spite of what they will cost us but because of what they will cost us29 The dialectic of pleasure and enjoyment also plays itself out in the relationship that subjects in society have to their leader According to Freud all group members install the leader in the position of an ego ideal and this ego ideal held in common furthers the bond among members of society But the identification with the leader has two sides to it on the one hand subjects identify with the leaderrsquos symbolic position as a non castrated ideal existing beyond the world of lack but on the other hand subjects identify with the leaderrsquos weaknesses which exist in spite of the powerful image30 Both modes of identification work together in order to give subjects a sense of being a member of society but they work in radically different ways The identification with the leaderrsquos power provides the subject with a sense of symbolic identity and recognition whereas the identification with the leaderrsquos weaknesses allows the subject to enjoy being a part of the community The identification with the leaderrsquos strength provides the pleasure that obscures the enjoyment deriving from the identification with the leaderrsquos weaknesses The weaknesses indicate that the leader is a subject of loss that shehe enjoys rather than being entirely devoted to ruling as a neutral embodiment of the people The weaknesses are evidence of the leaderrsquos enjoyment points at which a private enjoyment stains the public image By identifying with these points subjects in a community affirm the association of enjoyment with loss rather than with presence But at the same time the leaderrsquos weaknesses cannot completely eclipse the evidence for the leaderrsquos strength The strength allows subjects who identify with the leader in herhis weakness to disavow this would-be traumatic identification and to associate themselves consciously with strength rather than weakness The trajectory of Bill Clintonrsquos popularity during his presidency illustrates precisely how identification with the leader unfolds When accusations of sexual impropriety with Monica Lewinsky first appeared Clintonrsquos public approval rating reached its highest levels Most thought that Clinton was probably guilty of some private wrongdoing but they also felt that his sexual peccadilloes should remain private Though they infuriated his Republican accusers his sexual weaknesses had the effect of enhancing his overall popularity This trend continued until it became undeniably clear that Clinton really was guilty when it became impossible to disavow his weakness At this point identifying with Clinton became inescapably apparent as identifying with Clinton in his weakness which rendered it more difficult to sustain The American populace could enjoy Clintonrsquos weakness and form a social bond through this weakness only as long as it remained partially

obscured The fundamental barrier to the establishment of an authentic social bond is the resistance to avowing the traumatic nature of that bond We use the pleasure that accompanies the bombing of Afghanistan to disguise the shared enjoyment we experience through the traumatic experience of loss But this pleasure inevitably disappoints us and triggers the belief that someone has stolen the complete pleasure that we expected to experience This is why there can properly be no end to the War on Terror no end to the list of countries that the United States plans to

invade to attain complete security no end to the number of terrorist leaders executed31 Complete security like complete pleasure is mythical It attempts to bypass the one experience that cannot be bypassed mdashthe foundational experience of loss mdash and it is this experience that holds the key to an authentic social bond

The paranoid anxiety of the status quo results in the projection of threats onto the other in an effort to suture the Lack ndash this type of politics mobilizes the population toward fascismMcGowan 2013Todd McGowan Associate Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Vermont Enjoying What We Donrsquot Have A Psychoanalytic Politics University of Nebraska 2013 pg 44-49

While nostalgia locates the ultimate enjoyment in the subjectrsquos own past paranoia locates it in the other Paranoia thus offers the subject not just the image of the ultimate enjoyment (like nostalgia) but also an explanation for its absence Nostalgia and paranoia usually operate side by side in order to provide the subject a way of figuring its missing enjoyment On its own nostalgia as a mode of subjectivity seems to have limited political consequences Groups may use nostalgia as a political weapon but its political weight is diffused to some extent because it involves the subjects relation to itself rather than to an other The same cannot be said for paranoia which is why finding a way to counter paranoia represents an urgent political task Paranoia is political in its very structure It views the other as a threat and produces hostility toward the other The paranoid subject usually adopts one of two possible attitudes toward the other According to the first paranoia serves to explain the loss of the privileged object If I take up a paranoid attitude toward the other I see her his enjoyment coming at the expense of mine The other enjoys the lost object that is rightfully mine The other having stolen my enjoyment bears responsibility for my existence as a

subject of loss This type of paranoia removes the burden of loss from the subject and places it onto the other

and in addition it functions like nostalgia to convince the subject that having the object is a possibility According to the

second attitude however paranoia represents an attempt to convince ourselves that we have not lost the privileged object We are paranoid not that the other has stolen the privileged object but that it plans to do so The imagined threat that the other poses reassures us that we have the ultimate enjoyment and that this is what the other targets By imagining a threat we fantasize the privileged object back into existence despite its status as constitutively lost At first glance it is difficult to see how paranoia might function as an attractive attitude for subjects to take up The paranoid subject must endure a constant menace that has no tangible or definitive

presence Everyone that this subject meets is a potential enemy in disguise threatening to steal or already having stolen the subjects privileged object In terms of the subjects own identity paranoia does not provide security or stability In fact it uproots all sense of security that the subject has concerning its identity But its appeal does not lie in how it transforms subjectivity its appeal stems from its ability to close the gap in the social field of meaning its ability to be a guarantor that authorizes our social interaction Paranoia develops in response to the inherent inconsistency of social authority There are authorities but no Authority and a decisive Authority would be necessary to provide subjects a sense of foundation a sense that there is solid ground underneath their feet Social proclamations and regulations place the subject in an impossible position one simply cannot believe and obey every edict emanating from social authorities without being torn apart in the effort These contradictions occur on all levels of social pronouncements One hears for instance about the dangers of eating too much fat and then one hears about the cancer-preventing power of chocolate Parents tell their children not to fight and at the same time tell them to stand up for themselves George W Bush claimed that the Iraq War was waged to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction and later claimed that its purpose was to liberate the country from a cruel dictator Such inconsistencies are not merely contingent developments within our particular society but necessarily follow from the ultimate groundlessness of the social order itself There is no final authority that calls all the shots in society and guarantees the consistency of the social order It is instead a structure in charge and this structure functions through its very misfiring The inconsistency of social authority- the gap in the social field of meaning - provides it with an openness to difference If social authority was a closed circuit that operated without a hitch it would have no way of incorporating the subject into its fold The subject invests itself in social authority precisely because this authority gives the subject contradictory demands Faced with these incongruous imperatives the subject cannot readily decipher what the social authority wants from it Beneath the inconsistency the desire of the authority remains a mystery The subject begins to desire in response to this unknown desire of the social Other the inconsistency of the social authority has the effect of attracting the subject and constituting the desire of the subject as the desire of the Other A thoroughly consistent social authority while logically unthinkable would not draw the desire of the subject in this way It might force individuals into obedience but it would not create the investment in the social order that the inconsistent social authority creates Confronting the inconsistency of social authority is not an easy task for the subject Many try to sustain a belief in its consistency through an imaginary construction that represses contradictory ideas The problem with this solution is that these ideas become more powerful through their repression and the result is some form of neurosis Another possibility is the paranoid reaction Rather than trying to wrestle with the problem of the gap in authority the paranoid subject eliminates it by positing an other existing in this gap an other behind the scenes pulling the strings As Slavoj Zizek explains it Paranoia is at its most elementary a belief into an Other of the Other into an Other who hidden behind the Other of the explicit social texture programs what appears to us as the unforeseen effects of social life and thus guarantees its consistency beneath the chaos of market the degradation of morals and so on there is the purposeful strategy of the Jewish plot The comfort that paranoia provides for the subject derives solely from this guarantee For the paranoid subject the surface inconsistency of social authority hides an underlying consistency authorized by a real authority whom most subjects never notice Paranoia simultaneously allows the subject to sense its own superiority in recognizing the conspiracy and to avoid confronting the horror of an inconsistent social authority As with nostalgia

paranoia is primarily aligned with a right-wing political agenda Its suspicion of the other nourishes a nationalistic politics and energizes

the call for a return to traditional social arrangements Just as much of the investment in the Cold War struggle derived from paranoia it fuels

the contemporary war on terror The exemplary right-wing political formation Fascism has its basis in paranoia

seeing the Jew or some equivalent as secretly controlling the social order to the detriment of all law-abiding citizens The idea of an other operating behind the scenes serves to justify restrictions on civil liberties racism police violence and so on A paranoid populace is a populace ready to embrace a Fascist regime Despite the inherent link between paranoia and conservatism leftists employ paranoia to a vast extent far more than they do nostalgia Paranoid theories about the secret brokers of power who decide the fate of the capitalist world are widespread on the Left It is common sense among leftists that big oil companies have suppressed the development of alternative energies that the CIA assassinated Kennedy and that major drug companies control the Food and Drug Administration just to name a few of the more well known conspiracy theories The truth or falsity of these theories has nothing to do with their function for the subject who accepts them The paranoid subject is often correct in its various speculations but paranoia nonetheless provides a way for the subject to avoid confronting the inconsistency of social authority For the paranoid subject conspiracy theories dont simply explain a single event they solve the problem of the social order as such According to this thought process all loss stems from the conspiracy which has derailed the social order and upset its balance The paranoid subject cannot accept the necessity of loss and the conspiracy theory works to render loss empirical rather than ontological This is evident in Oliver Stones JFK (1991) a film in which Stone posits a vast conspiracy that resulted in the death of Kennedy Of course Stone is probably correct that this conspiracy existed but the film goes astray primarily through its apotheosis of Kennedy an apotheosis that reveals whats at stake in all paranoia According to the film had he remained in power Kennedy would have prevented the horror of the Vietnam War and thus spared the United States the psychic wound that this war created With Kennedy one can imagine an American social order existing without strife and loss The conspiracy theory allows Stone this image which testifies to the avoidability of loss But Stone is not the only leftist to turn to paranoia Many do so in order to confront forces that they otherwise couldnt identify Among those who suffer from political oppression paranoia and conspiracy theory serve as vehicles for thinking through systems of control and even mobilizing action against those systems As Peter Knight points out Conspiracy thinking has played an important role in constituting various forms of African American political and cultural activism38 When it directly produces activism the political valence of paranoia seems to tilt more clearly to the left than it does in the case of Stones film In Marxist Fredric Jameson focuses on a related aspect of paranoia as he analyzes the paranoid film in The Geopolitical Aesthetic In this work Jameson aligns conspiracy theory with what he calls cognitive mapping- the attempt to think the global capitalist system in its totality The diffuseness of global capitalism prevents the kind of cognitive mapping that was possible in earlier epochs Today in order to think the totality at all subjects must resort to the idea of a conspiracy As Jameson points out in his analysis of All the Presidentrsquos Men The map of conspiracy itself suggests the possibility of cognitive mapping as a whole and stands as its substitute and yet its allegory all at once40 Jamesons statement reflects his ambivalence about conspiracy theory and paranoia - even though it allegorizes cognitive mapping it also substitutes for it - but he nonetheless sees its usefulness as a strategy for the Left especially when facing the global capitalist leviathan

The problem is that even when it works to mobilize subjects to fight against an oppressive system paranoia has the effect of depriving subjects of their agency By eliminating the gap in social authority and filling in this gap with a real authority who effectively runs the show paranoia deprives subjects of the space in which they exist as subjects The subject occupies the position of the gap in social authority it emerges through and because of internal inconsistency in the social field of meaning The extent to which paranoia allows the subject to experience social authority as a consistent field is the extent to which it works against the subject itself Even if it manages tangible political victories emancipatory politics that relies on paranoia undermines itself by increasing the power of authority in the thinking of subjects and

decreasing their freedom Whats more it doesnt actually work Like nostalgia paranoia can never constitute a successful strategy for the subject dealing with its fundamental condition It will never provide the enjoyment that it promises the subject Uncovering and eliminating the hidden real authority will bring not the ultimate enjoyment but horrible disappointment This is why the paranoid mindset cannot admit to itself that the hidden other has been vanquished

The enjoyment that paranoia does provide requires the continuing existence of the threat even though it imagines an enjoyment that would come with the threats disappearance Paranoia runs aground due to its failure to admit the connection between enjoyment and loss It allows the subject to imagine that loss is the contingent result of a secret malevolent force that we might conquer By implicitly positing the avoidability of loss paranoia leaves subjects unable to locate and recognize the nature of their own enjoyment

This anxiety is the core problem of the psyche Our inability to come to terms with this void is a fate worse than death Our anxiety functions as the condition for the possibility of Hiroshima and Auschwitz In attempts to master this emptiness we project our weakness through conflict This projection provides us the unrestrained power to bombard the other with pure suffering and destruction in an attempt to control the contingencies that constitute existence Davis 2001Walter A Davis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative Pg 103-108

We begin with an effort to describe what is the deepest experiencemdashthe one most deeply denied Catastrophic anxiety is that fear that haunts us from within the fear that one has already been annihilated that like Beckett one has never been born properly and never will be because inner paralysis is the psyches defining conditionmdasha truth attested each time when lining to cohere as a subject one collapses before the tidal wave of an Regression against oneself that rises up from within An

unspeakable dread weds the psyche to terror All other forms of anxiety are pale after-thoughts There is a threat worse than extinction The deepest self-knowledge we harbor the knowledge that haunts us as perhaps our deepest

self-reference is the fear that our inner world is ruled by a force opposed to our being Death is the icy wind that blows through all we do This is the anxiety from which other anxieties derive as displacements delays and vain attempts to deny or attenuate our terror before a dread

that is nameless and must remain so lest despair finalize its hold on us In catastrophic anxiety the destruction of ones power to be and the ceaseless unraveling of all attempts to surmount this condition is experienced as an event that has already happened That event forms the first self-reference the negative judgment of an Other on ones beingmdashinternalized as self-undoing Postmodern posturing before the phrase I am an other here receives the concretization that shatters free play There is a wound at the heart of subjectivity a self-ulceration that incessantly bleeds itself out into the world The issue of the wound is a soul caked in ice in a despair that apparently cannot be

mediated the nightmare state of a consciousness utterly awake alone and arrested all exits barred facing inner paralysis as the truth of ones life We ceaselessly flee this experience because if it ever comes down full upon us an even more terrifying process begins an implosion in which ones subjective being is resolved into fragments of pure anxiety that leave one incapable of existing as subject except in the howl to which each suffered state descends in a final chilling recognitionmdashthat everything one has done and suffered is but sound and fury signifying nothing One has become a corpse with insomnia Identity and self-reference thereafter ceaselessly circle about that void This is the hour of the wolf where one is arrested before the primary fact at the deepest register of the psyche one finds a voice of terror Fear of psychic dissolution is the ground condition of our being as subjects Subjectivity is founded in anguish before the dread of becoming no more than bits and pieces of pure horror fleeing in panic a voice that has already overtaken us resolving our subjective being into traumatic episodes of pure persecution At the heart of inwardness a malevolent spirit presides To put it in nuclear metaphors catastrophic anxiety is the threat of implosion into the others unlimited destructiveness To complete the picture we need only add Winnicotts point people live in dread of this situation projecting fear of a breakdown into the future because the breakdown has already occurred

B Exorcism through Evacuation And so a crypt is built to contain this anguish and repress the experience that is its cause We organize a life of identities and stabilities to give ourselves the illusion of escape Unable to reverse our condition we take up the only alternative We try to evacuate the whole thing to blow it out into the world and invest it in objects that are fitted to receive the full brunt of ones discontent and powerless to reply Projection the egos priest is founded in identification with an internal aggressor That is the complex that informs the effort to lodge our disorders and forbidden desires in others so that we can wage an attack on our inner conflicts then watch the ensuing spectacle from a safe distance Evacuation thus finds in projection a prime agent of human perception and the secure base for the perpetual mutual defeat that Sartre finds in all concrete

relations with others Were always on the lookout for a chance to make someone else bear our discontents But its never enough Satisfaction eludes us We keep erupting bleeding from within in a leukemia of soul that rages whenever we see those who have in their daily lives a beauty that makes us uglyFor then the projections return with the force of the furies Envy and resentment erupt as the assault within our inner world of the truth of our charactermdasha truth we deny by reinvesting it externally This grows apace over the years and then we long for a listing deliverance a final solution in the dim recognition that when projection proceeds from the register of catastrophe it requires and longs for a grand exorcism What we seek incessantly is a total evacuation of all inner discord a complete and lasting externalization in an ideal victim one in whom all that haunts us will stay outside lodged in the world in what Hegel calls a standing negation9 Our need is for a subject who is destroyed and lives on proof of a sublime aggression sculpted in time The Bomb provides such

an opportunity The criteria required to exorcize catastrophic anxiety finds in it the conditions for expelling the most primitive anxieties in the perfect objective correlative The subject voids itself of its core

anxietymdashthe inability to reverse inner destructivenessmdashby becoming the power to destroy unbound raining judgment down on a mass of subjects who are indifferently bound together as fragments of pure suffering unable after that action to ever form any identity except as walking corpses hibakusha deadened affect delivered over to the condition of death-in-life10 Projection here succeeds because in that shattered mirror one sees oneself reflected as the equal

of the power within that originally proclaimed ones utter worthlessness Malign reversal has grown to the event All inner anxiety about ones power to be resolves itself in the power to act free of restraint We have become the thing we feared Its destructiveness is now ours and nothing else has being The Contradiction The SublimemdashFrom the Crypt The mediation

traced above is driven by a contradiction about which it circles endlessly That is what the sublime object of the ego-ratio reveals when read from its crypt Sublime action seeks an absolute reversal of catastrophic anxiety in the absolute affirmation of unshakable guarantees Catastrophe must be reversed because it is that experience of contingency that underlies the horror of contingency in all its forms the lone driving the search for the guarantees needed to contain it In

catastrophe contingency is the others will as unbounded unlimited destructiveness The threat of extinction is the restraint here placed on subject This restraint is prior to the dialectic of desire restrained and checked on which Hegel grounds his phenomenology Desire here isnt restrained and checkedmdashit is turned back against itself in torment The other requires my destruction for their pleasure and assures that end by colonizing the psyche with an aggression that renders impotent every effort to make a beginning a tentative move toward independence or self-cohesion There is no exit but one apparently identification with the aggressor I become a self by turning someone or something else into an object delivered over to the true golden rule do onto others what was once done onto you This logic maintains because catastrophic anxiety internalized is death-work as the self-

mediation whereby we enact the command of the Other The only way out the only way to finalize this process is evacuation through a lasting exorcism It alone confers on the psyche a certitude beyond all cogitos It is also the mediation that finds it in flight forward already in its primitive imaginary one with the Bomb In its inner world the catastrophic subject experiences itself as full of death disease corruption The Bomb alone has the power to cast all nuclear waste outside and beneath oneself in a way that indefinitely extends the temporality of that act Radiation disease is a death that works inwardmdashinvisibly yet inexorably Death thereby breeds itself forth into an indefinite future omnipresent in a working a differance that begets delayed effects as further insurance against Nachtraglichkeit The extension of deaths dominion attained in the Bomb serves one grand function to prevent the return of projections by extending the temporality of the deed into a future that is lived by its victims as a judgment that is inevitable irreversible the antithesis of Benjamins messianic time tickingmdasha plea to delay death that can only be answered by death The Bomb thus serves as felix culpa to

an inner necessity To do its job a sublime event must exorcize everything within the subject that makes it an object of its own contempt What better way than Orwells boot brought down in an act of splitting that magnifies the distance between the terror

on the ground and the view from above Catastrophe is now fully outside oneself located in an other who has become nothing but matter body become spectacle of pain frozen forever in charred sculptures strewn across a devastated landscape Laocoon Munched but with the Howl silenced and deferred until it erupts later from within the survivors in a semiosis that can only be read by the scientists who planted it there and have now come (as biopowerknowledge) to study their handiwork as it blooms and bursts from deep within the body of the hibakusha as further testimony of ones powerjouissance Evacuation is complete Death-work has been lodged securely in the Other In the hibakusha one gets to see ones Thanatos as a narrative principle a force in history One gets to see over time what it is like to live death Soul-murder as the innermost reality of the crypt produces and finds in the

hibakusha its dialectical image As the expressive figura of death incarnate a terrifying verveilledoch here attains its objective correlative To purge oneself of catastrophic anxiety an utterly dehumanized object is not enough Neither the Sartrean look nor the Nazi act suffice The disorder of the psyche is deeper prior to desire (Sartre) and demand (Nazism) The projection of death-work can never rest by simply investing ones self-contempt in another For evacuation to work the

object must become something one can study inspect perform operations upon Catastrophic anxiety is the a proiri that gives Auschwitz and Hiroshima their necessity in the genocidal imagination The Bomb constitutes an Event because the psyche

reverses its core conditionmdashits cardiac arrest in inner self-loathingmdashthrough a projection that is total and irreversible If the evacuation of trauma is the abiding motive atop the crypt there is nothing abstract or Lacanian about the Real that results from its projection Evacuation is that malevolent reversal that condemns one to endless repetition One blows ones self-hatred and ones rage over that state fully out into the world but is thereby rendered powerless to do anything but gape in rapt amazement at ones creation That is perhaps why for over fifty years now whenever given the opportunity Paul Tibbets has proudly repeated the declaration that he has not had a moments remorse or regret Death-work externalized leaves one a spent and reified subject lacking any power other than the endless repetition of ones deed The wheel thus comes full circle in the only justice granted such subjects When catastrophic anxiety is only mediated by death-work the affects that compose subjectivity are rent assunder and scattered in pockets of pure persecution With each attempt to compose an inner self-cohesion death-work as internal saboteur rises up in a renewed attack on the effort to be Using the Bomb to reverse this disorder produces as its result a perfect attic justice Guilt and remorse are denied the doers of the deed because to feel such things is to renew a process of self-unraveling What the Bomb was meant to deliver one from has become the guardian

of untroubled sleep With the call of conscience rendered impossible the subject becomes overtly psychotic and must cling ever more desperately to an untroubled memory of the sublime event The subject thereby pronounces without being able to comprehend or mediate it the truth about itself in the ravaged landscape of Hiroshima the founding inner world of the psychotic-a world of utter fragmentation and the obliteration of every term of reference-has finally found a home to which it must say stay thou art so fair a home in which nothing inhuman is unheimlich

The moralization of anxiety manifests itself in our inability confront evil To displace this anxiety we make ourselves ldquogoodrdquo to protect ourselves from danger Failure to confront this psychical conflict reifies the original trauma and makes the destruction of the self meaninglessDavis 2001Walter A Davis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative Pg 86-87

No wonder resistance becomes the key term in the first stage of the unfolding drama This time however Kant canrsquot shift everything onto a plane of conceptual defenses and controls Affect weighs too heavily Intermediate moves immanent within that register are required Opposing affects must be created and marshaled as a first line of defense For the first time in Kant rationalistic mediation gives way to dramatic self-mediation Kant will finally attempt an agon that moves solely within the medium of affect To resist psychic unraveling he must

establish a countervailing force within the order of affect itself For Kant however affective self-mediation is equivalent to bending everything in a moral direction In doing so the author of the ethic of pure duty gives us the true genealogy of morals

That dubious ascent begins once the force threatening destruction is characterized as ldquoevilrdquo Anxiety is thereby transformed into a moralizing fear that we lack the power to resist ldquoevilrdquo Moralizing then structures the subsequent discourse but without exorcizing the psychological subtext that will undercut it This contradiction is in fact what ethics will here reveal about itselfIn making ourselves ldquogoodrdquo subjects we make ourselves beings unworthy of destruction That

transformation also requires the resources of rhetoric since we must ldquopersuaderdquo a tough audience The true goal in remaking ourselves is to tame the power that threatens us by tapping its conscience To do so we create within ourselves a new agency one that recognizing our virtue promises protection We thereby create the illusion that the threatening force has been softened and then transformed into a voice that warmly supports the good intentions of the nascent ego The superego as ego-ideal has been created So ends the founding self-mediation in the genealogy of an ethical ration By staging this internal drama the psyche has taken the action within required to create the space needed to assert control over affect The necessary act follows ndash the attempt to affect a complete reversal of the psychersquos initial condition Kant asserts repeatedly that we can only judge the sublime and experience its proper ldquopleasurerdquo if we view things from ldquoa safe placerdquo But in the psyche as opposed to mind the safe place doesnrsquot exist a priori It has to be invented and with it the most revealing picture of the genesis of what we now call the ldquoegordquo It is a difficult birth to a dubious and troubled function The problem of the ego is one of generating a transformation from impotence to power within affect itself through an agon immanent to that register But Kant is unable to sustain such an agon We get instead a displacement toward concepts through a use of the defensive mechanism known as splitting Ego and inner world divide in an unbridgeable rift thus establishing this condition as the true ldquoidentityrdquo of the ego The ego is the effort to repress the conflicts in the psyche from which it derives But while displacement and intellectualization offer a handle the egorsquos work is far from done The continuing pressure of inner conflicts requires a further battle In that struggle moralizing interpretations do yeoman service by splitting the psychersquos original trauma into a longed-for reificationmdashthe opposition of the ego to the drives

We have become creatures full of instincts The crucial task of the aff is to open up the unconscious counter narrative to provide a mirror to reflect upon the presupposed American identitySucharov 2005Mira M Sucharov assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli Palestinian Peacerdquo Pg 27-28

Just as individuals and groups possess consciousness and an unconscious I argue that every society maintains not only a dominant (conscious) narrative but an unconscious counternarrative as well which

the former has in part arisen to conceal As the counternarrative represents the role that society most fears adopting it resides in the unconscious where it will not interfere with the day-to-day transmission and fulfillment of the dominant narratives and the dominant roles For instance a defensive states counternarrative would encapsulate the view that we are not only defensive but sometimes we can be aggressive 35 Narratives and counternarratives can coexist in two waysmdash either with the counternarrative being simply an unactualized fear or with the counternarrative corresponding to an actual role being enacted alongside the dominant role-identity Thus while an actor may consciously be aware of a counterrole that she abhors (eg the good student who avoids cheating on exams) the unconscious reminds us that the cheater is latent in the self-portfolio of the good student In the event that this student cheats radical change can only come about once the self has

been reconciled with its unconscious opposite Actors will not become aware of the divergence from their dominant identity without the aid of a mirror however Only with the help of outside forces drawing attention to the clash between the two narratives will elites experience a cognitive dissonance necessitating a realignment between actions and role-identity One of the most salient transmission belts for the creation of state narratives is collective memory Memorymdashactive or latent recall of things occurring in the pastmdashhas begun to be understood as not solely a private activity but as representing a group phenomenon as well 36 On the collective level memory can be either experience-near-active one-step removed or distantly removed Active memory would be represented by Holocaust survivors in Israel and the Diaspora for instance One step removed would be the surrogate memories that their immediate Offspring carry with them37 and distantly removed would be exemplified by the Rabbinic injunction that Jews experience the annual telling of the Exodus from Egypt as if they were there While a case could be made for discounting the importance of actual experiences in favor of the way

those experiences arc remembered both of these are crucial for ascertaining role identity Just as traumatic events in a persons life may be repressed in memory but still shape that persons identity the international observer needs to account for actual experiences yet view these as embedded within a narrative context Similarly some historical events undergo a process of memory revision in these cases the observer must be sensitive to the effect that the new discourse has on the societys perception of these events whether or not these stories accord with fact The clinical parallel in psychoanalysis is that while the analysands relationship with her parents is considered crucial to uncovering the contours of her psychology the analyst as a rule does not attempt to meet the parents firsthand rather the patients recounting of these experiences is considered to be the most important channel of investigationmdash and hence transformation Since we are talking about collections of individuals memory needs to be actively transmitted to the societys members in order for it to influence the citizens sense of collective identity One of the ways this can be done is through ritual Being repetitive while symbolically imbued ritual gains meaning only through the symbols attributed to it by the group and is a collective process that serves to link actors to a series of past events for which they may not have been physically present Moreover private rituals that are collectively prescribed such as prayer serve to bind the individual to the collective particularly when there is a formalized liturgy Most collective rituals occur according to the calendar and therefore can encompass regular ceremonies that come to act as markers for the individuals personal time cycle38Sometimes particular collective memories that have been sustained over time are ruptured with citizens contemplating new facts about their countrys past Revisionist history is an example of an attempt to bring forth these sorts of new facts When history is reinterpreted the society can either shun the dissenting voices or else gradually reevaluate the original narratives When this reevaluation occurs society is more apt to uncover the hitherto unconscious counternarratives a discovery that can

lead to the realization that the states behavior might be contradicting the states role-identity In other words revisionist historians and other domestic dissenters can serve as the mirror referred to later

Vote affirmative to give up hope in the face of guarantees - only holding yourself completely open in the face of the promise of a sustainable status quo can open space for self-overcoming that allows us to engage in new forms of praxisDavis 2006 Walter A Davis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deathrsquos Dream Kingdom Pg 63

To know this situation for what it is challenges what is finally the deepest and most fundamental of the guarantees The principle of Hope To appropriate Eliot After such knowledge what forgiveness There is perhaps nothing that can be done to change the situation Ive described But then what is the purpose of knowing such things if they only produce meaningless suffering Is despair the end result of a life shorn of the guarantees Or are we finally like the drunks in ONeills The Iceman Cometh knowing that in order to sustain the illusions required to go on living they must pronounce Hickey mad and reject everything he revealed to them about

their lives as a product of that madness Perhaps its time to admit what the need for Hope really signifies Denial of responsibility for certain situations under the assumption that knowing them correctly would lead to despair Raising that specter is of course the rhetorical ploy invoked to prematurely terminate inquiry lest it impinge on

emotional and psychological needs Despair thus remains an empty concept We dont know what it is and never will as long as we use the need for hope to prevent discovery of our capacities to endure Whether despair is what we will find on the other side of hope is something we cant know For all hope really signifies is a testament to our weakness and our fears Perhaps we are called to something beyond it What Shakespeare called tragic

readiness For in opening ourselves to the possibility of despair we also open ourselves to the possibility of self-overcoming and through it the discovery of a praxis that lies on the other side of the conceptual and existential paralyses created by the guarantees We cant know what is to be done as long as we continue to respond to our situation by invoking ahistorical values and guarantees that are grounded in an essentialistic and ahistorical theory of human nature

PlanThe United States federal government should substantially curtail its domestic surveillance by ceasing all domestic surveillance

Contention 2 is FramingAn ethics of existence forecloses the tragic struggle in which we never confront our inner trauma- only our affirmative can open new ways of relating to ourselves that can overcome these limitations- the 1AC is a precondition for any meaning to our livesDavis 2006 Walter ADavis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg238-240)

In her critique of Kantian ethics Alenka Zupancic often refers to the Lacanian idea that there is a loss deeper than ones life The loss of ones reason for living The apostle of duty offers a heroic example of how one escapes the threat of that loss What Im suggesting here is that ethics actually begins on the other side of it With the possibility that first exists when one discovers that one has already lost or violated or fatally compromised ones reason for living because the values one thinks one honors and the actual truth of ones life are thoroughly at odds The traumatic event that brings one to this recognition is the origin of ethics This is the ethical task it establishes to see if one can pay the price for having violated oneself by assuming the full burden of the situation one has thereby createdThe ethical situation accordingly confronts the subject with the necessity to choose to be in a radically new way or die inside Nothing less is demanded than a totally new way of relating to oneself for the guilt one experiences in such a situation is existentializing One is guilty toward oneself for having failed to honor the duties that one bears to oneself for having so thoroughly lied to oneself about ones life As Hamlet learns it is through that recognition that one first discovers that one has tragic responsibilities toward oneself that can no longer be evaded because one with this situation is the even deeper discovery that there are failures that can be irreversible That is the possibility defining the situation one is now in What one does will reveal the truth of who one is Guilt toward oneself has overtaken all possibilities of displacement and denial Fail now and one dies within Most people will of course do just about anything to avoid guilt or to get cleansed of it as quickly as possible That is why so many fail the test when it comes to them shrinking inside rather than expanding to the demands of our innermost possibility the one defining our humanity An ethics of existence begins with the traumatic experience in which everything weve tried to escape about ourselves catches up with us One then knows that ones prior life has been a flight And all ones brave ideas and bright ethical claims airy nothingmdashthe indulgence in comforting and self-alienating lies But now one

is finally like Hamlet in the situation from which there is no exit An ethics grounded in the possibility of freedom depends on the actions one performs within oneself when one finds oneself in a crisis that can no longer be denied This is precisely the kind of situation Kant is unable to consider which is why he constructs in Duty the principle of choice that renders it impossible In serving Duty one is delivered from the repressed thought that now can never arise that ones whole life and all its choices especially the ethical ones may be no more than a flight from things in oneself that one flees because one fears that if one is ever forced to face oneself one will suffer a destruction worse than death Destruction within An existentializing ethic begins on the other side of all the things we do to delay that event For it is when the thing one fears happens that one first discovers the truth of ones life the depth of ones inauthenticity The trauma that will measure ones humanity has arrived Nothing else now exists but the lonely struggle of the psyche with itself Suicide (including the primary form of suicide inner death) is one term of that situation Ethics is the other An ethics of existence is what one does when one finally finds oneself in the traumatic situation that brings one before oneself There is one lesson in this a lesson that probably cant be learned Rather than running from the trauma we should plunge toward it since it is only through it that we can discover both the truth about ourselves and what we are able to do in the face of that truth To activate that possibility all thats needed perhaps is to drown out the noise and chatter one keeps running in ones head Perhaps the truth is that the truth about ourselves is not deeply repressed and unknown Its closer than we think available to introspection if we but dared But thats what makes the kind of impassioned reflection Hamlet engages in so terrifying It exemplifies everything we know and dont want to know about ourselves18 Here is an attempt to offer an image that describes in depth the existential-psychoanalytic condition from which the possibility of ethics derives In George Orwells 1984 Winston Smith when tortured with the thing he most fears betrays the thing he loves To save his life he sacrifices what gives it meaning He capitulates before an inner torment that reduces the psyche to a condition of catastrophic anxiety (The image of the cage of rats placed over the head they will raven externalizes in a perfect objective correlative the terror that has the power to dissolve the psyche What is a phobia after all but an inner condition displaced into an external fear) What I want to suggest here is that Winston Smiths phobia describes the inner condition that defines any subject traumatized by itself Such a subject lives tortured by the struggle not to betray the thing one loves the thing that could give ones life meaning But one saves it only if one is willing to sacrifice everything to the

acceptance of the suffering and inner torment that service to it entails This is the ethical act whereby a subject attains tragic agency Becoming an existentially autonomous agent is the process of engaging the disorders of ones psyche in the effort of active reversal The wish to escape that effort to soften it or to insist that suffering must always have a happy resolution is the voice of self-betrayal If one gives in to it one loses with Winston the thing one has finally found the thing one can love more than ones life but only by suffering all that it demands That thing more precious than life is the tragic struggle that gives life perhaps the only meaning it can have

The ethic of the aff is key - only an ethical act that confronts our inner trauma with a constant and inner openness can we create the conditions for self-overcoming necessary to open ourselves to a meaningful existence - the only ethical choice is to fully confront contingencyDavis 2006 Walter A Davis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg235-238

What follows attempts to distill the ethic of existence in to its fundamental principles I also try here to present those thesis in a way that will engage the readers psyche and emotions at precisely the place within us where each of us makes a basic decision about ourselves Thats the only self that matters The others are selfreifying defenses The argument thus constitutes both an appeal to the readers freedom and an attempt to impinge on that freedom to bring each reader before him or herself by challenging defenses with the power that some ideas have to light a fire in the soul (1) We concur with Kant that if a choice is not free its not moral The possibility of freedom depends however on an in-depth analysis of ones psyche Such an analysis leads from the destruction of ego identity to the need to bring about a complete reversal in ones relationship to oneself by deracinating the voice of the other Thinking is ethical insofar as it engages one thing the battle of a subject with itself over the meaning of its being (2) There is no way to abridge that process nor to provide guarantees that will secure a safe outcome To sustain the psychoanalytic turn the psyche must continually throw itself into question and root out the emotions that bind it to a pattern of lies An ethic of the existential subject depends on maximizing what Keats termed negative capability the ability to be in uncertainties Mysteries doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason Rather than resolving doubts the purpose of thought and action is to deepen them An act is ethical insofar as it deepens the conflict of the subject with itself (3) One acts ethically only when all symbolic and ideological supports have collapsed Only then can one take on responsibility for oneself because only then is one at issue and at risk The ethical act must radically open itself to contingency in a situation where one must create values yet where those values can derive from nothing but the depth of ones engagement in the situation By the same token such values cannot be a final solution but must open themselves to later contingencies Ethics must always allow itself to be measured by contingency because contingency is precisely what calls up ethical responsibility The primary ethical situation is not one where there is a clear course of duty but where a subject trembles before its responsibility to create new values in a situation that reduces received values to rubble (4) Ethics begins when there is a genuine crisis of values even perhaps the need for a re-valuation of all values For Kant there was not nor could there be such a crisis The values were known immutable and generally agreed upon The only question was what kind of principle they would be grounded in which meant for Kant and the Aufklarung how could they be grounded in Reason For us in contrast the primary fact is a historicity that bites into the very possibility of the ethical Every ethical value must be willing to historicize itself That recognition entails the following considerations The desert grows Under the guise of fundamentalist crusades herd moralities dominate The extent of inhumanity is appalling So many values that once seemed so solid have been so thoroughly debunked The possibility of ethics now begins with a systematic exposure of all superego pathologies all the ethical ideologies that societies use to introduce a fundamental passivity into subjects while convincing those same subjects that they are good in a goodness that depends on willed ignorance An existential ethic is radically destructive of received beliefs radically disruptive of the desires of the normal subject Refusing and exposing all Symbolic supports it seeks in the struggle of the psyche with its disorders the source of value (5) Ethics is a matter of extremity It begins in the most extreme actmdashthe act of radical individuation in which one opens ones psyche to an interrogation that must be sustained in its extremity Ethics is about a choice in which a subject risks the value and meaning of its existence not about those choices that assure it of that meaning Moreover it is only when one does this that one experiences for the first time the

terror implicit in the oft-quoted Sartrean statement existence precedes essence (6) Ethics must engage and derive from the dread that defines choice Let me illustrate this proposition by contrasting Hamlets choice with the situation in Styrons Sophies Choice The horrifying choice Sophie facesmdashto choose which of her children will be sent to the gas chambermdashis a forced choice and thus extreme and exceptional in a way that deprives it of the possibility of being normative17 Hamlets choice in contrast is a free one that issues from nothing but his freedom and the readiness with which he accepts the selftorture that existence entails Sophie is tortured from without by the madness of the other and the inhuman logic that madness requires in order to know itself (Styron calls the officer who forces the choice on Sophie a genius of the Reich) Hamlet is tortured from within by the logic of self-criticism and self-overcoming that informs the existentializing process We are fortunate if we never face a situation like Sophies nor suffer the death-in-life that is the result of such choices But insofar as we have a psyche Hamlets situation is the general one that defines us Or to put it in properly ethical terms engaging the kind of situation he faces is the act that activates the inherent possibility that defines us The choice that founds such an ethic must therefore be distinguished both from the a priori choice made by the apostle of duty and Sophies forced choice All three refer to extreme choices and situations In only one however is guilt toward oneself both the origin of the choice and its result That is only one of the three choices is the ground of its own possibility and thereby the source of an existentialization that issues in values bound to the tragic contingencies of our situatedness

2AC

A2 ndash Realism

We control the internal link to their impacts The psychoanalysis of the affirmative forces an internal investigation of the ways in which the subjectrsquos subconscious desires rationalize what we would consider self-interest This means that we can only make sense of realism through a lens of psychoanalysis Sucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 17-18)

The psychological turn that international relations took with the rise of behavioralism in the 1960s has begun to expand beyond focusing on cognitionmdashhow individuals thinkmdashto a wider appreciation of the role of emotional determinants of action one of many factors that were long dismissed as unscientific Part of the reason for this hesitant courtship is no doubt the long strides that international relations theory has taken toward refining its investigative lenses such that less easily observable phenomena can be more confidently incorporated into the solid theoretical infrastructure that the discipline has now adopted A central example of this evolution is the analytical watershed inaugurated by neorealism which fashioned a conceptual playing field where little had existed before Neorealism a theoretical school that views international relations as taking place within an anarchical state system with no overarching authority in turn spawned the constructivist turn in international relationsmdashthe approach that stresses the importance of social identity in determining international outcomesmdashand subsequent counterarguments that built on yet other social and psychological preceptsmdash all of which agree that there is such a thing as an international systemmdashthough they understand the effects of anarchy differently Introducing psychoanalysis to international relations can therefore be seen as the next logical step for a relatively young discipline that seeks to understand why political actors behave the way they do While all psychoanalysts draw on Freuds unique contribution subsequent approaches have altered many of his assumptions This trend has kept pace with the embracing of new epistemological and ontological perspectives by other scientific and social scientific fields such as the quantum revolution in physics -a paradigm shift that has since influenced other disciplines The form of psychoanalytic theory that I use here is the contemporary relational strand one that analysts have alternately termed relational-model theorizing a dyadic systems perspective and intersubjectivity theory This approach shares an ontology basic to constructivism in international relations the psychology (identity) of the person (state) is not hard-wired into the unit but develops in part from the actions of other actors in the social environment (the family the therapeutic setting the international system) and in part through the shared assumptions that permeate that system As an approach centered on the individual mind contemporary psychoanalysis takes into account the broader social context within which actors act Psychoanalysis also provides a coherent theory of behavior incorporating three elements that have mostly been invisible in international relations theory but that provide a fuller understanding of how states and nonstate actors interact emotion the unconscious and the possibility for actors own cognitive and emotional insight to be a source of behavior change In drawing on these principles perhaps the most significant contribution that psychoanalysis can make to international relations is in improving on prevailing theories of identity which in turn illuminate questions about international action Within international relations constructivism has been criticized for neglecting the question of how identity is in fact created Cognitive psychologymdashwhich international relations has begun to draw on liberallymdashin part helps to fill this gap Yet with its assumption that the emotional legacy of early interpersonal relationships is essential in shaping personality and subsequent behavior psychoanalysis offers a more comprehensive model of identity creation than those put forth by cognitive theorists Recognizing these explanatory benefits contructivists have recently called for exploring the potential that psychoanalysis holds for understanding international politics Thus unlike the prevailing psychoanalytic approaches in international relationsmdashnamely psychohistories of individual leaders and the focus-group potential of micro-level conflict resolution the psychoanalytic approach I use here is meant to coexist happily alongside other streams of systemic theory in international relations

Forcing the state away from what it considers a core tenet of national defense in the exact opposite way it desires creates the conditions necessary for reflection of the efficacy of the initial policies of surveillance which changes future policySucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 32-)

Like most individuals states possess a complex arsenal of motivations that are not all palatable to the politys sense of self mdashnot least of which is due to the discrepant voices vying for influence in any society Yet the dominant self mdashthat overarching group ethos that does not necessarily reflect each single (sub)voicemdashimplicitly prescribes a set of normatively acceptable behaviors Should a state adopt a policy course that contradicts the states role-identity we can expect some sort of cognitive dissonance to arise leading to a radical realignment between actions and identity Just as a man who once struck his wife might offer the apologetic plea that I dont know what got into me it is up to the analyst to help the subject come to terms with the aggression that has evidently been very much inside of him all along The policy shift therefore results from the force of the role-identity prodding the self back into behavioral consistency However acting in contradiction to ones role-identity does not necessarily result in a behavior shift The dissonance between role-identity and behavior must be both unbearable and experienced at an emotional level in order for such a shift to result If the dissonance remained at a cognitive level it is likely that the subject would employ one of a number of cognitive biases in order to rationalize the discrepancy42 The dredging up of the unconscious counternarrative assures that the dissonance is experienced deeply enough to result in the taking of radical action to realign actions with identity 43 This hypothesis of cognitive-emotional realization is grounded in the clinical findings of psychoanalytic theory that suggest that under certain conditions actors may become consciously aware of previously unconscious processes44 The classic understanding of cognitive dissonancemdashas articulated by Leon Festingermdashis that inconsistency between behavior and belief results in psychological discomfort that leads to activity oriented toward dissonance reduction just as hunger leads to activity oriented toward hunger reduction45 In line with psychoanalysis the actual cognitive-emotional realization brings to light what had previously been stored in the unconscious areas of the states subjective world In actuality the assumption here is that the role-challenging behavior (paired with domestic challenges) causes elites to reflect on the states role- identity Moreover my use of cognitive-emotional realization imbues the concept with a distinctively emotional component as well Whereas pure cognitive dissonance refers to the challenging of an individuals worldview (ie the revelation of new facts)46 I am introducing the more ontologically powerful notion of challenges to the self47 When this behavior undermines the very legitimacy buttressing the states raison detat the dissonance is particularly acute Catalysts for Realization Once decision-makers come to realize that the states foreign-policy actions have contradicted the states role-identity a policy shift may result The important question that remains is what contributes to this realization Numerous sources may act as the mirror necessary for the state to reflect on its behavior For clarity I have divided them into three categories domestic elements (including the military the peace movement revisionist historians artists and the domestic media) other states (including allies and adversaries as well as those states news media) and international structures (including international organizations norms and regimes) Domestic Elements The Military If the military acts in a way that the populace sees as contradicting the states self-image (even if the military is merely carrying out governmental policies) society can experience a corresponding cognitive

dissonance In a democracy the military takes its directives from the government however military culture is instrumental in shaping the broader strategic culture encompassing foreign-policy decisions mdashand role-identitymdashmore generally Most of the time the relationship between the civilian and military spheres resembles a symbiosis commands are given by civilians and implemented by the military which in turn will advise and reshape subsequent policies In some cases ex-military personnel will pursue a career in government on being discharged However it is possible for the military to experience a sense of dissonance between a particular policy and its overall defense doctrine or ethic Soldiers might articulate discomfort in carrying out a particular mission or the number of conscientious objectors may rise In a country in which conscientious objection is previously unheard of the founding of such a movement will therefore signal an even higher degree of dissonance between behavior and institutional role-identity In examining foreign-policy shifts the role of the military is crucial in representing the degree of concordance between national role-identity and foreign policy In states where the military has particular salience for establishing national identitymdashthose states with mandatory and universal conscription for instancemdashthat institution will be particularly salient

Their dependence on pragmatism to justify unrealistic internal link chains and counter psychological methods creates the worst type of moral tunnel vision in which we become incapable of understanding the carnage of our ideology ndash this makes ethics impossibleDavis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg47-48)

But its always a good idea when seeking an explanation of the human motives behind actions to stick with the empirical With stated intentions and official rationales Otherwise we give ourselves over to psychobabble Despite official denial by the Department of Defense that DU is harmful a series of explanations are now in place to account for the development and use of DU weapons DU is cost-effective militarily efficient and turns to productive use a waste product wed otherwise have to dispose of at great cost In a variety of ways for the past two days We who leave here in sorrow know that we will one day be reunited with her in joy My concern here is not with the ontological status of this preposterous belief but with its psychological function as a guarantee that offers human beings a way to deprive death of its finality And the terror that prospect entails The function of guarantees is to enable human beings to bear events and contingencies that would otherwise be too traumatic There is much that we can face apparently only by denying Such perhaps is one accurate estimation of what it means lo be a human being to remain a child of ones needs and desires disguising that fact in the form of beliefs and ideas The primary purpose of religion philosophy and culture has been to provide conceptual psychological and emotional guarantees so I hat traumatic events become part of a larger framework that assures the realization of our hopes and dreams Without such supports most people supposedly would find life unlivable Through the ministry of the guarantees we banish those thoughts and feelings that we are convinced would deprive life of meaning plunging us into despair Experience accordingly becomes the movement from and to the affirmation of the guarantees through their imposition on events The main line of Western philosophy can most profitably be seen as I series of efforts to provide a ground for the guarantees That effort achieves one of its culminations in Hegel who defined the purpose of philosophy as the elimination of the contingent As father of the philosophy of history he offered that new discipline a single goal to demonstrate that the rational is real and the real rational that history is the story of progress liberty the realization of a universal humanity Or to put it in vulgar terms democracy and civilization are on the march and will soon sweep the entire Middle East In order to triumph over the contingencies of existencemdashdoubt about oneself ones place in the world and ones final endmdashmany guarantees are needed Moreover they must form a system of reinforcing beliefs such that if one guarantee is threatened other guarantees come in to fill the breach Thereby the function of the system as a whole is assured Within the system of guarantees one guarantee however is superordinate The belief that human nature is basically good As animal rationale we are endowed with an ahistorical essence that cannot be lost Evil is an aberration Consequently I heres always reason for hope and the belief that no matter how bad things get well always find a way to recover everything that I lie guarantees assure Psyche Its all a matter of pragmatic efficiency with a little capitalist profit motive thrown in for good measure Theres only one thing wrong with this explanation It leaves out the basis for the calculus Theres every reason to use DU and no reason not to use it if and only if one rationale informs all decisions How to maximize death regardless of consequences or alternatives Introduce any countervailing motives and the entire chain of decisions becomes questionable Conscious stated intentions then reveal themselves as functions of something else that

has been conveniently rendered unconscious What looks like a purely pragmatic matter devoid of psychological motives now reveals the opposite the fact that Thanatos so inhabits the system that the absence of anything opposed to it goes without saying Thanatos has become what Wittgenstein called a form of life7 a way of being so deeply rooted that it operates automatically habitually and of necessity It has become a collective unconscious And as such it is no longer accessible to those whose intentions conceal and reveal it The reason for sticking with the empirical is now clear There is something insane in the empirical That is what the historian must uncover Before we ask ourselves how this situation came to pass we need to ask another question For its easy to claim we dont know about such things because the media refuses to tell us about them Theres another reason for our ignorance however and its the one we need to confront I refer to the possibility that we choose our ignorance because otherwise wed lose the system of guarantees we depend on for our identity and our understanding of history As Barbara Bush put it in telling Diane Sawyer why she doesnt watch the news Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many what day its gonna happen and how many this or what do you suppose Or I mean its its not relevant So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that8 It would be easy to deride Mrs Bush to congratulate oneself on not sharing her attitude What I hope to show however is that on an essential level one determinative in the last instance we are in full agreement with her and delude ourselves as long as we think otherwise

IR SPECIFIC ndash The method of the affirmative best supplements our understanding of international relations by including elements that are absent in normal policy examinations of international relations Sucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 18-20)

It has long been argued that even within the confines of rational-choice approaches the nature of a decision-makers preferences cannot be assumed a priori and indeed their distinctiveness derives from factors ranging from emotions to personality to the selective use of historical analogies Emotion in short can be considered the sine qua non of social life a realization that has recently begun to permeate international relations theory Moreover the concept of the unconscious that anchors psychoanalysis can illuminate the question of why an individual experiences a sense of dissonance when her actions do not conform to her identity the mechanism by which the dissonance between action and identity can become unbearable and therefore why humans experience the need to match the two The unconscious is that aspect of the self that remains the most untapped yet potentially the most satisfying determinant of action coming as it does early in the causal chain At its most basic the unconscious is simply the repository for those characteristics that an actor fears adopting in other words action fantasies that the actor despises but can plausibly entertain This fundamental tension between the feared and the imaginable is what normally keeps these fantasies in check and is what makes the unconscious so potentially powerful as an explanatory tool And while the unconscious is an admittedly contested concept scholars from various fields have issued tentative calls for its exploration and convincing deductive and empirical research certainly justify its consideration One theoretical perspective that has been criticized for ignoring the unconscious is sociologys symbolic interactionism an approach that underpins constructivism in international relations Part of the reason for the tension between sociology including symbolic interactionism and psychoanalysis arguably lies in an antiquated understanding of psychology the false belief that to employ psychology as an explanatory approach one must ignore the impact that ones social environment has on ones personality self-image and behavior However contemporary psychoanalysis presents a view of the self that is more relational than what Freudian drive theory had suggested A psychoanalytic approach does not have to assume that unconscious or otherwise emotional factors arise from the actor independent of the shared understandings that define the social environment Admitting an explanatory role for the unconscious therefore does not imply a rejection of intersubjectivity mutual-constitution or any of the other organizing principles of sociology and constructivism Rather it simply means that ideas held in the unconscious serve as one filter through which actors interpret social interaction The unconscious therefore may be understood either as one element of agency that the actor brings to interpreting his social script or as itself the product of social forces that interpret and constrain action The first perspective assumes that agency does not have to be conscious to be meaningful agency at its most basic can simply imply action and intentionality can therefore encompass an unconscious component The second view means that the unconscious does not have to be understood as a pre-wired component of the unit that in turn shapes behavior rather it can be viewed as an emergent and mediating phenomenon We can therefore understand cognition as being inherently situated within social processes This is consistent with a relational view of social life and yet it is an important theoretical addition to the prevailing wisdom in international relations about how social understandings

ultimately shape behavior A final contribution that psychoanalysis can make to our understanding of international relationsmdashand conflict resolution in particularmdashis its assumption that entrenched behavior patterns can be altered through cognitive and emotional insight In addition to challenging the static conception of human nature that underpinned classical realism (arguably the first theory of international relations) and that provided a rather pessimistic view of human affairs this assumption is a valuable addition to any theory of international relations in which the prevailing theories of actionmdashmaterial power in the case of states polarity in the case of state systemsmdashare difficult if not impossible to manipulate As a result many of the most prominent international relations theories have lacked meaningful policy implications Conversely psychoanalytic theory suggests tools for ameliorating some of the most pressing global problems including protracted conflict and war While some psychoanalytically based conflict-resolution approaches use the focus-group format to simulate the healing function of the therapy setting this book demonstrates that the gaining of conscious insight into ones role deviationmdasha prerequisite for policy changemdashcan come about through real-life international interaction that requires neither a skilled conflict practitioner nor the willingness of elites to participate in such an exercise Rather under certain conditions role conflict can prompt domestic and international elements to hold a mirror to the face of elites resulting in a collective cognitive dissonance that can lead to policy change This mirror can take a number of formsmdashacts of protest by domestic groups media coverage and actions by allies adversaries or international structures These sources will be discussed further

IR SPECIFIC ndash What their internal links consider to be ldquoself-interestrdquo for a state doesnrsquot actually exist States are not sentient Instead they are composed by a collection of minds that act in self-interest which means that psychoanalytic evaluation of the self is a prior question to understanding the interests of the state Sucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 21-22)

Rather than referring to a notion of collective selfhood that is shared by multiple states- as some constructivist theorists of collective identity would maintainmdashthe title of this book the international self is meant to suggest not only that each state possesses a distinctive identity but that this identity develops out of the states relationship with other international actors This concept also implies that decisions emanating from the polity are derived from a process not simply the sum of the states parts Yet while we have already shown that psychoanalysis can accommodate a role for environmental processes in shaping behavior we still need to be aware of the risks of anthropomorphizing the state a practice that gets to the heart of the debate between two analytical positions that cut across the social sciences methodological individualism and holism While methodological individualism views social life as the product of actions taken by individuals holism understands the group to be a meaningful unit in and of itself Yet to an extent the debate between the two perspectives is already fixed While the holists have in their favor a precedent of semantic habitmdash we tend to anthropomorphize the state in everyday speech more often than not (eg Washington decided to wage war against al-Qaeda)mdashmethodological individualism is allied with the rich literature of rational choice and more prosaically the commonsense discomfort that arises when we ascribe human characteristics to things including groups Groups do not have minds any more than do other social facts and group behavior is after all the product of individuals acting on the groups behalf Finally given the presence of disparate individuals and subgroups constituting any society it can be misleading to attribute a single group consciousness to a political entity In a foreign-policy context accordingly adherents of this view would focus on elite attitudes bureaucratic politics andor interest group activities to tease out the causal relationship between Intentions and outcomes Yet a strong case can be made for the emergent properties of states and their policy processes something happens between the point at which citizens articulate preferences and those preferences are translated into policies Insofar as elite decisions do not always reflect the opinion of the majority there remains some degree of independent agency that may very well accrue to the state as a whole Under this reasoning it would be plausible to assert the existence of an overarching group self as Alexander Wendt does when he claims that states are people too In addition to the views of significant strands of psychoanalytic thought (which would not necessarily be expected to assume that units other than the individual can be psychoanalyzed) the idea of a group self enjoys far-reaching support across the social sciencesmdashinternational relations included This includes neorealisms assumption that the state is a unitary actor the Collective self hood implied by social identity theory the concept of political culture early psychoanalytic assumptions about the group as well as studies on obedience group-think and the crowd phenomenon There is a reason why scholars are drawn to the group as a unit of analysismdashwitness anthropologists concern with tribes and civilizations sociologists focus on street gangs and societies and political scientists emphasis on states and

transnational actors Group behavior and individual behavior are not necessarily identical Nor can an individual be expected to behave the same way in the context of a group as he or she would alone Moreover constructivism goes so far as to assume the possibility of shared norms across states a claim that has enjoyed much empirical support during the first active decade of constructivist research It is much more defensible to argue the existence of a collective identity within a state the boundaries of which contain degrees of centralized media language and other discursive channels for cultural dissemination and which prescribe the roles that the groups members are expected to perform within the context of that group And if different subgroups within the state disseminate disparate narratives we can assume that the most dominant group within society (as defined by some combination of ethnicity class or gender) has custody over a single consequential dominant narrative Finally even if we choose to ascribe a states national ethos to its elites we need to remember that state leaders are the product of the society in which they were reared This view would effectively mitigate the tension between elite- and mass-level phenomena in international relations since both elites and masses are socialized by the overarching structure of the collective

A2 ndash DisadvantagesThe internal linkrsquos dependence on rationality only serves to protect us from the unknown that the future holds This ultimately reduces all forms of knowledge to something that can be calculated which ensures violence The only way to reverse this trend is to force a confrontation with tragedy and the unknownDavis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg51-52)

Emotional The innermost need of human beings is to feel good about themselves Whatever threatens that feeling must be exorcised Health normalcy and productivity depend on avoiding negative feelings Hope and optimism arent just healthy attitudes they are requirements of our nature Biologically wired We cannot remain for long in trauma Recovery moreover must restore our faith in the guarantees and our hopes for the future The need for hope is In fact the capstone of the entire system of guarantees Yet it too apparently has a history Today over 10 million of our children are on prescription drugs to prevent depression and anxiety Informed of this fact by Bill Maher the French actress Julie Delphy spoke the spontaneous wisdom of an archaic culture Dont they know that depression is a good thing that its something you have to go through in order to grow Not anymoreThe key to understanding the power of the guarantees is to understand the fears that they exorcise Thanks to religion death suffering and evil are deprived of their power Through the attainment of reason all other forms of consciousness and what they might reveal are put in their place Poetic knowing is deprived both of its legitimacy and its terror Science as fulfillment of reason assures us of domination over nature What Heidegger termed technoscientific rationality becomes the measure of what is real Belief in historical progress banishes the recurrent suspicion that history may lack direction or even worse move to the darkest of ends The condition is thereby set that makes it impossible for us to experience traumatic events such as 9-11 except as occasions to take whatever actions are needed to reaffirm our goodness and restore our guarantees It is in the personal order however that the guarantees do their deepest work Psychologically belief in the self or self-identity exorcises the most frightening contingency that there is a void at the center of the American psyche with panic anxiety and its corollary compulsive consumption the expression of a desperate non-identity That specter brings us before the greatest fear that our psyche not our conscious deliberative intentions is the author of our actions an author who will do anything in order to feel safe secure and righteous All of our emotional needs then stand forth under the rule of a single necessity the need to feel good about oneself at whatever cost and to sustain hope by banishing anything that would trouble us Resolution catharsis (ie the discharge of painful tensions or awareness) and renewal emerge as the needs that bind us with an iron necessity to the guarantees and all that they make it impossible for us to know It is easy to deprecate Dubya and apparently to hold onto the idea that hes a temporary aberration But the problem goes deeper To revive a battle cry from the 1960s insofar as one is wedded to any one of the guarantees one is part of the problem and not the solution For the grandest function of the system of guarantees as a whole and in each one of its parts is to blind us to historyAnd so to take up again the question stated previously how did the situation now being created in Iraq come about The next three sections constitute an attempt to answer that question by constructing for America a repressed history

The negative is attempting to apply reason to ethics and psychology This only creates a hard understanding of our inner psyche which is a loss of the self that outweighs every other impact Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg174-175)

This recognition implies a primary question What is the nature and extent of the ethical responsibility human beings have for such a condition To what extent can evil and the actions that flow from it be said to be chosen in the exercise of a freedom for which one bears ethical responsibility Traditionally ethical responsibility only applies to actions that are taken after deliberation and with full knowledge of the consequences actions where choice is a function of our ability to reason where the moral law is known and where one chooses to violate it for motives that can be specified as functions of a self- interest that overrides all other motives and considerations Mitigate any of these factors and one mitigates ethical responsibility Ethical responsibility is compromised or eliminated for example if ones action is determined by forces outside ones control if one acts without premeditation under duress in blind obedience to customs or authorities as the result of a pathology because of some limitation in the ability to think or to understand the consequences of ones action or because one acted without any conscious intention to do wrong However deplorable their deeds the mad for example are not evil Evil requires consciousness choice freedom If evil is to be a human possibility on a par with the possibility of goodness it must be something that is determined within the order of freedom The trouble with the traditional understanding of these conditions however is the effort to confine them within the limits of rationalism and a purely cognitive model of the mind Rationality is noble but single-minded devotion to it leaves the true life of the psyche undetected Focusing on it prematurely shifts discussion to a rarefied mode of mentation that is then cut off from the rest of the personality To sustain and deny that split reason is then given disproportionate weight in determining what we are and do But the dream of reason is precisely that A dream a desiremdashto bring ones being into correspondence with reason and thereby eliminate everything else especially in determining the questions of ethics No one brought this dream to bear on moral experience more rigorously than Immanuel Kant That effort is the sublime beauty of his thought But experiencing oneself in terms of a priori rationality comes at a terrible cost Life becomes a process in which we sleepwalk our way through most of what we do because weve cut ourselves off from the actual bases of our actions Our psyche becomes a stranger to us We fixate on giving rational accounts of ourselves and in the process alienate ourselves from everything else Emotions become irrationalities breaks with reason things we must overcome or worse things we can only acknowledge when they are good proper and in tune with reason The rest of our being becomes brute inclinations frailties of our nature desires that disrupt an otherwise rational identity As a result in terms of ethics whether we know it or not under the guise of reason weve made an offer that most human beings cannot refuse Claiming not to consciously intend what one does has become the grand excuse Traditional definitions of the three cardinal categories of ethics are a monument to that motive Restricting intention motive and choice to the canons of rationality fashions them to the designs of human mendacity For if by intention we mean a deliberate rational choice with full knowledge of the consequences evil as Ive described it is not chosen If along the same lines we restrict motive lo purposes for which we bear responsibility because they issue not from frailties of our nature or the force of circumstances but from an explicit knowledge of what one is doing and why evil as thus far described does not exist within the order of human motivation One can identify self-interest careerism and happiness as motives but to say that many agents act in order to advance Thanatos is hard to fathom Unless that is we expand the category of motive to include purposes that derive from the psyche in all its inherent conflictedness But once posit such a possibility choice becomes a concept that must be rethought in a radically new way

Their internal links are symptoms of the fantasy that we strive to maintain This logic becomes used to justify atrocity The affirmativersquos rejection of attempting to control the future allows alternate practices to emerge Vote affirmative to traverse the fantasy of their internal link chains Even if you donrsquot think we can solve the 1AC is a more productive through experiment than their disad Davis 2006(Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg63-65)

Is there anything more evil than shooting children in a school yard or flying planes into buildings One hears this rhetorical question often today Getting it firmly implanted in our minds seems to be one of the current ideological functions of the media A correct response requires careful reflection on the circumstance that underlies the knee-jerk response thanks to the power of the image it conjures up The promise inherent in Technoscientificrationality is deliverance from images Killing for it like everything else occurs at a distance In the inaugural moment Tibbets in the cockpit of the Enola Gay unable to imagine what he has just done as a human act It was all impersonal12 And today in the silent secret midnight ways that radiation poisoning works from within like a deed without a doer separated in space and time from its absent cause Perhaps killing at a distance is the greater evil precisely because it abrogates the image and the human connection between slayer and slain If I kill another man with my bare hands my deed is immediate to my embodied consciousness To kill that way you have to feel hate fear anguish remorse etc whereas to kill from a distance or through an invisible contamination is to render the whole thing impersonal With the desired result the ability for example of the man who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima incinerating 600000 people in a second and condemning another 300000 to the condition of hibakusha the walking dead to boast for over 59 years now that he has never felt a moment of regret or remorse Tibbets lack of moral imagination is one with his representative status as precursor For now its easy to litter a landscape with DU while denying that the stuff has any long-term medical or environmental effects13 The evil of killing at a distance is that it makes death unreal Protected from the image all who participate in the deed are delivered over to a pure and impersonal calculus (An aside if we really want to support our troops we must achieve for them a new Bill of Rights No one should ever be ordered to use weapons without being given a full knowledge of the long-term human and environmental consequences of those weapons To do otherwise is to deprive our soldiers of the choice that makes them human) The powers that be learned one lesson from Vietnam No more images The mistake was to let us see the carnage up close every night on TV The news as image entered our consciousness at the register where genuine change begins Where horror is felt free of the tyranny of the concept and the hypnotic power of the guarantees Desert Storm was the corrective the Nintendo war a war broadcast to look just like one of the video games wed been programmed to love Prohibition of the image is now a fundamental article of faith No images are allowed to come back to us from Iraq II (Michael Moores real crime was to give us a brief glimpse at what the mainstream media proscribe) Abolition of the image is one of the primary conditions of ecocide Everything must be rendered abstract invisible unreal No image can be allowed to trouble our sleep to lacerate our soul For then we might begin to know that there is indeed an evil far worse than shooting children in schoolyards or flying airplanes into buildings To move us toward that knowledge let me end with the forbidden which I must here attempt to convey solely through the more abstract medium of words since Ive not yet gained permission to reproduce a photograph I saw not long ago Its the picture of an Iraqi baby a victim of DU who was born with no nose mouth eyes

anus or genitals and with flipper limbs a common result of radiation exposure in utero That childs body full of red open ulcers is twisted in knots its ulcerated face contorted in a look of unspeakable suffering An authentic image of the sacredness of human life Of the preciousness of every breath To look at that child is to realize ones duty to mourn it to give voice to its right to invade Our consciousness and expose the evil of those who prate on about being pro-life while refusing to let us see what theyve reduced life to Luke 171-2 The image of that child must become the force in our minds that motivates us to deracinate all guarantees that shield us from the reality of that childs situation Or to put it another way every time one demands catharsis resolution and renewal that child is born again condemned to its writhing That is why its image must embolden us to question the most hallowed of the guarantees the one Ive refrained from discussing until now In the face of such evil what is to be done Is resistance ever justified in resorting to violence No we are told because if we do so we become just like them This ethical principle supposedly applies universally and atemporally It does so however because it assures t he guarantee that no matter what happens well never get our hands dirty History cant intrude on the categorical imperative Whatever action one takes one must maintain ones ethical purity Even if that means there is nothing one can do and after its been demonstrated I hat there are no non-violent ways to change the situation Perhaps we can no longer allow ourselves the luxury of such an ethic Bush did the moral imagination one favor His pre-emptive unilateralism made official what has been clear for so long but denied due to its implications There is no body to which we can turn for Justice not the UN the World Court or any other framework of international law The US will flaunt its contempt for such bodies whenever it suits its purpose And thus another mode of peaceful non-violent praxis is deprived of its guarantee

A2 ndash CounterplansTheir counterplan still attempts to maintain some type of guarantee for the future Their obsession with security and the future fail to force a confrontation with the trauma of the unknown - this means that only the aff can solve Anything else results in a return to the ideology of security Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg38-39)

But to undertake that task we must purge ourselves of the thing in ourselves that stands in the way I have termed it the guarantees By that term I refer to all those assurances we set up a priori to protect ourselves from the reality of historical trauma The significance of eventsmdashthe Shoah Hiroshima 9-11mdash is their power to call such guarantees into question by exposing cherished beliefs to the claims of darker views and by forcing us to think in radically new ways considering things about the human being that weve persistently denied or marginalized One dimension of any traumatic event is the shock it brings to traditional ways of thinking Thats why the dominant response to any historical trauma is the attempt to restore the guarantees by finding a way t o impose them on the event in order to contain and interpret it The ideological function of the guarantee is thereby demonstrated A way has been found to limit the impact of the event by picturing it as an aberration a temporary departure from values and beliefs that can always be recovered because they constitute something essentialistic or universal about human nature Something trans-historical History may disrupt our essence but it cannot destroy it The concept of human naturemdashin all t h e variants constituting the philosophic and psychological history of that idea from Plato and Aristotle through American self psychologymdashis the primary way in which we endeavor to deny history An event is traumatic precisely because it suggests that history occurs beyond the limits we want to impose on it and therefore may move in directions that have nothing to do with human nature or the cherished beliefs and values we derive from that concept Events put us as subjectsmdashand as thinkersmdash into a traumatic relationship to both ourselves and our world The anxiety at the center of thought is revealed Ideologists rush in to fill that void and restore the guarantees Our effort must be t o do the opposite and thereby sustain the vital possibility implicit in an event That possibility is to sustain a break with the guarantees and thereby find for history a radically different way of thinking To put it concretely a trauma cannot be resolved until its been constituted The Western Logos is a monument to t he effort to avoid t h a t task indeed to render it impossible a priori To reverse that tradition the things above all we must rid ourselves of are the desire and demand for resolution The recycling of the guarantees must give way to a n existentializing imperative to constitute and work within trauma in a way that addresses the psyche at the same register as Gibson and Abu Ghraib do by creating images symbolic actions and emotions that are of equal depth but that move us in an antithetical directionmdashtoward the inner transformation needed to purge ourselves of Thanatos Such an effort however cannot itself be yet another variant of the guarantees as happens when Love and Eros are posited as ahistorical values If anything the possibility of Love is far more difficult and exacting than death because it can only arise by reversing the prior force that death has within us The following two sections offer a brief picture of the kind of agonistic process such an effort entails in order to whet our appetite for something that should by now be evident The critique of ideology cannot be a merely intellectual exercise It must be the activation within our psyche of a countervailing drama

Any risk of ldquosolvencyrdquo for the counterplan is a reason to vote aff because it is an attempt to guarantee the future by pre-emptive action Even claims of a ldquonet-benefitrdquo are a link to the affirmative criticism Only the aff forcibly confronts the unknownDavis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg51-52)

Emotional The innermost need of human beings is to feel good about themselves Whatever threatens that feeling must be exorcised Health normalcy and productivity depend on avoiding negative feelings Hope and optimism arent just healthy attitudes they are requirements of our nature Biologically wired We cannot remain for long in trauma Recovery moreover must restore our faith in the guarantees and our hopes for the future The need for hope is In fact the capstone of the entire system of guarantees Yet it too apparently has a history Today over 10 million of our children are on prescription drugs to prevent depression and anxiety Informed of this fact by Bill Maher the French actress Julie Delphy spoke the spontaneous wisdom of an archaic culture Dont they know that depression is a good thing that its something you have to go through in order to grow Not anymore The key to understanding the power of the guarantees is to understand the fears that they exorcise Thanks to religion death suffering and evil are deprived of their power Through the attainment of reason all other forms of consciousness and what they might reveal are put in their place Poetic knowing is deprived both of its legitimacy and its terror Science as fulfillment of reason assures us of domination over nature What Heidegger termed technoscientific rationality becomes the measure of what is real Belief in historical progress banishes the recurrent suspicion that history may lack direction or even worse move to the darkest of ends The condition is thereby set that makes it impossible for us to experience traumatic events such as 9-11 except as occasions to take whatever actions are needed to reaffirm our goodness and restore our guarantees It is in the personal order however that the guarantees do their deepest work Psychologically belief in the self or self-identity exorcises the most frightening contingency that there is a void at the center of the American psyche with panic anxiety and its corollary compulsive consumption the expression of a desperate non-identity That specter brings us before the greatest fear that our psyche not our conscious deliberative intentions is the author of our actions an author who will do anything in order to feel safe secure and righteous All of our emotional needs then stand forth under the rule of a single necessity the need to feel good about oneself at whatever cost and to sustain hope by banishing anything that would trouble us Resolution catharsis (ie the discharge of painful tensions or awareness) and renewal emerge as the needs that bind us with an iron necessity to the guarantees and all that they make it impossible for us to know It is easy to deprecate Dubya and apparently to hold onto the idea that hes a temporary aberration But the problem goes deeper To revive a battle cry from the 1960s insofar as one is wedded to any one of the guarantees one is part of the problem and not the solution For the grandest function of the system of guarantees as a whole and in each one of its parts is to blind us to history And so to take up again the question stated previously how did the situation now being created in Iraq come about The next three sections constitute an attempt to answer that question by constructing for America a repressed history

Any net benefit to the counterplan links to the criticism of the affirmative and is a reason that the counterplan cannot solve the affirmative We must confront the unknown to solve Davis 2001Watler A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative Pg 38-39

One upshoot of that act is a recovery of the dialectic of Eros and Thanatos as a way of thinking about history In anticipation of later developments (chapter 4 part 2) I only present the basic lines of this idea here The depth-charge sounded by an Event is its ability to reveal that the relationship of Eros and Thanatos is not eternal but historical to the core with the end of that dialectic entailing the possible extinction of one of the terms This is the spectre Freud exorcized by establishing a dualistic way of conceptualizing the two categories The alternative is an immanent dialectic one where history as contingency subjects everything to irreversible change with Thanatos a force in culture dedicated to the extinction of Eros and with the power to bring about that closure to the eternal dialectic Traumatic events constitute an abrupt and painful reversal of the eternal dialectic because in them we fund Eros deprived of all assurances Contra Freud there is nothing universal biological or ahistorical about the eternal battle Both terms are fully implicated in history caught up in processes Capable of producing irreversible transformations Forces in the psyche opposed to life which we have persistently marginalized in proclaiming our humanism rise up in the Event to challenge all we believe about human nature and history Rather than a world grounded in love the primacy of goodness in human nature the achievement of rationality and the ameliorative virtues of the social process the Event reveals a world in which envy and hate stalk life seeking a final solution that can only come with the extinction of the antagonist After such knowledge we can never begin again cleansed of history restored through its narration to some essential humanistic identity with all our fundamental beliefs in essential goodness reaffirmed Eros again pristine and empowered Feeling the pressure of death as it weighs upon and works within us becomes the gauge that measures the depth of our participation in history The Event rends all the masks that enable us to conceive evil as an aberrance Existential contingency unseats all essentializing views of human nature revealing historicity as a process in which Thanatos may be the drive informing the reality principle There is nothing in human nature that protects us from this eventuality Positing an essential and always recoverable nature outside history is not the solution but part of the problem the way we blind ourselves a priori to our situation

Only a complete withdrawal from psychological guarantees can force us to confront trauma The counterplanrsquos insistence that there is something tangible that can be manipulated or solved for is a link Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg38-39)

But to undertake that task we must purge ourselves of the thing in ourselves that stands in the way I have termed it the guarantees By that term I refer to all those assurances we set up a priori to protect ourselves from the reality of historical trauma The significance of eventsmdashthe Shoah Hiroshima 9-11mdash is their power to call such guarantees into question by exposing cherished beliefs to the claims of darker views and by forcing us to think in radically new ways considering things about the human being that weve persistently denied or marginalized One dimension of any traumatic event is the shock it brings

to traditional ways of thinking Thats why the dominant response to any historical trauma is the attempt to restore the guarantees by finding a way t o impose them on the event in order to contain and interpret it The ideological function of the guarantee is thereby demonstrated A way has been found to limit the impact of the event by picturing it as an aberration a temporary departure from values and beliefs that can always be recovered because they constitute something essentialistic or universal about human nature Something trans-historical History may disrupt our essence but it cannot destroy it The concept of human naturemdashin all t h e variants constituting the philosophic and psychological history of that idea from Plato and Aristotle through American self psychologymdashis the primary way in which we endeavor to deny history An event is traumatic precisely because it suggests that history occurs beyond the limits we want to impose on it and therefore may move in directions that have nothing to do with human nature or the cherished beliefs and values we derive from that concept Events put us as subjectsmdashand as thinkersmdash into a traumatic relationship to both ourselves and our world The anxiety at the center of thought is revealed Ideologists rush in to fill that void and restore the guarantees Our effort must be t o do the opposite and thereby sustain the vital possibility implicit in an event That possibility is to sustain a break with the guarantees and thereby find for history a radically different way of thinking To put it concretely a trauma cannot be resolved until its been constituted The Western Logos is a monument to t he effort to avoid t h a t task indeed to render it impossible a priori To reverse that tradition the things above all we must rid ourselves of are the desire and demand for resolution The recycling of the guarantees must give way to a n existentializing imperative to constitute and work within trauma in a way that addresses the psyche at the same register as Gibson and Abu Ghraib do by creating images symbolic actions and emotions that are of equal depth but that move us in an antithetical directionmdashtoward the inner transformation needed to purge ourselves of Thanatos Such an effort however cannot itself be yet another variant of the guarantees as happens when Love and Eros are posited as ahistorical values If anything the possibility of Love is far more difficult and exacting than death because it can only arise by reversing the prior force that death has within us The following two sections offer a brief picture of the kind of agonistic process such an effort entails in order to whet our appetite for something that should by now be evident The critique of ideology cannot be a merely intellectual exercise It must be the activation within our psyche of a countervailing drama

A2 ndash KritiksOur ethics come first -- Discovery of the unconscious is crucial to the recognition of responsibility by every subject- only our framework opens space for agency and recognition of our choices- our ethics are crucial to understand the historical contingencies that make up the status quo and open space for change Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg182-185)

Freud discovered more than the Unconscious He discovered our responsibility for it for becoming aware of how what we repress rules our life and therefore our duty to gain knowledge of our unconscious as the precondition for becoming an ethically responsible agent In terms of ethics theres a quick way to summarize the significance of the Unconscious What we dont know about ourselves is what we domdashto the other In calling us to such a reflection on ourselves Freud also taught us a new way to reflect one that forces us to move beyond the rational world of conscious deliberations and intentions Once make the psychoanalytic turn and the sources of self-knowledge increase exponentially Every time one understands a dream a paraphraxis an aesthetic experience a fantasy one suffers in principle a revolution in ones life For such experiences put one in touch with the deep conflicts that define the psyche A dream for example does not tell us about something outside the realm of our conscious grasp though this view of repression typifies how a convenient misunderstanding blunts the force of psychoanalysis A good dream reveals the desires and conflicts structuring our life It thereby opens our quotidian life to an in-depth exploration Listen to a dream rightly and one finds that one must confront something one has been avoidingmdashor doing Such is what it would mean to assume responsibility for ones dreams One would start to live from an awareness of ones psyche rather than in a continued attempt to escape that awareness Freud doesnt abolish intention he expands it by showing how often consciousness is defense mechanism and rationality the cover that conceals the actual motives on which we act and how often accordingly insistence on conscious intentions is the lie we cling to in order to deny our responsibility The seductive or prohibitive way of relating that a parent adopts toward a child for example may carry as its primary repressed intention the desire to wound that child in their sexuality This is why its so necessary at a later point in time for such parents to deny that they ever harbored let alone acted on such an intention And yet our actions do indeed speak louder than words in conveying our actual intentions Action is concrete intentionality because it is through it that we live out our feelings desires and conflicts And they are what the other invariably receives as a message that is often sharply different from what we say especially when through the exercise of intentionality we reassure ourselves about what good loving human beings we are The psyche is a lonely hunter avid in the pursuit of purposes it carefully conceals from itself The ethical greatness of Sigmund Freud is the crisis he introduced into that practice Rather than getting us off the hook psychoanalysis sticks it far deeper in us than any previous ethic Intentionality is convenient because it absolves us of the greatest responsibilitymdashresponsibility for who we are Everything stays in the safely guarded space of deliberative discursive quasi-judicial rationality as if this were the primary way we relate to ourselves or to turn the screw a peg further as if when we arent relating to ourselves this way we arent fully moral agents fully responsible for our actions But once let responsibility expand into the inner life of the psyche and we take on a new ethical burden to know oneself in depth and not recoil in horror from what one learns or persist in virtuous denial of the hidden motives one must confront in order to become responsible for ones psyche Indeed deliberation is itself transformed by l he psychoanalytic turn Freud shows that to deliberate correctly one must focus the inquiry on those motives that one tries to conceal from oneself since they are where the truth of ones conduct may lie

In terms of the problem of evil this line of thought has an obvious implication Our primary responsibility which we continually shirk is to find the evil in ourselves Theoretically and emotionally the same thing prevents that discovery the desire to uphold the idea that human nature is inherently or basically good with evil an aberration a fall a break with the natural order of things an exception to the rule of human decency Psychoanalysis like history renders such sentiments questionable at best And irrelevant to where inquiry must beginmdashwith psychological conflict the primary fact that defines us To be human is to live denned by wounds and disorders that are prior to the mediations (themselves rare) that result in a moral character that can be termed good Goodness is not something essentialistically guaranteed in a nature its an achievement that comes through the overcoming of ways of being that have a foothold in us long before some human beings take up the effort to reverse them Psychoanalysis from this point of view is neither pessimistic nor relativistic It is humanistic in the deepest way seeing the human as an achievement and valuing it by demonstrating what that achievement requires Psychoanalysis doesnt point to ethical relativism It points instead to an order of rank among human beings based on the degree to which a knowledge of ones psyche has become the basis of ones actions Ethically to know ones psyche is of necessity to engage in an effort to transform it since inner change is the only way to halt the projection of what otherwise does harm to others Psychological change is the primary task ethics the result

Their alternative misses the point In lieu of a criticism of the affirmative it is a much better act to internalize our anxiety and explore the effects within the psyche This allows us an uncastrated interaction with reality Davis 2001Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative pg xviii-xix

Virginia Woolf said that in or about December 1910 human nature changed She would have recorded a similar shock in August of 1945 The change Woolf witnessed has now of course been safely domesticated and has a local habitation and a name modernism The second change also has a namemdashpostmodernismmdashbut the ideologies most closely associated with its development remain mired in the first moment of an arrested dialectic12 Irony and aporia dominate the postmodern sensibility because its considerable energies are devoted to a displacement of the Event that remains at the center of our collective historical Unconsciousmdashthe referent that serves as the motive behind the denial of reference Reference must be continually deferred then rendered impossible because anxiety and flight from that anxiety define our actual response to the one referent that will continue to weigh on our consciousness until we restore the proper dialectical direction and move from the delights of skeptical play to a recovery of the demands of unhappy consciousness Einstein said the Bomb changed everythingmdashexcept the ways we think As such it is the inwardness of our inwardness never more so perhaps than when we use deconstructive irony as the master trope that delivers us from the burden of a historically situated subjectivity or at that opposite extreme that amounts to the same thing when we reassert an essentialist humanism as the fixed and universal system of understanding and explanation that washes us clean of history and its contingencies What if we broke with both strategiesmdashand rather than deconstructing the Bomb or containing it we tried to internalize it and then trace the ways it explodes and implodes within the psyche Such an effort would take as its goal a reconstitution of the tragic as the dialectical category that provides the only adequate idea for comprehendingmdashand existingmdashin the present Such a humanism however confronts as its prior and primary task a deracination of the system of guarantees on which previous humanisms have depended For the function of that system with respect to history has been to establish as canons of research and explanation a set of essentialistic concepts of meaning logic and human nature that function to insulate historians and their

audiences so that horror can never be more than the temporary aberration from which we always of necessity recover The narration of History thereby becomes yet another occasion for deployingmdashand thereby reinforcingmdashthe central beliefs and Values of the humanistic tradition That tradition thus provides the ego or identity-principle that we (the community of humanistic interpreters) move from and to in dealing with events that challenge our certainties13 We love to read and write histories because such stories tell us who we already know we are while conveniently exorcizing the threat of those accounts that would hold up a different mirror to our nature History is indeed a fiction the corpse over which we warm ourselves so that we may rise cleansed catharted the system of needs beliefs and guarantees restoredmdashwith existence the self-reference perpetually deferred What if instead we approached history as a realitymdashand a disciplinemdash in which we must risk ourselves utterly One in which to know is to suffer irreversible change in ones beliefs values and even in ones identity with nothing in the logos of thought able to protect us from that possibility The reign of the a priori would thereby come to an end the principle of hope a category wed risk not one wed need to renew at whatever cost Could such an engagement constitute the true force and signification of Hiroshima16 and thereby evidence that events in history are the true Absolute that abide with usmdashthe gift of the past to the future as that call of conscience requiring of us no less than a fundamentally new understanding of the human psyche and the human condition

The permutation solves ndash psychoanalytical evaluation of our anxiety and our reliance on stability and security are prior questions to the alternative and the framework of the criticism The alternative is still castrated by desire which means that it does not access proper historical contextDavis 2006Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative pg 1-3

In August 1945 Elias Canetti writes the following in his journal A tormenting thought as of a certain point history was no longer real Without noticing it all mankind suddenly left reality everything happening since then was supposedly not true but we supposedly didnt notice Our task would now be to find that point and as long as we didnt have it we would be forced to abide in our present destruction1 What Canetti cant see is that the point he refers to is the one he inhabits He cant see it because it is too close and blinds him (as it would soon the inhabitants of two cities) with a light not of this world The proliferation of new theories of history in recent decades is itself a response to a historical situationmdashthat defined by the Bomb That connection is also what these theories cannot know about themselves and ceaselessly displace in teaching us all the new ways we can know and write about the past What they do know is that the assumptions and guarantees on which historians have traditionally relied in constituting their subject and the needs that histories fulfill in offering us an account of events structured by these guarantees are no longer adequate to a contemporary awareness of history and historicity2 To cite the major developments (though in no necessary order of importance)3 1 Foucaults concept of genealogical history and the archeology of knowledge and its creative extension in the new historicist methodologies developed by Stephen Greenblatt and his circle 2 The hermeneutic theories of history and historical explanation developed by Gadamer Habermas and Ricoeur with special note given to Ricoeurs development of a complex theory of time and narrative 3 Derridas recent work on Marx and Benjamin and his continuing effort to expose the Hegelian assumptions about history progress and the logos which structure the way history is narrated by historians who know little or nothing of Hegel 4 Althusser Sartre Gramsci and the many often sharply opposed approaches to history developed in recent years by Marxists as different as Frederic Jameson G A Cohen Perry Anderson and Stuart Hall 5 The recovery of Kants speculations on history and its recent extension in Lyotards theory of the differend 6 The attempts by Slavoj Zizek Joan Copjec and Teresa Brennan to articulate the theory of history implicit in Lacan 7 The massive significance of Walter Benjamins speculations the continued vitality of Adorno and the Frankfurt school and the renewed interest in the thought of Kenneth Burke 8 The work of Louis O Mink Hayden White Dominick LaCapra Roy Schafer and others on the narrative and tropological principles that shape the writing of history To this list one can add Collingwood and McKeons earlier theorizing about history the work of Braudel Baudrillard deCerteau Calinescu and Bourdieu and the new modes of historical writing and historical investigation developed by anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz James Clifford and Natalie Zemon Davis The list is by no means complete because one must add to it two developments that may be of

greater significance and that complicate the issue of the historical I refer first to the number of alternative histories that have emerged in recent years thanks to feminist multicultural postcolonial subaltern and queer studies Such works have contributed more than new knowledge to our understanding of the past They have broken with the logic the procedures and the ruling assumptions of traditional historical methodologies by showing how that logic has as its primary function the exclusion (or marginalization) of voices that challenge its hegemony and the motives that inform its explanations Such studies are not merely of local interest They entail a theoretical crisis the recognition that the principles of historical explanation that we regard as true rational objective and universal are cultural conventional ideological and deeply implicated in power and the repressions required for its maintenance Ways of thinking derived from other cultures or voices silenced by the dominant culture may provide precisely the critical handle required to understand what is really at work in the privileging of certain canons of reasoning and explanation as scientific and objective and the rejection of other experiences and ways of thinking as illegitimate and unfounded The true bite of the multiculturalmdash seldom honored because it cuts in every directionmdashis the idea that none of us are locked into privileging our own culture and subject position(s) We can gain distance from our frameworks by immersing ourselves in other ways of thinking We can then use that experience to become aware of things that our culture and its dominant interest groups do not want to know about themselves The implication of such an orientation for history is considerable since historical explanation is perhaps the primary way in which a community establishes the structures of belief mind and feeling on which it depends in giving an identity to its members4 Thanks to the explosion of the multicultural we now have a way to internally distance ourselves from such beliefs and practices even perhaps following Nietzsche to touch all that goes without saying with the hammer as with a tuning fork

Case Stuff

War on Terror BadThe myth of effective security fosters a violent project that necessitates the creation of terrorists to be sacrificed on the altar of societyMcGowan 2013Associate Professor at the University of Vermont (Todd Enjoying What We Donrsquot Have Project Muse)

The fundamental barrier to the establishment of an authentic social bond is the resistance to avowing the traumatic nature of that bond We use the pleasure that accompanies the bombing of Afghanistan to disguise the shared enjoyment we experience through the traumatic experience of loss But this pleasure inevitably disappoints us and triggers the belief that someone has stolen the complete pleasure that we expected to experience This is why there can properly be no end to the War on Terror no end to the list of countries that the United States plans to invade to attain complete security no end to the number of terrorist leaders executed 31

Complete security like complete pleasure is mythical It attempts to bypass the one experience that cannot be bypassed mdash the foundational experience of loss mdash and it is this experience that holds the key to an authentic social bond The structure of society (which is the result of the structure of signification) is such that it blinds the subject to the possibility of shared sacrifice and the social bond that results from it No matter how often children hear the ideology of sharing or how many times we repeat to them the gospel of fairness they will inevitably believe that their sacrifice has enabled others to enjoy more than their proper share or unfairly

Loss of the SelfSurveillance devastates the gap between the Self and our informaticized bodies ndash the total knowledge it provides deprives one of the ability to function as a subject eradicating onersquos identity ndash this results in complete annihilationFriesen et al 2012 Dr Norm Friesen is Canada Research Chair in E-Learning Practices at Thompson Rivers University His academic credentials include a PhD in Education from the University of Alberta Andrew Feenberg School of Communication Simon Fraser University Grace Smith Arapiki Solutions Inc (Norm Friesen Andrew Feenberg Grace Smith and Shannon Lowe 2012 ldquoExperiencing Surveillancerdquo pp 82-83 (Re)Inventing The Internet httplinkspringercomchapter1010072F978-94-6091-734-9_4)

Students of surveillance have been so impressed by the ever-growing completeness of this data image that they animate it as though it were an actual person Identity is seen as coeval with an assemblage of traces rather than with actual presence Thus van der Ploeg writes of ldquothe

inability to distinguish between rsquothe body itselfrsquo and rsquobody informationrdquorsquo (van der Ploeg 2003 p 69) Haggerty and Ericson similarly write the surveillance assemblage standardizes the capture of fleshinformation flows of the human body It is not

so much immediately concerned with the direct physical relocation of the human body (although this may be an ultimate consequence)

but with transforming the body into pure information such that it can be rendered more mobile and comparable (Haggerty amp Ericson 2000 p 613) There is something right about this turn in surveillance theory and yet it is obvious that we are still able to distinguish the real person from the traces that person leaves behind The trace is bound to us by its origin and often by internal signs of various sorts so we do not quite leave it behind after all And yet we do not want to drag along every trace of our passage through life We count on the erasure of most traces It is this erasure that enables us to face the world afresh each day and to face it with a self-image we

construct at least partially anew for each new situation in which we find ourselves In existentialndashphenomenological terms privacy and secrecy are centrally constitutive of self and selfhood Holding something private or secret emphasizes the difference between self and other and confirms the autonomy of onersquos interiority and individuality ldquoSecrecy secures so to speak the possibility of a second world alongside of the obvious worldrdquo as Simmel (1906 p 462) puts it In contemporary conditions of surveillance and dataveillance subjectivity itself is dependent on maintaining the gap between our embodied selves and our informaticized bodies It would be intolerable for everyone to have full access to our salary the details of our relations to our family our medical histories sexual proclivities and so on Such knowledge would completely objectify us and force us to live up to (or down to) the image of ourselves implied in this knowledge Like Sartrersquos spy at the keyhole

himself espied we would be evacuated of those aspects of identity and interiority concealed within us frozen in the objectifying gaze of the other and essentially deprived of our ability to function as a subject We could no longer choose to project an identity appropriate to our inclination and situation as everything having to do with our identity would have been pre-empted Truly to be completely ldquooutedrdquo is to be annihilated

The gaze of surveillance invades and traps one psychologically rendering one enslavedVaz 1995 (Angelina Fall 1995 Dalhousie French Studies Vol 32 Mises en scegravene du regard (Fall 1995) pp 37-38 ldquoWhos Got the Look Sartres Gaze and Foucaults Panopticismrdquo JSTOR httpwwwjstororgstable40837004)

This grand formula is even applicable at the level of an encounter between two individuals where the theme of ldquosubjection by exposurerdquo is

dominant As Sartre says ldquobeing-seen constitutes me as a defenseless being for a freedom which is not my freedom [hellip] I am a slave to the degree that my being is dependent at my center of a freedom which is not mine and which is the very condition of my beingrdquo (Being p 358) In this sense the gaze does not just create and invade physical spaces there is a sense in which the gaze invades and traps me psychologically As a temporal-spatial object in the world being locked at forces me to apprehend myself as the

that the sacrifices on the way to the product produce These sacrifices allow us to experience the social bond by repeating the act of sacrifice through which each subject became a member of the social order It is not so much that the pursuit of pleasure backfires (though it does) but that it is never done simply for its own sake We embark on social projects not in spite of what they will cost us but because of what they will cost us29 The dialectic of pleasure and enjoyment also plays itself out in the relationship that subjects in society have to their leader According to Freud all group members install the leader in the position of an ego ideal and this ego ideal held in common furthers the bond among members of society But the identification with the leader has two sides to it on the one hand subjects identify with the leaderrsquos symbolic position as a non castrated ideal existing beyond the world of lack but on the other hand subjects identify with the leaderrsquos weaknesses which exist in spite of the powerful image30 Both modes of identification work together in order to give subjects a sense of being a member of society but they work in radically different ways The identification with the leaderrsquos power provides the subject with a sense of symbolic identity and recognition whereas the identification with the leaderrsquos weaknesses allows the subject to enjoy being a part of the community The identification with the leaderrsquos strength provides the pleasure that obscures the enjoyment deriving from the identification with the leaderrsquos weaknesses The weaknesses indicate that the leader is a subject of loss that shehe enjoys rather than being entirely devoted to ruling as a neutral embodiment of the people The weaknesses are evidence of the leaderrsquos enjoyment points at which a private enjoyment stains the public image By identifying with these points subjects in a community affirm the association of enjoyment with loss rather than with presence But at the same time the leaderrsquos weaknesses cannot completely eclipse the evidence for the leaderrsquos strength The strength allows subjects who identify with the leader in herhis weakness to disavow this would-be traumatic identification and to associate themselves consciously with strength rather than weakness The trajectory of Bill Clintonrsquos popularity during his presidency illustrates precisely how identification with the leader unfolds When accusations of sexual impropriety with Monica Lewinsky first appeared Clintonrsquos public approval rating reached its highest levels Most thought that Clinton was probably guilty of some private wrongdoing but they also felt that his sexual peccadilloes should remain private Though they infuriated his Republican accusers his sexual weaknesses had the effect of enhancing his overall popularity This trend continued until it became undeniably clear that Clinton really was guilty when it became impossible to disavow his weakness At this point identifying with Clinton became inescapably apparent as identifying with Clinton in his weakness which rendered it more difficult to sustain The American populace could enjoy Clintonrsquos weakness and form a social bond through this weakness only as long as it remained partially

obscured The fundamental barrier to the establishment of an authentic social bond is the resistance to avowing the traumatic nature of that bond We use the pleasure that accompanies the bombing of Afghanistan to disguise the shared enjoyment we experience through the traumatic experience of loss But this pleasure inevitably disappoints us and triggers the belief that someone has stolen the complete pleasure that we expected to experience This is why there can properly be no end to the War on Terror no end to the list of countries that the United States plans to

invade to attain complete security no end to the number of terrorist leaders executed31 Complete security like complete pleasure is mythical It attempts to bypass the one experience that cannot be bypassed mdashthe foundational experience of loss mdash and it is this experience that holds the key to an authentic social bond

The paranoid anxiety of the status quo results in the projection of threats onto the other in an effort to suture the Lack ndash this type of politics mobilizes the population toward fascismMcGowan 2013Todd McGowan Associate Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Vermont Enjoying What We Donrsquot Have A Psychoanalytic Politics University of Nebraska 2013 pg 44-49

While nostalgia locates the ultimate enjoyment in the subjectrsquos own past paranoia locates it in the other Paranoia thus offers the subject not just the image of the ultimate enjoyment (like nostalgia) but also an explanation for its absence Nostalgia and paranoia usually operate side by side in order to provide the subject a way of figuring its missing enjoyment On its own nostalgia as a mode of subjectivity seems to have limited political consequences Groups may use nostalgia as a political weapon but its political weight is diffused to some extent because it involves the subjects relation to itself rather than to an other The same cannot be said for paranoia which is why finding a way to counter paranoia represents an urgent political task Paranoia is political in its very structure It views the other as a threat and produces hostility toward the other The paranoid subject usually adopts one of two possible attitudes toward the other According to the first paranoia serves to explain the loss of the privileged object If I take up a paranoid attitude toward the other I see her his enjoyment coming at the expense of mine The other enjoys the lost object that is rightfully mine The other having stolen my enjoyment bears responsibility for my existence as a

subject of loss This type of paranoia removes the burden of loss from the subject and places it onto the other

and in addition it functions like nostalgia to convince the subject that having the object is a possibility According to the

second attitude however paranoia represents an attempt to convince ourselves that we have not lost the privileged object We are paranoid not that the other has stolen the privileged object but that it plans to do so The imagined threat that the other poses reassures us that we have the ultimate enjoyment and that this is what the other targets By imagining a threat we fantasize the privileged object back into existence despite its status as constitutively lost At first glance it is difficult to see how paranoia might function as an attractive attitude for subjects to take up The paranoid subject must endure a constant menace that has no tangible or definitive

presence Everyone that this subject meets is a potential enemy in disguise threatening to steal or already having stolen the subjects privileged object In terms of the subjects own identity paranoia does not provide security or stability In fact it uproots all sense of security that the subject has concerning its identity But its appeal does not lie in how it transforms subjectivity its appeal stems from its ability to close the gap in the social field of meaning its ability to be a guarantor that authorizes our social interaction Paranoia develops in response to the inherent inconsistency of social authority There are authorities but no Authority and a decisive Authority would be necessary to provide subjects a sense of foundation a sense that there is solid ground underneath their feet Social proclamations and regulations place the subject in an impossible position one simply cannot believe and obey every edict emanating from social authorities without being torn apart in the effort These contradictions occur on all levels of social pronouncements One hears for instance about the dangers of eating too much fat and then one hears about the cancer-preventing power of chocolate Parents tell their children not to fight and at the same time tell them to stand up for themselves George W Bush claimed that the Iraq War was waged to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction and later claimed that its purpose was to liberate the country from a cruel dictator Such inconsistencies are not merely contingent developments within our particular society but necessarily follow from the ultimate groundlessness of the social order itself There is no final authority that calls all the shots in society and guarantees the consistency of the social order It is instead a structure in charge and this structure functions through its very misfiring The inconsistency of social authority- the gap in the social field of meaning - provides it with an openness to difference If social authority was a closed circuit that operated without a hitch it would have no way of incorporating the subject into its fold The subject invests itself in social authority precisely because this authority gives the subject contradictory demands Faced with these incongruous imperatives the subject cannot readily decipher what the social authority wants from it Beneath the inconsistency the desire of the authority remains a mystery The subject begins to desire in response to this unknown desire of the social Other the inconsistency of the social authority has the effect of attracting the subject and constituting the desire of the subject as the desire of the Other A thoroughly consistent social authority while logically unthinkable would not draw the desire of the subject in this way It might force individuals into obedience but it would not create the investment in the social order that the inconsistent social authority creates Confronting the inconsistency of social authority is not an easy task for the subject Many try to sustain a belief in its consistency through an imaginary construction that represses contradictory ideas The problem with this solution is that these ideas become more powerful through their repression and the result is some form of neurosis Another possibility is the paranoid reaction Rather than trying to wrestle with the problem of the gap in authority the paranoid subject eliminates it by positing an other existing in this gap an other behind the scenes pulling the strings As Slavoj Zizek explains it Paranoia is at its most elementary a belief into an Other of the Other into an Other who hidden behind the Other of the explicit social texture programs what appears to us as the unforeseen effects of social life and thus guarantees its consistency beneath the chaos of market the degradation of morals and so on there is the purposeful strategy of the Jewish plot The comfort that paranoia provides for the subject derives solely from this guarantee For the paranoid subject the surface inconsistency of social authority hides an underlying consistency authorized by a real authority whom most subjects never notice Paranoia simultaneously allows the subject to sense its own superiority in recognizing the conspiracy and to avoid confronting the horror of an inconsistent social authority As with nostalgia

paranoia is primarily aligned with a right-wing political agenda Its suspicion of the other nourishes a nationalistic politics and energizes

the call for a return to traditional social arrangements Just as much of the investment in the Cold War struggle derived from paranoia it fuels

the contemporary war on terror The exemplary right-wing political formation Fascism has its basis in paranoia

seeing the Jew or some equivalent as secretly controlling the social order to the detriment of all law-abiding citizens The idea of an other operating behind the scenes serves to justify restrictions on civil liberties racism police violence and so on A paranoid populace is a populace ready to embrace a Fascist regime Despite the inherent link between paranoia and conservatism leftists employ paranoia to a vast extent far more than they do nostalgia Paranoid theories about the secret brokers of power who decide the fate of the capitalist world are widespread on the Left It is common sense among leftists that big oil companies have suppressed the development of alternative energies that the CIA assassinated Kennedy and that major drug companies control the Food and Drug Administration just to name a few of the more well known conspiracy theories The truth or falsity of these theories has nothing to do with their function for the subject who accepts them The paranoid subject is often correct in its various speculations but paranoia nonetheless provides a way for the subject to avoid confronting the inconsistency of social authority For the paranoid subject conspiracy theories dont simply explain a single event they solve the problem of the social order as such According to this thought process all loss stems from the conspiracy which has derailed the social order and upset its balance The paranoid subject cannot accept the necessity of loss and the conspiracy theory works to render loss empirical rather than ontological This is evident in Oliver Stones JFK (1991) a film in which Stone posits a vast conspiracy that resulted in the death of Kennedy Of course Stone is probably correct that this conspiracy existed but the film goes astray primarily through its apotheosis of Kennedy an apotheosis that reveals whats at stake in all paranoia According to the film had he remained in power Kennedy would have prevented the horror of the Vietnam War and thus spared the United States the psychic wound that this war created With Kennedy one can imagine an American social order existing without strife and loss The conspiracy theory allows Stone this image which testifies to the avoidability of loss But Stone is not the only leftist to turn to paranoia Many do so in order to confront forces that they otherwise couldnt identify Among those who suffer from political oppression paranoia and conspiracy theory serve as vehicles for thinking through systems of control and even mobilizing action against those systems As Peter Knight points out Conspiracy thinking has played an important role in constituting various forms of African American political and cultural activism38 When it directly produces activism the political valence of paranoia seems to tilt more clearly to the left than it does in the case of Stones film In Marxist Fredric Jameson focuses on a related aspect of paranoia as he analyzes the paranoid film in The Geopolitical Aesthetic In this work Jameson aligns conspiracy theory with what he calls cognitive mapping- the attempt to think the global capitalist system in its totality The diffuseness of global capitalism prevents the kind of cognitive mapping that was possible in earlier epochs Today in order to think the totality at all subjects must resort to the idea of a conspiracy As Jameson points out in his analysis of All the Presidentrsquos Men The map of conspiracy itself suggests the possibility of cognitive mapping as a whole and stands as its substitute and yet its allegory all at once40 Jamesons statement reflects his ambivalence about conspiracy theory and paranoia - even though it allegorizes cognitive mapping it also substitutes for it - but he nonetheless sees its usefulness as a strategy for the Left especially when facing the global capitalist leviathan

The problem is that even when it works to mobilize subjects to fight against an oppressive system paranoia has the effect of depriving subjects of their agency By eliminating the gap in social authority and filling in this gap with a real authority who effectively runs the show paranoia deprives subjects of the space in which they exist as subjects The subject occupies the position of the gap in social authority it emerges through and because of internal inconsistency in the social field of meaning The extent to which paranoia allows the subject to experience social authority as a consistent field is the extent to which it works against the subject itself Even if it manages tangible political victories emancipatory politics that relies on paranoia undermines itself by increasing the power of authority in the thinking of subjects and

decreasing their freedom Whats more it doesnt actually work Like nostalgia paranoia can never constitute a successful strategy for the subject dealing with its fundamental condition It will never provide the enjoyment that it promises the subject Uncovering and eliminating the hidden real authority will bring not the ultimate enjoyment but horrible disappointment This is why the paranoid mindset cannot admit to itself that the hidden other has been vanquished

The enjoyment that paranoia does provide requires the continuing existence of the threat even though it imagines an enjoyment that would come with the threats disappearance Paranoia runs aground due to its failure to admit the connection between enjoyment and loss It allows the subject to imagine that loss is the contingent result of a secret malevolent force that we might conquer By implicitly positing the avoidability of loss paranoia leaves subjects unable to locate and recognize the nature of their own enjoyment

This anxiety is the core problem of the psyche Our inability to come to terms with this void is a fate worse than death Our anxiety functions as the condition for the possibility of Hiroshima and Auschwitz In attempts to master this emptiness we project our weakness through conflict This projection provides us the unrestrained power to bombard the other with pure suffering and destruction in an attempt to control the contingencies that constitute existence Davis 2001Walter A Davis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative Pg 103-108

We begin with an effort to describe what is the deepest experiencemdashthe one most deeply denied Catastrophic anxiety is that fear that haunts us from within the fear that one has already been annihilated that like Beckett one has never been born properly and never will be because inner paralysis is the psyches defining conditionmdasha truth attested each time when lining to cohere as a subject one collapses before the tidal wave of an Regression against oneself that rises up from within An

unspeakable dread weds the psyche to terror All other forms of anxiety are pale after-thoughts There is a threat worse than extinction The deepest self-knowledge we harbor the knowledge that haunts us as perhaps our deepest

self-reference is the fear that our inner world is ruled by a force opposed to our being Death is the icy wind that blows through all we do This is the anxiety from which other anxieties derive as displacements delays and vain attempts to deny or attenuate our terror before a dread

that is nameless and must remain so lest despair finalize its hold on us In catastrophic anxiety the destruction of ones power to be and the ceaseless unraveling of all attempts to surmount this condition is experienced as an event that has already happened That event forms the first self-reference the negative judgment of an Other on ones beingmdashinternalized as self-undoing Postmodern posturing before the phrase I am an other here receives the concretization that shatters free play There is a wound at the heart of subjectivity a self-ulceration that incessantly bleeds itself out into the world The issue of the wound is a soul caked in ice in a despair that apparently cannot be

mediated the nightmare state of a consciousness utterly awake alone and arrested all exits barred facing inner paralysis as the truth of ones life We ceaselessly flee this experience because if it ever comes down full upon us an even more terrifying process begins an implosion in which ones subjective being is resolved into fragments of pure anxiety that leave one incapable of existing as subject except in the howl to which each suffered state descends in a final chilling recognitionmdashthat everything one has done and suffered is but sound and fury signifying nothing One has become a corpse with insomnia Identity and self-reference thereafter ceaselessly circle about that void This is the hour of the wolf where one is arrested before the primary fact at the deepest register of the psyche one finds a voice of terror Fear of psychic dissolution is the ground condition of our being as subjects Subjectivity is founded in anguish before the dread of becoming no more than bits and pieces of pure horror fleeing in panic a voice that has already overtaken us resolving our subjective being into traumatic episodes of pure persecution At the heart of inwardness a malevolent spirit presides To put it in nuclear metaphors catastrophic anxiety is the threat of implosion into the others unlimited destructiveness To complete the picture we need only add Winnicotts point people live in dread of this situation projecting fear of a breakdown into the future because the breakdown has already occurred

B Exorcism through Evacuation And so a crypt is built to contain this anguish and repress the experience that is its cause We organize a life of identities and stabilities to give ourselves the illusion of escape Unable to reverse our condition we take up the only alternative We try to evacuate the whole thing to blow it out into the world and invest it in objects that are fitted to receive the full brunt of ones discontent and powerless to reply Projection the egos priest is founded in identification with an internal aggressor That is the complex that informs the effort to lodge our disorders and forbidden desires in others so that we can wage an attack on our inner conflicts then watch the ensuing spectacle from a safe distance Evacuation thus finds in projection a prime agent of human perception and the secure base for the perpetual mutual defeat that Sartre finds in all concrete

relations with others Were always on the lookout for a chance to make someone else bear our discontents But its never enough Satisfaction eludes us We keep erupting bleeding from within in a leukemia of soul that rages whenever we see those who have in their daily lives a beauty that makes us uglyFor then the projections return with the force of the furies Envy and resentment erupt as the assault within our inner world of the truth of our charactermdasha truth we deny by reinvesting it externally This grows apace over the years and then we long for a listing deliverance a final solution in the dim recognition that when projection proceeds from the register of catastrophe it requires and longs for a grand exorcism What we seek incessantly is a total evacuation of all inner discord a complete and lasting externalization in an ideal victim one in whom all that haunts us will stay outside lodged in the world in what Hegel calls a standing negation9 Our need is for a subject who is destroyed and lives on proof of a sublime aggression sculpted in time The Bomb provides such

an opportunity The criteria required to exorcize catastrophic anxiety finds in it the conditions for expelling the most primitive anxieties in the perfect objective correlative The subject voids itself of its core

anxietymdashthe inability to reverse inner destructivenessmdashby becoming the power to destroy unbound raining judgment down on a mass of subjects who are indifferently bound together as fragments of pure suffering unable after that action to ever form any identity except as walking corpses hibakusha deadened affect delivered over to the condition of death-in-life10 Projection here succeeds because in that shattered mirror one sees oneself reflected as the equal

of the power within that originally proclaimed ones utter worthlessness Malign reversal has grown to the event All inner anxiety about ones power to be resolves itself in the power to act free of restraint We have become the thing we feared Its destructiveness is now ours and nothing else has being The Contradiction The SublimemdashFrom the Crypt The mediation

traced above is driven by a contradiction about which it circles endlessly That is what the sublime object of the ego-ratio reveals when read from its crypt Sublime action seeks an absolute reversal of catastrophic anxiety in the absolute affirmation of unshakable guarantees Catastrophe must be reversed because it is that experience of contingency that underlies the horror of contingency in all its forms the lone driving the search for the guarantees needed to contain it In

catastrophe contingency is the others will as unbounded unlimited destructiveness The threat of extinction is the restraint here placed on subject This restraint is prior to the dialectic of desire restrained and checked on which Hegel grounds his phenomenology Desire here isnt restrained and checkedmdashit is turned back against itself in torment The other requires my destruction for their pleasure and assures that end by colonizing the psyche with an aggression that renders impotent every effort to make a beginning a tentative move toward independence or self-cohesion There is no exit but one apparently identification with the aggressor I become a self by turning someone or something else into an object delivered over to the true golden rule do onto others what was once done onto you This logic maintains because catastrophic anxiety internalized is death-work as the self-

mediation whereby we enact the command of the Other The only way out the only way to finalize this process is evacuation through a lasting exorcism It alone confers on the psyche a certitude beyond all cogitos It is also the mediation that finds it in flight forward already in its primitive imaginary one with the Bomb In its inner world the catastrophic subject experiences itself as full of death disease corruption The Bomb alone has the power to cast all nuclear waste outside and beneath oneself in a way that indefinitely extends the temporality of that act Radiation disease is a death that works inwardmdashinvisibly yet inexorably Death thereby breeds itself forth into an indefinite future omnipresent in a working a differance that begets delayed effects as further insurance against Nachtraglichkeit The extension of deaths dominion attained in the Bomb serves one grand function to prevent the return of projections by extending the temporality of the deed into a future that is lived by its victims as a judgment that is inevitable irreversible the antithesis of Benjamins messianic time tickingmdasha plea to delay death that can only be answered by death The Bomb thus serves as felix culpa to

an inner necessity To do its job a sublime event must exorcize everything within the subject that makes it an object of its own contempt What better way than Orwells boot brought down in an act of splitting that magnifies the distance between the terror

on the ground and the view from above Catastrophe is now fully outside oneself located in an other who has become nothing but matter body become spectacle of pain frozen forever in charred sculptures strewn across a devastated landscape Laocoon Munched but with the Howl silenced and deferred until it erupts later from within the survivors in a semiosis that can only be read by the scientists who planted it there and have now come (as biopowerknowledge) to study their handiwork as it blooms and bursts from deep within the body of the hibakusha as further testimony of ones powerjouissance Evacuation is complete Death-work has been lodged securely in the Other In the hibakusha one gets to see ones Thanatos as a narrative principle a force in history One gets to see over time what it is like to live death Soul-murder as the innermost reality of the crypt produces and finds in the

hibakusha its dialectical image As the expressive figura of death incarnate a terrifying verveilledoch here attains its objective correlative To purge oneself of catastrophic anxiety an utterly dehumanized object is not enough Neither the Sartrean look nor the Nazi act suffice The disorder of the psyche is deeper prior to desire (Sartre) and demand (Nazism) The projection of death-work can never rest by simply investing ones self-contempt in another For evacuation to work the

object must become something one can study inspect perform operations upon Catastrophic anxiety is the a proiri that gives Auschwitz and Hiroshima their necessity in the genocidal imagination The Bomb constitutes an Event because the psyche

reverses its core conditionmdashits cardiac arrest in inner self-loathingmdashthrough a projection that is total and irreversible If the evacuation of trauma is the abiding motive atop the crypt there is nothing abstract or Lacanian about the Real that results from its projection Evacuation is that malevolent reversal that condemns one to endless repetition One blows ones self-hatred and ones rage over that state fully out into the world but is thereby rendered powerless to do anything but gape in rapt amazement at ones creation That is perhaps why for over fifty years now whenever given the opportunity Paul Tibbets has proudly repeated the declaration that he has not had a moments remorse or regret Death-work externalized leaves one a spent and reified subject lacking any power other than the endless repetition of ones deed The wheel thus comes full circle in the only justice granted such subjects When catastrophic anxiety is only mediated by death-work the affects that compose subjectivity are rent assunder and scattered in pockets of pure persecution With each attempt to compose an inner self-cohesion death-work as internal saboteur rises up in a renewed attack on the effort to be Using the Bomb to reverse this disorder produces as its result a perfect attic justice Guilt and remorse are denied the doers of the deed because to feel such things is to renew a process of self-unraveling What the Bomb was meant to deliver one from has become the guardian

of untroubled sleep With the call of conscience rendered impossible the subject becomes overtly psychotic and must cling ever more desperately to an untroubled memory of the sublime event The subject thereby pronounces without being able to comprehend or mediate it the truth about itself in the ravaged landscape of Hiroshima the founding inner world of the psychotic-a world of utter fragmentation and the obliteration of every term of reference-has finally found a home to which it must say stay thou art so fair a home in which nothing inhuman is unheimlich

The moralization of anxiety manifests itself in our inability confront evil To displace this anxiety we make ourselves ldquogoodrdquo to protect ourselves from danger Failure to confront this psychical conflict reifies the original trauma and makes the destruction of the self meaninglessDavis 2001Walter A Davis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative Pg 86-87

No wonder resistance becomes the key term in the first stage of the unfolding drama This time however Kant canrsquot shift everything onto a plane of conceptual defenses and controls Affect weighs too heavily Intermediate moves immanent within that register are required Opposing affects must be created and marshaled as a first line of defense For the first time in Kant rationalistic mediation gives way to dramatic self-mediation Kant will finally attempt an agon that moves solely within the medium of affect To resist psychic unraveling he must

establish a countervailing force within the order of affect itself For Kant however affective self-mediation is equivalent to bending everything in a moral direction In doing so the author of the ethic of pure duty gives us the true genealogy of morals

That dubious ascent begins once the force threatening destruction is characterized as ldquoevilrdquo Anxiety is thereby transformed into a moralizing fear that we lack the power to resist ldquoevilrdquo Moralizing then structures the subsequent discourse but without exorcizing the psychological subtext that will undercut it This contradiction is in fact what ethics will here reveal about itselfIn making ourselves ldquogoodrdquo subjects we make ourselves beings unworthy of destruction That

transformation also requires the resources of rhetoric since we must ldquopersuaderdquo a tough audience The true goal in remaking ourselves is to tame the power that threatens us by tapping its conscience To do so we create within ourselves a new agency one that recognizing our virtue promises protection We thereby create the illusion that the threatening force has been softened and then transformed into a voice that warmly supports the good intentions of the nascent ego The superego as ego-ideal has been created So ends the founding self-mediation in the genealogy of an ethical ration By staging this internal drama the psyche has taken the action within required to create the space needed to assert control over affect The necessary act follows ndash the attempt to affect a complete reversal of the psychersquos initial condition Kant asserts repeatedly that we can only judge the sublime and experience its proper ldquopleasurerdquo if we view things from ldquoa safe placerdquo But in the psyche as opposed to mind the safe place doesnrsquot exist a priori It has to be invented and with it the most revealing picture of the genesis of what we now call the ldquoegordquo It is a difficult birth to a dubious and troubled function The problem of the ego is one of generating a transformation from impotence to power within affect itself through an agon immanent to that register But Kant is unable to sustain such an agon We get instead a displacement toward concepts through a use of the defensive mechanism known as splitting Ego and inner world divide in an unbridgeable rift thus establishing this condition as the true ldquoidentityrdquo of the ego The ego is the effort to repress the conflicts in the psyche from which it derives But while displacement and intellectualization offer a handle the egorsquos work is far from done The continuing pressure of inner conflicts requires a further battle In that struggle moralizing interpretations do yeoman service by splitting the psychersquos original trauma into a longed-for reificationmdashthe opposition of the ego to the drives

We have become creatures full of instincts The crucial task of the aff is to open up the unconscious counter narrative to provide a mirror to reflect upon the presupposed American identitySucharov 2005Mira M Sucharov assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli Palestinian Peacerdquo Pg 27-28

Just as individuals and groups possess consciousness and an unconscious I argue that every society maintains not only a dominant (conscious) narrative but an unconscious counternarrative as well which

the former has in part arisen to conceal As the counternarrative represents the role that society most fears adopting it resides in the unconscious where it will not interfere with the day-to-day transmission and fulfillment of the dominant narratives and the dominant roles For instance a defensive states counternarrative would encapsulate the view that we are not only defensive but sometimes we can be aggressive 35 Narratives and counternarratives can coexist in two waysmdash either with the counternarrative being simply an unactualized fear or with the counternarrative corresponding to an actual role being enacted alongside the dominant role-identity Thus while an actor may consciously be aware of a counterrole that she abhors (eg the good student who avoids cheating on exams) the unconscious reminds us that the cheater is latent in the self-portfolio of the good student In the event that this student cheats radical change can only come about once the self has

been reconciled with its unconscious opposite Actors will not become aware of the divergence from their dominant identity without the aid of a mirror however Only with the help of outside forces drawing attention to the clash between the two narratives will elites experience a cognitive dissonance necessitating a realignment between actions and role-identity One of the most salient transmission belts for the creation of state narratives is collective memory Memorymdashactive or latent recall of things occurring in the pastmdashhas begun to be understood as not solely a private activity but as representing a group phenomenon as well 36 On the collective level memory can be either experience-near-active one-step removed or distantly removed Active memory would be represented by Holocaust survivors in Israel and the Diaspora for instance One step removed would be the surrogate memories that their immediate Offspring carry with them37 and distantly removed would be exemplified by the Rabbinic injunction that Jews experience the annual telling of the Exodus from Egypt as if they were there While a case could be made for discounting the importance of actual experiences in favor of the way

those experiences arc remembered both of these are crucial for ascertaining role identity Just as traumatic events in a persons life may be repressed in memory but still shape that persons identity the international observer needs to account for actual experiences yet view these as embedded within a narrative context Similarly some historical events undergo a process of memory revision in these cases the observer must be sensitive to the effect that the new discourse has on the societys perception of these events whether or not these stories accord with fact The clinical parallel in psychoanalysis is that while the analysands relationship with her parents is considered crucial to uncovering the contours of her psychology the analyst as a rule does not attempt to meet the parents firsthand rather the patients recounting of these experiences is considered to be the most important channel of investigationmdash and hence transformation Since we are talking about collections of individuals memory needs to be actively transmitted to the societys members in order for it to influence the citizens sense of collective identity One of the ways this can be done is through ritual Being repetitive while symbolically imbued ritual gains meaning only through the symbols attributed to it by the group and is a collective process that serves to link actors to a series of past events for which they may not have been physically present Moreover private rituals that are collectively prescribed such as prayer serve to bind the individual to the collective particularly when there is a formalized liturgy Most collective rituals occur according to the calendar and therefore can encompass regular ceremonies that come to act as markers for the individuals personal time cycle38Sometimes particular collective memories that have been sustained over time are ruptured with citizens contemplating new facts about their countrys past Revisionist history is an example of an attempt to bring forth these sorts of new facts When history is reinterpreted the society can either shun the dissenting voices or else gradually reevaluate the original narratives When this reevaluation occurs society is more apt to uncover the hitherto unconscious counternarratives a discovery that can

lead to the realization that the states behavior might be contradicting the states role-identity In other words revisionist historians and other domestic dissenters can serve as the mirror referred to later

Vote affirmative to give up hope in the face of guarantees - only holding yourself completely open in the face of the promise of a sustainable status quo can open space for self-overcoming that allows us to engage in new forms of praxisDavis 2006 Walter A Davis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deathrsquos Dream Kingdom Pg 63

To know this situation for what it is challenges what is finally the deepest and most fundamental of the guarantees The principle of Hope To appropriate Eliot After such knowledge what forgiveness There is perhaps nothing that can be done to change the situation Ive described But then what is the purpose of knowing such things if they only produce meaningless suffering Is despair the end result of a life shorn of the guarantees Or are we finally like the drunks in ONeills The Iceman Cometh knowing that in order to sustain the illusions required to go on living they must pronounce Hickey mad and reject everything he revealed to them about

their lives as a product of that madness Perhaps its time to admit what the need for Hope really signifies Denial of responsibility for certain situations under the assumption that knowing them correctly would lead to despair Raising that specter is of course the rhetorical ploy invoked to prematurely terminate inquiry lest it impinge on

emotional and psychological needs Despair thus remains an empty concept We dont know what it is and never will as long as we use the need for hope to prevent discovery of our capacities to endure Whether despair is what we will find on the other side of hope is something we cant know For all hope really signifies is a testament to our weakness and our fears Perhaps we are called to something beyond it What Shakespeare called tragic

readiness For in opening ourselves to the possibility of despair we also open ourselves to the possibility of self-overcoming and through it the discovery of a praxis that lies on the other side of the conceptual and existential paralyses created by the guarantees We cant know what is to be done as long as we continue to respond to our situation by invoking ahistorical values and guarantees that are grounded in an essentialistic and ahistorical theory of human nature

PlanThe United States federal government should substantially curtail its domestic surveillance by ceasing all domestic surveillance

Contention 2 is FramingAn ethics of existence forecloses the tragic struggle in which we never confront our inner trauma- only our affirmative can open new ways of relating to ourselves that can overcome these limitations- the 1AC is a precondition for any meaning to our livesDavis 2006 Walter ADavis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg238-240)

In her critique of Kantian ethics Alenka Zupancic often refers to the Lacanian idea that there is a loss deeper than ones life The loss of ones reason for living The apostle of duty offers a heroic example of how one escapes the threat of that loss What Im suggesting here is that ethics actually begins on the other side of it With the possibility that first exists when one discovers that one has already lost or violated or fatally compromised ones reason for living because the values one thinks one honors and the actual truth of ones life are thoroughly at odds The traumatic event that brings one to this recognition is the origin of ethics This is the ethical task it establishes to see if one can pay the price for having violated oneself by assuming the full burden of the situation one has thereby createdThe ethical situation accordingly confronts the subject with the necessity to choose to be in a radically new way or die inside Nothing less is demanded than a totally new way of relating to oneself for the guilt one experiences in such a situation is existentializing One is guilty toward oneself for having failed to honor the duties that one bears to oneself for having so thoroughly lied to oneself about ones life As Hamlet learns it is through that recognition that one first discovers that one has tragic responsibilities toward oneself that can no longer be evaded because one with this situation is the even deeper discovery that there are failures that can be irreversible That is the possibility defining the situation one is now in What one does will reveal the truth of who one is Guilt toward oneself has overtaken all possibilities of displacement and denial Fail now and one dies within Most people will of course do just about anything to avoid guilt or to get cleansed of it as quickly as possible That is why so many fail the test when it comes to them shrinking inside rather than expanding to the demands of our innermost possibility the one defining our humanity An ethics of existence begins with the traumatic experience in which everything weve tried to escape about ourselves catches up with us One then knows that ones prior life has been a flight And all ones brave ideas and bright ethical claims airy nothingmdashthe indulgence in comforting and self-alienating lies But now one

is finally like Hamlet in the situation from which there is no exit An ethics grounded in the possibility of freedom depends on the actions one performs within oneself when one finds oneself in a crisis that can no longer be denied This is precisely the kind of situation Kant is unable to consider which is why he constructs in Duty the principle of choice that renders it impossible In serving Duty one is delivered from the repressed thought that now can never arise that ones whole life and all its choices especially the ethical ones may be no more than a flight from things in oneself that one flees because one fears that if one is ever forced to face oneself one will suffer a destruction worse than death Destruction within An existentializing ethic begins on the other side of all the things we do to delay that event For it is when the thing one fears happens that one first discovers the truth of ones life the depth of ones inauthenticity The trauma that will measure ones humanity has arrived Nothing else now exists but the lonely struggle of the psyche with itself Suicide (including the primary form of suicide inner death) is one term of that situation Ethics is the other An ethics of existence is what one does when one finally finds oneself in the traumatic situation that brings one before oneself There is one lesson in this a lesson that probably cant be learned Rather than running from the trauma we should plunge toward it since it is only through it that we can discover both the truth about ourselves and what we are able to do in the face of that truth To activate that possibility all thats needed perhaps is to drown out the noise and chatter one keeps running in ones head Perhaps the truth is that the truth about ourselves is not deeply repressed and unknown Its closer than we think available to introspection if we but dared But thats what makes the kind of impassioned reflection Hamlet engages in so terrifying It exemplifies everything we know and dont want to know about ourselves18 Here is an attempt to offer an image that describes in depth the existential-psychoanalytic condition from which the possibility of ethics derives In George Orwells 1984 Winston Smith when tortured with the thing he most fears betrays the thing he loves To save his life he sacrifices what gives it meaning He capitulates before an inner torment that reduces the psyche to a condition of catastrophic anxiety (The image of the cage of rats placed over the head they will raven externalizes in a perfect objective correlative the terror that has the power to dissolve the psyche What is a phobia after all but an inner condition displaced into an external fear) What I want to suggest here is that Winston Smiths phobia describes the inner condition that defines any subject traumatized by itself Such a subject lives tortured by the struggle not to betray the thing one loves the thing that could give ones life meaning But one saves it only if one is willing to sacrifice everything to the

acceptance of the suffering and inner torment that service to it entails This is the ethical act whereby a subject attains tragic agency Becoming an existentially autonomous agent is the process of engaging the disorders of ones psyche in the effort of active reversal The wish to escape that effort to soften it or to insist that suffering must always have a happy resolution is the voice of self-betrayal If one gives in to it one loses with Winston the thing one has finally found the thing one can love more than ones life but only by suffering all that it demands That thing more precious than life is the tragic struggle that gives life perhaps the only meaning it can have

The ethic of the aff is key - only an ethical act that confronts our inner trauma with a constant and inner openness can we create the conditions for self-overcoming necessary to open ourselves to a meaningful existence - the only ethical choice is to fully confront contingencyDavis 2006 Walter A Davis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg235-238

What follows attempts to distill the ethic of existence in to its fundamental principles I also try here to present those thesis in a way that will engage the readers psyche and emotions at precisely the place within us where each of us makes a basic decision about ourselves Thats the only self that matters The others are selfreifying defenses The argument thus constitutes both an appeal to the readers freedom and an attempt to impinge on that freedom to bring each reader before him or herself by challenging defenses with the power that some ideas have to light a fire in the soul (1) We concur with Kant that if a choice is not free its not moral The possibility of freedom depends however on an in-depth analysis of ones psyche Such an analysis leads from the destruction of ego identity to the need to bring about a complete reversal in ones relationship to oneself by deracinating the voice of the other Thinking is ethical insofar as it engages one thing the battle of a subject with itself over the meaning of its being (2) There is no way to abridge that process nor to provide guarantees that will secure a safe outcome To sustain the psychoanalytic turn the psyche must continually throw itself into question and root out the emotions that bind it to a pattern of lies An ethic of the existential subject depends on maximizing what Keats termed negative capability the ability to be in uncertainties Mysteries doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason Rather than resolving doubts the purpose of thought and action is to deepen them An act is ethical insofar as it deepens the conflict of the subject with itself (3) One acts ethically only when all symbolic and ideological supports have collapsed Only then can one take on responsibility for oneself because only then is one at issue and at risk The ethical act must radically open itself to contingency in a situation where one must create values yet where those values can derive from nothing but the depth of ones engagement in the situation By the same token such values cannot be a final solution but must open themselves to later contingencies Ethics must always allow itself to be measured by contingency because contingency is precisely what calls up ethical responsibility The primary ethical situation is not one where there is a clear course of duty but where a subject trembles before its responsibility to create new values in a situation that reduces received values to rubble (4) Ethics begins when there is a genuine crisis of values even perhaps the need for a re-valuation of all values For Kant there was not nor could there be such a crisis The values were known immutable and generally agreed upon The only question was what kind of principle they would be grounded in which meant for Kant and the Aufklarung how could they be grounded in Reason For us in contrast the primary fact is a historicity that bites into the very possibility of the ethical Every ethical value must be willing to historicize itself That recognition entails the following considerations The desert grows Under the guise of fundamentalist crusades herd moralities dominate The extent of inhumanity is appalling So many values that once seemed so solid have been so thoroughly debunked The possibility of ethics now begins with a systematic exposure of all superego pathologies all the ethical ideologies that societies use to introduce a fundamental passivity into subjects while convincing those same subjects that they are good in a goodness that depends on willed ignorance An existential ethic is radically destructive of received beliefs radically disruptive of the desires of the normal subject Refusing and exposing all Symbolic supports it seeks in the struggle of the psyche with its disorders the source of value (5) Ethics is a matter of extremity It begins in the most extreme actmdashthe act of radical individuation in which one opens ones psyche to an interrogation that must be sustained in its extremity Ethics is about a choice in which a subject risks the value and meaning of its existence not about those choices that assure it of that meaning Moreover it is only when one does this that one experiences for the first time the

terror implicit in the oft-quoted Sartrean statement existence precedes essence (6) Ethics must engage and derive from the dread that defines choice Let me illustrate this proposition by contrasting Hamlets choice with the situation in Styrons Sophies Choice The horrifying choice Sophie facesmdashto choose which of her children will be sent to the gas chambermdashis a forced choice and thus extreme and exceptional in a way that deprives it of the possibility of being normative17 Hamlets choice in contrast is a free one that issues from nothing but his freedom and the readiness with which he accepts the selftorture that existence entails Sophie is tortured from without by the madness of the other and the inhuman logic that madness requires in order to know itself (Styron calls the officer who forces the choice on Sophie a genius of the Reich) Hamlet is tortured from within by the logic of self-criticism and self-overcoming that informs the existentializing process We are fortunate if we never face a situation like Sophies nor suffer the death-in-life that is the result of such choices But insofar as we have a psyche Hamlets situation is the general one that defines us Or to put it in properly ethical terms engaging the kind of situation he faces is the act that activates the inherent possibility that defines us The choice that founds such an ethic must therefore be distinguished both from the a priori choice made by the apostle of duty and Sophies forced choice All three refer to extreme choices and situations In only one however is guilt toward oneself both the origin of the choice and its result That is only one of the three choices is the ground of its own possibility and thereby the source of an existentialization that issues in values bound to the tragic contingencies of our situatedness

2AC

A2 ndash Realism

We control the internal link to their impacts The psychoanalysis of the affirmative forces an internal investigation of the ways in which the subjectrsquos subconscious desires rationalize what we would consider self-interest This means that we can only make sense of realism through a lens of psychoanalysis Sucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 17-18)

The psychological turn that international relations took with the rise of behavioralism in the 1960s has begun to expand beyond focusing on cognitionmdashhow individuals thinkmdashto a wider appreciation of the role of emotional determinants of action one of many factors that were long dismissed as unscientific Part of the reason for this hesitant courtship is no doubt the long strides that international relations theory has taken toward refining its investigative lenses such that less easily observable phenomena can be more confidently incorporated into the solid theoretical infrastructure that the discipline has now adopted A central example of this evolution is the analytical watershed inaugurated by neorealism which fashioned a conceptual playing field where little had existed before Neorealism a theoretical school that views international relations as taking place within an anarchical state system with no overarching authority in turn spawned the constructivist turn in international relationsmdashthe approach that stresses the importance of social identity in determining international outcomesmdashand subsequent counterarguments that built on yet other social and psychological preceptsmdash all of which agree that there is such a thing as an international systemmdashthough they understand the effects of anarchy differently Introducing psychoanalysis to international relations can therefore be seen as the next logical step for a relatively young discipline that seeks to understand why political actors behave the way they do While all psychoanalysts draw on Freuds unique contribution subsequent approaches have altered many of his assumptions This trend has kept pace with the embracing of new epistemological and ontological perspectives by other scientific and social scientific fields such as the quantum revolution in physics -a paradigm shift that has since influenced other disciplines The form of psychoanalytic theory that I use here is the contemporary relational strand one that analysts have alternately termed relational-model theorizing a dyadic systems perspective and intersubjectivity theory This approach shares an ontology basic to constructivism in international relations the psychology (identity) of the person (state) is not hard-wired into the unit but develops in part from the actions of other actors in the social environment (the family the therapeutic setting the international system) and in part through the shared assumptions that permeate that system As an approach centered on the individual mind contemporary psychoanalysis takes into account the broader social context within which actors act Psychoanalysis also provides a coherent theory of behavior incorporating three elements that have mostly been invisible in international relations theory but that provide a fuller understanding of how states and nonstate actors interact emotion the unconscious and the possibility for actors own cognitive and emotional insight to be a source of behavior change In drawing on these principles perhaps the most significant contribution that psychoanalysis can make to international relations is in improving on prevailing theories of identity which in turn illuminate questions about international action Within international relations constructivism has been criticized for neglecting the question of how identity is in fact created Cognitive psychologymdashwhich international relations has begun to draw on liberallymdashin part helps to fill this gap Yet with its assumption that the emotional legacy of early interpersonal relationships is essential in shaping personality and subsequent behavior psychoanalysis offers a more comprehensive model of identity creation than those put forth by cognitive theorists Recognizing these explanatory benefits contructivists have recently called for exploring the potential that psychoanalysis holds for understanding international politics Thus unlike the prevailing psychoanalytic approaches in international relationsmdashnamely psychohistories of individual leaders and the focus-group potential of micro-level conflict resolution the psychoanalytic approach I use here is meant to coexist happily alongside other streams of systemic theory in international relations

Forcing the state away from what it considers a core tenet of national defense in the exact opposite way it desires creates the conditions necessary for reflection of the efficacy of the initial policies of surveillance which changes future policySucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 32-)

Like most individuals states possess a complex arsenal of motivations that are not all palatable to the politys sense of self mdashnot least of which is due to the discrepant voices vying for influence in any society Yet the dominant self mdashthat overarching group ethos that does not necessarily reflect each single (sub)voicemdashimplicitly prescribes a set of normatively acceptable behaviors Should a state adopt a policy course that contradicts the states role-identity we can expect some sort of cognitive dissonance to arise leading to a radical realignment between actions and identity Just as a man who once struck his wife might offer the apologetic plea that I dont know what got into me it is up to the analyst to help the subject come to terms with the aggression that has evidently been very much inside of him all along The policy shift therefore results from the force of the role-identity prodding the self back into behavioral consistency However acting in contradiction to ones role-identity does not necessarily result in a behavior shift The dissonance between role-identity and behavior must be both unbearable and experienced at an emotional level in order for such a shift to result If the dissonance remained at a cognitive level it is likely that the subject would employ one of a number of cognitive biases in order to rationalize the discrepancy42 The dredging up of the unconscious counternarrative assures that the dissonance is experienced deeply enough to result in the taking of radical action to realign actions with identity 43 This hypothesis of cognitive-emotional realization is grounded in the clinical findings of psychoanalytic theory that suggest that under certain conditions actors may become consciously aware of previously unconscious processes44 The classic understanding of cognitive dissonancemdashas articulated by Leon Festingermdashis that inconsistency between behavior and belief results in psychological discomfort that leads to activity oriented toward dissonance reduction just as hunger leads to activity oriented toward hunger reduction45 In line with psychoanalysis the actual cognitive-emotional realization brings to light what had previously been stored in the unconscious areas of the states subjective world In actuality the assumption here is that the role-challenging behavior (paired with domestic challenges) causes elites to reflect on the states role- identity Moreover my use of cognitive-emotional realization imbues the concept with a distinctively emotional component as well Whereas pure cognitive dissonance refers to the challenging of an individuals worldview (ie the revelation of new facts)46 I am introducing the more ontologically powerful notion of challenges to the self47 When this behavior undermines the very legitimacy buttressing the states raison detat the dissonance is particularly acute Catalysts for Realization Once decision-makers come to realize that the states foreign-policy actions have contradicted the states role-identity a policy shift may result The important question that remains is what contributes to this realization Numerous sources may act as the mirror necessary for the state to reflect on its behavior For clarity I have divided them into three categories domestic elements (including the military the peace movement revisionist historians artists and the domestic media) other states (including allies and adversaries as well as those states news media) and international structures (including international organizations norms and regimes) Domestic Elements The Military If the military acts in a way that the populace sees as contradicting the states self-image (even if the military is merely carrying out governmental policies) society can experience a corresponding cognitive

dissonance In a democracy the military takes its directives from the government however military culture is instrumental in shaping the broader strategic culture encompassing foreign-policy decisions mdashand role-identitymdashmore generally Most of the time the relationship between the civilian and military spheres resembles a symbiosis commands are given by civilians and implemented by the military which in turn will advise and reshape subsequent policies In some cases ex-military personnel will pursue a career in government on being discharged However it is possible for the military to experience a sense of dissonance between a particular policy and its overall defense doctrine or ethic Soldiers might articulate discomfort in carrying out a particular mission or the number of conscientious objectors may rise In a country in which conscientious objection is previously unheard of the founding of such a movement will therefore signal an even higher degree of dissonance between behavior and institutional role-identity In examining foreign-policy shifts the role of the military is crucial in representing the degree of concordance between national role-identity and foreign policy In states where the military has particular salience for establishing national identitymdashthose states with mandatory and universal conscription for instancemdashthat institution will be particularly salient

Their dependence on pragmatism to justify unrealistic internal link chains and counter psychological methods creates the worst type of moral tunnel vision in which we become incapable of understanding the carnage of our ideology ndash this makes ethics impossibleDavis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg47-48)

But its always a good idea when seeking an explanation of the human motives behind actions to stick with the empirical With stated intentions and official rationales Otherwise we give ourselves over to psychobabble Despite official denial by the Department of Defense that DU is harmful a series of explanations are now in place to account for the development and use of DU weapons DU is cost-effective militarily efficient and turns to productive use a waste product wed otherwise have to dispose of at great cost In a variety of ways for the past two days We who leave here in sorrow know that we will one day be reunited with her in joy My concern here is not with the ontological status of this preposterous belief but with its psychological function as a guarantee that offers human beings a way to deprive death of its finality And the terror that prospect entails The function of guarantees is to enable human beings to bear events and contingencies that would otherwise be too traumatic There is much that we can face apparently only by denying Such perhaps is one accurate estimation of what it means lo be a human being to remain a child of ones needs and desires disguising that fact in the form of beliefs and ideas The primary purpose of religion philosophy and culture has been to provide conceptual psychological and emotional guarantees so I hat traumatic events become part of a larger framework that assures the realization of our hopes and dreams Without such supports most people supposedly would find life unlivable Through the ministry of the guarantees we banish those thoughts and feelings that we are convinced would deprive life of meaning plunging us into despair Experience accordingly becomes the movement from and to the affirmation of the guarantees through their imposition on events The main line of Western philosophy can most profitably be seen as I series of efforts to provide a ground for the guarantees That effort achieves one of its culminations in Hegel who defined the purpose of philosophy as the elimination of the contingent As father of the philosophy of history he offered that new discipline a single goal to demonstrate that the rational is real and the real rational that history is the story of progress liberty the realization of a universal humanity Or to put it in vulgar terms democracy and civilization are on the march and will soon sweep the entire Middle East In order to triumph over the contingencies of existencemdashdoubt about oneself ones place in the world and ones final endmdashmany guarantees are needed Moreover they must form a system of reinforcing beliefs such that if one guarantee is threatened other guarantees come in to fill the breach Thereby the function of the system as a whole is assured Within the system of guarantees one guarantee however is superordinate The belief that human nature is basically good As animal rationale we are endowed with an ahistorical essence that cannot be lost Evil is an aberration Consequently I heres always reason for hope and the belief that no matter how bad things get well always find a way to recover everything that I lie guarantees assure Psyche Its all a matter of pragmatic efficiency with a little capitalist profit motive thrown in for good measure Theres only one thing wrong with this explanation It leaves out the basis for the calculus Theres every reason to use DU and no reason not to use it if and only if one rationale informs all decisions How to maximize death regardless of consequences or alternatives Introduce any countervailing motives and the entire chain of decisions becomes questionable Conscious stated intentions then reveal themselves as functions of something else that

has been conveniently rendered unconscious What looks like a purely pragmatic matter devoid of psychological motives now reveals the opposite the fact that Thanatos so inhabits the system that the absence of anything opposed to it goes without saying Thanatos has become what Wittgenstein called a form of life7 a way of being so deeply rooted that it operates automatically habitually and of necessity It has become a collective unconscious And as such it is no longer accessible to those whose intentions conceal and reveal it The reason for sticking with the empirical is now clear There is something insane in the empirical That is what the historian must uncover Before we ask ourselves how this situation came to pass we need to ask another question For its easy to claim we dont know about such things because the media refuses to tell us about them Theres another reason for our ignorance however and its the one we need to confront I refer to the possibility that we choose our ignorance because otherwise wed lose the system of guarantees we depend on for our identity and our understanding of history As Barbara Bush put it in telling Diane Sawyer why she doesnt watch the news Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many what day its gonna happen and how many this or what do you suppose Or I mean its its not relevant So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that8 It would be easy to deride Mrs Bush to congratulate oneself on not sharing her attitude What I hope to show however is that on an essential level one determinative in the last instance we are in full agreement with her and delude ourselves as long as we think otherwise

IR SPECIFIC ndash The method of the affirmative best supplements our understanding of international relations by including elements that are absent in normal policy examinations of international relations Sucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 18-20)

It has long been argued that even within the confines of rational-choice approaches the nature of a decision-makers preferences cannot be assumed a priori and indeed their distinctiveness derives from factors ranging from emotions to personality to the selective use of historical analogies Emotion in short can be considered the sine qua non of social life a realization that has recently begun to permeate international relations theory Moreover the concept of the unconscious that anchors psychoanalysis can illuminate the question of why an individual experiences a sense of dissonance when her actions do not conform to her identity the mechanism by which the dissonance between action and identity can become unbearable and therefore why humans experience the need to match the two The unconscious is that aspect of the self that remains the most untapped yet potentially the most satisfying determinant of action coming as it does early in the causal chain At its most basic the unconscious is simply the repository for those characteristics that an actor fears adopting in other words action fantasies that the actor despises but can plausibly entertain This fundamental tension between the feared and the imaginable is what normally keeps these fantasies in check and is what makes the unconscious so potentially powerful as an explanatory tool And while the unconscious is an admittedly contested concept scholars from various fields have issued tentative calls for its exploration and convincing deductive and empirical research certainly justify its consideration One theoretical perspective that has been criticized for ignoring the unconscious is sociologys symbolic interactionism an approach that underpins constructivism in international relations Part of the reason for the tension between sociology including symbolic interactionism and psychoanalysis arguably lies in an antiquated understanding of psychology the false belief that to employ psychology as an explanatory approach one must ignore the impact that ones social environment has on ones personality self-image and behavior However contemporary psychoanalysis presents a view of the self that is more relational than what Freudian drive theory had suggested A psychoanalytic approach does not have to assume that unconscious or otherwise emotional factors arise from the actor independent of the shared understandings that define the social environment Admitting an explanatory role for the unconscious therefore does not imply a rejection of intersubjectivity mutual-constitution or any of the other organizing principles of sociology and constructivism Rather it simply means that ideas held in the unconscious serve as one filter through which actors interpret social interaction The unconscious therefore may be understood either as one element of agency that the actor brings to interpreting his social script or as itself the product of social forces that interpret and constrain action The first perspective assumes that agency does not have to be conscious to be meaningful agency at its most basic can simply imply action and intentionality can therefore encompass an unconscious component The second view means that the unconscious does not have to be understood as a pre-wired component of the unit that in turn shapes behavior rather it can be viewed as an emergent and mediating phenomenon We can therefore understand cognition as being inherently situated within social processes This is consistent with a relational view of social life and yet it is an important theoretical addition to the prevailing wisdom in international relations about how social understandings

ultimately shape behavior A final contribution that psychoanalysis can make to our understanding of international relationsmdashand conflict resolution in particularmdashis its assumption that entrenched behavior patterns can be altered through cognitive and emotional insight In addition to challenging the static conception of human nature that underpinned classical realism (arguably the first theory of international relations) and that provided a rather pessimistic view of human affairs this assumption is a valuable addition to any theory of international relations in which the prevailing theories of actionmdashmaterial power in the case of states polarity in the case of state systemsmdashare difficult if not impossible to manipulate As a result many of the most prominent international relations theories have lacked meaningful policy implications Conversely psychoanalytic theory suggests tools for ameliorating some of the most pressing global problems including protracted conflict and war While some psychoanalytically based conflict-resolution approaches use the focus-group format to simulate the healing function of the therapy setting this book demonstrates that the gaining of conscious insight into ones role deviationmdasha prerequisite for policy changemdashcan come about through real-life international interaction that requires neither a skilled conflict practitioner nor the willingness of elites to participate in such an exercise Rather under certain conditions role conflict can prompt domestic and international elements to hold a mirror to the face of elites resulting in a collective cognitive dissonance that can lead to policy change This mirror can take a number of formsmdashacts of protest by domestic groups media coverage and actions by allies adversaries or international structures These sources will be discussed further

IR SPECIFIC ndash What their internal links consider to be ldquoself-interestrdquo for a state doesnrsquot actually exist States are not sentient Instead they are composed by a collection of minds that act in self-interest which means that psychoanalytic evaluation of the self is a prior question to understanding the interests of the state Sucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 21-22)

Rather than referring to a notion of collective selfhood that is shared by multiple states- as some constructivist theorists of collective identity would maintainmdashthe title of this book the international self is meant to suggest not only that each state possesses a distinctive identity but that this identity develops out of the states relationship with other international actors This concept also implies that decisions emanating from the polity are derived from a process not simply the sum of the states parts Yet while we have already shown that psychoanalysis can accommodate a role for environmental processes in shaping behavior we still need to be aware of the risks of anthropomorphizing the state a practice that gets to the heart of the debate between two analytical positions that cut across the social sciences methodological individualism and holism While methodological individualism views social life as the product of actions taken by individuals holism understands the group to be a meaningful unit in and of itself Yet to an extent the debate between the two perspectives is already fixed While the holists have in their favor a precedent of semantic habitmdash we tend to anthropomorphize the state in everyday speech more often than not (eg Washington decided to wage war against al-Qaeda)mdashmethodological individualism is allied with the rich literature of rational choice and more prosaically the commonsense discomfort that arises when we ascribe human characteristics to things including groups Groups do not have minds any more than do other social facts and group behavior is after all the product of individuals acting on the groups behalf Finally given the presence of disparate individuals and subgroups constituting any society it can be misleading to attribute a single group consciousness to a political entity In a foreign-policy context accordingly adherents of this view would focus on elite attitudes bureaucratic politics andor interest group activities to tease out the causal relationship between Intentions and outcomes Yet a strong case can be made for the emergent properties of states and their policy processes something happens between the point at which citizens articulate preferences and those preferences are translated into policies Insofar as elite decisions do not always reflect the opinion of the majority there remains some degree of independent agency that may very well accrue to the state as a whole Under this reasoning it would be plausible to assert the existence of an overarching group self as Alexander Wendt does when he claims that states are people too In addition to the views of significant strands of psychoanalytic thought (which would not necessarily be expected to assume that units other than the individual can be psychoanalyzed) the idea of a group self enjoys far-reaching support across the social sciencesmdashinternational relations included This includes neorealisms assumption that the state is a unitary actor the Collective self hood implied by social identity theory the concept of political culture early psychoanalytic assumptions about the group as well as studies on obedience group-think and the crowd phenomenon There is a reason why scholars are drawn to the group as a unit of analysismdashwitness anthropologists concern with tribes and civilizations sociologists focus on street gangs and societies and political scientists emphasis on states and

transnational actors Group behavior and individual behavior are not necessarily identical Nor can an individual be expected to behave the same way in the context of a group as he or she would alone Moreover constructivism goes so far as to assume the possibility of shared norms across states a claim that has enjoyed much empirical support during the first active decade of constructivist research It is much more defensible to argue the existence of a collective identity within a state the boundaries of which contain degrees of centralized media language and other discursive channels for cultural dissemination and which prescribe the roles that the groups members are expected to perform within the context of that group And if different subgroups within the state disseminate disparate narratives we can assume that the most dominant group within society (as defined by some combination of ethnicity class or gender) has custody over a single consequential dominant narrative Finally even if we choose to ascribe a states national ethos to its elites we need to remember that state leaders are the product of the society in which they were reared This view would effectively mitigate the tension between elite- and mass-level phenomena in international relations since both elites and masses are socialized by the overarching structure of the collective

A2 ndash DisadvantagesThe internal linkrsquos dependence on rationality only serves to protect us from the unknown that the future holds This ultimately reduces all forms of knowledge to something that can be calculated which ensures violence The only way to reverse this trend is to force a confrontation with tragedy and the unknownDavis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg51-52)

Emotional The innermost need of human beings is to feel good about themselves Whatever threatens that feeling must be exorcised Health normalcy and productivity depend on avoiding negative feelings Hope and optimism arent just healthy attitudes they are requirements of our nature Biologically wired We cannot remain for long in trauma Recovery moreover must restore our faith in the guarantees and our hopes for the future The need for hope is In fact the capstone of the entire system of guarantees Yet it too apparently has a history Today over 10 million of our children are on prescription drugs to prevent depression and anxiety Informed of this fact by Bill Maher the French actress Julie Delphy spoke the spontaneous wisdom of an archaic culture Dont they know that depression is a good thing that its something you have to go through in order to grow Not anymoreThe key to understanding the power of the guarantees is to understand the fears that they exorcise Thanks to religion death suffering and evil are deprived of their power Through the attainment of reason all other forms of consciousness and what they might reveal are put in their place Poetic knowing is deprived both of its legitimacy and its terror Science as fulfillment of reason assures us of domination over nature What Heidegger termed technoscientific rationality becomes the measure of what is real Belief in historical progress banishes the recurrent suspicion that history may lack direction or even worse move to the darkest of ends The condition is thereby set that makes it impossible for us to experience traumatic events such as 9-11 except as occasions to take whatever actions are needed to reaffirm our goodness and restore our guarantees It is in the personal order however that the guarantees do their deepest work Psychologically belief in the self or self-identity exorcises the most frightening contingency that there is a void at the center of the American psyche with panic anxiety and its corollary compulsive consumption the expression of a desperate non-identity That specter brings us before the greatest fear that our psyche not our conscious deliberative intentions is the author of our actions an author who will do anything in order to feel safe secure and righteous All of our emotional needs then stand forth under the rule of a single necessity the need to feel good about oneself at whatever cost and to sustain hope by banishing anything that would trouble us Resolution catharsis (ie the discharge of painful tensions or awareness) and renewal emerge as the needs that bind us with an iron necessity to the guarantees and all that they make it impossible for us to know It is easy to deprecate Dubya and apparently to hold onto the idea that hes a temporary aberration But the problem goes deeper To revive a battle cry from the 1960s insofar as one is wedded to any one of the guarantees one is part of the problem and not the solution For the grandest function of the system of guarantees as a whole and in each one of its parts is to blind us to historyAnd so to take up again the question stated previously how did the situation now being created in Iraq come about The next three sections constitute an attempt to answer that question by constructing for America a repressed history

The negative is attempting to apply reason to ethics and psychology This only creates a hard understanding of our inner psyche which is a loss of the self that outweighs every other impact Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg174-175)

This recognition implies a primary question What is the nature and extent of the ethical responsibility human beings have for such a condition To what extent can evil and the actions that flow from it be said to be chosen in the exercise of a freedom for which one bears ethical responsibility Traditionally ethical responsibility only applies to actions that are taken after deliberation and with full knowledge of the consequences actions where choice is a function of our ability to reason where the moral law is known and where one chooses to violate it for motives that can be specified as functions of a self- interest that overrides all other motives and considerations Mitigate any of these factors and one mitigates ethical responsibility Ethical responsibility is compromised or eliminated for example if ones action is determined by forces outside ones control if one acts without premeditation under duress in blind obedience to customs or authorities as the result of a pathology because of some limitation in the ability to think or to understand the consequences of ones action or because one acted without any conscious intention to do wrong However deplorable their deeds the mad for example are not evil Evil requires consciousness choice freedom If evil is to be a human possibility on a par with the possibility of goodness it must be something that is determined within the order of freedom The trouble with the traditional understanding of these conditions however is the effort to confine them within the limits of rationalism and a purely cognitive model of the mind Rationality is noble but single-minded devotion to it leaves the true life of the psyche undetected Focusing on it prematurely shifts discussion to a rarefied mode of mentation that is then cut off from the rest of the personality To sustain and deny that split reason is then given disproportionate weight in determining what we are and do But the dream of reason is precisely that A dream a desiremdashto bring ones being into correspondence with reason and thereby eliminate everything else especially in determining the questions of ethics No one brought this dream to bear on moral experience more rigorously than Immanuel Kant That effort is the sublime beauty of his thought But experiencing oneself in terms of a priori rationality comes at a terrible cost Life becomes a process in which we sleepwalk our way through most of what we do because weve cut ourselves off from the actual bases of our actions Our psyche becomes a stranger to us We fixate on giving rational accounts of ourselves and in the process alienate ourselves from everything else Emotions become irrationalities breaks with reason things we must overcome or worse things we can only acknowledge when they are good proper and in tune with reason The rest of our being becomes brute inclinations frailties of our nature desires that disrupt an otherwise rational identity As a result in terms of ethics whether we know it or not under the guise of reason weve made an offer that most human beings cannot refuse Claiming not to consciously intend what one does has become the grand excuse Traditional definitions of the three cardinal categories of ethics are a monument to that motive Restricting intention motive and choice to the canons of rationality fashions them to the designs of human mendacity For if by intention we mean a deliberate rational choice with full knowledge of the consequences evil as Ive described it is not chosen If along the same lines we restrict motive lo purposes for which we bear responsibility because they issue not from frailties of our nature or the force of circumstances but from an explicit knowledge of what one is doing and why evil as thus far described does not exist within the order of human motivation One can identify self-interest careerism and happiness as motives but to say that many agents act in order to advance Thanatos is hard to fathom Unless that is we expand the category of motive to include purposes that derive from the psyche in all its inherent conflictedness But once posit such a possibility choice becomes a concept that must be rethought in a radically new way

Their internal links are symptoms of the fantasy that we strive to maintain This logic becomes used to justify atrocity The affirmativersquos rejection of attempting to control the future allows alternate practices to emerge Vote affirmative to traverse the fantasy of their internal link chains Even if you donrsquot think we can solve the 1AC is a more productive through experiment than their disad Davis 2006(Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg63-65)

Is there anything more evil than shooting children in a school yard or flying planes into buildings One hears this rhetorical question often today Getting it firmly implanted in our minds seems to be one of the current ideological functions of the media A correct response requires careful reflection on the circumstance that underlies the knee-jerk response thanks to the power of the image it conjures up The promise inherent in Technoscientificrationality is deliverance from images Killing for it like everything else occurs at a distance In the inaugural moment Tibbets in the cockpit of the Enola Gay unable to imagine what he has just done as a human act It was all impersonal12 And today in the silent secret midnight ways that radiation poisoning works from within like a deed without a doer separated in space and time from its absent cause Perhaps killing at a distance is the greater evil precisely because it abrogates the image and the human connection between slayer and slain If I kill another man with my bare hands my deed is immediate to my embodied consciousness To kill that way you have to feel hate fear anguish remorse etc whereas to kill from a distance or through an invisible contamination is to render the whole thing impersonal With the desired result the ability for example of the man who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima incinerating 600000 people in a second and condemning another 300000 to the condition of hibakusha the walking dead to boast for over 59 years now that he has never felt a moment of regret or remorse Tibbets lack of moral imagination is one with his representative status as precursor For now its easy to litter a landscape with DU while denying that the stuff has any long-term medical or environmental effects13 The evil of killing at a distance is that it makes death unreal Protected from the image all who participate in the deed are delivered over to a pure and impersonal calculus (An aside if we really want to support our troops we must achieve for them a new Bill of Rights No one should ever be ordered to use weapons without being given a full knowledge of the long-term human and environmental consequences of those weapons To do otherwise is to deprive our soldiers of the choice that makes them human) The powers that be learned one lesson from Vietnam No more images The mistake was to let us see the carnage up close every night on TV The news as image entered our consciousness at the register where genuine change begins Where horror is felt free of the tyranny of the concept and the hypnotic power of the guarantees Desert Storm was the corrective the Nintendo war a war broadcast to look just like one of the video games wed been programmed to love Prohibition of the image is now a fundamental article of faith No images are allowed to come back to us from Iraq II (Michael Moores real crime was to give us a brief glimpse at what the mainstream media proscribe) Abolition of the image is one of the primary conditions of ecocide Everything must be rendered abstract invisible unreal No image can be allowed to trouble our sleep to lacerate our soul For then we might begin to know that there is indeed an evil far worse than shooting children in schoolyards or flying airplanes into buildings To move us toward that knowledge let me end with the forbidden which I must here attempt to convey solely through the more abstract medium of words since Ive not yet gained permission to reproduce a photograph I saw not long ago Its the picture of an Iraqi baby a victim of DU who was born with no nose mouth eyes

anus or genitals and with flipper limbs a common result of radiation exposure in utero That childs body full of red open ulcers is twisted in knots its ulcerated face contorted in a look of unspeakable suffering An authentic image of the sacredness of human life Of the preciousness of every breath To look at that child is to realize ones duty to mourn it to give voice to its right to invade Our consciousness and expose the evil of those who prate on about being pro-life while refusing to let us see what theyve reduced life to Luke 171-2 The image of that child must become the force in our minds that motivates us to deracinate all guarantees that shield us from the reality of that childs situation Or to put it another way every time one demands catharsis resolution and renewal that child is born again condemned to its writhing That is why its image must embolden us to question the most hallowed of the guarantees the one Ive refrained from discussing until now In the face of such evil what is to be done Is resistance ever justified in resorting to violence No we are told because if we do so we become just like them This ethical principle supposedly applies universally and atemporally It does so however because it assures t he guarantee that no matter what happens well never get our hands dirty History cant intrude on the categorical imperative Whatever action one takes one must maintain ones ethical purity Even if that means there is nothing one can do and after its been demonstrated I hat there are no non-violent ways to change the situation Perhaps we can no longer allow ourselves the luxury of such an ethic Bush did the moral imagination one favor His pre-emptive unilateralism made official what has been clear for so long but denied due to its implications There is no body to which we can turn for Justice not the UN the World Court or any other framework of international law The US will flaunt its contempt for such bodies whenever it suits its purpose And thus another mode of peaceful non-violent praxis is deprived of its guarantee

A2 ndash CounterplansTheir counterplan still attempts to maintain some type of guarantee for the future Their obsession with security and the future fail to force a confrontation with the trauma of the unknown - this means that only the aff can solve Anything else results in a return to the ideology of security Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg38-39)

But to undertake that task we must purge ourselves of the thing in ourselves that stands in the way I have termed it the guarantees By that term I refer to all those assurances we set up a priori to protect ourselves from the reality of historical trauma The significance of eventsmdashthe Shoah Hiroshima 9-11mdash is their power to call such guarantees into question by exposing cherished beliefs to the claims of darker views and by forcing us to think in radically new ways considering things about the human being that weve persistently denied or marginalized One dimension of any traumatic event is the shock it brings to traditional ways of thinking Thats why the dominant response to any historical trauma is the attempt to restore the guarantees by finding a way t o impose them on the event in order to contain and interpret it The ideological function of the guarantee is thereby demonstrated A way has been found to limit the impact of the event by picturing it as an aberration a temporary departure from values and beliefs that can always be recovered because they constitute something essentialistic or universal about human nature Something trans-historical History may disrupt our essence but it cannot destroy it The concept of human naturemdashin all t h e variants constituting the philosophic and psychological history of that idea from Plato and Aristotle through American self psychologymdashis the primary way in which we endeavor to deny history An event is traumatic precisely because it suggests that history occurs beyond the limits we want to impose on it and therefore may move in directions that have nothing to do with human nature or the cherished beliefs and values we derive from that concept Events put us as subjectsmdashand as thinkersmdash into a traumatic relationship to both ourselves and our world The anxiety at the center of thought is revealed Ideologists rush in to fill that void and restore the guarantees Our effort must be t o do the opposite and thereby sustain the vital possibility implicit in an event That possibility is to sustain a break with the guarantees and thereby find for history a radically different way of thinking To put it concretely a trauma cannot be resolved until its been constituted The Western Logos is a monument to t he effort to avoid t h a t task indeed to render it impossible a priori To reverse that tradition the things above all we must rid ourselves of are the desire and demand for resolution The recycling of the guarantees must give way to a n existentializing imperative to constitute and work within trauma in a way that addresses the psyche at the same register as Gibson and Abu Ghraib do by creating images symbolic actions and emotions that are of equal depth but that move us in an antithetical directionmdashtoward the inner transformation needed to purge ourselves of Thanatos Such an effort however cannot itself be yet another variant of the guarantees as happens when Love and Eros are posited as ahistorical values If anything the possibility of Love is far more difficult and exacting than death because it can only arise by reversing the prior force that death has within us The following two sections offer a brief picture of the kind of agonistic process such an effort entails in order to whet our appetite for something that should by now be evident The critique of ideology cannot be a merely intellectual exercise It must be the activation within our psyche of a countervailing drama

Any risk of ldquosolvencyrdquo for the counterplan is a reason to vote aff because it is an attempt to guarantee the future by pre-emptive action Even claims of a ldquonet-benefitrdquo are a link to the affirmative criticism Only the aff forcibly confronts the unknownDavis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg51-52)

Emotional The innermost need of human beings is to feel good about themselves Whatever threatens that feeling must be exorcised Health normalcy and productivity depend on avoiding negative feelings Hope and optimism arent just healthy attitudes they are requirements of our nature Biologically wired We cannot remain for long in trauma Recovery moreover must restore our faith in the guarantees and our hopes for the future The need for hope is In fact the capstone of the entire system of guarantees Yet it too apparently has a history Today over 10 million of our children are on prescription drugs to prevent depression and anxiety Informed of this fact by Bill Maher the French actress Julie Delphy spoke the spontaneous wisdom of an archaic culture Dont they know that depression is a good thing that its something you have to go through in order to grow Not anymore The key to understanding the power of the guarantees is to understand the fears that they exorcise Thanks to religion death suffering and evil are deprived of their power Through the attainment of reason all other forms of consciousness and what they might reveal are put in their place Poetic knowing is deprived both of its legitimacy and its terror Science as fulfillment of reason assures us of domination over nature What Heidegger termed technoscientific rationality becomes the measure of what is real Belief in historical progress banishes the recurrent suspicion that history may lack direction or even worse move to the darkest of ends The condition is thereby set that makes it impossible for us to experience traumatic events such as 9-11 except as occasions to take whatever actions are needed to reaffirm our goodness and restore our guarantees It is in the personal order however that the guarantees do their deepest work Psychologically belief in the self or self-identity exorcises the most frightening contingency that there is a void at the center of the American psyche with panic anxiety and its corollary compulsive consumption the expression of a desperate non-identity That specter brings us before the greatest fear that our psyche not our conscious deliberative intentions is the author of our actions an author who will do anything in order to feel safe secure and righteous All of our emotional needs then stand forth under the rule of a single necessity the need to feel good about oneself at whatever cost and to sustain hope by banishing anything that would trouble us Resolution catharsis (ie the discharge of painful tensions or awareness) and renewal emerge as the needs that bind us with an iron necessity to the guarantees and all that they make it impossible for us to know It is easy to deprecate Dubya and apparently to hold onto the idea that hes a temporary aberration But the problem goes deeper To revive a battle cry from the 1960s insofar as one is wedded to any one of the guarantees one is part of the problem and not the solution For the grandest function of the system of guarantees as a whole and in each one of its parts is to blind us to history And so to take up again the question stated previously how did the situation now being created in Iraq come about The next three sections constitute an attempt to answer that question by constructing for America a repressed history

Any net benefit to the counterplan links to the criticism of the affirmative and is a reason that the counterplan cannot solve the affirmative We must confront the unknown to solve Davis 2001Watler A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative Pg 38-39

One upshoot of that act is a recovery of the dialectic of Eros and Thanatos as a way of thinking about history In anticipation of later developments (chapter 4 part 2) I only present the basic lines of this idea here The depth-charge sounded by an Event is its ability to reveal that the relationship of Eros and Thanatos is not eternal but historical to the core with the end of that dialectic entailing the possible extinction of one of the terms This is the spectre Freud exorcized by establishing a dualistic way of conceptualizing the two categories The alternative is an immanent dialectic one where history as contingency subjects everything to irreversible change with Thanatos a force in culture dedicated to the extinction of Eros and with the power to bring about that closure to the eternal dialectic Traumatic events constitute an abrupt and painful reversal of the eternal dialectic because in them we fund Eros deprived of all assurances Contra Freud there is nothing universal biological or ahistorical about the eternal battle Both terms are fully implicated in history caught up in processes Capable of producing irreversible transformations Forces in the psyche opposed to life which we have persistently marginalized in proclaiming our humanism rise up in the Event to challenge all we believe about human nature and history Rather than a world grounded in love the primacy of goodness in human nature the achievement of rationality and the ameliorative virtues of the social process the Event reveals a world in which envy and hate stalk life seeking a final solution that can only come with the extinction of the antagonist After such knowledge we can never begin again cleansed of history restored through its narration to some essential humanistic identity with all our fundamental beliefs in essential goodness reaffirmed Eros again pristine and empowered Feeling the pressure of death as it weighs upon and works within us becomes the gauge that measures the depth of our participation in history The Event rends all the masks that enable us to conceive evil as an aberrance Existential contingency unseats all essentializing views of human nature revealing historicity as a process in which Thanatos may be the drive informing the reality principle There is nothing in human nature that protects us from this eventuality Positing an essential and always recoverable nature outside history is not the solution but part of the problem the way we blind ourselves a priori to our situation

Only a complete withdrawal from psychological guarantees can force us to confront trauma The counterplanrsquos insistence that there is something tangible that can be manipulated or solved for is a link Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg38-39)

But to undertake that task we must purge ourselves of the thing in ourselves that stands in the way I have termed it the guarantees By that term I refer to all those assurances we set up a priori to protect ourselves from the reality of historical trauma The significance of eventsmdashthe Shoah Hiroshima 9-11mdash is their power to call such guarantees into question by exposing cherished beliefs to the claims of darker views and by forcing us to think in radically new ways considering things about the human being that weve persistently denied or marginalized One dimension of any traumatic event is the shock it brings

to traditional ways of thinking Thats why the dominant response to any historical trauma is the attempt to restore the guarantees by finding a way t o impose them on the event in order to contain and interpret it The ideological function of the guarantee is thereby demonstrated A way has been found to limit the impact of the event by picturing it as an aberration a temporary departure from values and beliefs that can always be recovered because they constitute something essentialistic or universal about human nature Something trans-historical History may disrupt our essence but it cannot destroy it The concept of human naturemdashin all t h e variants constituting the philosophic and psychological history of that idea from Plato and Aristotle through American self psychologymdashis the primary way in which we endeavor to deny history An event is traumatic precisely because it suggests that history occurs beyond the limits we want to impose on it and therefore may move in directions that have nothing to do with human nature or the cherished beliefs and values we derive from that concept Events put us as subjectsmdashand as thinkersmdash into a traumatic relationship to both ourselves and our world The anxiety at the center of thought is revealed Ideologists rush in to fill that void and restore the guarantees Our effort must be t o do the opposite and thereby sustain the vital possibility implicit in an event That possibility is to sustain a break with the guarantees and thereby find for history a radically different way of thinking To put it concretely a trauma cannot be resolved until its been constituted The Western Logos is a monument to t he effort to avoid t h a t task indeed to render it impossible a priori To reverse that tradition the things above all we must rid ourselves of are the desire and demand for resolution The recycling of the guarantees must give way to a n existentializing imperative to constitute and work within trauma in a way that addresses the psyche at the same register as Gibson and Abu Ghraib do by creating images symbolic actions and emotions that are of equal depth but that move us in an antithetical directionmdashtoward the inner transformation needed to purge ourselves of Thanatos Such an effort however cannot itself be yet another variant of the guarantees as happens when Love and Eros are posited as ahistorical values If anything the possibility of Love is far more difficult and exacting than death because it can only arise by reversing the prior force that death has within us The following two sections offer a brief picture of the kind of agonistic process such an effort entails in order to whet our appetite for something that should by now be evident The critique of ideology cannot be a merely intellectual exercise It must be the activation within our psyche of a countervailing drama

A2 ndash KritiksOur ethics come first -- Discovery of the unconscious is crucial to the recognition of responsibility by every subject- only our framework opens space for agency and recognition of our choices- our ethics are crucial to understand the historical contingencies that make up the status quo and open space for change Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg182-185)

Freud discovered more than the Unconscious He discovered our responsibility for it for becoming aware of how what we repress rules our life and therefore our duty to gain knowledge of our unconscious as the precondition for becoming an ethically responsible agent In terms of ethics theres a quick way to summarize the significance of the Unconscious What we dont know about ourselves is what we domdashto the other In calling us to such a reflection on ourselves Freud also taught us a new way to reflect one that forces us to move beyond the rational world of conscious deliberations and intentions Once make the psychoanalytic turn and the sources of self-knowledge increase exponentially Every time one understands a dream a paraphraxis an aesthetic experience a fantasy one suffers in principle a revolution in ones life For such experiences put one in touch with the deep conflicts that define the psyche A dream for example does not tell us about something outside the realm of our conscious grasp though this view of repression typifies how a convenient misunderstanding blunts the force of psychoanalysis A good dream reveals the desires and conflicts structuring our life It thereby opens our quotidian life to an in-depth exploration Listen to a dream rightly and one finds that one must confront something one has been avoidingmdashor doing Such is what it would mean to assume responsibility for ones dreams One would start to live from an awareness of ones psyche rather than in a continued attempt to escape that awareness Freud doesnt abolish intention he expands it by showing how often consciousness is defense mechanism and rationality the cover that conceals the actual motives on which we act and how often accordingly insistence on conscious intentions is the lie we cling to in order to deny our responsibility The seductive or prohibitive way of relating that a parent adopts toward a child for example may carry as its primary repressed intention the desire to wound that child in their sexuality This is why its so necessary at a later point in time for such parents to deny that they ever harbored let alone acted on such an intention And yet our actions do indeed speak louder than words in conveying our actual intentions Action is concrete intentionality because it is through it that we live out our feelings desires and conflicts And they are what the other invariably receives as a message that is often sharply different from what we say especially when through the exercise of intentionality we reassure ourselves about what good loving human beings we are The psyche is a lonely hunter avid in the pursuit of purposes it carefully conceals from itself The ethical greatness of Sigmund Freud is the crisis he introduced into that practice Rather than getting us off the hook psychoanalysis sticks it far deeper in us than any previous ethic Intentionality is convenient because it absolves us of the greatest responsibilitymdashresponsibility for who we are Everything stays in the safely guarded space of deliberative discursive quasi-judicial rationality as if this were the primary way we relate to ourselves or to turn the screw a peg further as if when we arent relating to ourselves this way we arent fully moral agents fully responsible for our actions But once let responsibility expand into the inner life of the psyche and we take on a new ethical burden to know oneself in depth and not recoil in horror from what one learns or persist in virtuous denial of the hidden motives one must confront in order to become responsible for ones psyche Indeed deliberation is itself transformed by l he psychoanalytic turn Freud shows that to deliberate correctly one must focus the inquiry on those motives that one tries to conceal from oneself since they are where the truth of ones conduct may lie

In terms of the problem of evil this line of thought has an obvious implication Our primary responsibility which we continually shirk is to find the evil in ourselves Theoretically and emotionally the same thing prevents that discovery the desire to uphold the idea that human nature is inherently or basically good with evil an aberration a fall a break with the natural order of things an exception to the rule of human decency Psychoanalysis like history renders such sentiments questionable at best And irrelevant to where inquiry must beginmdashwith psychological conflict the primary fact that defines us To be human is to live denned by wounds and disorders that are prior to the mediations (themselves rare) that result in a moral character that can be termed good Goodness is not something essentialistically guaranteed in a nature its an achievement that comes through the overcoming of ways of being that have a foothold in us long before some human beings take up the effort to reverse them Psychoanalysis from this point of view is neither pessimistic nor relativistic It is humanistic in the deepest way seeing the human as an achievement and valuing it by demonstrating what that achievement requires Psychoanalysis doesnt point to ethical relativism It points instead to an order of rank among human beings based on the degree to which a knowledge of ones psyche has become the basis of ones actions Ethically to know ones psyche is of necessity to engage in an effort to transform it since inner change is the only way to halt the projection of what otherwise does harm to others Psychological change is the primary task ethics the result

Their alternative misses the point In lieu of a criticism of the affirmative it is a much better act to internalize our anxiety and explore the effects within the psyche This allows us an uncastrated interaction with reality Davis 2001Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative pg xviii-xix

Virginia Woolf said that in or about December 1910 human nature changed She would have recorded a similar shock in August of 1945 The change Woolf witnessed has now of course been safely domesticated and has a local habitation and a name modernism The second change also has a namemdashpostmodernismmdashbut the ideologies most closely associated with its development remain mired in the first moment of an arrested dialectic12 Irony and aporia dominate the postmodern sensibility because its considerable energies are devoted to a displacement of the Event that remains at the center of our collective historical Unconsciousmdashthe referent that serves as the motive behind the denial of reference Reference must be continually deferred then rendered impossible because anxiety and flight from that anxiety define our actual response to the one referent that will continue to weigh on our consciousness until we restore the proper dialectical direction and move from the delights of skeptical play to a recovery of the demands of unhappy consciousness Einstein said the Bomb changed everythingmdashexcept the ways we think As such it is the inwardness of our inwardness never more so perhaps than when we use deconstructive irony as the master trope that delivers us from the burden of a historically situated subjectivity or at that opposite extreme that amounts to the same thing when we reassert an essentialist humanism as the fixed and universal system of understanding and explanation that washes us clean of history and its contingencies What if we broke with both strategiesmdashand rather than deconstructing the Bomb or containing it we tried to internalize it and then trace the ways it explodes and implodes within the psyche Such an effort would take as its goal a reconstitution of the tragic as the dialectical category that provides the only adequate idea for comprehendingmdashand existingmdashin the present Such a humanism however confronts as its prior and primary task a deracination of the system of guarantees on which previous humanisms have depended For the function of that system with respect to history has been to establish as canons of research and explanation a set of essentialistic concepts of meaning logic and human nature that function to insulate historians and their

audiences so that horror can never be more than the temporary aberration from which we always of necessity recover The narration of History thereby becomes yet another occasion for deployingmdashand thereby reinforcingmdashthe central beliefs and Values of the humanistic tradition That tradition thus provides the ego or identity-principle that we (the community of humanistic interpreters) move from and to in dealing with events that challenge our certainties13 We love to read and write histories because such stories tell us who we already know we are while conveniently exorcizing the threat of those accounts that would hold up a different mirror to our nature History is indeed a fiction the corpse over which we warm ourselves so that we may rise cleansed catharted the system of needs beliefs and guarantees restoredmdashwith existence the self-reference perpetually deferred What if instead we approached history as a realitymdashand a disciplinemdash in which we must risk ourselves utterly One in which to know is to suffer irreversible change in ones beliefs values and even in ones identity with nothing in the logos of thought able to protect us from that possibility The reign of the a priori would thereby come to an end the principle of hope a category wed risk not one wed need to renew at whatever cost Could such an engagement constitute the true force and signification of Hiroshima16 and thereby evidence that events in history are the true Absolute that abide with usmdashthe gift of the past to the future as that call of conscience requiring of us no less than a fundamentally new understanding of the human psyche and the human condition

The permutation solves ndash psychoanalytical evaluation of our anxiety and our reliance on stability and security are prior questions to the alternative and the framework of the criticism The alternative is still castrated by desire which means that it does not access proper historical contextDavis 2006Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative pg 1-3

In August 1945 Elias Canetti writes the following in his journal A tormenting thought as of a certain point history was no longer real Without noticing it all mankind suddenly left reality everything happening since then was supposedly not true but we supposedly didnt notice Our task would now be to find that point and as long as we didnt have it we would be forced to abide in our present destruction1 What Canetti cant see is that the point he refers to is the one he inhabits He cant see it because it is too close and blinds him (as it would soon the inhabitants of two cities) with a light not of this world The proliferation of new theories of history in recent decades is itself a response to a historical situationmdashthat defined by the Bomb That connection is also what these theories cannot know about themselves and ceaselessly displace in teaching us all the new ways we can know and write about the past What they do know is that the assumptions and guarantees on which historians have traditionally relied in constituting their subject and the needs that histories fulfill in offering us an account of events structured by these guarantees are no longer adequate to a contemporary awareness of history and historicity2 To cite the major developments (though in no necessary order of importance)3 1 Foucaults concept of genealogical history and the archeology of knowledge and its creative extension in the new historicist methodologies developed by Stephen Greenblatt and his circle 2 The hermeneutic theories of history and historical explanation developed by Gadamer Habermas and Ricoeur with special note given to Ricoeurs development of a complex theory of time and narrative 3 Derridas recent work on Marx and Benjamin and his continuing effort to expose the Hegelian assumptions about history progress and the logos which structure the way history is narrated by historians who know little or nothing of Hegel 4 Althusser Sartre Gramsci and the many often sharply opposed approaches to history developed in recent years by Marxists as different as Frederic Jameson G A Cohen Perry Anderson and Stuart Hall 5 The recovery of Kants speculations on history and its recent extension in Lyotards theory of the differend 6 The attempts by Slavoj Zizek Joan Copjec and Teresa Brennan to articulate the theory of history implicit in Lacan 7 The massive significance of Walter Benjamins speculations the continued vitality of Adorno and the Frankfurt school and the renewed interest in the thought of Kenneth Burke 8 The work of Louis O Mink Hayden White Dominick LaCapra Roy Schafer and others on the narrative and tropological principles that shape the writing of history To this list one can add Collingwood and McKeons earlier theorizing about history the work of Braudel Baudrillard deCerteau Calinescu and Bourdieu and the new modes of historical writing and historical investigation developed by anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz James Clifford and Natalie Zemon Davis The list is by no means complete because one must add to it two developments that may be of

greater significance and that complicate the issue of the historical I refer first to the number of alternative histories that have emerged in recent years thanks to feminist multicultural postcolonial subaltern and queer studies Such works have contributed more than new knowledge to our understanding of the past They have broken with the logic the procedures and the ruling assumptions of traditional historical methodologies by showing how that logic has as its primary function the exclusion (or marginalization) of voices that challenge its hegemony and the motives that inform its explanations Such studies are not merely of local interest They entail a theoretical crisis the recognition that the principles of historical explanation that we regard as true rational objective and universal are cultural conventional ideological and deeply implicated in power and the repressions required for its maintenance Ways of thinking derived from other cultures or voices silenced by the dominant culture may provide precisely the critical handle required to understand what is really at work in the privileging of certain canons of reasoning and explanation as scientific and objective and the rejection of other experiences and ways of thinking as illegitimate and unfounded The true bite of the multiculturalmdash seldom honored because it cuts in every directionmdashis the idea that none of us are locked into privileging our own culture and subject position(s) We can gain distance from our frameworks by immersing ourselves in other ways of thinking We can then use that experience to become aware of things that our culture and its dominant interest groups do not want to know about themselves The implication of such an orientation for history is considerable since historical explanation is perhaps the primary way in which a community establishes the structures of belief mind and feeling on which it depends in giving an identity to its members4 Thanks to the explosion of the multicultural we now have a way to internally distance ourselves from such beliefs and practices even perhaps following Nietzsche to touch all that goes without saying with the hammer as with a tuning fork

Case Stuff

War on Terror BadThe myth of effective security fosters a violent project that necessitates the creation of terrorists to be sacrificed on the altar of societyMcGowan 2013Associate Professor at the University of Vermont (Todd Enjoying What We Donrsquot Have Project Muse)

The fundamental barrier to the establishment of an authentic social bond is the resistance to avowing the traumatic nature of that bond We use the pleasure that accompanies the bombing of Afghanistan to disguise the shared enjoyment we experience through the traumatic experience of loss But this pleasure inevitably disappoints us and triggers the belief that someone has stolen the complete pleasure that we expected to experience This is why there can properly be no end to the War on Terror no end to the list of countries that the United States plans to invade to attain complete security no end to the number of terrorist leaders executed 31

Complete security like complete pleasure is mythical It attempts to bypass the one experience that cannot be bypassed mdash the foundational experience of loss mdash and it is this experience that holds the key to an authentic social bond The structure of society (which is the result of the structure of signification) is such that it blinds the subject to the possibility of shared sacrifice and the social bond that results from it No matter how often children hear the ideology of sharing or how many times we repeat to them the gospel of fairness they will inevitably believe that their sacrifice has enabled others to enjoy more than their proper share or unfairly

Loss of the SelfSurveillance devastates the gap between the Self and our informaticized bodies ndash the total knowledge it provides deprives one of the ability to function as a subject eradicating onersquos identity ndash this results in complete annihilationFriesen et al 2012 Dr Norm Friesen is Canada Research Chair in E-Learning Practices at Thompson Rivers University His academic credentials include a PhD in Education from the University of Alberta Andrew Feenberg School of Communication Simon Fraser University Grace Smith Arapiki Solutions Inc (Norm Friesen Andrew Feenberg Grace Smith and Shannon Lowe 2012 ldquoExperiencing Surveillancerdquo pp 82-83 (Re)Inventing The Internet httplinkspringercomchapter1010072F978-94-6091-734-9_4)

Students of surveillance have been so impressed by the ever-growing completeness of this data image that they animate it as though it were an actual person Identity is seen as coeval with an assemblage of traces rather than with actual presence Thus van der Ploeg writes of ldquothe

inability to distinguish between rsquothe body itselfrsquo and rsquobody informationrdquorsquo (van der Ploeg 2003 p 69) Haggerty and Ericson similarly write the surveillance assemblage standardizes the capture of fleshinformation flows of the human body It is not

so much immediately concerned with the direct physical relocation of the human body (although this may be an ultimate consequence)

but with transforming the body into pure information such that it can be rendered more mobile and comparable (Haggerty amp Ericson 2000 p 613) There is something right about this turn in surveillance theory and yet it is obvious that we are still able to distinguish the real person from the traces that person leaves behind The trace is bound to us by its origin and often by internal signs of various sorts so we do not quite leave it behind after all And yet we do not want to drag along every trace of our passage through life We count on the erasure of most traces It is this erasure that enables us to face the world afresh each day and to face it with a self-image we

construct at least partially anew for each new situation in which we find ourselves In existentialndashphenomenological terms privacy and secrecy are centrally constitutive of self and selfhood Holding something private or secret emphasizes the difference between self and other and confirms the autonomy of onersquos interiority and individuality ldquoSecrecy secures so to speak the possibility of a second world alongside of the obvious worldrdquo as Simmel (1906 p 462) puts it In contemporary conditions of surveillance and dataveillance subjectivity itself is dependent on maintaining the gap between our embodied selves and our informaticized bodies It would be intolerable for everyone to have full access to our salary the details of our relations to our family our medical histories sexual proclivities and so on Such knowledge would completely objectify us and force us to live up to (or down to) the image of ourselves implied in this knowledge Like Sartrersquos spy at the keyhole

himself espied we would be evacuated of those aspects of identity and interiority concealed within us frozen in the objectifying gaze of the other and essentially deprived of our ability to function as a subject We could no longer choose to project an identity appropriate to our inclination and situation as everything having to do with our identity would have been pre-empted Truly to be completely ldquooutedrdquo is to be annihilated

The gaze of surveillance invades and traps one psychologically rendering one enslavedVaz 1995 (Angelina Fall 1995 Dalhousie French Studies Vol 32 Mises en scegravene du regard (Fall 1995) pp 37-38 ldquoWhos Got the Look Sartres Gaze and Foucaults Panopticismrdquo JSTOR httpwwwjstororgstable40837004)

This grand formula is even applicable at the level of an encounter between two individuals where the theme of ldquosubjection by exposurerdquo is

dominant As Sartre says ldquobeing-seen constitutes me as a defenseless being for a freedom which is not my freedom [hellip] I am a slave to the degree that my being is dependent at my center of a freedom which is not mine and which is the very condition of my beingrdquo (Being p 358) In this sense the gaze does not just create and invade physical spaces there is a sense in which the gaze invades and traps me psychologically As a temporal-spatial object in the world being locked at forces me to apprehend myself as the

The paranoid anxiety of the status quo results in the projection of threats onto the other in an effort to suture the Lack ndash this type of politics mobilizes the population toward fascismMcGowan 2013Todd McGowan Associate Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Vermont Enjoying What We Donrsquot Have A Psychoanalytic Politics University of Nebraska 2013 pg 44-49

While nostalgia locates the ultimate enjoyment in the subjectrsquos own past paranoia locates it in the other Paranoia thus offers the subject not just the image of the ultimate enjoyment (like nostalgia) but also an explanation for its absence Nostalgia and paranoia usually operate side by side in order to provide the subject a way of figuring its missing enjoyment On its own nostalgia as a mode of subjectivity seems to have limited political consequences Groups may use nostalgia as a political weapon but its political weight is diffused to some extent because it involves the subjects relation to itself rather than to an other The same cannot be said for paranoia which is why finding a way to counter paranoia represents an urgent political task Paranoia is political in its very structure It views the other as a threat and produces hostility toward the other The paranoid subject usually adopts one of two possible attitudes toward the other According to the first paranoia serves to explain the loss of the privileged object If I take up a paranoid attitude toward the other I see her his enjoyment coming at the expense of mine The other enjoys the lost object that is rightfully mine The other having stolen my enjoyment bears responsibility for my existence as a

subject of loss This type of paranoia removes the burden of loss from the subject and places it onto the other

and in addition it functions like nostalgia to convince the subject that having the object is a possibility According to the

second attitude however paranoia represents an attempt to convince ourselves that we have not lost the privileged object We are paranoid not that the other has stolen the privileged object but that it plans to do so The imagined threat that the other poses reassures us that we have the ultimate enjoyment and that this is what the other targets By imagining a threat we fantasize the privileged object back into existence despite its status as constitutively lost At first glance it is difficult to see how paranoia might function as an attractive attitude for subjects to take up The paranoid subject must endure a constant menace that has no tangible or definitive

presence Everyone that this subject meets is a potential enemy in disguise threatening to steal or already having stolen the subjects privileged object In terms of the subjects own identity paranoia does not provide security or stability In fact it uproots all sense of security that the subject has concerning its identity But its appeal does not lie in how it transforms subjectivity its appeal stems from its ability to close the gap in the social field of meaning its ability to be a guarantor that authorizes our social interaction Paranoia develops in response to the inherent inconsistency of social authority There are authorities but no Authority and a decisive Authority would be necessary to provide subjects a sense of foundation a sense that there is solid ground underneath their feet Social proclamations and regulations place the subject in an impossible position one simply cannot believe and obey every edict emanating from social authorities without being torn apart in the effort These contradictions occur on all levels of social pronouncements One hears for instance about the dangers of eating too much fat and then one hears about the cancer-preventing power of chocolate Parents tell their children not to fight and at the same time tell them to stand up for themselves George W Bush claimed that the Iraq War was waged to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction and later claimed that its purpose was to liberate the country from a cruel dictator Such inconsistencies are not merely contingent developments within our particular society but necessarily follow from the ultimate groundlessness of the social order itself There is no final authority that calls all the shots in society and guarantees the consistency of the social order It is instead a structure in charge and this structure functions through its very misfiring The inconsistency of social authority- the gap in the social field of meaning - provides it with an openness to difference If social authority was a closed circuit that operated without a hitch it would have no way of incorporating the subject into its fold The subject invests itself in social authority precisely because this authority gives the subject contradictory demands Faced with these incongruous imperatives the subject cannot readily decipher what the social authority wants from it Beneath the inconsistency the desire of the authority remains a mystery The subject begins to desire in response to this unknown desire of the social Other the inconsistency of the social authority has the effect of attracting the subject and constituting the desire of the subject as the desire of the Other A thoroughly consistent social authority while logically unthinkable would not draw the desire of the subject in this way It might force individuals into obedience but it would not create the investment in the social order that the inconsistent social authority creates Confronting the inconsistency of social authority is not an easy task for the subject Many try to sustain a belief in its consistency through an imaginary construction that represses contradictory ideas The problem with this solution is that these ideas become more powerful through their repression and the result is some form of neurosis Another possibility is the paranoid reaction Rather than trying to wrestle with the problem of the gap in authority the paranoid subject eliminates it by positing an other existing in this gap an other behind the scenes pulling the strings As Slavoj Zizek explains it Paranoia is at its most elementary a belief into an Other of the Other into an Other who hidden behind the Other of the explicit social texture programs what appears to us as the unforeseen effects of social life and thus guarantees its consistency beneath the chaos of market the degradation of morals and so on there is the purposeful strategy of the Jewish plot The comfort that paranoia provides for the subject derives solely from this guarantee For the paranoid subject the surface inconsistency of social authority hides an underlying consistency authorized by a real authority whom most subjects never notice Paranoia simultaneously allows the subject to sense its own superiority in recognizing the conspiracy and to avoid confronting the horror of an inconsistent social authority As with nostalgia

paranoia is primarily aligned with a right-wing political agenda Its suspicion of the other nourishes a nationalistic politics and energizes

the call for a return to traditional social arrangements Just as much of the investment in the Cold War struggle derived from paranoia it fuels

the contemporary war on terror The exemplary right-wing political formation Fascism has its basis in paranoia

seeing the Jew or some equivalent as secretly controlling the social order to the detriment of all law-abiding citizens The idea of an other operating behind the scenes serves to justify restrictions on civil liberties racism police violence and so on A paranoid populace is a populace ready to embrace a Fascist regime Despite the inherent link between paranoia and conservatism leftists employ paranoia to a vast extent far more than they do nostalgia Paranoid theories about the secret brokers of power who decide the fate of the capitalist world are widespread on the Left It is common sense among leftists that big oil companies have suppressed the development of alternative energies that the CIA assassinated Kennedy and that major drug companies control the Food and Drug Administration just to name a few of the more well known conspiracy theories The truth or falsity of these theories has nothing to do with their function for the subject who accepts them The paranoid subject is often correct in its various speculations but paranoia nonetheless provides a way for the subject to avoid confronting the inconsistency of social authority For the paranoid subject conspiracy theories dont simply explain a single event they solve the problem of the social order as such According to this thought process all loss stems from the conspiracy which has derailed the social order and upset its balance The paranoid subject cannot accept the necessity of loss and the conspiracy theory works to render loss empirical rather than ontological This is evident in Oliver Stones JFK (1991) a film in which Stone posits a vast conspiracy that resulted in the death of Kennedy Of course Stone is probably correct that this conspiracy existed but the film goes astray primarily through its apotheosis of Kennedy an apotheosis that reveals whats at stake in all paranoia According to the film had he remained in power Kennedy would have prevented the horror of the Vietnam War and thus spared the United States the psychic wound that this war created With Kennedy one can imagine an American social order existing without strife and loss The conspiracy theory allows Stone this image which testifies to the avoidability of loss But Stone is not the only leftist to turn to paranoia Many do so in order to confront forces that they otherwise couldnt identify Among those who suffer from political oppression paranoia and conspiracy theory serve as vehicles for thinking through systems of control and even mobilizing action against those systems As Peter Knight points out Conspiracy thinking has played an important role in constituting various forms of African American political and cultural activism38 When it directly produces activism the political valence of paranoia seems to tilt more clearly to the left than it does in the case of Stones film In Marxist Fredric Jameson focuses on a related aspect of paranoia as he analyzes the paranoid film in The Geopolitical Aesthetic In this work Jameson aligns conspiracy theory with what he calls cognitive mapping- the attempt to think the global capitalist system in its totality The diffuseness of global capitalism prevents the kind of cognitive mapping that was possible in earlier epochs Today in order to think the totality at all subjects must resort to the idea of a conspiracy As Jameson points out in his analysis of All the Presidentrsquos Men The map of conspiracy itself suggests the possibility of cognitive mapping as a whole and stands as its substitute and yet its allegory all at once40 Jamesons statement reflects his ambivalence about conspiracy theory and paranoia - even though it allegorizes cognitive mapping it also substitutes for it - but he nonetheless sees its usefulness as a strategy for the Left especially when facing the global capitalist leviathan

The problem is that even when it works to mobilize subjects to fight against an oppressive system paranoia has the effect of depriving subjects of their agency By eliminating the gap in social authority and filling in this gap with a real authority who effectively runs the show paranoia deprives subjects of the space in which they exist as subjects The subject occupies the position of the gap in social authority it emerges through and because of internal inconsistency in the social field of meaning The extent to which paranoia allows the subject to experience social authority as a consistent field is the extent to which it works against the subject itself Even if it manages tangible political victories emancipatory politics that relies on paranoia undermines itself by increasing the power of authority in the thinking of subjects and

decreasing their freedom Whats more it doesnt actually work Like nostalgia paranoia can never constitute a successful strategy for the subject dealing with its fundamental condition It will never provide the enjoyment that it promises the subject Uncovering and eliminating the hidden real authority will bring not the ultimate enjoyment but horrible disappointment This is why the paranoid mindset cannot admit to itself that the hidden other has been vanquished

The enjoyment that paranoia does provide requires the continuing existence of the threat even though it imagines an enjoyment that would come with the threats disappearance Paranoia runs aground due to its failure to admit the connection between enjoyment and loss It allows the subject to imagine that loss is the contingent result of a secret malevolent force that we might conquer By implicitly positing the avoidability of loss paranoia leaves subjects unable to locate and recognize the nature of their own enjoyment

This anxiety is the core problem of the psyche Our inability to come to terms with this void is a fate worse than death Our anxiety functions as the condition for the possibility of Hiroshima and Auschwitz In attempts to master this emptiness we project our weakness through conflict This projection provides us the unrestrained power to bombard the other with pure suffering and destruction in an attempt to control the contingencies that constitute existence Davis 2001Walter A Davis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative Pg 103-108

We begin with an effort to describe what is the deepest experiencemdashthe one most deeply denied Catastrophic anxiety is that fear that haunts us from within the fear that one has already been annihilated that like Beckett one has never been born properly and never will be because inner paralysis is the psyches defining conditionmdasha truth attested each time when lining to cohere as a subject one collapses before the tidal wave of an Regression against oneself that rises up from within An

unspeakable dread weds the psyche to terror All other forms of anxiety are pale after-thoughts There is a threat worse than extinction The deepest self-knowledge we harbor the knowledge that haunts us as perhaps our deepest

self-reference is the fear that our inner world is ruled by a force opposed to our being Death is the icy wind that blows through all we do This is the anxiety from which other anxieties derive as displacements delays and vain attempts to deny or attenuate our terror before a dread

that is nameless and must remain so lest despair finalize its hold on us In catastrophic anxiety the destruction of ones power to be and the ceaseless unraveling of all attempts to surmount this condition is experienced as an event that has already happened That event forms the first self-reference the negative judgment of an Other on ones beingmdashinternalized as self-undoing Postmodern posturing before the phrase I am an other here receives the concretization that shatters free play There is a wound at the heart of subjectivity a self-ulceration that incessantly bleeds itself out into the world The issue of the wound is a soul caked in ice in a despair that apparently cannot be

mediated the nightmare state of a consciousness utterly awake alone and arrested all exits barred facing inner paralysis as the truth of ones life We ceaselessly flee this experience because if it ever comes down full upon us an even more terrifying process begins an implosion in which ones subjective being is resolved into fragments of pure anxiety that leave one incapable of existing as subject except in the howl to which each suffered state descends in a final chilling recognitionmdashthat everything one has done and suffered is but sound and fury signifying nothing One has become a corpse with insomnia Identity and self-reference thereafter ceaselessly circle about that void This is the hour of the wolf where one is arrested before the primary fact at the deepest register of the psyche one finds a voice of terror Fear of psychic dissolution is the ground condition of our being as subjects Subjectivity is founded in anguish before the dread of becoming no more than bits and pieces of pure horror fleeing in panic a voice that has already overtaken us resolving our subjective being into traumatic episodes of pure persecution At the heart of inwardness a malevolent spirit presides To put it in nuclear metaphors catastrophic anxiety is the threat of implosion into the others unlimited destructiveness To complete the picture we need only add Winnicotts point people live in dread of this situation projecting fear of a breakdown into the future because the breakdown has already occurred

B Exorcism through Evacuation And so a crypt is built to contain this anguish and repress the experience that is its cause We organize a life of identities and stabilities to give ourselves the illusion of escape Unable to reverse our condition we take up the only alternative We try to evacuate the whole thing to blow it out into the world and invest it in objects that are fitted to receive the full brunt of ones discontent and powerless to reply Projection the egos priest is founded in identification with an internal aggressor That is the complex that informs the effort to lodge our disorders and forbidden desires in others so that we can wage an attack on our inner conflicts then watch the ensuing spectacle from a safe distance Evacuation thus finds in projection a prime agent of human perception and the secure base for the perpetual mutual defeat that Sartre finds in all concrete

relations with others Were always on the lookout for a chance to make someone else bear our discontents But its never enough Satisfaction eludes us We keep erupting bleeding from within in a leukemia of soul that rages whenever we see those who have in their daily lives a beauty that makes us uglyFor then the projections return with the force of the furies Envy and resentment erupt as the assault within our inner world of the truth of our charactermdasha truth we deny by reinvesting it externally This grows apace over the years and then we long for a listing deliverance a final solution in the dim recognition that when projection proceeds from the register of catastrophe it requires and longs for a grand exorcism What we seek incessantly is a total evacuation of all inner discord a complete and lasting externalization in an ideal victim one in whom all that haunts us will stay outside lodged in the world in what Hegel calls a standing negation9 Our need is for a subject who is destroyed and lives on proof of a sublime aggression sculpted in time The Bomb provides such

an opportunity The criteria required to exorcize catastrophic anxiety finds in it the conditions for expelling the most primitive anxieties in the perfect objective correlative The subject voids itself of its core

anxietymdashthe inability to reverse inner destructivenessmdashby becoming the power to destroy unbound raining judgment down on a mass of subjects who are indifferently bound together as fragments of pure suffering unable after that action to ever form any identity except as walking corpses hibakusha deadened affect delivered over to the condition of death-in-life10 Projection here succeeds because in that shattered mirror one sees oneself reflected as the equal

of the power within that originally proclaimed ones utter worthlessness Malign reversal has grown to the event All inner anxiety about ones power to be resolves itself in the power to act free of restraint We have become the thing we feared Its destructiveness is now ours and nothing else has being The Contradiction The SublimemdashFrom the Crypt The mediation

traced above is driven by a contradiction about which it circles endlessly That is what the sublime object of the ego-ratio reveals when read from its crypt Sublime action seeks an absolute reversal of catastrophic anxiety in the absolute affirmation of unshakable guarantees Catastrophe must be reversed because it is that experience of contingency that underlies the horror of contingency in all its forms the lone driving the search for the guarantees needed to contain it In

catastrophe contingency is the others will as unbounded unlimited destructiveness The threat of extinction is the restraint here placed on subject This restraint is prior to the dialectic of desire restrained and checked on which Hegel grounds his phenomenology Desire here isnt restrained and checkedmdashit is turned back against itself in torment The other requires my destruction for their pleasure and assures that end by colonizing the psyche with an aggression that renders impotent every effort to make a beginning a tentative move toward independence or self-cohesion There is no exit but one apparently identification with the aggressor I become a self by turning someone or something else into an object delivered over to the true golden rule do onto others what was once done onto you This logic maintains because catastrophic anxiety internalized is death-work as the self-

mediation whereby we enact the command of the Other The only way out the only way to finalize this process is evacuation through a lasting exorcism It alone confers on the psyche a certitude beyond all cogitos It is also the mediation that finds it in flight forward already in its primitive imaginary one with the Bomb In its inner world the catastrophic subject experiences itself as full of death disease corruption The Bomb alone has the power to cast all nuclear waste outside and beneath oneself in a way that indefinitely extends the temporality of that act Radiation disease is a death that works inwardmdashinvisibly yet inexorably Death thereby breeds itself forth into an indefinite future omnipresent in a working a differance that begets delayed effects as further insurance against Nachtraglichkeit The extension of deaths dominion attained in the Bomb serves one grand function to prevent the return of projections by extending the temporality of the deed into a future that is lived by its victims as a judgment that is inevitable irreversible the antithesis of Benjamins messianic time tickingmdasha plea to delay death that can only be answered by death The Bomb thus serves as felix culpa to

an inner necessity To do its job a sublime event must exorcize everything within the subject that makes it an object of its own contempt What better way than Orwells boot brought down in an act of splitting that magnifies the distance between the terror

on the ground and the view from above Catastrophe is now fully outside oneself located in an other who has become nothing but matter body become spectacle of pain frozen forever in charred sculptures strewn across a devastated landscape Laocoon Munched but with the Howl silenced and deferred until it erupts later from within the survivors in a semiosis that can only be read by the scientists who planted it there and have now come (as biopowerknowledge) to study their handiwork as it blooms and bursts from deep within the body of the hibakusha as further testimony of ones powerjouissance Evacuation is complete Death-work has been lodged securely in the Other In the hibakusha one gets to see ones Thanatos as a narrative principle a force in history One gets to see over time what it is like to live death Soul-murder as the innermost reality of the crypt produces and finds in the

hibakusha its dialectical image As the expressive figura of death incarnate a terrifying verveilledoch here attains its objective correlative To purge oneself of catastrophic anxiety an utterly dehumanized object is not enough Neither the Sartrean look nor the Nazi act suffice The disorder of the psyche is deeper prior to desire (Sartre) and demand (Nazism) The projection of death-work can never rest by simply investing ones self-contempt in another For evacuation to work the

object must become something one can study inspect perform operations upon Catastrophic anxiety is the a proiri that gives Auschwitz and Hiroshima their necessity in the genocidal imagination The Bomb constitutes an Event because the psyche

reverses its core conditionmdashits cardiac arrest in inner self-loathingmdashthrough a projection that is total and irreversible If the evacuation of trauma is the abiding motive atop the crypt there is nothing abstract or Lacanian about the Real that results from its projection Evacuation is that malevolent reversal that condemns one to endless repetition One blows ones self-hatred and ones rage over that state fully out into the world but is thereby rendered powerless to do anything but gape in rapt amazement at ones creation That is perhaps why for over fifty years now whenever given the opportunity Paul Tibbets has proudly repeated the declaration that he has not had a moments remorse or regret Death-work externalized leaves one a spent and reified subject lacking any power other than the endless repetition of ones deed The wheel thus comes full circle in the only justice granted such subjects When catastrophic anxiety is only mediated by death-work the affects that compose subjectivity are rent assunder and scattered in pockets of pure persecution With each attempt to compose an inner self-cohesion death-work as internal saboteur rises up in a renewed attack on the effort to be Using the Bomb to reverse this disorder produces as its result a perfect attic justice Guilt and remorse are denied the doers of the deed because to feel such things is to renew a process of self-unraveling What the Bomb was meant to deliver one from has become the guardian

of untroubled sleep With the call of conscience rendered impossible the subject becomes overtly psychotic and must cling ever more desperately to an untroubled memory of the sublime event The subject thereby pronounces without being able to comprehend or mediate it the truth about itself in the ravaged landscape of Hiroshima the founding inner world of the psychotic-a world of utter fragmentation and the obliteration of every term of reference-has finally found a home to which it must say stay thou art so fair a home in which nothing inhuman is unheimlich

The moralization of anxiety manifests itself in our inability confront evil To displace this anxiety we make ourselves ldquogoodrdquo to protect ourselves from danger Failure to confront this psychical conflict reifies the original trauma and makes the destruction of the self meaninglessDavis 2001Walter A Davis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative Pg 86-87

No wonder resistance becomes the key term in the first stage of the unfolding drama This time however Kant canrsquot shift everything onto a plane of conceptual defenses and controls Affect weighs too heavily Intermediate moves immanent within that register are required Opposing affects must be created and marshaled as a first line of defense For the first time in Kant rationalistic mediation gives way to dramatic self-mediation Kant will finally attempt an agon that moves solely within the medium of affect To resist psychic unraveling he must

establish a countervailing force within the order of affect itself For Kant however affective self-mediation is equivalent to bending everything in a moral direction In doing so the author of the ethic of pure duty gives us the true genealogy of morals

That dubious ascent begins once the force threatening destruction is characterized as ldquoevilrdquo Anxiety is thereby transformed into a moralizing fear that we lack the power to resist ldquoevilrdquo Moralizing then structures the subsequent discourse but without exorcizing the psychological subtext that will undercut it This contradiction is in fact what ethics will here reveal about itselfIn making ourselves ldquogoodrdquo subjects we make ourselves beings unworthy of destruction That

transformation also requires the resources of rhetoric since we must ldquopersuaderdquo a tough audience The true goal in remaking ourselves is to tame the power that threatens us by tapping its conscience To do so we create within ourselves a new agency one that recognizing our virtue promises protection We thereby create the illusion that the threatening force has been softened and then transformed into a voice that warmly supports the good intentions of the nascent ego The superego as ego-ideal has been created So ends the founding self-mediation in the genealogy of an ethical ration By staging this internal drama the psyche has taken the action within required to create the space needed to assert control over affect The necessary act follows ndash the attempt to affect a complete reversal of the psychersquos initial condition Kant asserts repeatedly that we can only judge the sublime and experience its proper ldquopleasurerdquo if we view things from ldquoa safe placerdquo But in the psyche as opposed to mind the safe place doesnrsquot exist a priori It has to be invented and with it the most revealing picture of the genesis of what we now call the ldquoegordquo It is a difficult birth to a dubious and troubled function The problem of the ego is one of generating a transformation from impotence to power within affect itself through an agon immanent to that register But Kant is unable to sustain such an agon We get instead a displacement toward concepts through a use of the defensive mechanism known as splitting Ego and inner world divide in an unbridgeable rift thus establishing this condition as the true ldquoidentityrdquo of the ego The ego is the effort to repress the conflicts in the psyche from which it derives But while displacement and intellectualization offer a handle the egorsquos work is far from done The continuing pressure of inner conflicts requires a further battle In that struggle moralizing interpretations do yeoman service by splitting the psychersquos original trauma into a longed-for reificationmdashthe opposition of the ego to the drives

We have become creatures full of instincts The crucial task of the aff is to open up the unconscious counter narrative to provide a mirror to reflect upon the presupposed American identitySucharov 2005Mira M Sucharov assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli Palestinian Peacerdquo Pg 27-28

Just as individuals and groups possess consciousness and an unconscious I argue that every society maintains not only a dominant (conscious) narrative but an unconscious counternarrative as well which

the former has in part arisen to conceal As the counternarrative represents the role that society most fears adopting it resides in the unconscious where it will not interfere with the day-to-day transmission and fulfillment of the dominant narratives and the dominant roles For instance a defensive states counternarrative would encapsulate the view that we are not only defensive but sometimes we can be aggressive 35 Narratives and counternarratives can coexist in two waysmdash either with the counternarrative being simply an unactualized fear or with the counternarrative corresponding to an actual role being enacted alongside the dominant role-identity Thus while an actor may consciously be aware of a counterrole that she abhors (eg the good student who avoids cheating on exams) the unconscious reminds us that the cheater is latent in the self-portfolio of the good student In the event that this student cheats radical change can only come about once the self has

been reconciled with its unconscious opposite Actors will not become aware of the divergence from their dominant identity without the aid of a mirror however Only with the help of outside forces drawing attention to the clash between the two narratives will elites experience a cognitive dissonance necessitating a realignment between actions and role-identity One of the most salient transmission belts for the creation of state narratives is collective memory Memorymdashactive or latent recall of things occurring in the pastmdashhas begun to be understood as not solely a private activity but as representing a group phenomenon as well 36 On the collective level memory can be either experience-near-active one-step removed or distantly removed Active memory would be represented by Holocaust survivors in Israel and the Diaspora for instance One step removed would be the surrogate memories that their immediate Offspring carry with them37 and distantly removed would be exemplified by the Rabbinic injunction that Jews experience the annual telling of the Exodus from Egypt as if they were there While a case could be made for discounting the importance of actual experiences in favor of the way

those experiences arc remembered both of these are crucial for ascertaining role identity Just as traumatic events in a persons life may be repressed in memory but still shape that persons identity the international observer needs to account for actual experiences yet view these as embedded within a narrative context Similarly some historical events undergo a process of memory revision in these cases the observer must be sensitive to the effect that the new discourse has on the societys perception of these events whether or not these stories accord with fact The clinical parallel in psychoanalysis is that while the analysands relationship with her parents is considered crucial to uncovering the contours of her psychology the analyst as a rule does not attempt to meet the parents firsthand rather the patients recounting of these experiences is considered to be the most important channel of investigationmdash and hence transformation Since we are talking about collections of individuals memory needs to be actively transmitted to the societys members in order for it to influence the citizens sense of collective identity One of the ways this can be done is through ritual Being repetitive while symbolically imbued ritual gains meaning only through the symbols attributed to it by the group and is a collective process that serves to link actors to a series of past events for which they may not have been physically present Moreover private rituals that are collectively prescribed such as prayer serve to bind the individual to the collective particularly when there is a formalized liturgy Most collective rituals occur according to the calendar and therefore can encompass regular ceremonies that come to act as markers for the individuals personal time cycle38Sometimes particular collective memories that have been sustained over time are ruptured with citizens contemplating new facts about their countrys past Revisionist history is an example of an attempt to bring forth these sorts of new facts When history is reinterpreted the society can either shun the dissenting voices or else gradually reevaluate the original narratives When this reevaluation occurs society is more apt to uncover the hitherto unconscious counternarratives a discovery that can

lead to the realization that the states behavior might be contradicting the states role-identity In other words revisionist historians and other domestic dissenters can serve as the mirror referred to later

Vote affirmative to give up hope in the face of guarantees - only holding yourself completely open in the face of the promise of a sustainable status quo can open space for self-overcoming that allows us to engage in new forms of praxisDavis 2006 Walter A Davis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deathrsquos Dream Kingdom Pg 63

To know this situation for what it is challenges what is finally the deepest and most fundamental of the guarantees The principle of Hope To appropriate Eliot After such knowledge what forgiveness There is perhaps nothing that can be done to change the situation Ive described But then what is the purpose of knowing such things if they only produce meaningless suffering Is despair the end result of a life shorn of the guarantees Or are we finally like the drunks in ONeills The Iceman Cometh knowing that in order to sustain the illusions required to go on living they must pronounce Hickey mad and reject everything he revealed to them about

their lives as a product of that madness Perhaps its time to admit what the need for Hope really signifies Denial of responsibility for certain situations under the assumption that knowing them correctly would lead to despair Raising that specter is of course the rhetorical ploy invoked to prematurely terminate inquiry lest it impinge on

emotional and psychological needs Despair thus remains an empty concept We dont know what it is and never will as long as we use the need for hope to prevent discovery of our capacities to endure Whether despair is what we will find on the other side of hope is something we cant know For all hope really signifies is a testament to our weakness and our fears Perhaps we are called to something beyond it What Shakespeare called tragic

readiness For in opening ourselves to the possibility of despair we also open ourselves to the possibility of self-overcoming and through it the discovery of a praxis that lies on the other side of the conceptual and existential paralyses created by the guarantees We cant know what is to be done as long as we continue to respond to our situation by invoking ahistorical values and guarantees that are grounded in an essentialistic and ahistorical theory of human nature

PlanThe United States federal government should substantially curtail its domestic surveillance by ceasing all domestic surveillance

Contention 2 is FramingAn ethics of existence forecloses the tragic struggle in which we never confront our inner trauma- only our affirmative can open new ways of relating to ourselves that can overcome these limitations- the 1AC is a precondition for any meaning to our livesDavis 2006 Walter ADavis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg238-240)

In her critique of Kantian ethics Alenka Zupancic often refers to the Lacanian idea that there is a loss deeper than ones life The loss of ones reason for living The apostle of duty offers a heroic example of how one escapes the threat of that loss What Im suggesting here is that ethics actually begins on the other side of it With the possibility that first exists when one discovers that one has already lost or violated or fatally compromised ones reason for living because the values one thinks one honors and the actual truth of ones life are thoroughly at odds The traumatic event that brings one to this recognition is the origin of ethics This is the ethical task it establishes to see if one can pay the price for having violated oneself by assuming the full burden of the situation one has thereby createdThe ethical situation accordingly confronts the subject with the necessity to choose to be in a radically new way or die inside Nothing less is demanded than a totally new way of relating to oneself for the guilt one experiences in such a situation is existentializing One is guilty toward oneself for having failed to honor the duties that one bears to oneself for having so thoroughly lied to oneself about ones life As Hamlet learns it is through that recognition that one first discovers that one has tragic responsibilities toward oneself that can no longer be evaded because one with this situation is the even deeper discovery that there are failures that can be irreversible That is the possibility defining the situation one is now in What one does will reveal the truth of who one is Guilt toward oneself has overtaken all possibilities of displacement and denial Fail now and one dies within Most people will of course do just about anything to avoid guilt or to get cleansed of it as quickly as possible That is why so many fail the test when it comes to them shrinking inside rather than expanding to the demands of our innermost possibility the one defining our humanity An ethics of existence begins with the traumatic experience in which everything weve tried to escape about ourselves catches up with us One then knows that ones prior life has been a flight And all ones brave ideas and bright ethical claims airy nothingmdashthe indulgence in comforting and self-alienating lies But now one

is finally like Hamlet in the situation from which there is no exit An ethics grounded in the possibility of freedom depends on the actions one performs within oneself when one finds oneself in a crisis that can no longer be denied This is precisely the kind of situation Kant is unable to consider which is why he constructs in Duty the principle of choice that renders it impossible In serving Duty one is delivered from the repressed thought that now can never arise that ones whole life and all its choices especially the ethical ones may be no more than a flight from things in oneself that one flees because one fears that if one is ever forced to face oneself one will suffer a destruction worse than death Destruction within An existentializing ethic begins on the other side of all the things we do to delay that event For it is when the thing one fears happens that one first discovers the truth of ones life the depth of ones inauthenticity The trauma that will measure ones humanity has arrived Nothing else now exists but the lonely struggle of the psyche with itself Suicide (including the primary form of suicide inner death) is one term of that situation Ethics is the other An ethics of existence is what one does when one finally finds oneself in the traumatic situation that brings one before oneself There is one lesson in this a lesson that probably cant be learned Rather than running from the trauma we should plunge toward it since it is only through it that we can discover both the truth about ourselves and what we are able to do in the face of that truth To activate that possibility all thats needed perhaps is to drown out the noise and chatter one keeps running in ones head Perhaps the truth is that the truth about ourselves is not deeply repressed and unknown Its closer than we think available to introspection if we but dared But thats what makes the kind of impassioned reflection Hamlet engages in so terrifying It exemplifies everything we know and dont want to know about ourselves18 Here is an attempt to offer an image that describes in depth the existential-psychoanalytic condition from which the possibility of ethics derives In George Orwells 1984 Winston Smith when tortured with the thing he most fears betrays the thing he loves To save his life he sacrifices what gives it meaning He capitulates before an inner torment that reduces the psyche to a condition of catastrophic anxiety (The image of the cage of rats placed over the head they will raven externalizes in a perfect objective correlative the terror that has the power to dissolve the psyche What is a phobia after all but an inner condition displaced into an external fear) What I want to suggest here is that Winston Smiths phobia describes the inner condition that defines any subject traumatized by itself Such a subject lives tortured by the struggle not to betray the thing one loves the thing that could give ones life meaning But one saves it only if one is willing to sacrifice everything to the

acceptance of the suffering and inner torment that service to it entails This is the ethical act whereby a subject attains tragic agency Becoming an existentially autonomous agent is the process of engaging the disorders of ones psyche in the effort of active reversal The wish to escape that effort to soften it or to insist that suffering must always have a happy resolution is the voice of self-betrayal If one gives in to it one loses with Winston the thing one has finally found the thing one can love more than ones life but only by suffering all that it demands That thing more precious than life is the tragic struggle that gives life perhaps the only meaning it can have

The ethic of the aff is key - only an ethical act that confronts our inner trauma with a constant and inner openness can we create the conditions for self-overcoming necessary to open ourselves to a meaningful existence - the only ethical choice is to fully confront contingencyDavis 2006 Walter A Davis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg235-238

What follows attempts to distill the ethic of existence in to its fundamental principles I also try here to present those thesis in a way that will engage the readers psyche and emotions at precisely the place within us where each of us makes a basic decision about ourselves Thats the only self that matters The others are selfreifying defenses The argument thus constitutes both an appeal to the readers freedom and an attempt to impinge on that freedom to bring each reader before him or herself by challenging defenses with the power that some ideas have to light a fire in the soul (1) We concur with Kant that if a choice is not free its not moral The possibility of freedom depends however on an in-depth analysis of ones psyche Such an analysis leads from the destruction of ego identity to the need to bring about a complete reversal in ones relationship to oneself by deracinating the voice of the other Thinking is ethical insofar as it engages one thing the battle of a subject with itself over the meaning of its being (2) There is no way to abridge that process nor to provide guarantees that will secure a safe outcome To sustain the psychoanalytic turn the psyche must continually throw itself into question and root out the emotions that bind it to a pattern of lies An ethic of the existential subject depends on maximizing what Keats termed negative capability the ability to be in uncertainties Mysteries doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason Rather than resolving doubts the purpose of thought and action is to deepen them An act is ethical insofar as it deepens the conflict of the subject with itself (3) One acts ethically only when all symbolic and ideological supports have collapsed Only then can one take on responsibility for oneself because only then is one at issue and at risk The ethical act must radically open itself to contingency in a situation where one must create values yet where those values can derive from nothing but the depth of ones engagement in the situation By the same token such values cannot be a final solution but must open themselves to later contingencies Ethics must always allow itself to be measured by contingency because contingency is precisely what calls up ethical responsibility The primary ethical situation is not one where there is a clear course of duty but where a subject trembles before its responsibility to create new values in a situation that reduces received values to rubble (4) Ethics begins when there is a genuine crisis of values even perhaps the need for a re-valuation of all values For Kant there was not nor could there be such a crisis The values were known immutable and generally agreed upon The only question was what kind of principle they would be grounded in which meant for Kant and the Aufklarung how could they be grounded in Reason For us in contrast the primary fact is a historicity that bites into the very possibility of the ethical Every ethical value must be willing to historicize itself That recognition entails the following considerations The desert grows Under the guise of fundamentalist crusades herd moralities dominate The extent of inhumanity is appalling So many values that once seemed so solid have been so thoroughly debunked The possibility of ethics now begins with a systematic exposure of all superego pathologies all the ethical ideologies that societies use to introduce a fundamental passivity into subjects while convincing those same subjects that they are good in a goodness that depends on willed ignorance An existential ethic is radically destructive of received beliefs radically disruptive of the desires of the normal subject Refusing and exposing all Symbolic supports it seeks in the struggle of the psyche with its disorders the source of value (5) Ethics is a matter of extremity It begins in the most extreme actmdashthe act of radical individuation in which one opens ones psyche to an interrogation that must be sustained in its extremity Ethics is about a choice in which a subject risks the value and meaning of its existence not about those choices that assure it of that meaning Moreover it is only when one does this that one experiences for the first time the

terror implicit in the oft-quoted Sartrean statement existence precedes essence (6) Ethics must engage and derive from the dread that defines choice Let me illustrate this proposition by contrasting Hamlets choice with the situation in Styrons Sophies Choice The horrifying choice Sophie facesmdashto choose which of her children will be sent to the gas chambermdashis a forced choice and thus extreme and exceptional in a way that deprives it of the possibility of being normative17 Hamlets choice in contrast is a free one that issues from nothing but his freedom and the readiness with which he accepts the selftorture that existence entails Sophie is tortured from without by the madness of the other and the inhuman logic that madness requires in order to know itself (Styron calls the officer who forces the choice on Sophie a genius of the Reich) Hamlet is tortured from within by the logic of self-criticism and self-overcoming that informs the existentializing process We are fortunate if we never face a situation like Sophies nor suffer the death-in-life that is the result of such choices But insofar as we have a psyche Hamlets situation is the general one that defines us Or to put it in properly ethical terms engaging the kind of situation he faces is the act that activates the inherent possibility that defines us The choice that founds such an ethic must therefore be distinguished both from the a priori choice made by the apostle of duty and Sophies forced choice All three refer to extreme choices and situations In only one however is guilt toward oneself both the origin of the choice and its result That is only one of the three choices is the ground of its own possibility and thereby the source of an existentialization that issues in values bound to the tragic contingencies of our situatedness

2AC

A2 ndash Realism

We control the internal link to their impacts The psychoanalysis of the affirmative forces an internal investigation of the ways in which the subjectrsquos subconscious desires rationalize what we would consider self-interest This means that we can only make sense of realism through a lens of psychoanalysis Sucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 17-18)

The psychological turn that international relations took with the rise of behavioralism in the 1960s has begun to expand beyond focusing on cognitionmdashhow individuals thinkmdashto a wider appreciation of the role of emotional determinants of action one of many factors that were long dismissed as unscientific Part of the reason for this hesitant courtship is no doubt the long strides that international relations theory has taken toward refining its investigative lenses such that less easily observable phenomena can be more confidently incorporated into the solid theoretical infrastructure that the discipline has now adopted A central example of this evolution is the analytical watershed inaugurated by neorealism which fashioned a conceptual playing field where little had existed before Neorealism a theoretical school that views international relations as taking place within an anarchical state system with no overarching authority in turn spawned the constructivist turn in international relationsmdashthe approach that stresses the importance of social identity in determining international outcomesmdashand subsequent counterarguments that built on yet other social and psychological preceptsmdash all of which agree that there is such a thing as an international systemmdashthough they understand the effects of anarchy differently Introducing psychoanalysis to international relations can therefore be seen as the next logical step for a relatively young discipline that seeks to understand why political actors behave the way they do While all psychoanalysts draw on Freuds unique contribution subsequent approaches have altered many of his assumptions This trend has kept pace with the embracing of new epistemological and ontological perspectives by other scientific and social scientific fields such as the quantum revolution in physics -a paradigm shift that has since influenced other disciplines The form of psychoanalytic theory that I use here is the contemporary relational strand one that analysts have alternately termed relational-model theorizing a dyadic systems perspective and intersubjectivity theory This approach shares an ontology basic to constructivism in international relations the psychology (identity) of the person (state) is not hard-wired into the unit but develops in part from the actions of other actors in the social environment (the family the therapeutic setting the international system) and in part through the shared assumptions that permeate that system As an approach centered on the individual mind contemporary psychoanalysis takes into account the broader social context within which actors act Psychoanalysis also provides a coherent theory of behavior incorporating three elements that have mostly been invisible in international relations theory but that provide a fuller understanding of how states and nonstate actors interact emotion the unconscious and the possibility for actors own cognitive and emotional insight to be a source of behavior change In drawing on these principles perhaps the most significant contribution that psychoanalysis can make to international relations is in improving on prevailing theories of identity which in turn illuminate questions about international action Within international relations constructivism has been criticized for neglecting the question of how identity is in fact created Cognitive psychologymdashwhich international relations has begun to draw on liberallymdashin part helps to fill this gap Yet with its assumption that the emotional legacy of early interpersonal relationships is essential in shaping personality and subsequent behavior psychoanalysis offers a more comprehensive model of identity creation than those put forth by cognitive theorists Recognizing these explanatory benefits contructivists have recently called for exploring the potential that psychoanalysis holds for understanding international politics Thus unlike the prevailing psychoanalytic approaches in international relationsmdashnamely psychohistories of individual leaders and the focus-group potential of micro-level conflict resolution the psychoanalytic approach I use here is meant to coexist happily alongside other streams of systemic theory in international relations

Forcing the state away from what it considers a core tenet of national defense in the exact opposite way it desires creates the conditions necessary for reflection of the efficacy of the initial policies of surveillance which changes future policySucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 32-)

Like most individuals states possess a complex arsenal of motivations that are not all palatable to the politys sense of self mdashnot least of which is due to the discrepant voices vying for influence in any society Yet the dominant self mdashthat overarching group ethos that does not necessarily reflect each single (sub)voicemdashimplicitly prescribes a set of normatively acceptable behaviors Should a state adopt a policy course that contradicts the states role-identity we can expect some sort of cognitive dissonance to arise leading to a radical realignment between actions and identity Just as a man who once struck his wife might offer the apologetic plea that I dont know what got into me it is up to the analyst to help the subject come to terms with the aggression that has evidently been very much inside of him all along The policy shift therefore results from the force of the role-identity prodding the self back into behavioral consistency However acting in contradiction to ones role-identity does not necessarily result in a behavior shift The dissonance between role-identity and behavior must be both unbearable and experienced at an emotional level in order for such a shift to result If the dissonance remained at a cognitive level it is likely that the subject would employ one of a number of cognitive biases in order to rationalize the discrepancy42 The dredging up of the unconscious counternarrative assures that the dissonance is experienced deeply enough to result in the taking of radical action to realign actions with identity 43 This hypothesis of cognitive-emotional realization is grounded in the clinical findings of psychoanalytic theory that suggest that under certain conditions actors may become consciously aware of previously unconscious processes44 The classic understanding of cognitive dissonancemdashas articulated by Leon Festingermdashis that inconsistency between behavior and belief results in psychological discomfort that leads to activity oriented toward dissonance reduction just as hunger leads to activity oriented toward hunger reduction45 In line with psychoanalysis the actual cognitive-emotional realization brings to light what had previously been stored in the unconscious areas of the states subjective world In actuality the assumption here is that the role-challenging behavior (paired with domestic challenges) causes elites to reflect on the states role- identity Moreover my use of cognitive-emotional realization imbues the concept with a distinctively emotional component as well Whereas pure cognitive dissonance refers to the challenging of an individuals worldview (ie the revelation of new facts)46 I am introducing the more ontologically powerful notion of challenges to the self47 When this behavior undermines the very legitimacy buttressing the states raison detat the dissonance is particularly acute Catalysts for Realization Once decision-makers come to realize that the states foreign-policy actions have contradicted the states role-identity a policy shift may result The important question that remains is what contributes to this realization Numerous sources may act as the mirror necessary for the state to reflect on its behavior For clarity I have divided them into three categories domestic elements (including the military the peace movement revisionist historians artists and the domestic media) other states (including allies and adversaries as well as those states news media) and international structures (including international organizations norms and regimes) Domestic Elements The Military If the military acts in a way that the populace sees as contradicting the states self-image (even if the military is merely carrying out governmental policies) society can experience a corresponding cognitive

dissonance In a democracy the military takes its directives from the government however military culture is instrumental in shaping the broader strategic culture encompassing foreign-policy decisions mdashand role-identitymdashmore generally Most of the time the relationship between the civilian and military spheres resembles a symbiosis commands are given by civilians and implemented by the military which in turn will advise and reshape subsequent policies In some cases ex-military personnel will pursue a career in government on being discharged However it is possible for the military to experience a sense of dissonance between a particular policy and its overall defense doctrine or ethic Soldiers might articulate discomfort in carrying out a particular mission or the number of conscientious objectors may rise In a country in which conscientious objection is previously unheard of the founding of such a movement will therefore signal an even higher degree of dissonance between behavior and institutional role-identity In examining foreign-policy shifts the role of the military is crucial in representing the degree of concordance between national role-identity and foreign policy In states where the military has particular salience for establishing national identitymdashthose states with mandatory and universal conscription for instancemdashthat institution will be particularly salient

Their dependence on pragmatism to justify unrealistic internal link chains and counter psychological methods creates the worst type of moral tunnel vision in which we become incapable of understanding the carnage of our ideology ndash this makes ethics impossibleDavis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg47-48)

But its always a good idea when seeking an explanation of the human motives behind actions to stick with the empirical With stated intentions and official rationales Otherwise we give ourselves over to psychobabble Despite official denial by the Department of Defense that DU is harmful a series of explanations are now in place to account for the development and use of DU weapons DU is cost-effective militarily efficient and turns to productive use a waste product wed otherwise have to dispose of at great cost In a variety of ways for the past two days We who leave here in sorrow know that we will one day be reunited with her in joy My concern here is not with the ontological status of this preposterous belief but with its psychological function as a guarantee that offers human beings a way to deprive death of its finality And the terror that prospect entails The function of guarantees is to enable human beings to bear events and contingencies that would otherwise be too traumatic There is much that we can face apparently only by denying Such perhaps is one accurate estimation of what it means lo be a human being to remain a child of ones needs and desires disguising that fact in the form of beliefs and ideas The primary purpose of religion philosophy and culture has been to provide conceptual psychological and emotional guarantees so I hat traumatic events become part of a larger framework that assures the realization of our hopes and dreams Without such supports most people supposedly would find life unlivable Through the ministry of the guarantees we banish those thoughts and feelings that we are convinced would deprive life of meaning plunging us into despair Experience accordingly becomes the movement from and to the affirmation of the guarantees through their imposition on events The main line of Western philosophy can most profitably be seen as I series of efforts to provide a ground for the guarantees That effort achieves one of its culminations in Hegel who defined the purpose of philosophy as the elimination of the contingent As father of the philosophy of history he offered that new discipline a single goal to demonstrate that the rational is real and the real rational that history is the story of progress liberty the realization of a universal humanity Or to put it in vulgar terms democracy and civilization are on the march and will soon sweep the entire Middle East In order to triumph over the contingencies of existencemdashdoubt about oneself ones place in the world and ones final endmdashmany guarantees are needed Moreover they must form a system of reinforcing beliefs such that if one guarantee is threatened other guarantees come in to fill the breach Thereby the function of the system as a whole is assured Within the system of guarantees one guarantee however is superordinate The belief that human nature is basically good As animal rationale we are endowed with an ahistorical essence that cannot be lost Evil is an aberration Consequently I heres always reason for hope and the belief that no matter how bad things get well always find a way to recover everything that I lie guarantees assure Psyche Its all a matter of pragmatic efficiency with a little capitalist profit motive thrown in for good measure Theres only one thing wrong with this explanation It leaves out the basis for the calculus Theres every reason to use DU and no reason not to use it if and only if one rationale informs all decisions How to maximize death regardless of consequences or alternatives Introduce any countervailing motives and the entire chain of decisions becomes questionable Conscious stated intentions then reveal themselves as functions of something else that

has been conveniently rendered unconscious What looks like a purely pragmatic matter devoid of psychological motives now reveals the opposite the fact that Thanatos so inhabits the system that the absence of anything opposed to it goes without saying Thanatos has become what Wittgenstein called a form of life7 a way of being so deeply rooted that it operates automatically habitually and of necessity It has become a collective unconscious And as such it is no longer accessible to those whose intentions conceal and reveal it The reason for sticking with the empirical is now clear There is something insane in the empirical That is what the historian must uncover Before we ask ourselves how this situation came to pass we need to ask another question For its easy to claim we dont know about such things because the media refuses to tell us about them Theres another reason for our ignorance however and its the one we need to confront I refer to the possibility that we choose our ignorance because otherwise wed lose the system of guarantees we depend on for our identity and our understanding of history As Barbara Bush put it in telling Diane Sawyer why she doesnt watch the news Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many what day its gonna happen and how many this or what do you suppose Or I mean its its not relevant So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that8 It would be easy to deride Mrs Bush to congratulate oneself on not sharing her attitude What I hope to show however is that on an essential level one determinative in the last instance we are in full agreement with her and delude ourselves as long as we think otherwise

IR SPECIFIC ndash The method of the affirmative best supplements our understanding of international relations by including elements that are absent in normal policy examinations of international relations Sucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 18-20)

It has long been argued that even within the confines of rational-choice approaches the nature of a decision-makers preferences cannot be assumed a priori and indeed their distinctiveness derives from factors ranging from emotions to personality to the selective use of historical analogies Emotion in short can be considered the sine qua non of social life a realization that has recently begun to permeate international relations theory Moreover the concept of the unconscious that anchors psychoanalysis can illuminate the question of why an individual experiences a sense of dissonance when her actions do not conform to her identity the mechanism by which the dissonance between action and identity can become unbearable and therefore why humans experience the need to match the two The unconscious is that aspect of the self that remains the most untapped yet potentially the most satisfying determinant of action coming as it does early in the causal chain At its most basic the unconscious is simply the repository for those characteristics that an actor fears adopting in other words action fantasies that the actor despises but can plausibly entertain This fundamental tension between the feared and the imaginable is what normally keeps these fantasies in check and is what makes the unconscious so potentially powerful as an explanatory tool And while the unconscious is an admittedly contested concept scholars from various fields have issued tentative calls for its exploration and convincing deductive and empirical research certainly justify its consideration One theoretical perspective that has been criticized for ignoring the unconscious is sociologys symbolic interactionism an approach that underpins constructivism in international relations Part of the reason for the tension between sociology including symbolic interactionism and psychoanalysis arguably lies in an antiquated understanding of psychology the false belief that to employ psychology as an explanatory approach one must ignore the impact that ones social environment has on ones personality self-image and behavior However contemporary psychoanalysis presents a view of the self that is more relational than what Freudian drive theory had suggested A psychoanalytic approach does not have to assume that unconscious or otherwise emotional factors arise from the actor independent of the shared understandings that define the social environment Admitting an explanatory role for the unconscious therefore does not imply a rejection of intersubjectivity mutual-constitution or any of the other organizing principles of sociology and constructivism Rather it simply means that ideas held in the unconscious serve as one filter through which actors interpret social interaction The unconscious therefore may be understood either as one element of agency that the actor brings to interpreting his social script or as itself the product of social forces that interpret and constrain action The first perspective assumes that agency does not have to be conscious to be meaningful agency at its most basic can simply imply action and intentionality can therefore encompass an unconscious component The second view means that the unconscious does not have to be understood as a pre-wired component of the unit that in turn shapes behavior rather it can be viewed as an emergent and mediating phenomenon We can therefore understand cognition as being inherently situated within social processes This is consistent with a relational view of social life and yet it is an important theoretical addition to the prevailing wisdom in international relations about how social understandings

ultimately shape behavior A final contribution that psychoanalysis can make to our understanding of international relationsmdashand conflict resolution in particularmdashis its assumption that entrenched behavior patterns can be altered through cognitive and emotional insight In addition to challenging the static conception of human nature that underpinned classical realism (arguably the first theory of international relations) and that provided a rather pessimistic view of human affairs this assumption is a valuable addition to any theory of international relations in which the prevailing theories of actionmdashmaterial power in the case of states polarity in the case of state systemsmdashare difficult if not impossible to manipulate As a result many of the most prominent international relations theories have lacked meaningful policy implications Conversely psychoanalytic theory suggests tools for ameliorating some of the most pressing global problems including protracted conflict and war While some psychoanalytically based conflict-resolution approaches use the focus-group format to simulate the healing function of the therapy setting this book demonstrates that the gaining of conscious insight into ones role deviationmdasha prerequisite for policy changemdashcan come about through real-life international interaction that requires neither a skilled conflict practitioner nor the willingness of elites to participate in such an exercise Rather under certain conditions role conflict can prompt domestic and international elements to hold a mirror to the face of elites resulting in a collective cognitive dissonance that can lead to policy change This mirror can take a number of formsmdashacts of protest by domestic groups media coverage and actions by allies adversaries or international structures These sources will be discussed further

IR SPECIFIC ndash What their internal links consider to be ldquoself-interestrdquo for a state doesnrsquot actually exist States are not sentient Instead they are composed by a collection of minds that act in self-interest which means that psychoanalytic evaluation of the self is a prior question to understanding the interests of the state Sucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 21-22)

Rather than referring to a notion of collective selfhood that is shared by multiple states- as some constructivist theorists of collective identity would maintainmdashthe title of this book the international self is meant to suggest not only that each state possesses a distinctive identity but that this identity develops out of the states relationship with other international actors This concept also implies that decisions emanating from the polity are derived from a process not simply the sum of the states parts Yet while we have already shown that psychoanalysis can accommodate a role for environmental processes in shaping behavior we still need to be aware of the risks of anthropomorphizing the state a practice that gets to the heart of the debate between two analytical positions that cut across the social sciences methodological individualism and holism While methodological individualism views social life as the product of actions taken by individuals holism understands the group to be a meaningful unit in and of itself Yet to an extent the debate between the two perspectives is already fixed While the holists have in their favor a precedent of semantic habitmdash we tend to anthropomorphize the state in everyday speech more often than not (eg Washington decided to wage war against al-Qaeda)mdashmethodological individualism is allied with the rich literature of rational choice and more prosaically the commonsense discomfort that arises when we ascribe human characteristics to things including groups Groups do not have minds any more than do other social facts and group behavior is after all the product of individuals acting on the groups behalf Finally given the presence of disparate individuals and subgroups constituting any society it can be misleading to attribute a single group consciousness to a political entity In a foreign-policy context accordingly adherents of this view would focus on elite attitudes bureaucratic politics andor interest group activities to tease out the causal relationship between Intentions and outcomes Yet a strong case can be made for the emergent properties of states and their policy processes something happens between the point at which citizens articulate preferences and those preferences are translated into policies Insofar as elite decisions do not always reflect the opinion of the majority there remains some degree of independent agency that may very well accrue to the state as a whole Under this reasoning it would be plausible to assert the existence of an overarching group self as Alexander Wendt does when he claims that states are people too In addition to the views of significant strands of psychoanalytic thought (which would not necessarily be expected to assume that units other than the individual can be psychoanalyzed) the idea of a group self enjoys far-reaching support across the social sciencesmdashinternational relations included This includes neorealisms assumption that the state is a unitary actor the Collective self hood implied by social identity theory the concept of political culture early psychoanalytic assumptions about the group as well as studies on obedience group-think and the crowd phenomenon There is a reason why scholars are drawn to the group as a unit of analysismdashwitness anthropologists concern with tribes and civilizations sociologists focus on street gangs and societies and political scientists emphasis on states and

transnational actors Group behavior and individual behavior are not necessarily identical Nor can an individual be expected to behave the same way in the context of a group as he or she would alone Moreover constructivism goes so far as to assume the possibility of shared norms across states a claim that has enjoyed much empirical support during the first active decade of constructivist research It is much more defensible to argue the existence of a collective identity within a state the boundaries of which contain degrees of centralized media language and other discursive channels for cultural dissemination and which prescribe the roles that the groups members are expected to perform within the context of that group And if different subgroups within the state disseminate disparate narratives we can assume that the most dominant group within society (as defined by some combination of ethnicity class or gender) has custody over a single consequential dominant narrative Finally even if we choose to ascribe a states national ethos to its elites we need to remember that state leaders are the product of the society in which they were reared This view would effectively mitigate the tension between elite- and mass-level phenomena in international relations since both elites and masses are socialized by the overarching structure of the collective

A2 ndash DisadvantagesThe internal linkrsquos dependence on rationality only serves to protect us from the unknown that the future holds This ultimately reduces all forms of knowledge to something that can be calculated which ensures violence The only way to reverse this trend is to force a confrontation with tragedy and the unknownDavis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg51-52)

Emotional The innermost need of human beings is to feel good about themselves Whatever threatens that feeling must be exorcised Health normalcy and productivity depend on avoiding negative feelings Hope and optimism arent just healthy attitudes they are requirements of our nature Biologically wired We cannot remain for long in trauma Recovery moreover must restore our faith in the guarantees and our hopes for the future The need for hope is In fact the capstone of the entire system of guarantees Yet it too apparently has a history Today over 10 million of our children are on prescription drugs to prevent depression and anxiety Informed of this fact by Bill Maher the French actress Julie Delphy spoke the spontaneous wisdom of an archaic culture Dont they know that depression is a good thing that its something you have to go through in order to grow Not anymoreThe key to understanding the power of the guarantees is to understand the fears that they exorcise Thanks to religion death suffering and evil are deprived of their power Through the attainment of reason all other forms of consciousness and what they might reveal are put in their place Poetic knowing is deprived both of its legitimacy and its terror Science as fulfillment of reason assures us of domination over nature What Heidegger termed technoscientific rationality becomes the measure of what is real Belief in historical progress banishes the recurrent suspicion that history may lack direction or even worse move to the darkest of ends The condition is thereby set that makes it impossible for us to experience traumatic events such as 9-11 except as occasions to take whatever actions are needed to reaffirm our goodness and restore our guarantees It is in the personal order however that the guarantees do their deepest work Psychologically belief in the self or self-identity exorcises the most frightening contingency that there is a void at the center of the American psyche with panic anxiety and its corollary compulsive consumption the expression of a desperate non-identity That specter brings us before the greatest fear that our psyche not our conscious deliberative intentions is the author of our actions an author who will do anything in order to feel safe secure and righteous All of our emotional needs then stand forth under the rule of a single necessity the need to feel good about oneself at whatever cost and to sustain hope by banishing anything that would trouble us Resolution catharsis (ie the discharge of painful tensions or awareness) and renewal emerge as the needs that bind us with an iron necessity to the guarantees and all that they make it impossible for us to know It is easy to deprecate Dubya and apparently to hold onto the idea that hes a temporary aberration But the problem goes deeper To revive a battle cry from the 1960s insofar as one is wedded to any one of the guarantees one is part of the problem and not the solution For the grandest function of the system of guarantees as a whole and in each one of its parts is to blind us to historyAnd so to take up again the question stated previously how did the situation now being created in Iraq come about The next three sections constitute an attempt to answer that question by constructing for America a repressed history

The negative is attempting to apply reason to ethics and psychology This only creates a hard understanding of our inner psyche which is a loss of the self that outweighs every other impact Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg174-175)

This recognition implies a primary question What is the nature and extent of the ethical responsibility human beings have for such a condition To what extent can evil and the actions that flow from it be said to be chosen in the exercise of a freedom for which one bears ethical responsibility Traditionally ethical responsibility only applies to actions that are taken after deliberation and with full knowledge of the consequences actions where choice is a function of our ability to reason where the moral law is known and where one chooses to violate it for motives that can be specified as functions of a self- interest that overrides all other motives and considerations Mitigate any of these factors and one mitigates ethical responsibility Ethical responsibility is compromised or eliminated for example if ones action is determined by forces outside ones control if one acts without premeditation under duress in blind obedience to customs or authorities as the result of a pathology because of some limitation in the ability to think or to understand the consequences of ones action or because one acted without any conscious intention to do wrong However deplorable their deeds the mad for example are not evil Evil requires consciousness choice freedom If evil is to be a human possibility on a par with the possibility of goodness it must be something that is determined within the order of freedom The trouble with the traditional understanding of these conditions however is the effort to confine them within the limits of rationalism and a purely cognitive model of the mind Rationality is noble but single-minded devotion to it leaves the true life of the psyche undetected Focusing on it prematurely shifts discussion to a rarefied mode of mentation that is then cut off from the rest of the personality To sustain and deny that split reason is then given disproportionate weight in determining what we are and do But the dream of reason is precisely that A dream a desiremdashto bring ones being into correspondence with reason and thereby eliminate everything else especially in determining the questions of ethics No one brought this dream to bear on moral experience more rigorously than Immanuel Kant That effort is the sublime beauty of his thought But experiencing oneself in terms of a priori rationality comes at a terrible cost Life becomes a process in which we sleepwalk our way through most of what we do because weve cut ourselves off from the actual bases of our actions Our psyche becomes a stranger to us We fixate on giving rational accounts of ourselves and in the process alienate ourselves from everything else Emotions become irrationalities breaks with reason things we must overcome or worse things we can only acknowledge when they are good proper and in tune with reason The rest of our being becomes brute inclinations frailties of our nature desires that disrupt an otherwise rational identity As a result in terms of ethics whether we know it or not under the guise of reason weve made an offer that most human beings cannot refuse Claiming not to consciously intend what one does has become the grand excuse Traditional definitions of the three cardinal categories of ethics are a monument to that motive Restricting intention motive and choice to the canons of rationality fashions them to the designs of human mendacity For if by intention we mean a deliberate rational choice with full knowledge of the consequences evil as Ive described it is not chosen If along the same lines we restrict motive lo purposes for which we bear responsibility because they issue not from frailties of our nature or the force of circumstances but from an explicit knowledge of what one is doing and why evil as thus far described does not exist within the order of human motivation One can identify self-interest careerism and happiness as motives but to say that many agents act in order to advance Thanatos is hard to fathom Unless that is we expand the category of motive to include purposes that derive from the psyche in all its inherent conflictedness But once posit such a possibility choice becomes a concept that must be rethought in a radically new way

Their internal links are symptoms of the fantasy that we strive to maintain This logic becomes used to justify atrocity The affirmativersquos rejection of attempting to control the future allows alternate practices to emerge Vote affirmative to traverse the fantasy of their internal link chains Even if you donrsquot think we can solve the 1AC is a more productive through experiment than their disad Davis 2006(Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg63-65)

Is there anything more evil than shooting children in a school yard or flying planes into buildings One hears this rhetorical question often today Getting it firmly implanted in our minds seems to be one of the current ideological functions of the media A correct response requires careful reflection on the circumstance that underlies the knee-jerk response thanks to the power of the image it conjures up The promise inherent in Technoscientificrationality is deliverance from images Killing for it like everything else occurs at a distance In the inaugural moment Tibbets in the cockpit of the Enola Gay unable to imagine what he has just done as a human act It was all impersonal12 And today in the silent secret midnight ways that radiation poisoning works from within like a deed without a doer separated in space and time from its absent cause Perhaps killing at a distance is the greater evil precisely because it abrogates the image and the human connection between slayer and slain If I kill another man with my bare hands my deed is immediate to my embodied consciousness To kill that way you have to feel hate fear anguish remorse etc whereas to kill from a distance or through an invisible contamination is to render the whole thing impersonal With the desired result the ability for example of the man who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima incinerating 600000 people in a second and condemning another 300000 to the condition of hibakusha the walking dead to boast for over 59 years now that he has never felt a moment of regret or remorse Tibbets lack of moral imagination is one with his representative status as precursor For now its easy to litter a landscape with DU while denying that the stuff has any long-term medical or environmental effects13 The evil of killing at a distance is that it makes death unreal Protected from the image all who participate in the deed are delivered over to a pure and impersonal calculus (An aside if we really want to support our troops we must achieve for them a new Bill of Rights No one should ever be ordered to use weapons without being given a full knowledge of the long-term human and environmental consequences of those weapons To do otherwise is to deprive our soldiers of the choice that makes them human) The powers that be learned one lesson from Vietnam No more images The mistake was to let us see the carnage up close every night on TV The news as image entered our consciousness at the register where genuine change begins Where horror is felt free of the tyranny of the concept and the hypnotic power of the guarantees Desert Storm was the corrective the Nintendo war a war broadcast to look just like one of the video games wed been programmed to love Prohibition of the image is now a fundamental article of faith No images are allowed to come back to us from Iraq II (Michael Moores real crime was to give us a brief glimpse at what the mainstream media proscribe) Abolition of the image is one of the primary conditions of ecocide Everything must be rendered abstract invisible unreal No image can be allowed to trouble our sleep to lacerate our soul For then we might begin to know that there is indeed an evil far worse than shooting children in schoolyards or flying airplanes into buildings To move us toward that knowledge let me end with the forbidden which I must here attempt to convey solely through the more abstract medium of words since Ive not yet gained permission to reproduce a photograph I saw not long ago Its the picture of an Iraqi baby a victim of DU who was born with no nose mouth eyes

anus or genitals and with flipper limbs a common result of radiation exposure in utero That childs body full of red open ulcers is twisted in knots its ulcerated face contorted in a look of unspeakable suffering An authentic image of the sacredness of human life Of the preciousness of every breath To look at that child is to realize ones duty to mourn it to give voice to its right to invade Our consciousness and expose the evil of those who prate on about being pro-life while refusing to let us see what theyve reduced life to Luke 171-2 The image of that child must become the force in our minds that motivates us to deracinate all guarantees that shield us from the reality of that childs situation Or to put it another way every time one demands catharsis resolution and renewal that child is born again condemned to its writhing That is why its image must embolden us to question the most hallowed of the guarantees the one Ive refrained from discussing until now In the face of such evil what is to be done Is resistance ever justified in resorting to violence No we are told because if we do so we become just like them This ethical principle supposedly applies universally and atemporally It does so however because it assures t he guarantee that no matter what happens well never get our hands dirty History cant intrude on the categorical imperative Whatever action one takes one must maintain ones ethical purity Even if that means there is nothing one can do and after its been demonstrated I hat there are no non-violent ways to change the situation Perhaps we can no longer allow ourselves the luxury of such an ethic Bush did the moral imagination one favor His pre-emptive unilateralism made official what has been clear for so long but denied due to its implications There is no body to which we can turn for Justice not the UN the World Court or any other framework of international law The US will flaunt its contempt for such bodies whenever it suits its purpose And thus another mode of peaceful non-violent praxis is deprived of its guarantee

A2 ndash CounterplansTheir counterplan still attempts to maintain some type of guarantee for the future Their obsession with security and the future fail to force a confrontation with the trauma of the unknown - this means that only the aff can solve Anything else results in a return to the ideology of security Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg38-39)

But to undertake that task we must purge ourselves of the thing in ourselves that stands in the way I have termed it the guarantees By that term I refer to all those assurances we set up a priori to protect ourselves from the reality of historical trauma The significance of eventsmdashthe Shoah Hiroshima 9-11mdash is their power to call such guarantees into question by exposing cherished beliefs to the claims of darker views and by forcing us to think in radically new ways considering things about the human being that weve persistently denied or marginalized One dimension of any traumatic event is the shock it brings to traditional ways of thinking Thats why the dominant response to any historical trauma is the attempt to restore the guarantees by finding a way t o impose them on the event in order to contain and interpret it The ideological function of the guarantee is thereby demonstrated A way has been found to limit the impact of the event by picturing it as an aberration a temporary departure from values and beliefs that can always be recovered because they constitute something essentialistic or universal about human nature Something trans-historical History may disrupt our essence but it cannot destroy it The concept of human naturemdashin all t h e variants constituting the philosophic and psychological history of that idea from Plato and Aristotle through American self psychologymdashis the primary way in which we endeavor to deny history An event is traumatic precisely because it suggests that history occurs beyond the limits we want to impose on it and therefore may move in directions that have nothing to do with human nature or the cherished beliefs and values we derive from that concept Events put us as subjectsmdashand as thinkersmdash into a traumatic relationship to both ourselves and our world The anxiety at the center of thought is revealed Ideologists rush in to fill that void and restore the guarantees Our effort must be t o do the opposite and thereby sustain the vital possibility implicit in an event That possibility is to sustain a break with the guarantees and thereby find for history a radically different way of thinking To put it concretely a trauma cannot be resolved until its been constituted The Western Logos is a monument to t he effort to avoid t h a t task indeed to render it impossible a priori To reverse that tradition the things above all we must rid ourselves of are the desire and demand for resolution The recycling of the guarantees must give way to a n existentializing imperative to constitute and work within trauma in a way that addresses the psyche at the same register as Gibson and Abu Ghraib do by creating images symbolic actions and emotions that are of equal depth but that move us in an antithetical directionmdashtoward the inner transformation needed to purge ourselves of Thanatos Such an effort however cannot itself be yet another variant of the guarantees as happens when Love and Eros are posited as ahistorical values If anything the possibility of Love is far more difficult and exacting than death because it can only arise by reversing the prior force that death has within us The following two sections offer a brief picture of the kind of agonistic process such an effort entails in order to whet our appetite for something that should by now be evident The critique of ideology cannot be a merely intellectual exercise It must be the activation within our psyche of a countervailing drama

Any risk of ldquosolvencyrdquo for the counterplan is a reason to vote aff because it is an attempt to guarantee the future by pre-emptive action Even claims of a ldquonet-benefitrdquo are a link to the affirmative criticism Only the aff forcibly confronts the unknownDavis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg51-52)

Emotional The innermost need of human beings is to feel good about themselves Whatever threatens that feeling must be exorcised Health normalcy and productivity depend on avoiding negative feelings Hope and optimism arent just healthy attitudes they are requirements of our nature Biologically wired We cannot remain for long in trauma Recovery moreover must restore our faith in the guarantees and our hopes for the future The need for hope is In fact the capstone of the entire system of guarantees Yet it too apparently has a history Today over 10 million of our children are on prescription drugs to prevent depression and anxiety Informed of this fact by Bill Maher the French actress Julie Delphy spoke the spontaneous wisdom of an archaic culture Dont they know that depression is a good thing that its something you have to go through in order to grow Not anymore The key to understanding the power of the guarantees is to understand the fears that they exorcise Thanks to religion death suffering and evil are deprived of their power Through the attainment of reason all other forms of consciousness and what they might reveal are put in their place Poetic knowing is deprived both of its legitimacy and its terror Science as fulfillment of reason assures us of domination over nature What Heidegger termed technoscientific rationality becomes the measure of what is real Belief in historical progress banishes the recurrent suspicion that history may lack direction or even worse move to the darkest of ends The condition is thereby set that makes it impossible for us to experience traumatic events such as 9-11 except as occasions to take whatever actions are needed to reaffirm our goodness and restore our guarantees It is in the personal order however that the guarantees do their deepest work Psychologically belief in the self or self-identity exorcises the most frightening contingency that there is a void at the center of the American psyche with panic anxiety and its corollary compulsive consumption the expression of a desperate non-identity That specter brings us before the greatest fear that our psyche not our conscious deliberative intentions is the author of our actions an author who will do anything in order to feel safe secure and righteous All of our emotional needs then stand forth under the rule of a single necessity the need to feel good about oneself at whatever cost and to sustain hope by banishing anything that would trouble us Resolution catharsis (ie the discharge of painful tensions or awareness) and renewal emerge as the needs that bind us with an iron necessity to the guarantees and all that they make it impossible for us to know It is easy to deprecate Dubya and apparently to hold onto the idea that hes a temporary aberration But the problem goes deeper To revive a battle cry from the 1960s insofar as one is wedded to any one of the guarantees one is part of the problem and not the solution For the grandest function of the system of guarantees as a whole and in each one of its parts is to blind us to history And so to take up again the question stated previously how did the situation now being created in Iraq come about The next three sections constitute an attempt to answer that question by constructing for America a repressed history

Any net benefit to the counterplan links to the criticism of the affirmative and is a reason that the counterplan cannot solve the affirmative We must confront the unknown to solve Davis 2001Watler A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative Pg 38-39

One upshoot of that act is a recovery of the dialectic of Eros and Thanatos as a way of thinking about history In anticipation of later developments (chapter 4 part 2) I only present the basic lines of this idea here The depth-charge sounded by an Event is its ability to reveal that the relationship of Eros and Thanatos is not eternal but historical to the core with the end of that dialectic entailing the possible extinction of one of the terms This is the spectre Freud exorcized by establishing a dualistic way of conceptualizing the two categories The alternative is an immanent dialectic one where history as contingency subjects everything to irreversible change with Thanatos a force in culture dedicated to the extinction of Eros and with the power to bring about that closure to the eternal dialectic Traumatic events constitute an abrupt and painful reversal of the eternal dialectic because in them we fund Eros deprived of all assurances Contra Freud there is nothing universal biological or ahistorical about the eternal battle Both terms are fully implicated in history caught up in processes Capable of producing irreversible transformations Forces in the psyche opposed to life which we have persistently marginalized in proclaiming our humanism rise up in the Event to challenge all we believe about human nature and history Rather than a world grounded in love the primacy of goodness in human nature the achievement of rationality and the ameliorative virtues of the social process the Event reveals a world in which envy and hate stalk life seeking a final solution that can only come with the extinction of the antagonist After such knowledge we can never begin again cleansed of history restored through its narration to some essential humanistic identity with all our fundamental beliefs in essential goodness reaffirmed Eros again pristine and empowered Feeling the pressure of death as it weighs upon and works within us becomes the gauge that measures the depth of our participation in history The Event rends all the masks that enable us to conceive evil as an aberrance Existential contingency unseats all essentializing views of human nature revealing historicity as a process in which Thanatos may be the drive informing the reality principle There is nothing in human nature that protects us from this eventuality Positing an essential and always recoverable nature outside history is not the solution but part of the problem the way we blind ourselves a priori to our situation

Only a complete withdrawal from psychological guarantees can force us to confront trauma The counterplanrsquos insistence that there is something tangible that can be manipulated or solved for is a link Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg38-39)

But to undertake that task we must purge ourselves of the thing in ourselves that stands in the way I have termed it the guarantees By that term I refer to all those assurances we set up a priori to protect ourselves from the reality of historical trauma The significance of eventsmdashthe Shoah Hiroshima 9-11mdash is their power to call such guarantees into question by exposing cherished beliefs to the claims of darker views and by forcing us to think in radically new ways considering things about the human being that weve persistently denied or marginalized One dimension of any traumatic event is the shock it brings

to traditional ways of thinking Thats why the dominant response to any historical trauma is the attempt to restore the guarantees by finding a way t o impose them on the event in order to contain and interpret it The ideological function of the guarantee is thereby demonstrated A way has been found to limit the impact of the event by picturing it as an aberration a temporary departure from values and beliefs that can always be recovered because they constitute something essentialistic or universal about human nature Something trans-historical History may disrupt our essence but it cannot destroy it The concept of human naturemdashin all t h e variants constituting the philosophic and psychological history of that idea from Plato and Aristotle through American self psychologymdashis the primary way in which we endeavor to deny history An event is traumatic precisely because it suggests that history occurs beyond the limits we want to impose on it and therefore may move in directions that have nothing to do with human nature or the cherished beliefs and values we derive from that concept Events put us as subjectsmdashand as thinkersmdash into a traumatic relationship to both ourselves and our world The anxiety at the center of thought is revealed Ideologists rush in to fill that void and restore the guarantees Our effort must be t o do the opposite and thereby sustain the vital possibility implicit in an event That possibility is to sustain a break with the guarantees and thereby find for history a radically different way of thinking To put it concretely a trauma cannot be resolved until its been constituted The Western Logos is a monument to t he effort to avoid t h a t task indeed to render it impossible a priori To reverse that tradition the things above all we must rid ourselves of are the desire and demand for resolution The recycling of the guarantees must give way to a n existentializing imperative to constitute and work within trauma in a way that addresses the psyche at the same register as Gibson and Abu Ghraib do by creating images symbolic actions and emotions that are of equal depth but that move us in an antithetical directionmdashtoward the inner transformation needed to purge ourselves of Thanatos Such an effort however cannot itself be yet another variant of the guarantees as happens when Love and Eros are posited as ahistorical values If anything the possibility of Love is far more difficult and exacting than death because it can only arise by reversing the prior force that death has within us The following two sections offer a brief picture of the kind of agonistic process such an effort entails in order to whet our appetite for something that should by now be evident The critique of ideology cannot be a merely intellectual exercise It must be the activation within our psyche of a countervailing drama

A2 ndash KritiksOur ethics come first -- Discovery of the unconscious is crucial to the recognition of responsibility by every subject- only our framework opens space for agency and recognition of our choices- our ethics are crucial to understand the historical contingencies that make up the status quo and open space for change Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg182-185)

Freud discovered more than the Unconscious He discovered our responsibility for it for becoming aware of how what we repress rules our life and therefore our duty to gain knowledge of our unconscious as the precondition for becoming an ethically responsible agent In terms of ethics theres a quick way to summarize the significance of the Unconscious What we dont know about ourselves is what we domdashto the other In calling us to such a reflection on ourselves Freud also taught us a new way to reflect one that forces us to move beyond the rational world of conscious deliberations and intentions Once make the psychoanalytic turn and the sources of self-knowledge increase exponentially Every time one understands a dream a paraphraxis an aesthetic experience a fantasy one suffers in principle a revolution in ones life For such experiences put one in touch with the deep conflicts that define the psyche A dream for example does not tell us about something outside the realm of our conscious grasp though this view of repression typifies how a convenient misunderstanding blunts the force of psychoanalysis A good dream reveals the desires and conflicts structuring our life It thereby opens our quotidian life to an in-depth exploration Listen to a dream rightly and one finds that one must confront something one has been avoidingmdashor doing Such is what it would mean to assume responsibility for ones dreams One would start to live from an awareness of ones psyche rather than in a continued attempt to escape that awareness Freud doesnt abolish intention he expands it by showing how often consciousness is defense mechanism and rationality the cover that conceals the actual motives on which we act and how often accordingly insistence on conscious intentions is the lie we cling to in order to deny our responsibility The seductive or prohibitive way of relating that a parent adopts toward a child for example may carry as its primary repressed intention the desire to wound that child in their sexuality This is why its so necessary at a later point in time for such parents to deny that they ever harbored let alone acted on such an intention And yet our actions do indeed speak louder than words in conveying our actual intentions Action is concrete intentionality because it is through it that we live out our feelings desires and conflicts And they are what the other invariably receives as a message that is often sharply different from what we say especially when through the exercise of intentionality we reassure ourselves about what good loving human beings we are The psyche is a lonely hunter avid in the pursuit of purposes it carefully conceals from itself The ethical greatness of Sigmund Freud is the crisis he introduced into that practice Rather than getting us off the hook psychoanalysis sticks it far deeper in us than any previous ethic Intentionality is convenient because it absolves us of the greatest responsibilitymdashresponsibility for who we are Everything stays in the safely guarded space of deliberative discursive quasi-judicial rationality as if this were the primary way we relate to ourselves or to turn the screw a peg further as if when we arent relating to ourselves this way we arent fully moral agents fully responsible for our actions But once let responsibility expand into the inner life of the psyche and we take on a new ethical burden to know oneself in depth and not recoil in horror from what one learns or persist in virtuous denial of the hidden motives one must confront in order to become responsible for ones psyche Indeed deliberation is itself transformed by l he psychoanalytic turn Freud shows that to deliberate correctly one must focus the inquiry on those motives that one tries to conceal from oneself since they are where the truth of ones conduct may lie

In terms of the problem of evil this line of thought has an obvious implication Our primary responsibility which we continually shirk is to find the evil in ourselves Theoretically and emotionally the same thing prevents that discovery the desire to uphold the idea that human nature is inherently or basically good with evil an aberration a fall a break with the natural order of things an exception to the rule of human decency Psychoanalysis like history renders such sentiments questionable at best And irrelevant to where inquiry must beginmdashwith psychological conflict the primary fact that defines us To be human is to live denned by wounds and disorders that are prior to the mediations (themselves rare) that result in a moral character that can be termed good Goodness is not something essentialistically guaranteed in a nature its an achievement that comes through the overcoming of ways of being that have a foothold in us long before some human beings take up the effort to reverse them Psychoanalysis from this point of view is neither pessimistic nor relativistic It is humanistic in the deepest way seeing the human as an achievement and valuing it by demonstrating what that achievement requires Psychoanalysis doesnt point to ethical relativism It points instead to an order of rank among human beings based on the degree to which a knowledge of ones psyche has become the basis of ones actions Ethically to know ones psyche is of necessity to engage in an effort to transform it since inner change is the only way to halt the projection of what otherwise does harm to others Psychological change is the primary task ethics the result

Their alternative misses the point In lieu of a criticism of the affirmative it is a much better act to internalize our anxiety and explore the effects within the psyche This allows us an uncastrated interaction with reality Davis 2001Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative pg xviii-xix

Virginia Woolf said that in or about December 1910 human nature changed She would have recorded a similar shock in August of 1945 The change Woolf witnessed has now of course been safely domesticated and has a local habitation and a name modernism The second change also has a namemdashpostmodernismmdashbut the ideologies most closely associated with its development remain mired in the first moment of an arrested dialectic12 Irony and aporia dominate the postmodern sensibility because its considerable energies are devoted to a displacement of the Event that remains at the center of our collective historical Unconsciousmdashthe referent that serves as the motive behind the denial of reference Reference must be continually deferred then rendered impossible because anxiety and flight from that anxiety define our actual response to the one referent that will continue to weigh on our consciousness until we restore the proper dialectical direction and move from the delights of skeptical play to a recovery of the demands of unhappy consciousness Einstein said the Bomb changed everythingmdashexcept the ways we think As such it is the inwardness of our inwardness never more so perhaps than when we use deconstructive irony as the master trope that delivers us from the burden of a historically situated subjectivity or at that opposite extreme that amounts to the same thing when we reassert an essentialist humanism as the fixed and universal system of understanding and explanation that washes us clean of history and its contingencies What if we broke with both strategiesmdashand rather than deconstructing the Bomb or containing it we tried to internalize it and then trace the ways it explodes and implodes within the psyche Such an effort would take as its goal a reconstitution of the tragic as the dialectical category that provides the only adequate idea for comprehendingmdashand existingmdashin the present Such a humanism however confronts as its prior and primary task a deracination of the system of guarantees on which previous humanisms have depended For the function of that system with respect to history has been to establish as canons of research and explanation a set of essentialistic concepts of meaning logic and human nature that function to insulate historians and their

audiences so that horror can never be more than the temporary aberration from which we always of necessity recover The narration of History thereby becomes yet another occasion for deployingmdashand thereby reinforcingmdashthe central beliefs and Values of the humanistic tradition That tradition thus provides the ego or identity-principle that we (the community of humanistic interpreters) move from and to in dealing with events that challenge our certainties13 We love to read and write histories because such stories tell us who we already know we are while conveniently exorcizing the threat of those accounts that would hold up a different mirror to our nature History is indeed a fiction the corpse over which we warm ourselves so that we may rise cleansed catharted the system of needs beliefs and guarantees restoredmdashwith existence the self-reference perpetually deferred What if instead we approached history as a realitymdashand a disciplinemdash in which we must risk ourselves utterly One in which to know is to suffer irreversible change in ones beliefs values and even in ones identity with nothing in the logos of thought able to protect us from that possibility The reign of the a priori would thereby come to an end the principle of hope a category wed risk not one wed need to renew at whatever cost Could such an engagement constitute the true force and signification of Hiroshima16 and thereby evidence that events in history are the true Absolute that abide with usmdashthe gift of the past to the future as that call of conscience requiring of us no less than a fundamentally new understanding of the human psyche and the human condition

The permutation solves ndash psychoanalytical evaluation of our anxiety and our reliance on stability and security are prior questions to the alternative and the framework of the criticism The alternative is still castrated by desire which means that it does not access proper historical contextDavis 2006Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative pg 1-3

In August 1945 Elias Canetti writes the following in his journal A tormenting thought as of a certain point history was no longer real Without noticing it all mankind suddenly left reality everything happening since then was supposedly not true but we supposedly didnt notice Our task would now be to find that point and as long as we didnt have it we would be forced to abide in our present destruction1 What Canetti cant see is that the point he refers to is the one he inhabits He cant see it because it is too close and blinds him (as it would soon the inhabitants of two cities) with a light not of this world The proliferation of new theories of history in recent decades is itself a response to a historical situationmdashthat defined by the Bomb That connection is also what these theories cannot know about themselves and ceaselessly displace in teaching us all the new ways we can know and write about the past What they do know is that the assumptions and guarantees on which historians have traditionally relied in constituting their subject and the needs that histories fulfill in offering us an account of events structured by these guarantees are no longer adequate to a contemporary awareness of history and historicity2 To cite the major developments (though in no necessary order of importance)3 1 Foucaults concept of genealogical history and the archeology of knowledge and its creative extension in the new historicist methodologies developed by Stephen Greenblatt and his circle 2 The hermeneutic theories of history and historical explanation developed by Gadamer Habermas and Ricoeur with special note given to Ricoeurs development of a complex theory of time and narrative 3 Derridas recent work on Marx and Benjamin and his continuing effort to expose the Hegelian assumptions about history progress and the logos which structure the way history is narrated by historians who know little or nothing of Hegel 4 Althusser Sartre Gramsci and the many often sharply opposed approaches to history developed in recent years by Marxists as different as Frederic Jameson G A Cohen Perry Anderson and Stuart Hall 5 The recovery of Kants speculations on history and its recent extension in Lyotards theory of the differend 6 The attempts by Slavoj Zizek Joan Copjec and Teresa Brennan to articulate the theory of history implicit in Lacan 7 The massive significance of Walter Benjamins speculations the continued vitality of Adorno and the Frankfurt school and the renewed interest in the thought of Kenneth Burke 8 The work of Louis O Mink Hayden White Dominick LaCapra Roy Schafer and others on the narrative and tropological principles that shape the writing of history To this list one can add Collingwood and McKeons earlier theorizing about history the work of Braudel Baudrillard deCerteau Calinescu and Bourdieu and the new modes of historical writing and historical investigation developed by anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz James Clifford and Natalie Zemon Davis The list is by no means complete because one must add to it two developments that may be of

greater significance and that complicate the issue of the historical I refer first to the number of alternative histories that have emerged in recent years thanks to feminist multicultural postcolonial subaltern and queer studies Such works have contributed more than new knowledge to our understanding of the past They have broken with the logic the procedures and the ruling assumptions of traditional historical methodologies by showing how that logic has as its primary function the exclusion (or marginalization) of voices that challenge its hegemony and the motives that inform its explanations Such studies are not merely of local interest They entail a theoretical crisis the recognition that the principles of historical explanation that we regard as true rational objective and universal are cultural conventional ideological and deeply implicated in power and the repressions required for its maintenance Ways of thinking derived from other cultures or voices silenced by the dominant culture may provide precisely the critical handle required to understand what is really at work in the privileging of certain canons of reasoning and explanation as scientific and objective and the rejection of other experiences and ways of thinking as illegitimate and unfounded The true bite of the multiculturalmdash seldom honored because it cuts in every directionmdashis the idea that none of us are locked into privileging our own culture and subject position(s) We can gain distance from our frameworks by immersing ourselves in other ways of thinking We can then use that experience to become aware of things that our culture and its dominant interest groups do not want to know about themselves The implication of such an orientation for history is considerable since historical explanation is perhaps the primary way in which a community establishes the structures of belief mind and feeling on which it depends in giving an identity to its members4 Thanks to the explosion of the multicultural we now have a way to internally distance ourselves from such beliefs and practices even perhaps following Nietzsche to touch all that goes without saying with the hammer as with a tuning fork

Case Stuff

War on Terror BadThe myth of effective security fosters a violent project that necessitates the creation of terrorists to be sacrificed on the altar of societyMcGowan 2013Associate Professor at the University of Vermont (Todd Enjoying What We Donrsquot Have Project Muse)

The fundamental barrier to the establishment of an authentic social bond is the resistance to avowing the traumatic nature of that bond We use the pleasure that accompanies the bombing of Afghanistan to disguise the shared enjoyment we experience through the traumatic experience of loss But this pleasure inevitably disappoints us and triggers the belief that someone has stolen the complete pleasure that we expected to experience This is why there can properly be no end to the War on Terror no end to the list of countries that the United States plans to invade to attain complete security no end to the number of terrorist leaders executed 31

Complete security like complete pleasure is mythical It attempts to bypass the one experience that cannot be bypassed mdash the foundational experience of loss mdash and it is this experience that holds the key to an authentic social bond The structure of society (which is the result of the structure of signification) is such that it blinds the subject to the possibility of shared sacrifice and the social bond that results from it No matter how often children hear the ideology of sharing or how many times we repeat to them the gospel of fairness they will inevitably believe that their sacrifice has enabled others to enjoy more than their proper share or unfairly

Loss of the SelfSurveillance devastates the gap between the Self and our informaticized bodies ndash the total knowledge it provides deprives one of the ability to function as a subject eradicating onersquos identity ndash this results in complete annihilationFriesen et al 2012 Dr Norm Friesen is Canada Research Chair in E-Learning Practices at Thompson Rivers University His academic credentials include a PhD in Education from the University of Alberta Andrew Feenberg School of Communication Simon Fraser University Grace Smith Arapiki Solutions Inc (Norm Friesen Andrew Feenberg Grace Smith and Shannon Lowe 2012 ldquoExperiencing Surveillancerdquo pp 82-83 (Re)Inventing The Internet httplinkspringercomchapter1010072F978-94-6091-734-9_4)

Students of surveillance have been so impressed by the ever-growing completeness of this data image that they animate it as though it were an actual person Identity is seen as coeval with an assemblage of traces rather than with actual presence Thus van der Ploeg writes of ldquothe

inability to distinguish between rsquothe body itselfrsquo and rsquobody informationrdquorsquo (van der Ploeg 2003 p 69) Haggerty and Ericson similarly write the surveillance assemblage standardizes the capture of fleshinformation flows of the human body It is not

so much immediately concerned with the direct physical relocation of the human body (although this may be an ultimate consequence)

but with transforming the body into pure information such that it can be rendered more mobile and comparable (Haggerty amp Ericson 2000 p 613) There is something right about this turn in surveillance theory and yet it is obvious that we are still able to distinguish the real person from the traces that person leaves behind The trace is bound to us by its origin and often by internal signs of various sorts so we do not quite leave it behind after all And yet we do not want to drag along every trace of our passage through life We count on the erasure of most traces It is this erasure that enables us to face the world afresh each day and to face it with a self-image we

construct at least partially anew for each new situation in which we find ourselves In existentialndashphenomenological terms privacy and secrecy are centrally constitutive of self and selfhood Holding something private or secret emphasizes the difference between self and other and confirms the autonomy of onersquos interiority and individuality ldquoSecrecy secures so to speak the possibility of a second world alongside of the obvious worldrdquo as Simmel (1906 p 462) puts it In contemporary conditions of surveillance and dataveillance subjectivity itself is dependent on maintaining the gap between our embodied selves and our informaticized bodies It would be intolerable for everyone to have full access to our salary the details of our relations to our family our medical histories sexual proclivities and so on Such knowledge would completely objectify us and force us to live up to (or down to) the image of ourselves implied in this knowledge Like Sartrersquos spy at the keyhole

himself espied we would be evacuated of those aspects of identity and interiority concealed within us frozen in the objectifying gaze of the other and essentially deprived of our ability to function as a subject We could no longer choose to project an identity appropriate to our inclination and situation as everything having to do with our identity would have been pre-empted Truly to be completely ldquooutedrdquo is to be annihilated

The gaze of surveillance invades and traps one psychologically rendering one enslavedVaz 1995 (Angelina Fall 1995 Dalhousie French Studies Vol 32 Mises en scegravene du regard (Fall 1995) pp 37-38 ldquoWhos Got the Look Sartres Gaze and Foucaults Panopticismrdquo JSTOR httpwwwjstororgstable40837004)

This grand formula is even applicable at the level of an encounter between two individuals where the theme of ldquosubjection by exposurerdquo is

dominant As Sartre says ldquobeing-seen constitutes me as a defenseless being for a freedom which is not my freedom [hellip] I am a slave to the degree that my being is dependent at my center of a freedom which is not mine and which is the very condition of my beingrdquo (Being p 358) In this sense the gaze does not just create and invade physical spaces there is a sense in which the gaze invades and traps me psychologically As a temporal-spatial object in the world being locked at forces me to apprehend myself as the

the contemporary war on terror The exemplary right-wing political formation Fascism has its basis in paranoia

seeing the Jew or some equivalent as secretly controlling the social order to the detriment of all law-abiding citizens The idea of an other operating behind the scenes serves to justify restrictions on civil liberties racism police violence and so on A paranoid populace is a populace ready to embrace a Fascist regime Despite the inherent link between paranoia and conservatism leftists employ paranoia to a vast extent far more than they do nostalgia Paranoid theories about the secret brokers of power who decide the fate of the capitalist world are widespread on the Left It is common sense among leftists that big oil companies have suppressed the development of alternative energies that the CIA assassinated Kennedy and that major drug companies control the Food and Drug Administration just to name a few of the more well known conspiracy theories The truth or falsity of these theories has nothing to do with their function for the subject who accepts them The paranoid subject is often correct in its various speculations but paranoia nonetheless provides a way for the subject to avoid confronting the inconsistency of social authority For the paranoid subject conspiracy theories dont simply explain a single event they solve the problem of the social order as such According to this thought process all loss stems from the conspiracy which has derailed the social order and upset its balance The paranoid subject cannot accept the necessity of loss and the conspiracy theory works to render loss empirical rather than ontological This is evident in Oliver Stones JFK (1991) a film in which Stone posits a vast conspiracy that resulted in the death of Kennedy Of course Stone is probably correct that this conspiracy existed but the film goes astray primarily through its apotheosis of Kennedy an apotheosis that reveals whats at stake in all paranoia According to the film had he remained in power Kennedy would have prevented the horror of the Vietnam War and thus spared the United States the psychic wound that this war created With Kennedy one can imagine an American social order existing without strife and loss The conspiracy theory allows Stone this image which testifies to the avoidability of loss But Stone is not the only leftist to turn to paranoia Many do so in order to confront forces that they otherwise couldnt identify Among those who suffer from political oppression paranoia and conspiracy theory serve as vehicles for thinking through systems of control and even mobilizing action against those systems As Peter Knight points out Conspiracy thinking has played an important role in constituting various forms of African American political and cultural activism38 When it directly produces activism the political valence of paranoia seems to tilt more clearly to the left than it does in the case of Stones film In Marxist Fredric Jameson focuses on a related aspect of paranoia as he analyzes the paranoid film in The Geopolitical Aesthetic In this work Jameson aligns conspiracy theory with what he calls cognitive mapping- the attempt to think the global capitalist system in its totality The diffuseness of global capitalism prevents the kind of cognitive mapping that was possible in earlier epochs Today in order to think the totality at all subjects must resort to the idea of a conspiracy As Jameson points out in his analysis of All the Presidentrsquos Men The map of conspiracy itself suggests the possibility of cognitive mapping as a whole and stands as its substitute and yet its allegory all at once40 Jamesons statement reflects his ambivalence about conspiracy theory and paranoia - even though it allegorizes cognitive mapping it also substitutes for it - but he nonetheless sees its usefulness as a strategy for the Left especially when facing the global capitalist leviathan

The problem is that even when it works to mobilize subjects to fight against an oppressive system paranoia has the effect of depriving subjects of their agency By eliminating the gap in social authority and filling in this gap with a real authority who effectively runs the show paranoia deprives subjects of the space in which they exist as subjects The subject occupies the position of the gap in social authority it emerges through and because of internal inconsistency in the social field of meaning The extent to which paranoia allows the subject to experience social authority as a consistent field is the extent to which it works against the subject itself Even if it manages tangible political victories emancipatory politics that relies on paranoia undermines itself by increasing the power of authority in the thinking of subjects and

decreasing their freedom Whats more it doesnt actually work Like nostalgia paranoia can never constitute a successful strategy for the subject dealing with its fundamental condition It will never provide the enjoyment that it promises the subject Uncovering and eliminating the hidden real authority will bring not the ultimate enjoyment but horrible disappointment This is why the paranoid mindset cannot admit to itself that the hidden other has been vanquished

The enjoyment that paranoia does provide requires the continuing existence of the threat even though it imagines an enjoyment that would come with the threats disappearance Paranoia runs aground due to its failure to admit the connection between enjoyment and loss It allows the subject to imagine that loss is the contingent result of a secret malevolent force that we might conquer By implicitly positing the avoidability of loss paranoia leaves subjects unable to locate and recognize the nature of their own enjoyment

This anxiety is the core problem of the psyche Our inability to come to terms with this void is a fate worse than death Our anxiety functions as the condition for the possibility of Hiroshima and Auschwitz In attempts to master this emptiness we project our weakness through conflict This projection provides us the unrestrained power to bombard the other with pure suffering and destruction in an attempt to control the contingencies that constitute existence Davis 2001Walter A Davis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative Pg 103-108

We begin with an effort to describe what is the deepest experiencemdashthe one most deeply denied Catastrophic anxiety is that fear that haunts us from within the fear that one has already been annihilated that like Beckett one has never been born properly and never will be because inner paralysis is the psyches defining conditionmdasha truth attested each time when lining to cohere as a subject one collapses before the tidal wave of an Regression against oneself that rises up from within An

unspeakable dread weds the psyche to terror All other forms of anxiety are pale after-thoughts There is a threat worse than extinction The deepest self-knowledge we harbor the knowledge that haunts us as perhaps our deepest

self-reference is the fear that our inner world is ruled by a force opposed to our being Death is the icy wind that blows through all we do This is the anxiety from which other anxieties derive as displacements delays and vain attempts to deny or attenuate our terror before a dread

that is nameless and must remain so lest despair finalize its hold on us In catastrophic anxiety the destruction of ones power to be and the ceaseless unraveling of all attempts to surmount this condition is experienced as an event that has already happened That event forms the first self-reference the negative judgment of an Other on ones beingmdashinternalized as self-undoing Postmodern posturing before the phrase I am an other here receives the concretization that shatters free play There is a wound at the heart of subjectivity a self-ulceration that incessantly bleeds itself out into the world The issue of the wound is a soul caked in ice in a despair that apparently cannot be

mediated the nightmare state of a consciousness utterly awake alone and arrested all exits barred facing inner paralysis as the truth of ones life We ceaselessly flee this experience because if it ever comes down full upon us an even more terrifying process begins an implosion in which ones subjective being is resolved into fragments of pure anxiety that leave one incapable of existing as subject except in the howl to which each suffered state descends in a final chilling recognitionmdashthat everything one has done and suffered is but sound and fury signifying nothing One has become a corpse with insomnia Identity and self-reference thereafter ceaselessly circle about that void This is the hour of the wolf where one is arrested before the primary fact at the deepest register of the psyche one finds a voice of terror Fear of psychic dissolution is the ground condition of our being as subjects Subjectivity is founded in anguish before the dread of becoming no more than bits and pieces of pure horror fleeing in panic a voice that has already overtaken us resolving our subjective being into traumatic episodes of pure persecution At the heart of inwardness a malevolent spirit presides To put it in nuclear metaphors catastrophic anxiety is the threat of implosion into the others unlimited destructiveness To complete the picture we need only add Winnicotts point people live in dread of this situation projecting fear of a breakdown into the future because the breakdown has already occurred

B Exorcism through Evacuation And so a crypt is built to contain this anguish and repress the experience that is its cause We organize a life of identities and stabilities to give ourselves the illusion of escape Unable to reverse our condition we take up the only alternative We try to evacuate the whole thing to blow it out into the world and invest it in objects that are fitted to receive the full brunt of ones discontent and powerless to reply Projection the egos priest is founded in identification with an internal aggressor That is the complex that informs the effort to lodge our disorders and forbidden desires in others so that we can wage an attack on our inner conflicts then watch the ensuing spectacle from a safe distance Evacuation thus finds in projection a prime agent of human perception and the secure base for the perpetual mutual defeat that Sartre finds in all concrete

relations with others Were always on the lookout for a chance to make someone else bear our discontents But its never enough Satisfaction eludes us We keep erupting bleeding from within in a leukemia of soul that rages whenever we see those who have in their daily lives a beauty that makes us uglyFor then the projections return with the force of the furies Envy and resentment erupt as the assault within our inner world of the truth of our charactermdasha truth we deny by reinvesting it externally This grows apace over the years and then we long for a listing deliverance a final solution in the dim recognition that when projection proceeds from the register of catastrophe it requires and longs for a grand exorcism What we seek incessantly is a total evacuation of all inner discord a complete and lasting externalization in an ideal victim one in whom all that haunts us will stay outside lodged in the world in what Hegel calls a standing negation9 Our need is for a subject who is destroyed and lives on proof of a sublime aggression sculpted in time The Bomb provides such

an opportunity The criteria required to exorcize catastrophic anxiety finds in it the conditions for expelling the most primitive anxieties in the perfect objective correlative The subject voids itself of its core

anxietymdashthe inability to reverse inner destructivenessmdashby becoming the power to destroy unbound raining judgment down on a mass of subjects who are indifferently bound together as fragments of pure suffering unable after that action to ever form any identity except as walking corpses hibakusha deadened affect delivered over to the condition of death-in-life10 Projection here succeeds because in that shattered mirror one sees oneself reflected as the equal

of the power within that originally proclaimed ones utter worthlessness Malign reversal has grown to the event All inner anxiety about ones power to be resolves itself in the power to act free of restraint We have become the thing we feared Its destructiveness is now ours and nothing else has being The Contradiction The SublimemdashFrom the Crypt The mediation

traced above is driven by a contradiction about which it circles endlessly That is what the sublime object of the ego-ratio reveals when read from its crypt Sublime action seeks an absolute reversal of catastrophic anxiety in the absolute affirmation of unshakable guarantees Catastrophe must be reversed because it is that experience of contingency that underlies the horror of contingency in all its forms the lone driving the search for the guarantees needed to contain it In

catastrophe contingency is the others will as unbounded unlimited destructiveness The threat of extinction is the restraint here placed on subject This restraint is prior to the dialectic of desire restrained and checked on which Hegel grounds his phenomenology Desire here isnt restrained and checkedmdashit is turned back against itself in torment The other requires my destruction for their pleasure and assures that end by colonizing the psyche with an aggression that renders impotent every effort to make a beginning a tentative move toward independence or self-cohesion There is no exit but one apparently identification with the aggressor I become a self by turning someone or something else into an object delivered over to the true golden rule do onto others what was once done onto you This logic maintains because catastrophic anxiety internalized is death-work as the self-

mediation whereby we enact the command of the Other The only way out the only way to finalize this process is evacuation through a lasting exorcism It alone confers on the psyche a certitude beyond all cogitos It is also the mediation that finds it in flight forward already in its primitive imaginary one with the Bomb In its inner world the catastrophic subject experiences itself as full of death disease corruption The Bomb alone has the power to cast all nuclear waste outside and beneath oneself in a way that indefinitely extends the temporality of that act Radiation disease is a death that works inwardmdashinvisibly yet inexorably Death thereby breeds itself forth into an indefinite future omnipresent in a working a differance that begets delayed effects as further insurance against Nachtraglichkeit The extension of deaths dominion attained in the Bomb serves one grand function to prevent the return of projections by extending the temporality of the deed into a future that is lived by its victims as a judgment that is inevitable irreversible the antithesis of Benjamins messianic time tickingmdasha plea to delay death that can only be answered by death The Bomb thus serves as felix culpa to

an inner necessity To do its job a sublime event must exorcize everything within the subject that makes it an object of its own contempt What better way than Orwells boot brought down in an act of splitting that magnifies the distance between the terror

on the ground and the view from above Catastrophe is now fully outside oneself located in an other who has become nothing but matter body become spectacle of pain frozen forever in charred sculptures strewn across a devastated landscape Laocoon Munched but with the Howl silenced and deferred until it erupts later from within the survivors in a semiosis that can only be read by the scientists who planted it there and have now come (as biopowerknowledge) to study their handiwork as it blooms and bursts from deep within the body of the hibakusha as further testimony of ones powerjouissance Evacuation is complete Death-work has been lodged securely in the Other In the hibakusha one gets to see ones Thanatos as a narrative principle a force in history One gets to see over time what it is like to live death Soul-murder as the innermost reality of the crypt produces and finds in the

hibakusha its dialectical image As the expressive figura of death incarnate a terrifying verveilledoch here attains its objective correlative To purge oneself of catastrophic anxiety an utterly dehumanized object is not enough Neither the Sartrean look nor the Nazi act suffice The disorder of the psyche is deeper prior to desire (Sartre) and demand (Nazism) The projection of death-work can never rest by simply investing ones self-contempt in another For evacuation to work the

object must become something one can study inspect perform operations upon Catastrophic anxiety is the a proiri that gives Auschwitz and Hiroshima their necessity in the genocidal imagination The Bomb constitutes an Event because the psyche

reverses its core conditionmdashits cardiac arrest in inner self-loathingmdashthrough a projection that is total and irreversible If the evacuation of trauma is the abiding motive atop the crypt there is nothing abstract or Lacanian about the Real that results from its projection Evacuation is that malevolent reversal that condemns one to endless repetition One blows ones self-hatred and ones rage over that state fully out into the world but is thereby rendered powerless to do anything but gape in rapt amazement at ones creation That is perhaps why for over fifty years now whenever given the opportunity Paul Tibbets has proudly repeated the declaration that he has not had a moments remorse or regret Death-work externalized leaves one a spent and reified subject lacking any power other than the endless repetition of ones deed The wheel thus comes full circle in the only justice granted such subjects When catastrophic anxiety is only mediated by death-work the affects that compose subjectivity are rent assunder and scattered in pockets of pure persecution With each attempt to compose an inner self-cohesion death-work as internal saboteur rises up in a renewed attack on the effort to be Using the Bomb to reverse this disorder produces as its result a perfect attic justice Guilt and remorse are denied the doers of the deed because to feel such things is to renew a process of self-unraveling What the Bomb was meant to deliver one from has become the guardian

of untroubled sleep With the call of conscience rendered impossible the subject becomes overtly psychotic and must cling ever more desperately to an untroubled memory of the sublime event The subject thereby pronounces without being able to comprehend or mediate it the truth about itself in the ravaged landscape of Hiroshima the founding inner world of the psychotic-a world of utter fragmentation and the obliteration of every term of reference-has finally found a home to which it must say stay thou art so fair a home in which nothing inhuman is unheimlich

The moralization of anxiety manifests itself in our inability confront evil To displace this anxiety we make ourselves ldquogoodrdquo to protect ourselves from danger Failure to confront this psychical conflict reifies the original trauma and makes the destruction of the self meaninglessDavis 2001Walter A Davis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative Pg 86-87

No wonder resistance becomes the key term in the first stage of the unfolding drama This time however Kant canrsquot shift everything onto a plane of conceptual defenses and controls Affect weighs too heavily Intermediate moves immanent within that register are required Opposing affects must be created and marshaled as a first line of defense For the first time in Kant rationalistic mediation gives way to dramatic self-mediation Kant will finally attempt an agon that moves solely within the medium of affect To resist psychic unraveling he must

establish a countervailing force within the order of affect itself For Kant however affective self-mediation is equivalent to bending everything in a moral direction In doing so the author of the ethic of pure duty gives us the true genealogy of morals

That dubious ascent begins once the force threatening destruction is characterized as ldquoevilrdquo Anxiety is thereby transformed into a moralizing fear that we lack the power to resist ldquoevilrdquo Moralizing then structures the subsequent discourse but without exorcizing the psychological subtext that will undercut it This contradiction is in fact what ethics will here reveal about itselfIn making ourselves ldquogoodrdquo subjects we make ourselves beings unworthy of destruction That

transformation also requires the resources of rhetoric since we must ldquopersuaderdquo a tough audience The true goal in remaking ourselves is to tame the power that threatens us by tapping its conscience To do so we create within ourselves a new agency one that recognizing our virtue promises protection We thereby create the illusion that the threatening force has been softened and then transformed into a voice that warmly supports the good intentions of the nascent ego The superego as ego-ideal has been created So ends the founding self-mediation in the genealogy of an ethical ration By staging this internal drama the psyche has taken the action within required to create the space needed to assert control over affect The necessary act follows ndash the attempt to affect a complete reversal of the psychersquos initial condition Kant asserts repeatedly that we can only judge the sublime and experience its proper ldquopleasurerdquo if we view things from ldquoa safe placerdquo But in the psyche as opposed to mind the safe place doesnrsquot exist a priori It has to be invented and with it the most revealing picture of the genesis of what we now call the ldquoegordquo It is a difficult birth to a dubious and troubled function The problem of the ego is one of generating a transformation from impotence to power within affect itself through an agon immanent to that register But Kant is unable to sustain such an agon We get instead a displacement toward concepts through a use of the defensive mechanism known as splitting Ego and inner world divide in an unbridgeable rift thus establishing this condition as the true ldquoidentityrdquo of the ego The ego is the effort to repress the conflicts in the psyche from which it derives But while displacement and intellectualization offer a handle the egorsquos work is far from done The continuing pressure of inner conflicts requires a further battle In that struggle moralizing interpretations do yeoman service by splitting the psychersquos original trauma into a longed-for reificationmdashthe opposition of the ego to the drives

We have become creatures full of instincts The crucial task of the aff is to open up the unconscious counter narrative to provide a mirror to reflect upon the presupposed American identitySucharov 2005Mira M Sucharov assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli Palestinian Peacerdquo Pg 27-28

Just as individuals and groups possess consciousness and an unconscious I argue that every society maintains not only a dominant (conscious) narrative but an unconscious counternarrative as well which

the former has in part arisen to conceal As the counternarrative represents the role that society most fears adopting it resides in the unconscious where it will not interfere with the day-to-day transmission and fulfillment of the dominant narratives and the dominant roles For instance a defensive states counternarrative would encapsulate the view that we are not only defensive but sometimes we can be aggressive 35 Narratives and counternarratives can coexist in two waysmdash either with the counternarrative being simply an unactualized fear or with the counternarrative corresponding to an actual role being enacted alongside the dominant role-identity Thus while an actor may consciously be aware of a counterrole that she abhors (eg the good student who avoids cheating on exams) the unconscious reminds us that the cheater is latent in the self-portfolio of the good student In the event that this student cheats radical change can only come about once the self has

been reconciled with its unconscious opposite Actors will not become aware of the divergence from their dominant identity without the aid of a mirror however Only with the help of outside forces drawing attention to the clash between the two narratives will elites experience a cognitive dissonance necessitating a realignment between actions and role-identity One of the most salient transmission belts for the creation of state narratives is collective memory Memorymdashactive or latent recall of things occurring in the pastmdashhas begun to be understood as not solely a private activity but as representing a group phenomenon as well 36 On the collective level memory can be either experience-near-active one-step removed or distantly removed Active memory would be represented by Holocaust survivors in Israel and the Diaspora for instance One step removed would be the surrogate memories that their immediate Offspring carry with them37 and distantly removed would be exemplified by the Rabbinic injunction that Jews experience the annual telling of the Exodus from Egypt as if they were there While a case could be made for discounting the importance of actual experiences in favor of the way

those experiences arc remembered both of these are crucial for ascertaining role identity Just as traumatic events in a persons life may be repressed in memory but still shape that persons identity the international observer needs to account for actual experiences yet view these as embedded within a narrative context Similarly some historical events undergo a process of memory revision in these cases the observer must be sensitive to the effect that the new discourse has on the societys perception of these events whether or not these stories accord with fact The clinical parallel in psychoanalysis is that while the analysands relationship with her parents is considered crucial to uncovering the contours of her psychology the analyst as a rule does not attempt to meet the parents firsthand rather the patients recounting of these experiences is considered to be the most important channel of investigationmdash and hence transformation Since we are talking about collections of individuals memory needs to be actively transmitted to the societys members in order for it to influence the citizens sense of collective identity One of the ways this can be done is through ritual Being repetitive while symbolically imbued ritual gains meaning only through the symbols attributed to it by the group and is a collective process that serves to link actors to a series of past events for which they may not have been physically present Moreover private rituals that are collectively prescribed such as prayer serve to bind the individual to the collective particularly when there is a formalized liturgy Most collective rituals occur according to the calendar and therefore can encompass regular ceremonies that come to act as markers for the individuals personal time cycle38Sometimes particular collective memories that have been sustained over time are ruptured with citizens contemplating new facts about their countrys past Revisionist history is an example of an attempt to bring forth these sorts of new facts When history is reinterpreted the society can either shun the dissenting voices or else gradually reevaluate the original narratives When this reevaluation occurs society is more apt to uncover the hitherto unconscious counternarratives a discovery that can

lead to the realization that the states behavior might be contradicting the states role-identity In other words revisionist historians and other domestic dissenters can serve as the mirror referred to later

Vote affirmative to give up hope in the face of guarantees - only holding yourself completely open in the face of the promise of a sustainable status quo can open space for self-overcoming that allows us to engage in new forms of praxisDavis 2006 Walter A Davis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deathrsquos Dream Kingdom Pg 63

To know this situation for what it is challenges what is finally the deepest and most fundamental of the guarantees The principle of Hope To appropriate Eliot After such knowledge what forgiveness There is perhaps nothing that can be done to change the situation Ive described But then what is the purpose of knowing such things if they only produce meaningless suffering Is despair the end result of a life shorn of the guarantees Or are we finally like the drunks in ONeills The Iceman Cometh knowing that in order to sustain the illusions required to go on living they must pronounce Hickey mad and reject everything he revealed to them about

their lives as a product of that madness Perhaps its time to admit what the need for Hope really signifies Denial of responsibility for certain situations under the assumption that knowing them correctly would lead to despair Raising that specter is of course the rhetorical ploy invoked to prematurely terminate inquiry lest it impinge on

emotional and psychological needs Despair thus remains an empty concept We dont know what it is and never will as long as we use the need for hope to prevent discovery of our capacities to endure Whether despair is what we will find on the other side of hope is something we cant know For all hope really signifies is a testament to our weakness and our fears Perhaps we are called to something beyond it What Shakespeare called tragic

readiness For in opening ourselves to the possibility of despair we also open ourselves to the possibility of self-overcoming and through it the discovery of a praxis that lies on the other side of the conceptual and existential paralyses created by the guarantees We cant know what is to be done as long as we continue to respond to our situation by invoking ahistorical values and guarantees that are grounded in an essentialistic and ahistorical theory of human nature

PlanThe United States federal government should substantially curtail its domestic surveillance by ceasing all domestic surveillance

Contention 2 is FramingAn ethics of existence forecloses the tragic struggle in which we never confront our inner trauma- only our affirmative can open new ways of relating to ourselves that can overcome these limitations- the 1AC is a precondition for any meaning to our livesDavis 2006 Walter ADavis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg238-240)

In her critique of Kantian ethics Alenka Zupancic often refers to the Lacanian idea that there is a loss deeper than ones life The loss of ones reason for living The apostle of duty offers a heroic example of how one escapes the threat of that loss What Im suggesting here is that ethics actually begins on the other side of it With the possibility that first exists when one discovers that one has already lost or violated or fatally compromised ones reason for living because the values one thinks one honors and the actual truth of ones life are thoroughly at odds The traumatic event that brings one to this recognition is the origin of ethics This is the ethical task it establishes to see if one can pay the price for having violated oneself by assuming the full burden of the situation one has thereby createdThe ethical situation accordingly confronts the subject with the necessity to choose to be in a radically new way or die inside Nothing less is demanded than a totally new way of relating to oneself for the guilt one experiences in such a situation is existentializing One is guilty toward oneself for having failed to honor the duties that one bears to oneself for having so thoroughly lied to oneself about ones life As Hamlet learns it is through that recognition that one first discovers that one has tragic responsibilities toward oneself that can no longer be evaded because one with this situation is the even deeper discovery that there are failures that can be irreversible That is the possibility defining the situation one is now in What one does will reveal the truth of who one is Guilt toward oneself has overtaken all possibilities of displacement and denial Fail now and one dies within Most people will of course do just about anything to avoid guilt or to get cleansed of it as quickly as possible That is why so many fail the test when it comes to them shrinking inside rather than expanding to the demands of our innermost possibility the one defining our humanity An ethics of existence begins with the traumatic experience in which everything weve tried to escape about ourselves catches up with us One then knows that ones prior life has been a flight And all ones brave ideas and bright ethical claims airy nothingmdashthe indulgence in comforting and self-alienating lies But now one

is finally like Hamlet in the situation from which there is no exit An ethics grounded in the possibility of freedom depends on the actions one performs within oneself when one finds oneself in a crisis that can no longer be denied This is precisely the kind of situation Kant is unable to consider which is why he constructs in Duty the principle of choice that renders it impossible In serving Duty one is delivered from the repressed thought that now can never arise that ones whole life and all its choices especially the ethical ones may be no more than a flight from things in oneself that one flees because one fears that if one is ever forced to face oneself one will suffer a destruction worse than death Destruction within An existentializing ethic begins on the other side of all the things we do to delay that event For it is when the thing one fears happens that one first discovers the truth of ones life the depth of ones inauthenticity The trauma that will measure ones humanity has arrived Nothing else now exists but the lonely struggle of the psyche with itself Suicide (including the primary form of suicide inner death) is one term of that situation Ethics is the other An ethics of existence is what one does when one finally finds oneself in the traumatic situation that brings one before oneself There is one lesson in this a lesson that probably cant be learned Rather than running from the trauma we should plunge toward it since it is only through it that we can discover both the truth about ourselves and what we are able to do in the face of that truth To activate that possibility all thats needed perhaps is to drown out the noise and chatter one keeps running in ones head Perhaps the truth is that the truth about ourselves is not deeply repressed and unknown Its closer than we think available to introspection if we but dared But thats what makes the kind of impassioned reflection Hamlet engages in so terrifying It exemplifies everything we know and dont want to know about ourselves18 Here is an attempt to offer an image that describes in depth the existential-psychoanalytic condition from which the possibility of ethics derives In George Orwells 1984 Winston Smith when tortured with the thing he most fears betrays the thing he loves To save his life he sacrifices what gives it meaning He capitulates before an inner torment that reduces the psyche to a condition of catastrophic anxiety (The image of the cage of rats placed over the head they will raven externalizes in a perfect objective correlative the terror that has the power to dissolve the psyche What is a phobia after all but an inner condition displaced into an external fear) What I want to suggest here is that Winston Smiths phobia describes the inner condition that defines any subject traumatized by itself Such a subject lives tortured by the struggle not to betray the thing one loves the thing that could give ones life meaning But one saves it only if one is willing to sacrifice everything to the

acceptance of the suffering and inner torment that service to it entails This is the ethical act whereby a subject attains tragic agency Becoming an existentially autonomous agent is the process of engaging the disorders of ones psyche in the effort of active reversal The wish to escape that effort to soften it or to insist that suffering must always have a happy resolution is the voice of self-betrayal If one gives in to it one loses with Winston the thing one has finally found the thing one can love more than ones life but only by suffering all that it demands That thing more precious than life is the tragic struggle that gives life perhaps the only meaning it can have

The ethic of the aff is key - only an ethical act that confronts our inner trauma with a constant and inner openness can we create the conditions for self-overcoming necessary to open ourselves to a meaningful existence - the only ethical choice is to fully confront contingencyDavis 2006 Walter A Davis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg235-238

What follows attempts to distill the ethic of existence in to its fundamental principles I also try here to present those thesis in a way that will engage the readers psyche and emotions at precisely the place within us where each of us makes a basic decision about ourselves Thats the only self that matters The others are selfreifying defenses The argument thus constitutes both an appeal to the readers freedom and an attempt to impinge on that freedom to bring each reader before him or herself by challenging defenses with the power that some ideas have to light a fire in the soul (1) We concur with Kant that if a choice is not free its not moral The possibility of freedom depends however on an in-depth analysis of ones psyche Such an analysis leads from the destruction of ego identity to the need to bring about a complete reversal in ones relationship to oneself by deracinating the voice of the other Thinking is ethical insofar as it engages one thing the battle of a subject with itself over the meaning of its being (2) There is no way to abridge that process nor to provide guarantees that will secure a safe outcome To sustain the psychoanalytic turn the psyche must continually throw itself into question and root out the emotions that bind it to a pattern of lies An ethic of the existential subject depends on maximizing what Keats termed negative capability the ability to be in uncertainties Mysteries doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason Rather than resolving doubts the purpose of thought and action is to deepen them An act is ethical insofar as it deepens the conflict of the subject with itself (3) One acts ethically only when all symbolic and ideological supports have collapsed Only then can one take on responsibility for oneself because only then is one at issue and at risk The ethical act must radically open itself to contingency in a situation where one must create values yet where those values can derive from nothing but the depth of ones engagement in the situation By the same token such values cannot be a final solution but must open themselves to later contingencies Ethics must always allow itself to be measured by contingency because contingency is precisely what calls up ethical responsibility The primary ethical situation is not one where there is a clear course of duty but where a subject trembles before its responsibility to create new values in a situation that reduces received values to rubble (4) Ethics begins when there is a genuine crisis of values even perhaps the need for a re-valuation of all values For Kant there was not nor could there be such a crisis The values were known immutable and generally agreed upon The only question was what kind of principle they would be grounded in which meant for Kant and the Aufklarung how could they be grounded in Reason For us in contrast the primary fact is a historicity that bites into the very possibility of the ethical Every ethical value must be willing to historicize itself That recognition entails the following considerations The desert grows Under the guise of fundamentalist crusades herd moralities dominate The extent of inhumanity is appalling So many values that once seemed so solid have been so thoroughly debunked The possibility of ethics now begins with a systematic exposure of all superego pathologies all the ethical ideologies that societies use to introduce a fundamental passivity into subjects while convincing those same subjects that they are good in a goodness that depends on willed ignorance An existential ethic is radically destructive of received beliefs radically disruptive of the desires of the normal subject Refusing and exposing all Symbolic supports it seeks in the struggle of the psyche with its disorders the source of value (5) Ethics is a matter of extremity It begins in the most extreme actmdashthe act of radical individuation in which one opens ones psyche to an interrogation that must be sustained in its extremity Ethics is about a choice in which a subject risks the value and meaning of its existence not about those choices that assure it of that meaning Moreover it is only when one does this that one experiences for the first time the

terror implicit in the oft-quoted Sartrean statement existence precedes essence (6) Ethics must engage and derive from the dread that defines choice Let me illustrate this proposition by contrasting Hamlets choice with the situation in Styrons Sophies Choice The horrifying choice Sophie facesmdashto choose which of her children will be sent to the gas chambermdashis a forced choice and thus extreme and exceptional in a way that deprives it of the possibility of being normative17 Hamlets choice in contrast is a free one that issues from nothing but his freedom and the readiness with which he accepts the selftorture that existence entails Sophie is tortured from without by the madness of the other and the inhuman logic that madness requires in order to know itself (Styron calls the officer who forces the choice on Sophie a genius of the Reich) Hamlet is tortured from within by the logic of self-criticism and self-overcoming that informs the existentializing process We are fortunate if we never face a situation like Sophies nor suffer the death-in-life that is the result of such choices But insofar as we have a psyche Hamlets situation is the general one that defines us Or to put it in properly ethical terms engaging the kind of situation he faces is the act that activates the inherent possibility that defines us The choice that founds such an ethic must therefore be distinguished both from the a priori choice made by the apostle of duty and Sophies forced choice All three refer to extreme choices and situations In only one however is guilt toward oneself both the origin of the choice and its result That is only one of the three choices is the ground of its own possibility and thereby the source of an existentialization that issues in values bound to the tragic contingencies of our situatedness

2AC

A2 ndash Realism

We control the internal link to their impacts The psychoanalysis of the affirmative forces an internal investigation of the ways in which the subjectrsquos subconscious desires rationalize what we would consider self-interest This means that we can only make sense of realism through a lens of psychoanalysis Sucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 17-18)

The psychological turn that international relations took with the rise of behavioralism in the 1960s has begun to expand beyond focusing on cognitionmdashhow individuals thinkmdashto a wider appreciation of the role of emotional determinants of action one of many factors that were long dismissed as unscientific Part of the reason for this hesitant courtship is no doubt the long strides that international relations theory has taken toward refining its investigative lenses such that less easily observable phenomena can be more confidently incorporated into the solid theoretical infrastructure that the discipline has now adopted A central example of this evolution is the analytical watershed inaugurated by neorealism which fashioned a conceptual playing field where little had existed before Neorealism a theoretical school that views international relations as taking place within an anarchical state system with no overarching authority in turn spawned the constructivist turn in international relationsmdashthe approach that stresses the importance of social identity in determining international outcomesmdashand subsequent counterarguments that built on yet other social and psychological preceptsmdash all of which agree that there is such a thing as an international systemmdashthough they understand the effects of anarchy differently Introducing psychoanalysis to international relations can therefore be seen as the next logical step for a relatively young discipline that seeks to understand why political actors behave the way they do While all psychoanalysts draw on Freuds unique contribution subsequent approaches have altered many of his assumptions This trend has kept pace with the embracing of new epistemological and ontological perspectives by other scientific and social scientific fields such as the quantum revolution in physics -a paradigm shift that has since influenced other disciplines The form of psychoanalytic theory that I use here is the contemporary relational strand one that analysts have alternately termed relational-model theorizing a dyadic systems perspective and intersubjectivity theory This approach shares an ontology basic to constructivism in international relations the psychology (identity) of the person (state) is not hard-wired into the unit but develops in part from the actions of other actors in the social environment (the family the therapeutic setting the international system) and in part through the shared assumptions that permeate that system As an approach centered on the individual mind contemporary psychoanalysis takes into account the broader social context within which actors act Psychoanalysis also provides a coherent theory of behavior incorporating three elements that have mostly been invisible in international relations theory but that provide a fuller understanding of how states and nonstate actors interact emotion the unconscious and the possibility for actors own cognitive and emotional insight to be a source of behavior change In drawing on these principles perhaps the most significant contribution that psychoanalysis can make to international relations is in improving on prevailing theories of identity which in turn illuminate questions about international action Within international relations constructivism has been criticized for neglecting the question of how identity is in fact created Cognitive psychologymdashwhich international relations has begun to draw on liberallymdashin part helps to fill this gap Yet with its assumption that the emotional legacy of early interpersonal relationships is essential in shaping personality and subsequent behavior psychoanalysis offers a more comprehensive model of identity creation than those put forth by cognitive theorists Recognizing these explanatory benefits contructivists have recently called for exploring the potential that psychoanalysis holds for understanding international politics Thus unlike the prevailing psychoanalytic approaches in international relationsmdashnamely psychohistories of individual leaders and the focus-group potential of micro-level conflict resolution the psychoanalytic approach I use here is meant to coexist happily alongside other streams of systemic theory in international relations

Forcing the state away from what it considers a core tenet of national defense in the exact opposite way it desires creates the conditions necessary for reflection of the efficacy of the initial policies of surveillance which changes future policySucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 32-)

Like most individuals states possess a complex arsenal of motivations that are not all palatable to the politys sense of self mdashnot least of which is due to the discrepant voices vying for influence in any society Yet the dominant self mdashthat overarching group ethos that does not necessarily reflect each single (sub)voicemdashimplicitly prescribes a set of normatively acceptable behaviors Should a state adopt a policy course that contradicts the states role-identity we can expect some sort of cognitive dissonance to arise leading to a radical realignment between actions and identity Just as a man who once struck his wife might offer the apologetic plea that I dont know what got into me it is up to the analyst to help the subject come to terms with the aggression that has evidently been very much inside of him all along The policy shift therefore results from the force of the role-identity prodding the self back into behavioral consistency However acting in contradiction to ones role-identity does not necessarily result in a behavior shift The dissonance between role-identity and behavior must be both unbearable and experienced at an emotional level in order for such a shift to result If the dissonance remained at a cognitive level it is likely that the subject would employ one of a number of cognitive biases in order to rationalize the discrepancy42 The dredging up of the unconscious counternarrative assures that the dissonance is experienced deeply enough to result in the taking of radical action to realign actions with identity 43 This hypothesis of cognitive-emotional realization is grounded in the clinical findings of psychoanalytic theory that suggest that under certain conditions actors may become consciously aware of previously unconscious processes44 The classic understanding of cognitive dissonancemdashas articulated by Leon Festingermdashis that inconsistency between behavior and belief results in psychological discomfort that leads to activity oriented toward dissonance reduction just as hunger leads to activity oriented toward hunger reduction45 In line with psychoanalysis the actual cognitive-emotional realization brings to light what had previously been stored in the unconscious areas of the states subjective world In actuality the assumption here is that the role-challenging behavior (paired with domestic challenges) causes elites to reflect on the states role- identity Moreover my use of cognitive-emotional realization imbues the concept with a distinctively emotional component as well Whereas pure cognitive dissonance refers to the challenging of an individuals worldview (ie the revelation of new facts)46 I am introducing the more ontologically powerful notion of challenges to the self47 When this behavior undermines the very legitimacy buttressing the states raison detat the dissonance is particularly acute Catalysts for Realization Once decision-makers come to realize that the states foreign-policy actions have contradicted the states role-identity a policy shift may result The important question that remains is what contributes to this realization Numerous sources may act as the mirror necessary for the state to reflect on its behavior For clarity I have divided them into three categories domestic elements (including the military the peace movement revisionist historians artists and the domestic media) other states (including allies and adversaries as well as those states news media) and international structures (including international organizations norms and regimes) Domestic Elements The Military If the military acts in a way that the populace sees as contradicting the states self-image (even if the military is merely carrying out governmental policies) society can experience a corresponding cognitive

dissonance In a democracy the military takes its directives from the government however military culture is instrumental in shaping the broader strategic culture encompassing foreign-policy decisions mdashand role-identitymdashmore generally Most of the time the relationship between the civilian and military spheres resembles a symbiosis commands are given by civilians and implemented by the military which in turn will advise and reshape subsequent policies In some cases ex-military personnel will pursue a career in government on being discharged However it is possible for the military to experience a sense of dissonance between a particular policy and its overall defense doctrine or ethic Soldiers might articulate discomfort in carrying out a particular mission or the number of conscientious objectors may rise In a country in which conscientious objection is previously unheard of the founding of such a movement will therefore signal an even higher degree of dissonance between behavior and institutional role-identity In examining foreign-policy shifts the role of the military is crucial in representing the degree of concordance between national role-identity and foreign policy In states where the military has particular salience for establishing national identitymdashthose states with mandatory and universal conscription for instancemdashthat institution will be particularly salient

Their dependence on pragmatism to justify unrealistic internal link chains and counter psychological methods creates the worst type of moral tunnel vision in which we become incapable of understanding the carnage of our ideology ndash this makes ethics impossibleDavis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg47-48)

But its always a good idea when seeking an explanation of the human motives behind actions to stick with the empirical With stated intentions and official rationales Otherwise we give ourselves over to psychobabble Despite official denial by the Department of Defense that DU is harmful a series of explanations are now in place to account for the development and use of DU weapons DU is cost-effective militarily efficient and turns to productive use a waste product wed otherwise have to dispose of at great cost In a variety of ways for the past two days We who leave here in sorrow know that we will one day be reunited with her in joy My concern here is not with the ontological status of this preposterous belief but with its psychological function as a guarantee that offers human beings a way to deprive death of its finality And the terror that prospect entails The function of guarantees is to enable human beings to bear events and contingencies that would otherwise be too traumatic There is much that we can face apparently only by denying Such perhaps is one accurate estimation of what it means lo be a human being to remain a child of ones needs and desires disguising that fact in the form of beliefs and ideas The primary purpose of religion philosophy and culture has been to provide conceptual psychological and emotional guarantees so I hat traumatic events become part of a larger framework that assures the realization of our hopes and dreams Without such supports most people supposedly would find life unlivable Through the ministry of the guarantees we banish those thoughts and feelings that we are convinced would deprive life of meaning plunging us into despair Experience accordingly becomes the movement from and to the affirmation of the guarantees through their imposition on events The main line of Western philosophy can most profitably be seen as I series of efforts to provide a ground for the guarantees That effort achieves one of its culminations in Hegel who defined the purpose of philosophy as the elimination of the contingent As father of the philosophy of history he offered that new discipline a single goal to demonstrate that the rational is real and the real rational that history is the story of progress liberty the realization of a universal humanity Or to put it in vulgar terms democracy and civilization are on the march and will soon sweep the entire Middle East In order to triumph over the contingencies of existencemdashdoubt about oneself ones place in the world and ones final endmdashmany guarantees are needed Moreover they must form a system of reinforcing beliefs such that if one guarantee is threatened other guarantees come in to fill the breach Thereby the function of the system as a whole is assured Within the system of guarantees one guarantee however is superordinate The belief that human nature is basically good As animal rationale we are endowed with an ahistorical essence that cannot be lost Evil is an aberration Consequently I heres always reason for hope and the belief that no matter how bad things get well always find a way to recover everything that I lie guarantees assure Psyche Its all a matter of pragmatic efficiency with a little capitalist profit motive thrown in for good measure Theres only one thing wrong with this explanation It leaves out the basis for the calculus Theres every reason to use DU and no reason not to use it if and only if one rationale informs all decisions How to maximize death regardless of consequences or alternatives Introduce any countervailing motives and the entire chain of decisions becomes questionable Conscious stated intentions then reveal themselves as functions of something else that

has been conveniently rendered unconscious What looks like a purely pragmatic matter devoid of psychological motives now reveals the opposite the fact that Thanatos so inhabits the system that the absence of anything opposed to it goes without saying Thanatos has become what Wittgenstein called a form of life7 a way of being so deeply rooted that it operates automatically habitually and of necessity It has become a collective unconscious And as such it is no longer accessible to those whose intentions conceal and reveal it The reason for sticking with the empirical is now clear There is something insane in the empirical That is what the historian must uncover Before we ask ourselves how this situation came to pass we need to ask another question For its easy to claim we dont know about such things because the media refuses to tell us about them Theres another reason for our ignorance however and its the one we need to confront I refer to the possibility that we choose our ignorance because otherwise wed lose the system of guarantees we depend on for our identity and our understanding of history As Barbara Bush put it in telling Diane Sawyer why she doesnt watch the news Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many what day its gonna happen and how many this or what do you suppose Or I mean its its not relevant So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that8 It would be easy to deride Mrs Bush to congratulate oneself on not sharing her attitude What I hope to show however is that on an essential level one determinative in the last instance we are in full agreement with her and delude ourselves as long as we think otherwise

IR SPECIFIC ndash The method of the affirmative best supplements our understanding of international relations by including elements that are absent in normal policy examinations of international relations Sucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 18-20)

It has long been argued that even within the confines of rational-choice approaches the nature of a decision-makers preferences cannot be assumed a priori and indeed their distinctiveness derives from factors ranging from emotions to personality to the selective use of historical analogies Emotion in short can be considered the sine qua non of social life a realization that has recently begun to permeate international relations theory Moreover the concept of the unconscious that anchors psychoanalysis can illuminate the question of why an individual experiences a sense of dissonance when her actions do not conform to her identity the mechanism by which the dissonance between action and identity can become unbearable and therefore why humans experience the need to match the two The unconscious is that aspect of the self that remains the most untapped yet potentially the most satisfying determinant of action coming as it does early in the causal chain At its most basic the unconscious is simply the repository for those characteristics that an actor fears adopting in other words action fantasies that the actor despises but can plausibly entertain This fundamental tension between the feared and the imaginable is what normally keeps these fantasies in check and is what makes the unconscious so potentially powerful as an explanatory tool And while the unconscious is an admittedly contested concept scholars from various fields have issued tentative calls for its exploration and convincing deductive and empirical research certainly justify its consideration One theoretical perspective that has been criticized for ignoring the unconscious is sociologys symbolic interactionism an approach that underpins constructivism in international relations Part of the reason for the tension between sociology including symbolic interactionism and psychoanalysis arguably lies in an antiquated understanding of psychology the false belief that to employ psychology as an explanatory approach one must ignore the impact that ones social environment has on ones personality self-image and behavior However contemporary psychoanalysis presents a view of the self that is more relational than what Freudian drive theory had suggested A psychoanalytic approach does not have to assume that unconscious or otherwise emotional factors arise from the actor independent of the shared understandings that define the social environment Admitting an explanatory role for the unconscious therefore does not imply a rejection of intersubjectivity mutual-constitution or any of the other organizing principles of sociology and constructivism Rather it simply means that ideas held in the unconscious serve as one filter through which actors interpret social interaction The unconscious therefore may be understood either as one element of agency that the actor brings to interpreting his social script or as itself the product of social forces that interpret and constrain action The first perspective assumes that agency does not have to be conscious to be meaningful agency at its most basic can simply imply action and intentionality can therefore encompass an unconscious component The second view means that the unconscious does not have to be understood as a pre-wired component of the unit that in turn shapes behavior rather it can be viewed as an emergent and mediating phenomenon We can therefore understand cognition as being inherently situated within social processes This is consistent with a relational view of social life and yet it is an important theoretical addition to the prevailing wisdom in international relations about how social understandings

ultimately shape behavior A final contribution that psychoanalysis can make to our understanding of international relationsmdashand conflict resolution in particularmdashis its assumption that entrenched behavior patterns can be altered through cognitive and emotional insight In addition to challenging the static conception of human nature that underpinned classical realism (arguably the first theory of international relations) and that provided a rather pessimistic view of human affairs this assumption is a valuable addition to any theory of international relations in which the prevailing theories of actionmdashmaterial power in the case of states polarity in the case of state systemsmdashare difficult if not impossible to manipulate As a result many of the most prominent international relations theories have lacked meaningful policy implications Conversely psychoanalytic theory suggests tools for ameliorating some of the most pressing global problems including protracted conflict and war While some psychoanalytically based conflict-resolution approaches use the focus-group format to simulate the healing function of the therapy setting this book demonstrates that the gaining of conscious insight into ones role deviationmdasha prerequisite for policy changemdashcan come about through real-life international interaction that requires neither a skilled conflict practitioner nor the willingness of elites to participate in such an exercise Rather under certain conditions role conflict can prompt domestic and international elements to hold a mirror to the face of elites resulting in a collective cognitive dissonance that can lead to policy change This mirror can take a number of formsmdashacts of protest by domestic groups media coverage and actions by allies adversaries or international structures These sources will be discussed further

IR SPECIFIC ndash What their internal links consider to be ldquoself-interestrdquo for a state doesnrsquot actually exist States are not sentient Instead they are composed by a collection of minds that act in self-interest which means that psychoanalytic evaluation of the self is a prior question to understanding the interests of the state Sucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 21-22)

Rather than referring to a notion of collective selfhood that is shared by multiple states- as some constructivist theorists of collective identity would maintainmdashthe title of this book the international self is meant to suggest not only that each state possesses a distinctive identity but that this identity develops out of the states relationship with other international actors This concept also implies that decisions emanating from the polity are derived from a process not simply the sum of the states parts Yet while we have already shown that psychoanalysis can accommodate a role for environmental processes in shaping behavior we still need to be aware of the risks of anthropomorphizing the state a practice that gets to the heart of the debate between two analytical positions that cut across the social sciences methodological individualism and holism While methodological individualism views social life as the product of actions taken by individuals holism understands the group to be a meaningful unit in and of itself Yet to an extent the debate between the two perspectives is already fixed While the holists have in their favor a precedent of semantic habitmdash we tend to anthropomorphize the state in everyday speech more often than not (eg Washington decided to wage war against al-Qaeda)mdashmethodological individualism is allied with the rich literature of rational choice and more prosaically the commonsense discomfort that arises when we ascribe human characteristics to things including groups Groups do not have minds any more than do other social facts and group behavior is after all the product of individuals acting on the groups behalf Finally given the presence of disparate individuals and subgroups constituting any society it can be misleading to attribute a single group consciousness to a political entity In a foreign-policy context accordingly adherents of this view would focus on elite attitudes bureaucratic politics andor interest group activities to tease out the causal relationship between Intentions and outcomes Yet a strong case can be made for the emergent properties of states and their policy processes something happens between the point at which citizens articulate preferences and those preferences are translated into policies Insofar as elite decisions do not always reflect the opinion of the majority there remains some degree of independent agency that may very well accrue to the state as a whole Under this reasoning it would be plausible to assert the existence of an overarching group self as Alexander Wendt does when he claims that states are people too In addition to the views of significant strands of psychoanalytic thought (which would not necessarily be expected to assume that units other than the individual can be psychoanalyzed) the idea of a group self enjoys far-reaching support across the social sciencesmdashinternational relations included This includes neorealisms assumption that the state is a unitary actor the Collective self hood implied by social identity theory the concept of political culture early psychoanalytic assumptions about the group as well as studies on obedience group-think and the crowd phenomenon There is a reason why scholars are drawn to the group as a unit of analysismdashwitness anthropologists concern with tribes and civilizations sociologists focus on street gangs and societies and political scientists emphasis on states and

transnational actors Group behavior and individual behavior are not necessarily identical Nor can an individual be expected to behave the same way in the context of a group as he or she would alone Moreover constructivism goes so far as to assume the possibility of shared norms across states a claim that has enjoyed much empirical support during the first active decade of constructivist research It is much more defensible to argue the existence of a collective identity within a state the boundaries of which contain degrees of centralized media language and other discursive channels for cultural dissemination and which prescribe the roles that the groups members are expected to perform within the context of that group And if different subgroups within the state disseminate disparate narratives we can assume that the most dominant group within society (as defined by some combination of ethnicity class or gender) has custody over a single consequential dominant narrative Finally even if we choose to ascribe a states national ethos to its elites we need to remember that state leaders are the product of the society in which they were reared This view would effectively mitigate the tension between elite- and mass-level phenomena in international relations since both elites and masses are socialized by the overarching structure of the collective

A2 ndash DisadvantagesThe internal linkrsquos dependence on rationality only serves to protect us from the unknown that the future holds This ultimately reduces all forms of knowledge to something that can be calculated which ensures violence The only way to reverse this trend is to force a confrontation with tragedy and the unknownDavis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg51-52)

Emotional The innermost need of human beings is to feel good about themselves Whatever threatens that feeling must be exorcised Health normalcy and productivity depend on avoiding negative feelings Hope and optimism arent just healthy attitudes they are requirements of our nature Biologically wired We cannot remain for long in trauma Recovery moreover must restore our faith in the guarantees and our hopes for the future The need for hope is In fact the capstone of the entire system of guarantees Yet it too apparently has a history Today over 10 million of our children are on prescription drugs to prevent depression and anxiety Informed of this fact by Bill Maher the French actress Julie Delphy spoke the spontaneous wisdom of an archaic culture Dont they know that depression is a good thing that its something you have to go through in order to grow Not anymoreThe key to understanding the power of the guarantees is to understand the fears that they exorcise Thanks to religion death suffering and evil are deprived of their power Through the attainment of reason all other forms of consciousness and what they might reveal are put in their place Poetic knowing is deprived both of its legitimacy and its terror Science as fulfillment of reason assures us of domination over nature What Heidegger termed technoscientific rationality becomes the measure of what is real Belief in historical progress banishes the recurrent suspicion that history may lack direction or even worse move to the darkest of ends The condition is thereby set that makes it impossible for us to experience traumatic events such as 9-11 except as occasions to take whatever actions are needed to reaffirm our goodness and restore our guarantees It is in the personal order however that the guarantees do their deepest work Psychologically belief in the self or self-identity exorcises the most frightening contingency that there is a void at the center of the American psyche with panic anxiety and its corollary compulsive consumption the expression of a desperate non-identity That specter brings us before the greatest fear that our psyche not our conscious deliberative intentions is the author of our actions an author who will do anything in order to feel safe secure and righteous All of our emotional needs then stand forth under the rule of a single necessity the need to feel good about oneself at whatever cost and to sustain hope by banishing anything that would trouble us Resolution catharsis (ie the discharge of painful tensions or awareness) and renewal emerge as the needs that bind us with an iron necessity to the guarantees and all that they make it impossible for us to know It is easy to deprecate Dubya and apparently to hold onto the idea that hes a temporary aberration But the problem goes deeper To revive a battle cry from the 1960s insofar as one is wedded to any one of the guarantees one is part of the problem and not the solution For the grandest function of the system of guarantees as a whole and in each one of its parts is to blind us to historyAnd so to take up again the question stated previously how did the situation now being created in Iraq come about The next three sections constitute an attempt to answer that question by constructing for America a repressed history

The negative is attempting to apply reason to ethics and psychology This only creates a hard understanding of our inner psyche which is a loss of the self that outweighs every other impact Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg174-175)

This recognition implies a primary question What is the nature and extent of the ethical responsibility human beings have for such a condition To what extent can evil and the actions that flow from it be said to be chosen in the exercise of a freedom for which one bears ethical responsibility Traditionally ethical responsibility only applies to actions that are taken after deliberation and with full knowledge of the consequences actions where choice is a function of our ability to reason where the moral law is known and where one chooses to violate it for motives that can be specified as functions of a self- interest that overrides all other motives and considerations Mitigate any of these factors and one mitigates ethical responsibility Ethical responsibility is compromised or eliminated for example if ones action is determined by forces outside ones control if one acts without premeditation under duress in blind obedience to customs or authorities as the result of a pathology because of some limitation in the ability to think or to understand the consequences of ones action or because one acted without any conscious intention to do wrong However deplorable their deeds the mad for example are not evil Evil requires consciousness choice freedom If evil is to be a human possibility on a par with the possibility of goodness it must be something that is determined within the order of freedom The trouble with the traditional understanding of these conditions however is the effort to confine them within the limits of rationalism and a purely cognitive model of the mind Rationality is noble but single-minded devotion to it leaves the true life of the psyche undetected Focusing on it prematurely shifts discussion to a rarefied mode of mentation that is then cut off from the rest of the personality To sustain and deny that split reason is then given disproportionate weight in determining what we are and do But the dream of reason is precisely that A dream a desiremdashto bring ones being into correspondence with reason and thereby eliminate everything else especially in determining the questions of ethics No one brought this dream to bear on moral experience more rigorously than Immanuel Kant That effort is the sublime beauty of his thought But experiencing oneself in terms of a priori rationality comes at a terrible cost Life becomes a process in which we sleepwalk our way through most of what we do because weve cut ourselves off from the actual bases of our actions Our psyche becomes a stranger to us We fixate on giving rational accounts of ourselves and in the process alienate ourselves from everything else Emotions become irrationalities breaks with reason things we must overcome or worse things we can only acknowledge when they are good proper and in tune with reason The rest of our being becomes brute inclinations frailties of our nature desires that disrupt an otherwise rational identity As a result in terms of ethics whether we know it or not under the guise of reason weve made an offer that most human beings cannot refuse Claiming not to consciously intend what one does has become the grand excuse Traditional definitions of the three cardinal categories of ethics are a monument to that motive Restricting intention motive and choice to the canons of rationality fashions them to the designs of human mendacity For if by intention we mean a deliberate rational choice with full knowledge of the consequences evil as Ive described it is not chosen If along the same lines we restrict motive lo purposes for which we bear responsibility because they issue not from frailties of our nature or the force of circumstances but from an explicit knowledge of what one is doing and why evil as thus far described does not exist within the order of human motivation One can identify self-interest careerism and happiness as motives but to say that many agents act in order to advance Thanatos is hard to fathom Unless that is we expand the category of motive to include purposes that derive from the psyche in all its inherent conflictedness But once posit such a possibility choice becomes a concept that must be rethought in a radically new way

Their internal links are symptoms of the fantasy that we strive to maintain This logic becomes used to justify atrocity The affirmativersquos rejection of attempting to control the future allows alternate practices to emerge Vote affirmative to traverse the fantasy of their internal link chains Even if you donrsquot think we can solve the 1AC is a more productive through experiment than their disad Davis 2006(Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg63-65)

Is there anything more evil than shooting children in a school yard or flying planes into buildings One hears this rhetorical question often today Getting it firmly implanted in our minds seems to be one of the current ideological functions of the media A correct response requires careful reflection on the circumstance that underlies the knee-jerk response thanks to the power of the image it conjures up The promise inherent in Technoscientificrationality is deliverance from images Killing for it like everything else occurs at a distance In the inaugural moment Tibbets in the cockpit of the Enola Gay unable to imagine what he has just done as a human act It was all impersonal12 And today in the silent secret midnight ways that radiation poisoning works from within like a deed without a doer separated in space and time from its absent cause Perhaps killing at a distance is the greater evil precisely because it abrogates the image and the human connection between slayer and slain If I kill another man with my bare hands my deed is immediate to my embodied consciousness To kill that way you have to feel hate fear anguish remorse etc whereas to kill from a distance or through an invisible contamination is to render the whole thing impersonal With the desired result the ability for example of the man who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima incinerating 600000 people in a second and condemning another 300000 to the condition of hibakusha the walking dead to boast for over 59 years now that he has never felt a moment of regret or remorse Tibbets lack of moral imagination is one with his representative status as precursor For now its easy to litter a landscape with DU while denying that the stuff has any long-term medical or environmental effects13 The evil of killing at a distance is that it makes death unreal Protected from the image all who participate in the deed are delivered over to a pure and impersonal calculus (An aside if we really want to support our troops we must achieve for them a new Bill of Rights No one should ever be ordered to use weapons without being given a full knowledge of the long-term human and environmental consequences of those weapons To do otherwise is to deprive our soldiers of the choice that makes them human) The powers that be learned one lesson from Vietnam No more images The mistake was to let us see the carnage up close every night on TV The news as image entered our consciousness at the register where genuine change begins Where horror is felt free of the tyranny of the concept and the hypnotic power of the guarantees Desert Storm was the corrective the Nintendo war a war broadcast to look just like one of the video games wed been programmed to love Prohibition of the image is now a fundamental article of faith No images are allowed to come back to us from Iraq II (Michael Moores real crime was to give us a brief glimpse at what the mainstream media proscribe) Abolition of the image is one of the primary conditions of ecocide Everything must be rendered abstract invisible unreal No image can be allowed to trouble our sleep to lacerate our soul For then we might begin to know that there is indeed an evil far worse than shooting children in schoolyards or flying airplanes into buildings To move us toward that knowledge let me end with the forbidden which I must here attempt to convey solely through the more abstract medium of words since Ive not yet gained permission to reproduce a photograph I saw not long ago Its the picture of an Iraqi baby a victim of DU who was born with no nose mouth eyes

anus or genitals and with flipper limbs a common result of radiation exposure in utero That childs body full of red open ulcers is twisted in knots its ulcerated face contorted in a look of unspeakable suffering An authentic image of the sacredness of human life Of the preciousness of every breath To look at that child is to realize ones duty to mourn it to give voice to its right to invade Our consciousness and expose the evil of those who prate on about being pro-life while refusing to let us see what theyve reduced life to Luke 171-2 The image of that child must become the force in our minds that motivates us to deracinate all guarantees that shield us from the reality of that childs situation Or to put it another way every time one demands catharsis resolution and renewal that child is born again condemned to its writhing That is why its image must embolden us to question the most hallowed of the guarantees the one Ive refrained from discussing until now In the face of such evil what is to be done Is resistance ever justified in resorting to violence No we are told because if we do so we become just like them This ethical principle supposedly applies universally and atemporally It does so however because it assures t he guarantee that no matter what happens well never get our hands dirty History cant intrude on the categorical imperative Whatever action one takes one must maintain ones ethical purity Even if that means there is nothing one can do and after its been demonstrated I hat there are no non-violent ways to change the situation Perhaps we can no longer allow ourselves the luxury of such an ethic Bush did the moral imagination one favor His pre-emptive unilateralism made official what has been clear for so long but denied due to its implications There is no body to which we can turn for Justice not the UN the World Court or any other framework of international law The US will flaunt its contempt for such bodies whenever it suits its purpose And thus another mode of peaceful non-violent praxis is deprived of its guarantee

A2 ndash CounterplansTheir counterplan still attempts to maintain some type of guarantee for the future Their obsession with security and the future fail to force a confrontation with the trauma of the unknown - this means that only the aff can solve Anything else results in a return to the ideology of security Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg38-39)

But to undertake that task we must purge ourselves of the thing in ourselves that stands in the way I have termed it the guarantees By that term I refer to all those assurances we set up a priori to protect ourselves from the reality of historical trauma The significance of eventsmdashthe Shoah Hiroshima 9-11mdash is their power to call such guarantees into question by exposing cherished beliefs to the claims of darker views and by forcing us to think in radically new ways considering things about the human being that weve persistently denied or marginalized One dimension of any traumatic event is the shock it brings to traditional ways of thinking Thats why the dominant response to any historical trauma is the attempt to restore the guarantees by finding a way t o impose them on the event in order to contain and interpret it The ideological function of the guarantee is thereby demonstrated A way has been found to limit the impact of the event by picturing it as an aberration a temporary departure from values and beliefs that can always be recovered because they constitute something essentialistic or universal about human nature Something trans-historical History may disrupt our essence but it cannot destroy it The concept of human naturemdashin all t h e variants constituting the philosophic and psychological history of that idea from Plato and Aristotle through American self psychologymdashis the primary way in which we endeavor to deny history An event is traumatic precisely because it suggests that history occurs beyond the limits we want to impose on it and therefore may move in directions that have nothing to do with human nature or the cherished beliefs and values we derive from that concept Events put us as subjectsmdashand as thinkersmdash into a traumatic relationship to both ourselves and our world The anxiety at the center of thought is revealed Ideologists rush in to fill that void and restore the guarantees Our effort must be t o do the opposite and thereby sustain the vital possibility implicit in an event That possibility is to sustain a break with the guarantees and thereby find for history a radically different way of thinking To put it concretely a trauma cannot be resolved until its been constituted The Western Logos is a monument to t he effort to avoid t h a t task indeed to render it impossible a priori To reverse that tradition the things above all we must rid ourselves of are the desire and demand for resolution The recycling of the guarantees must give way to a n existentializing imperative to constitute and work within trauma in a way that addresses the psyche at the same register as Gibson and Abu Ghraib do by creating images symbolic actions and emotions that are of equal depth but that move us in an antithetical directionmdashtoward the inner transformation needed to purge ourselves of Thanatos Such an effort however cannot itself be yet another variant of the guarantees as happens when Love and Eros are posited as ahistorical values If anything the possibility of Love is far more difficult and exacting than death because it can only arise by reversing the prior force that death has within us The following two sections offer a brief picture of the kind of agonistic process such an effort entails in order to whet our appetite for something that should by now be evident The critique of ideology cannot be a merely intellectual exercise It must be the activation within our psyche of a countervailing drama

Any risk of ldquosolvencyrdquo for the counterplan is a reason to vote aff because it is an attempt to guarantee the future by pre-emptive action Even claims of a ldquonet-benefitrdquo are a link to the affirmative criticism Only the aff forcibly confronts the unknownDavis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg51-52)

Emotional The innermost need of human beings is to feel good about themselves Whatever threatens that feeling must be exorcised Health normalcy and productivity depend on avoiding negative feelings Hope and optimism arent just healthy attitudes they are requirements of our nature Biologically wired We cannot remain for long in trauma Recovery moreover must restore our faith in the guarantees and our hopes for the future The need for hope is In fact the capstone of the entire system of guarantees Yet it too apparently has a history Today over 10 million of our children are on prescription drugs to prevent depression and anxiety Informed of this fact by Bill Maher the French actress Julie Delphy spoke the spontaneous wisdom of an archaic culture Dont they know that depression is a good thing that its something you have to go through in order to grow Not anymore The key to understanding the power of the guarantees is to understand the fears that they exorcise Thanks to religion death suffering and evil are deprived of their power Through the attainment of reason all other forms of consciousness and what they might reveal are put in their place Poetic knowing is deprived both of its legitimacy and its terror Science as fulfillment of reason assures us of domination over nature What Heidegger termed technoscientific rationality becomes the measure of what is real Belief in historical progress banishes the recurrent suspicion that history may lack direction or even worse move to the darkest of ends The condition is thereby set that makes it impossible for us to experience traumatic events such as 9-11 except as occasions to take whatever actions are needed to reaffirm our goodness and restore our guarantees It is in the personal order however that the guarantees do their deepest work Psychologically belief in the self or self-identity exorcises the most frightening contingency that there is a void at the center of the American psyche with panic anxiety and its corollary compulsive consumption the expression of a desperate non-identity That specter brings us before the greatest fear that our psyche not our conscious deliberative intentions is the author of our actions an author who will do anything in order to feel safe secure and righteous All of our emotional needs then stand forth under the rule of a single necessity the need to feel good about oneself at whatever cost and to sustain hope by banishing anything that would trouble us Resolution catharsis (ie the discharge of painful tensions or awareness) and renewal emerge as the needs that bind us with an iron necessity to the guarantees and all that they make it impossible for us to know It is easy to deprecate Dubya and apparently to hold onto the idea that hes a temporary aberration But the problem goes deeper To revive a battle cry from the 1960s insofar as one is wedded to any one of the guarantees one is part of the problem and not the solution For the grandest function of the system of guarantees as a whole and in each one of its parts is to blind us to history And so to take up again the question stated previously how did the situation now being created in Iraq come about The next three sections constitute an attempt to answer that question by constructing for America a repressed history

Any net benefit to the counterplan links to the criticism of the affirmative and is a reason that the counterplan cannot solve the affirmative We must confront the unknown to solve Davis 2001Watler A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative Pg 38-39

One upshoot of that act is a recovery of the dialectic of Eros and Thanatos as a way of thinking about history In anticipation of later developments (chapter 4 part 2) I only present the basic lines of this idea here The depth-charge sounded by an Event is its ability to reveal that the relationship of Eros and Thanatos is not eternal but historical to the core with the end of that dialectic entailing the possible extinction of one of the terms This is the spectre Freud exorcized by establishing a dualistic way of conceptualizing the two categories The alternative is an immanent dialectic one where history as contingency subjects everything to irreversible change with Thanatos a force in culture dedicated to the extinction of Eros and with the power to bring about that closure to the eternal dialectic Traumatic events constitute an abrupt and painful reversal of the eternal dialectic because in them we fund Eros deprived of all assurances Contra Freud there is nothing universal biological or ahistorical about the eternal battle Both terms are fully implicated in history caught up in processes Capable of producing irreversible transformations Forces in the psyche opposed to life which we have persistently marginalized in proclaiming our humanism rise up in the Event to challenge all we believe about human nature and history Rather than a world grounded in love the primacy of goodness in human nature the achievement of rationality and the ameliorative virtues of the social process the Event reveals a world in which envy and hate stalk life seeking a final solution that can only come with the extinction of the antagonist After such knowledge we can never begin again cleansed of history restored through its narration to some essential humanistic identity with all our fundamental beliefs in essential goodness reaffirmed Eros again pristine and empowered Feeling the pressure of death as it weighs upon and works within us becomes the gauge that measures the depth of our participation in history The Event rends all the masks that enable us to conceive evil as an aberrance Existential contingency unseats all essentializing views of human nature revealing historicity as a process in which Thanatos may be the drive informing the reality principle There is nothing in human nature that protects us from this eventuality Positing an essential and always recoverable nature outside history is not the solution but part of the problem the way we blind ourselves a priori to our situation

Only a complete withdrawal from psychological guarantees can force us to confront trauma The counterplanrsquos insistence that there is something tangible that can be manipulated or solved for is a link Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg38-39)

But to undertake that task we must purge ourselves of the thing in ourselves that stands in the way I have termed it the guarantees By that term I refer to all those assurances we set up a priori to protect ourselves from the reality of historical trauma The significance of eventsmdashthe Shoah Hiroshima 9-11mdash is their power to call such guarantees into question by exposing cherished beliefs to the claims of darker views and by forcing us to think in radically new ways considering things about the human being that weve persistently denied or marginalized One dimension of any traumatic event is the shock it brings

to traditional ways of thinking Thats why the dominant response to any historical trauma is the attempt to restore the guarantees by finding a way t o impose them on the event in order to contain and interpret it The ideological function of the guarantee is thereby demonstrated A way has been found to limit the impact of the event by picturing it as an aberration a temporary departure from values and beliefs that can always be recovered because they constitute something essentialistic or universal about human nature Something trans-historical History may disrupt our essence but it cannot destroy it The concept of human naturemdashin all t h e variants constituting the philosophic and psychological history of that idea from Plato and Aristotle through American self psychologymdashis the primary way in which we endeavor to deny history An event is traumatic precisely because it suggests that history occurs beyond the limits we want to impose on it and therefore may move in directions that have nothing to do with human nature or the cherished beliefs and values we derive from that concept Events put us as subjectsmdashand as thinkersmdash into a traumatic relationship to both ourselves and our world The anxiety at the center of thought is revealed Ideologists rush in to fill that void and restore the guarantees Our effort must be t o do the opposite and thereby sustain the vital possibility implicit in an event That possibility is to sustain a break with the guarantees and thereby find for history a radically different way of thinking To put it concretely a trauma cannot be resolved until its been constituted The Western Logos is a monument to t he effort to avoid t h a t task indeed to render it impossible a priori To reverse that tradition the things above all we must rid ourselves of are the desire and demand for resolution The recycling of the guarantees must give way to a n existentializing imperative to constitute and work within trauma in a way that addresses the psyche at the same register as Gibson and Abu Ghraib do by creating images symbolic actions and emotions that are of equal depth but that move us in an antithetical directionmdashtoward the inner transformation needed to purge ourselves of Thanatos Such an effort however cannot itself be yet another variant of the guarantees as happens when Love and Eros are posited as ahistorical values If anything the possibility of Love is far more difficult and exacting than death because it can only arise by reversing the prior force that death has within us The following two sections offer a brief picture of the kind of agonistic process such an effort entails in order to whet our appetite for something that should by now be evident The critique of ideology cannot be a merely intellectual exercise It must be the activation within our psyche of a countervailing drama

A2 ndash KritiksOur ethics come first -- Discovery of the unconscious is crucial to the recognition of responsibility by every subject- only our framework opens space for agency and recognition of our choices- our ethics are crucial to understand the historical contingencies that make up the status quo and open space for change Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg182-185)

Freud discovered more than the Unconscious He discovered our responsibility for it for becoming aware of how what we repress rules our life and therefore our duty to gain knowledge of our unconscious as the precondition for becoming an ethically responsible agent In terms of ethics theres a quick way to summarize the significance of the Unconscious What we dont know about ourselves is what we domdashto the other In calling us to such a reflection on ourselves Freud also taught us a new way to reflect one that forces us to move beyond the rational world of conscious deliberations and intentions Once make the psychoanalytic turn and the sources of self-knowledge increase exponentially Every time one understands a dream a paraphraxis an aesthetic experience a fantasy one suffers in principle a revolution in ones life For such experiences put one in touch with the deep conflicts that define the psyche A dream for example does not tell us about something outside the realm of our conscious grasp though this view of repression typifies how a convenient misunderstanding blunts the force of psychoanalysis A good dream reveals the desires and conflicts structuring our life It thereby opens our quotidian life to an in-depth exploration Listen to a dream rightly and one finds that one must confront something one has been avoidingmdashor doing Such is what it would mean to assume responsibility for ones dreams One would start to live from an awareness of ones psyche rather than in a continued attempt to escape that awareness Freud doesnt abolish intention he expands it by showing how often consciousness is defense mechanism and rationality the cover that conceals the actual motives on which we act and how often accordingly insistence on conscious intentions is the lie we cling to in order to deny our responsibility The seductive or prohibitive way of relating that a parent adopts toward a child for example may carry as its primary repressed intention the desire to wound that child in their sexuality This is why its so necessary at a later point in time for such parents to deny that they ever harbored let alone acted on such an intention And yet our actions do indeed speak louder than words in conveying our actual intentions Action is concrete intentionality because it is through it that we live out our feelings desires and conflicts And they are what the other invariably receives as a message that is often sharply different from what we say especially when through the exercise of intentionality we reassure ourselves about what good loving human beings we are The psyche is a lonely hunter avid in the pursuit of purposes it carefully conceals from itself The ethical greatness of Sigmund Freud is the crisis he introduced into that practice Rather than getting us off the hook psychoanalysis sticks it far deeper in us than any previous ethic Intentionality is convenient because it absolves us of the greatest responsibilitymdashresponsibility for who we are Everything stays in the safely guarded space of deliberative discursive quasi-judicial rationality as if this were the primary way we relate to ourselves or to turn the screw a peg further as if when we arent relating to ourselves this way we arent fully moral agents fully responsible for our actions But once let responsibility expand into the inner life of the psyche and we take on a new ethical burden to know oneself in depth and not recoil in horror from what one learns or persist in virtuous denial of the hidden motives one must confront in order to become responsible for ones psyche Indeed deliberation is itself transformed by l he psychoanalytic turn Freud shows that to deliberate correctly one must focus the inquiry on those motives that one tries to conceal from oneself since they are where the truth of ones conduct may lie

In terms of the problem of evil this line of thought has an obvious implication Our primary responsibility which we continually shirk is to find the evil in ourselves Theoretically and emotionally the same thing prevents that discovery the desire to uphold the idea that human nature is inherently or basically good with evil an aberration a fall a break with the natural order of things an exception to the rule of human decency Psychoanalysis like history renders such sentiments questionable at best And irrelevant to where inquiry must beginmdashwith psychological conflict the primary fact that defines us To be human is to live denned by wounds and disorders that are prior to the mediations (themselves rare) that result in a moral character that can be termed good Goodness is not something essentialistically guaranteed in a nature its an achievement that comes through the overcoming of ways of being that have a foothold in us long before some human beings take up the effort to reverse them Psychoanalysis from this point of view is neither pessimistic nor relativistic It is humanistic in the deepest way seeing the human as an achievement and valuing it by demonstrating what that achievement requires Psychoanalysis doesnt point to ethical relativism It points instead to an order of rank among human beings based on the degree to which a knowledge of ones psyche has become the basis of ones actions Ethically to know ones psyche is of necessity to engage in an effort to transform it since inner change is the only way to halt the projection of what otherwise does harm to others Psychological change is the primary task ethics the result

Their alternative misses the point In lieu of a criticism of the affirmative it is a much better act to internalize our anxiety and explore the effects within the psyche This allows us an uncastrated interaction with reality Davis 2001Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative pg xviii-xix

Virginia Woolf said that in or about December 1910 human nature changed She would have recorded a similar shock in August of 1945 The change Woolf witnessed has now of course been safely domesticated and has a local habitation and a name modernism The second change also has a namemdashpostmodernismmdashbut the ideologies most closely associated with its development remain mired in the first moment of an arrested dialectic12 Irony and aporia dominate the postmodern sensibility because its considerable energies are devoted to a displacement of the Event that remains at the center of our collective historical Unconsciousmdashthe referent that serves as the motive behind the denial of reference Reference must be continually deferred then rendered impossible because anxiety and flight from that anxiety define our actual response to the one referent that will continue to weigh on our consciousness until we restore the proper dialectical direction and move from the delights of skeptical play to a recovery of the demands of unhappy consciousness Einstein said the Bomb changed everythingmdashexcept the ways we think As such it is the inwardness of our inwardness never more so perhaps than when we use deconstructive irony as the master trope that delivers us from the burden of a historically situated subjectivity or at that opposite extreme that amounts to the same thing when we reassert an essentialist humanism as the fixed and universal system of understanding and explanation that washes us clean of history and its contingencies What if we broke with both strategiesmdashand rather than deconstructing the Bomb or containing it we tried to internalize it and then trace the ways it explodes and implodes within the psyche Such an effort would take as its goal a reconstitution of the tragic as the dialectical category that provides the only adequate idea for comprehendingmdashand existingmdashin the present Such a humanism however confronts as its prior and primary task a deracination of the system of guarantees on which previous humanisms have depended For the function of that system with respect to history has been to establish as canons of research and explanation a set of essentialistic concepts of meaning logic and human nature that function to insulate historians and their

audiences so that horror can never be more than the temporary aberration from which we always of necessity recover The narration of History thereby becomes yet another occasion for deployingmdashand thereby reinforcingmdashthe central beliefs and Values of the humanistic tradition That tradition thus provides the ego or identity-principle that we (the community of humanistic interpreters) move from and to in dealing with events that challenge our certainties13 We love to read and write histories because such stories tell us who we already know we are while conveniently exorcizing the threat of those accounts that would hold up a different mirror to our nature History is indeed a fiction the corpse over which we warm ourselves so that we may rise cleansed catharted the system of needs beliefs and guarantees restoredmdashwith existence the self-reference perpetually deferred What if instead we approached history as a realitymdashand a disciplinemdash in which we must risk ourselves utterly One in which to know is to suffer irreversible change in ones beliefs values and even in ones identity with nothing in the logos of thought able to protect us from that possibility The reign of the a priori would thereby come to an end the principle of hope a category wed risk not one wed need to renew at whatever cost Could such an engagement constitute the true force and signification of Hiroshima16 and thereby evidence that events in history are the true Absolute that abide with usmdashthe gift of the past to the future as that call of conscience requiring of us no less than a fundamentally new understanding of the human psyche and the human condition

The permutation solves ndash psychoanalytical evaluation of our anxiety and our reliance on stability and security are prior questions to the alternative and the framework of the criticism The alternative is still castrated by desire which means that it does not access proper historical contextDavis 2006Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative pg 1-3

In August 1945 Elias Canetti writes the following in his journal A tormenting thought as of a certain point history was no longer real Without noticing it all mankind suddenly left reality everything happening since then was supposedly not true but we supposedly didnt notice Our task would now be to find that point and as long as we didnt have it we would be forced to abide in our present destruction1 What Canetti cant see is that the point he refers to is the one he inhabits He cant see it because it is too close and blinds him (as it would soon the inhabitants of two cities) with a light not of this world The proliferation of new theories of history in recent decades is itself a response to a historical situationmdashthat defined by the Bomb That connection is also what these theories cannot know about themselves and ceaselessly displace in teaching us all the new ways we can know and write about the past What they do know is that the assumptions and guarantees on which historians have traditionally relied in constituting their subject and the needs that histories fulfill in offering us an account of events structured by these guarantees are no longer adequate to a contemporary awareness of history and historicity2 To cite the major developments (though in no necessary order of importance)3 1 Foucaults concept of genealogical history and the archeology of knowledge and its creative extension in the new historicist methodologies developed by Stephen Greenblatt and his circle 2 The hermeneutic theories of history and historical explanation developed by Gadamer Habermas and Ricoeur with special note given to Ricoeurs development of a complex theory of time and narrative 3 Derridas recent work on Marx and Benjamin and his continuing effort to expose the Hegelian assumptions about history progress and the logos which structure the way history is narrated by historians who know little or nothing of Hegel 4 Althusser Sartre Gramsci and the many often sharply opposed approaches to history developed in recent years by Marxists as different as Frederic Jameson G A Cohen Perry Anderson and Stuart Hall 5 The recovery of Kants speculations on history and its recent extension in Lyotards theory of the differend 6 The attempts by Slavoj Zizek Joan Copjec and Teresa Brennan to articulate the theory of history implicit in Lacan 7 The massive significance of Walter Benjamins speculations the continued vitality of Adorno and the Frankfurt school and the renewed interest in the thought of Kenneth Burke 8 The work of Louis O Mink Hayden White Dominick LaCapra Roy Schafer and others on the narrative and tropological principles that shape the writing of history To this list one can add Collingwood and McKeons earlier theorizing about history the work of Braudel Baudrillard deCerteau Calinescu and Bourdieu and the new modes of historical writing and historical investigation developed by anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz James Clifford and Natalie Zemon Davis The list is by no means complete because one must add to it two developments that may be of

greater significance and that complicate the issue of the historical I refer first to the number of alternative histories that have emerged in recent years thanks to feminist multicultural postcolonial subaltern and queer studies Such works have contributed more than new knowledge to our understanding of the past They have broken with the logic the procedures and the ruling assumptions of traditional historical methodologies by showing how that logic has as its primary function the exclusion (or marginalization) of voices that challenge its hegemony and the motives that inform its explanations Such studies are not merely of local interest They entail a theoretical crisis the recognition that the principles of historical explanation that we regard as true rational objective and universal are cultural conventional ideological and deeply implicated in power and the repressions required for its maintenance Ways of thinking derived from other cultures or voices silenced by the dominant culture may provide precisely the critical handle required to understand what is really at work in the privileging of certain canons of reasoning and explanation as scientific and objective and the rejection of other experiences and ways of thinking as illegitimate and unfounded The true bite of the multiculturalmdash seldom honored because it cuts in every directionmdashis the idea that none of us are locked into privileging our own culture and subject position(s) We can gain distance from our frameworks by immersing ourselves in other ways of thinking We can then use that experience to become aware of things that our culture and its dominant interest groups do not want to know about themselves The implication of such an orientation for history is considerable since historical explanation is perhaps the primary way in which a community establishes the structures of belief mind and feeling on which it depends in giving an identity to its members4 Thanks to the explosion of the multicultural we now have a way to internally distance ourselves from such beliefs and practices even perhaps following Nietzsche to touch all that goes without saying with the hammer as with a tuning fork

Case Stuff

War on Terror BadThe myth of effective security fosters a violent project that necessitates the creation of terrorists to be sacrificed on the altar of societyMcGowan 2013Associate Professor at the University of Vermont (Todd Enjoying What We Donrsquot Have Project Muse)

The fundamental barrier to the establishment of an authentic social bond is the resistance to avowing the traumatic nature of that bond We use the pleasure that accompanies the bombing of Afghanistan to disguise the shared enjoyment we experience through the traumatic experience of loss But this pleasure inevitably disappoints us and triggers the belief that someone has stolen the complete pleasure that we expected to experience This is why there can properly be no end to the War on Terror no end to the list of countries that the United States plans to invade to attain complete security no end to the number of terrorist leaders executed 31

Complete security like complete pleasure is mythical It attempts to bypass the one experience that cannot be bypassed mdash the foundational experience of loss mdash and it is this experience that holds the key to an authentic social bond The structure of society (which is the result of the structure of signification) is such that it blinds the subject to the possibility of shared sacrifice and the social bond that results from it No matter how often children hear the ideology of sharing or how many times we repeat to them the gospel of fairness they will inevitably believe that their sacrifice has enabled others to enjoy more than their proper share or unfairly

Loss of the SelfSurveillance devastates the gap between the Self and our informaticized bodies ndash the total knowledge it provides deprives one of the ability to function as a subject eradicating onersquos identity ndash this results in complete annihilationFriesen et al 2012 Dr Norm Friesen is Canada Research Chair in E-Learning Practices at Thompson Rivers University His academic credentials include a PhD in Education from the University of Alberta Andrew Feenberg School of Communication Simon Fraser University Grace Smith Arapiki Solutions Inc (Norm Friesen Andrew Feenberg Grace Smith and Shannon Lowe 2012 ldquoExperiencing Surveillancerdquo pp 82-83 (Re)Inventing The Internet httplinkspringercomchapter1010072F978-94-6091-734-9_4)

Students of surveillance have been so impressed by the ever-growing completeness of this data image that they animate it as though it were an actual person Identity is seen as coeval with an assemblage of traces rather than with actual presence Thus van der Ploeg writes of ldquothe

inability to distinguish between rsquothe body itselfrsquo and rsquobody informationrdquorsquo (van der Ploeg 2003 p 69) Haggerty and Ericson similarly write the surveillance assemblage standardizes the capture of fleshinformation flows of the human body It is not

so much immediately concerned with the direct physical relocation of the human body (although this may be an ultimate consequence)

but with transforming the body into pure information such that it can be rendered more mobile and comparable (Haggerty amp Ericson 2000 p 613) There is something right about this turn in surveillance theory and yet it is obvious that we are still able to distinguish the real person from the traces that person leaves behind The trace is bound to us by its origin and often by internal signs of various sorts so we do not quite leave it behind after all And yet we do not want to drag along every trace of our passage through life We count on the erasure of most traces It is this erasure that enables us to face the world afresh each day and to face it with a self-image we

construct at least partially anew for each new situation in which we find ourselves In existentialndashphenomenological terms privacy and secrecy are centrally constitutive of self and selfhood Holding something private or secret emphasizes the difference between self and other and confirms the autonomy of onersquos interiority and individuality ldquoSecrecy secures so to speak the possibility of a second world alongside of the obvious worldrdquo as Simmel (1906 p 462) puts it In contemporary conditions of surveillance and dataveillance subjectivity itself is dependent on maintaining the gap between our embodied selves and our informaticized bodies It would be intolerable for everyone to have full access to our salary the details of our relations to our family our medical histories sexual proclivities and so on Such knowledge would completely objectify us and force us to live up to (or down to) the image of ourselves implied in this knowledge Like Sartrersquos spy at the keyhole

himself espied we would be evacuated of those aspects of identity and interiority concealed within us frozen in the objectifying gaze of the other and essentially deprived of our ability to function as a subject We could no longer choose to project an identity appropriate to our inclination and situation as everything having to do with our identity would have been pre-empted Truly to be completely ldquooutedrdquo is to be annihilated

The gaze of surveillance invades and traps one psychologically rendering one enslavedVaz 1995 (Angelina Fall 1995 Dalhousie French Studies Vol 32 Mises en scegravene du regard (Fall 1995) pp 37-38 ldquoWhos Got the Look Sartres Gaze and Foucaults Panopticismrdquo JSTOR httpwwwjstororgstable40837004)

This grand formula is even applicable at the level of an encounter between two individuals where the theme of ldquosubjection by exposurerdquo is

dominant As Sartre says ldquobeing-seen constitutes me as a defenseless being for a freedom which is not my freedom [hellip] I am a slave to the degree that my being is dependent at my center of a freedom which is not mine and which is the very condition of my beingrdquo (Being p 358) In this sense the gaze does not just create and invade physical spaces there is a sense in which the gaze invades and traps me psychologically As a temporal-spatial object in the world being locked at forces me to apprehend myself as the

This anxiety is the core problem of the psyche Our inability to come to terms with this void is a fate worse than death Our anxiety functions as the condition for the possibility of Hiroshima and Auschwitz In attempts to master this emptiness we project our weakness through conflict This projection provides us the unrestrained power to bombard the other with pure suffering and destruction in an attempt to control the contingencies that constitute existence Davis 2001Walter A Davis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative Pg 103-108

We begin with an effort to describe what is the deepest experiencemdashthe one most deeply denied Catastrophic anxiety is that fear that haunts us from within the fear that one has already been annihilated that like Beckett one has never been born properly and never will be because inner paralysis is the psyches defining conditionmdasha truth attested each time when lining to cohere as a subject one collapses before the tidal wave of an Regression against oneself that rises up from within An

unspeakable dread weds the psyche to terror All other forms of anxiety are pale after-thoughts There is a threat worse than extinction The deepest self-knowledge we harbor the knowledge that haunts us as perhaps our deepest

self-reference is the fear that our inner world is ruled by a force opposed to our being Death is the icy wind that blows through all we do This is the anxiety from which other anxieties derive as displacements delays and vain attempts to deny or attenuate our terror before a dread

that is nameless and must remain so lest despair finalize its hold on us In catastrophic anxiety the destruction of ones power to be and the ceaseless unraveling of all attempts to surmount this condition is experienced as an event that has already happened That event forms the first self-reference the negative judgment of an Other on ones beingmdashinternalized as self-undoing Postmodern posturing before the phrase I am an other here receives the concretization that shatters free play There is a wound at the heart of subjectivity a self-ulceration that incessantly bleeds itself out into the world The issue of the wound is a soul caked in ice in a despair that apparently cannot be

mediated the nightmare state of a consciousness utterly awake alone and arrested all exits barred facing inner paralysis as the truth of ones life We ceaselessly flee this experience because if it ever comes down full upon us an even more terrifying process begins an implosion in which ones subjective being is resolved into fragments of pure anxiety that leave one incapable of existing as subject except in the howl to which each suffered state descends in a final chilling recognitionmdashthat everything one has done and suffered is but sound and fury signifying nothing One has become a corpse with insomnia Identity and self-reference thereafter ceaselessly circle about that void This is the hour of the wolf where one is arrested before the primary fact at the deepest register of the psyche one finds a voice of terror Fear of psychic dissolution is the ground condition of our being as subjects Subjectivity is founded in anguish before the dread of becoming no more than bits and pieces of pure horror fleeing in panic a voice that has already overtaken us resolving our subjective being into traumatic episodes of pure persecution At the heart of inwardness a malevolent spirit presides To put it in nuclear metaphors catastrophic anxiety is the threat of implosion into the others unlimited destructiveness To complete the picture we need only add Winnicotts point people live in dread of this situation projecting fear of a breakdown into the future because the breakdown has already occurred

B Exorcism through Evacuation And so a crypt is built to contain this anguish and repress the experience that is its cause We organize a life of identities and stabilities to give ourselves the illusion of escape Unable to reverse our condition we take up the only alternative We try to evacuate the whole thing to blow it out into the world and invest it in objects that are fitted to receive the full brunt of ones discontent and powerless to reply Projection the egos priest is founded in identification with an internal aggressor That is the complex that informs the effort to lodge our disorders and forbidden desires in others so that we can wage an attack on our inner conflicts then watch the ensuing spectacle from a safe distance Evacuation thus finds in projection a prime agent of human perception and the secure base for the perpetual mutual defeat that Sartre finds in all concrete

relations with others Were always on the lookout for a chance to make someone else bear our discontents But its never enough Satisfaction eludes us We keep erupting bleeding from within in a leukemia of soul that rages whenever we see those who have in their daily lives a beauty that makes us uglyFor then the projections return with the force of the furies Envy and resentment erupt as the assault within our inner world of the truth of our charactermdasha truth we deny by reinvesting it externally This grows apace over the years and then we long for a listing deliverance a final solution in the dim recognition that when projection proceeds from the register of catastrophe it requires and longs for a grand exorcism What we seek incessantly is a total evacuation of all inner discord a complete and lasting externalization in an ideal victim one in whom all that haunts us will stay outside lodged in the world in what Hegel calls a standing negation9 Our need is for a subject who is destroyed and lives on proof of a sublime aggression sculpted in time The Bomb provides such

an opportunity The criteria required to exorcize catastrophic anxiety finds in it the conditions for expelling the most primitive anxieties in the perfect objective correlative The subject voids itself of its core

anxietymdashthe inability to reverse inner destructivenessmdashby becoming the power to destroy unbound raining judgment down on a mass of subjects who are indifferently bound together as fragments of pure suffering unable after that action to ever form any identity except as walking corpses hibakusha deadened affect delivered over to the condition of death-in-life10 Projection here succeeds because in that shattered mirror one sees oneself reflected as the equal

of the power within that originally proclaimed ones utter worthlessness Malign reversal has grown to the event All inner anxiety about ones power to be resolves itself in the power to act free of restraint We have become the thing we feared Its destructiveness is now ours and nothing else has being The Contradiction The SublimemdashFrom the Crypt The mediation

traced above is driven by a contradiction about which it circles endlessly That is what the sublime object of the ego-ratio reveals when read from its crypt Sublime action seeks an absolute reversal of catastrophic anxiety in the absolute affirmation of unshakable guarantees Catastrophe must be reversed because it is that experience of contingency that underlies the horror of contingency in all its forms the lone driving the search for the guarantees needed to contain it In

catastrophe contingency is the others will as unbounded unlimited destructiveness The threat of extinction is the restraint here placed on subject This restraint is prior to the dialectic of desire restrained and checked on which Hegel grounds his phenomenology Desire here isnt restrained and checkedmdashit is turned back against itself in torment The other requires my destruction for their pleasure and assures that end by colonizing the psyche with an aggression that renders impotent every effort to make a beginning a tentative move toward independence or self-cohesion There is no exit but one apparently identification with the aggressor I become a self by turning someone or something else into an object delivered over to the true golden rule do onto others what was once done onto you This logic maintains because catastrophic anxiety internalized is death-work as the self-

mediation whereby we enact the command of the Other The only way out the only way to finalize this process is evacuation through a lasting exorcism It alone confers on the psyche a certitude beyond all cogitos It is also the mediation that finds it in flight forward already in its primitive imaginary one with the Bomb In its inner world the catastrophic subject experiences itself as full of death disease corruption The Bomb alone has the power to cast all nuclear waste outside and beneath oneself in a way that indefinitely extends the temporality of that act Radiation disease is a death that works inwardmdashinvisibly yet inexorably Death thereby breeds itself forth into an indefinite future omnipresent in a working a differance that begets delayed effects as further insurance against Nachtraglichkeit The extension of deaths dominion attained in the Bomb serves one grand function to prevent the return of projections by extending the temporality of the deed into a future that is lived by its victims as a judgment that is inevitable irreversible the antithesis of Benjamins messianic time tickingmdasha plea to delay death that can only be answered by death The Bomb thus serves as felix culpa to

an inner necessity To do its job a sublime event must exorcize everything within the subject that makes it an object of its own contempt What better way than Orwells boot brought down in an act of splitting that magnifies the distance between the terror

on the ground and the view from above Catastrophe is now fully outside oneself located in an other who has become nothing but matter body become spectacle of pain frozen forever in charred sculptures strewn across a devastated landscape Laocoon Munched but with the Howl silenced and deferred until it erupts later from within the survivors in a semiosis that can only be read by the scientists who planted it there and have now come (as biopowerknowledge) to study their handiwork as it blooms and bursts from deep within the body of the hibakusha as further testimony of ones powerjouissance Evacuation is complete Death-work has been lodged securely in the Other In the hibakusha one gets to see ones Thanatos as a narrative principle a force in history One gets to see over time what it is like to live death Soul-murder as the innermost reality of the crypt produces and finds in the

hibakusha its dialectical image As the expressive figura of death incarnate a terrifying verveilledoch here attains its objective correlative To purge oneself of catastrophic anxiety an utterly dehumanized object is not enough Neither the Sartrean look nor the Nazi act suffice The disorder of the psyche is deeper prior to desire (Sartre) and demand (Nazism) The projection of death-work can never rest by simply investing ones self-contempt in another For evacuation to work the

object must become something one can study inspect perform operations upon Catastrophic anxiety is the a proiri that gives Auschwitz and Hiroshima their necessity in the genocidal imagination The Bomb constitutes an Event because the psyche

reverses its core conditionmdashits cardiac arrest in inner self-loathingmdashthrough a projection that is total and irreversible If the evacuation of trauma is the abiding motive atop the crypt there is nothing abstract or Lacanian about the Real that results from its projection Evacuation is that malevolent reversal that condemns one to endless repetition One blows ones self-hatred and ones rage over that state fully out into the world but is thereby rendered powerless to do anything but gape in rapt amazement at ones creation That is perhaps why for over fifty years now whenever given the opportunity Paul Tibbets has proudly repeated the declaration that he has not had a moments remorse or regret Death-work externalized leaves one a spent and reified subject lacking any power other than the endless repetition of ones deed The wheel thus comes full circle in the only justice granted such subjects When catastrophic anxiety is only mediated by death-work the affects that compose subjectivity are rent assunder and scattered in pockets of pure persecution With each attempt to compose an inner self-cohesion death-work as internal saboteur rises up in a renewed attack on the effort to be Using the Bomb to reverse this disorder produces as its result a perfect attic justice Guilt and remorse are denied the doers of the deed because to feel such things is to renew a process of self-unraveling What the Bomb was meant to deliver one from has become the guardian

of untroubled sleep With the call of conscience rendered impossible the subject becomes overtly psychotic and must cling ever more desperately to an untroubled memory of the sublime event The subject thereby pronounces without being able to comprehend or mediate it the truth about itself in the ravaged landscape of Hiroshima the founding inner world of the psychotic-a world of utter fragmentation and the obliteration of every term of reference-has finally found a home to which it must say stay thou art so fair a home in which nothing inhuman is unheimlich

The moralization of anxiety manifests itself in our inability confront evil To displace this anxiety we make ourselves ldquogoodrdquo to protect ourselves from danger Failure to confront this psychical conflict reifies the original trauma and makes the destruction of the self meaninglessDavis 2001Walter A Davis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative Pg 86-87

No wonder resistance becomes the key term in the first stage of the unfolding drama This time however Kant canrsquot shift everything onto a plane of conceptual defenses and controls Affect weighs too heavily Intermediate moves immanent within that register are required Opposing affects must be created and marshaled as a first line of defense For the first time in Kant rationalistic mediation gives way to dramatic self-mediation Kant will finally attempt an agon that moves solely within the medium of affect To resist psychic unraveling he must

establish a countervailing force within the order of affect itself For Kant however affective self-mediation is equivalent to bending everything in a moral direction In doing so the author of the ethic of pure duty gives us the true genealogy of morals

That dubious ascent begins once the force threatening destruction is characterized as ldquoevilrdquo Anxiety is thereby transformed into a moralizing fear that we lack the power to resist ldquoevilrdquo Moralizing then structures the subsequent discourse but without exorcizing the psychological subtext that will undercut it This contradiction is in fact what ethics will here reveal about itselfIn making ourselves ldquogoodrdquo subjects we make ourselves beings unworthy of destruction That

transformation also requires the resources of rhetoric since we must ldquopersuaderdquo a tough audience The true goal in remaking ourselves is to tame the power that threatens us by tapping its conscience To do so we create within ourselves a new agency one that recognizing our virtue promises protection We thereby create the illusion that the threatening force has been softened and then transformed into a voice that warmly supports the good intentions of the nascent ego The superego as ego-ideal has been created So ends the founding self-mediation in the genealogy of an ethical ration By staging this internal drama the psyche has taken the action within required to create the space needed to assert control over affect The necessary act follows ndash the attempt to affect a complete reversal of the psychersquos initial condition Kant asserts repeatedly that we can only judge the sublime and experience its proper ldquopleasurerdquo if we view things from ldquoa safe placerdquo But in the psyche as opposed to mind the safe place doesnrsquot exist a priori It has to be invented and with it the most revealing picture of the genesis of what we now call the ldquoegordquo It is a difficult birth to a dubious and troubled function The problem of the ego is one of generating a transformation from impotence to power within affect itself through an agon immanent to that register But Kant is unable to sustain such an agon We get instead a displacement toward concepts through a use of the defensive mechanism known as splitting Ego and inner world divide in an unbridgeable rift thus establishing this condition as the true ldquoidentityrdquo of the ego The ego is the effort to repress the conflicts in the psyche from which it derives But while displacement and intellectualization offer a handle the egorsquos work is far from done The continuing pressure of inner conflicts requires a further battle In that struggle moralizing interpretations do yeoman service by splitting the psychersquos original trauma into a longed-for reificationmdashthe opposition of the ego to the drives

We have become creatures full of instincts The crucial task of the aff is to open up the unconscious counter narrative to provide a mirror to reflect upon the presupposed American identitySucharov 2005Mira M Sucharov assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli Palestinian Peacerdquo Pg 27-28

Just as individuals and groups possess consciousness and an unconscious I argue that every society maintains not only a dominant (conscious) narrative but an unconscious counternarrative as well which

the former has in part arisen to conceal As the counternarrative represents the role that society most fears adopting it resides in the unconscious where it will not interfere with the day-to-day transmission and fulfillment of the dominant narratives and the dominant roles For instance a defensive states counternarrative would encapsulate the view that we are not only defensive but sometimes we can be aggressive 35 Narratives and counternarratives can coexist in two waysmdash either with the counternarrative being simply an unactualized fear or with the counternarrative corresponding to an actual role being enacted alongside the dominant role-identity Thus while an actor may consciously be aware of a counterrole that she abhors (eg the good student who avoids cheating on exams) the unconscious reminds us that the cheater is latent in the self-portfolio of the good student In the event that this student cheats radical change can only come about once the self has

been reconciled with its unconscious opposite Actors will not become aware of the divergence from their dominant identity without the aid of a mirror however Only with the help of outside forces drawing attention to the clash between the two narratives will elites experience a cognitive dissonance necessitating a realignment between actions and role-identity One of the most salient transmission belts for the creation of state narratives is collective memory Memorymdashactive or latent recall of things occurring in the pastmdashhas begun to be understood as not solely a private activity but as representing a group phenomenon as well 36 On the collective level memory can be either experience-near-active one-step removed or distantly removed Active memory would be represented by Holocaust survivors in Israel and the Diaspora for instance One step removed would be the surrogate memories that their immediate Offspring carry with them37 and distantly removed would be exemplified by the Rabbinic injunction that Jews experience the annual telling of the Exodus from Egypt as if they were there While a case could be made for discounting the importance of actual experiences in favor of the way

those experiences arc remembered both of these are crucial for ascertaining role identity Just as traumatic events in a persons life may be repressed in memory but still shape that persons identity the international observer needs to account for actual experiences yet view these as embedded within a narrative context Similarly some historical events undergo a process of memory revision in these cases the observer must be sensitive to the effect that the new discourse has on the societys perception of these events whether or not these stories accord with fact The clinical parallel in psychoanalysis is that while the analysands relationship with her parents is considered crucial to uncovering the contours of her psychology the analyst as a rule does not attempt to meet the parents firsthand rather the patients recounting of these experiences is considered to be the most important channel of investigationmdash and hence transformation Since we are talking about collections of individuals memory needs to be actively transmitted to the societys members in order for it to influence the citizens sense of collective identity One of the ways this can be done is through ritual Being repetitive while symbolically imbued ritual gains meaning only through the symbols attributed to it by the group and is a collective process that serves to link actors to a series of past events for which they may not have been physically present Moreover private rituals that are collectively prescribed such as prayer serve to bind the individual to the collective particularly when there is a formalized liturgy Most collective rituals occur according to the calendar and therefore can encompass regular ceremonies that come to act as markers for the individuals personal time cycle38Sometimes particular collective memories that have been sustained over time are ruptured with citizens contemplating new facts about their countrys past Revisionist history is an example of an attempt to bring forth these sorts of new facts When history is reinterpreted the society can either shun the dissenting voices or else gradually reevaluate the original narratives When this reevaluation occurs society is more apt to uncover the hitherto unconscious counternarratives a discovery that can

lead to the realization that the states behavior might be contradicting the states role-identity In other words revisionist historians and other domestic dissenters can serve as the mirror referred to later

Vote affirmative to give up hope in the face of guarantees - only holding yourself completely open in the face of the promise of a sustainable status quo can open space for self-overcoming that allows us to engage in new forms of praxisDavis 2006 Walter A Davis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deathrsquos Dream Kingdom Pg 63

To know this situation for what it is challenges what is finally the deepest and most fundamental of the guarantees The principle of Hope To appropriate Eliot After such knowledge what forgiveness There is perhaps nothing that can be done to change the situation Ive described But then what is the purpose of knowing such things if they only produce meaningless suffering Is despair the end result of a life shorn of the guarantees Or are we finally like the drunks in ONeills The Iceman Cometh knowing that in order to sustain the illusions required to go on living they must pronounce Hickey mad and reject everything he revealed to them about

their lives as a product of that madness Perhaps its time to admit what the need for Hope really signifies Denial of responsibility for certain situations under the assumption that knowing them correctly would lead to despair Raising that specter is of course the rhetorical ploy invoked to prematurely terminate inquiry lest it impinge on

emotional and psychological needs Despair thus remains an empty concept We dont know what it is and never will as long as we use the need for hope to prevent discovery of our capacities to endure Whether despair is what we will find on the other side of hope is something we cant know For all hope really signifies is a testament to our weakness and our fears Perhaps we are called to something beyond it What Shakespeare called tragic

readiness For in opening ourselves to the possibility of despair we also open ourselves to the possibility of self-overcoming and through it the discovery of a praxis that lies on the other side of the conceptual and existential paralyses created by the guarantees We cant know what is to be done as long as we continue to respond to our situation by invoking ahistorical values and guarantees that are grounded in an essentialistic and ahistorical theory of human nature

PlanThe United States federal government should substantially curtail its domestic surveillance by ceasing all domestic surveillance

Contention 2 is FramingAn ethics of existence forecloses the tragic struggle in which we never confront our inner trauma- only our affirmative can open new ways of relating to ourselves that can overcome these limitations- the 1AC is a precondition for any meaning to our livesDavis 2006 Walter ADavis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg238-240)

In her critique of Kantian ethics Alenka Zupancic often refers to the Lacanian idea that there is a loss deeper than ones life The loss of ones reason for living The apostle of duty offers a heroic example of how one escapes the threat of that loss What Im suggesting here is that ethics actually begins on the other side of it With the possibility that first exists when one discovers that one has already lost or violated or fatally compromised ones reason for living because the values one thinks one honors and the actual truth of ones life are thoroughly at odds The traumatic event that brings one to this recognition is the origin of ethics This is the ethical task it establishes to see if one can pay the price for having violated oneself by assuming the full burden of the situation one has thereby createdThe ethical situation accordingly confronts the subject with the necessity to choose to be in a radically new way or die inside Nothing less is demanded than a totally new way of relating to oneself for the guilt one experiences in such a situation is existentializing One is guilty toward oneself for having failed to honor the duties that one bears to oneself for having so thoroughly lied to oneself about ones life As Hamlet learns it is through that recognition that one first discovers that one has tragic responsibilities toward oneself that can no longer be evaded because one with this situation is the even deeper discovery that there are failures that can be irreversible That is the possibility defining the situation one is now in What one does will reveal the truth of who one is Guilt toward oneself has overtaken all possibilities of displacement and denial Fail now and one dies within Most people will of course do just about anything to avoid guilt or to get cleansed of it as quickly as possible That is why so many fail the test when it comes to them shrinking inside rather than expanding to the demands of our innermost possibility the one defining our humanity An ethics of existence begins with the traumatic experience in which everything weve tried to escape about ourselves catches up with us One then knows that ones prior life has been a flight And all ones brave ideas and bright ethical claims airy nothingmdashthe indulgence in comforting and self-alienating lies But now one

is finally like Hamlet in the situation from which there is no exit An ethics grounded in the possibility of freedom depends on the actions one performs within oneself when one finds oneself in a crisis that can no longer be denied This is precisely the kind of situation Kant is unable to consider which is why he constructs in Duty the principle of choice that renders it impossible In serving Duty one is delivered from the repressed thought that now can never arise that ones whole life and all its choices especially the ethical ones may be no more than a flight from things in oneself that one flees because one fears that if one is ever forced to face oneself one will suffer a destruction worse than death Destruction within An existentializing ethic begins on the other side of all the things we do to delay that event For it is when the thing one fears happens that one first discovers the truth of ones life the depth of ones inauthenticity The trauma that will measure ones humanity has arrived Nothing else now exists but the lonely struggle of the psyche with itself Suicide (including the primary form of suicide inner death) is one term of that situation Ethics is the other An ethics of existence is what one does when one finally finds oneself in the traumatic situation that brings one before oneself There is one lesson in this a lesson that probably cant be learned Rather than running from the trauma we should plunge toward it since it is only through it that we can discover both the truth about ourselves and what we are able to do in the face of that truth To activate that possibility all thats needed perhaps is to drown out the noise and chatter one keeps running in ones head Perhaps the truth is that the truth about ourselves is not deeply repressed and unknown Its closer than we think available to introspection if we but dared But thats what makes the kind of impassioned reflection Hamlet engages in so terrifying It exemplifies everything we know and dont want to know about ourselves18 Here is an attempt to offer an image that describes in depth the existential-psychoanalytic condition from which the possibility of ethics derives In George Orwells 1984 Winston Smith when tortured with the thing he most fears betrays the thing he loves To save his life he sacrifices what gives it meaning He capitulates before an inner torment that reduces the psyche to a condition of catastrophic anxiety (The image of the cage of rats placed over the head they will raven externalizes in a perfect objective correlative the terror that has the power to dissolve the psyche What is a phobia after all but an inner condition displaced into an external fear) What I want to suggest here is that Winston Smiths phobia describes the inner condition that defines any subject traumatized by itself Such a subject lives tortured by the struggle not to betray the thing one loves the thing that could give ones life meaning But one saves it only if one is willing to sacrifice everything to the

acceptance of the suffering and inner torment that service to it entails This is the ethical act whereby a subject attains tragic agency Becoming an existentially autonomous agent is the process of engaging the disorders of ones psyche in the effort of active reversal The wish to escape that effort to soften it or to insist that suffering must always have a happy resolution is the voice of self-betrayal If one gives in to it one loses with Winston the thing one has finally found the thing one can love more than ones life but only by suffering all that it demands That thing more precious than life is the tragic struggle that gives life perhaps the only meaning it can have

The ethic of the aff is key - only an ethical act that confronts our inner trauma with a constant and inner openness can we create the conditions for self-overcoming necessary to open ourselves to a meaningful existence - the only ethical choice is to fully confront contingencyDavis 2006 Walter A Davis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg235-238

What follows attempts to distill the ethic of existence in to its fundamental principles I also try here to present those thesis in a way that will engage the readers psyche and emotions at precisely the place within us where each of us makes a basic decision about ourselves Thats the only self that matters The others are selfreifying defenses The argument thus constitutes both an appeal to the readers freedom and an attempt to impinge on that freedom to bring each reader before him or herself by challenging defenses with the power that some ideas have to light a fire in the soul (1) We concur with Kant that if a choice is not free its not moral The possibility of freedom depends however on an in-depth analysis of ones psyche Such an analysis leads from the destruction of ego identity to the need to bring about a complete reversal in ones relationship to oneself by deracinating the voice of the other Thinking is ethical insofar as it engages one thing the battle of a subject with itself over the meaning of its being (2) There is no way to abridge that process nor to provide guarantees that will secure a safe outcome To sustain the psychoanalytic turn the psyche must continually throw itself into question and root out the emotions that bind it to a pattern of lies An ethic of the existential subject depends on maximizing what Keats termed negative capability the ability to be in uncertainties Mysteries doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason Rather than resolving doubts the purpose of thought and action is to deepen them An act is ethical insofar as it deepens the conflict of the subject with itself (3) One acts ethically only when all symbolic and ideological supports have collapsed Only then can one take on responsibility for oneself because only then is one at issue and at risk The ethical act must radically open itself to contingency in a situation where one must create values yet where those values can derive from nothing but the depth of ones engagement in the situation By the same token such values cannot be a final solution but must open themselves to later contingencies Ethics must always allow itself to be measured by contingency because contingency is precisely what calls up ethical responsibility The primary ethical situation is not one where there is a clear course of duty but where a subject trembles before its responsibility to create new values in a situation that reduces received values to rubble (4) Ethics begins when there is a genuine crisis of values even perhaps the need for a re-valuation of all values For Kant there was not nor could there be such a crisis The values were known immutable and generally agreed upon The only question was what kind of principle they would be grounded in which meant for Kant and the Aufklarung how could they be grounded in Reason For us in contrast the primary fact is a historicity that bites into the very possibility of the ethical Every ethical value must be willing to historicize itself That recognition entails the following considerations The desert grows Under the guise of fundamentalist crusades herd moralities dominate The extent of inhumanity is appalling So many values that once seemed so solid have been so thoroughly debunked The possibility of ethics now begins with a systematic exposure of all superego pathologies all the ethical ideologies that societies use to introduce a fundamental passivity into subjects while convincing those same subjects that they are good in a goodness that depends on willed ignorance An existential ethic is radically destructive of received beliefs radically disruptive of the desires of the normal subject Refusing and exposing all Symbolic supports it seeks in the struggle of the psyche with its disorders the source of value (5) Ethics is a matter of extremity It begins in the most extreme actmdashthe act of radical individuation in which one opens ones psyche to an interrogation that must be sustained in its extremity Ethics is about a choice in which a subject risks the value and meaning of its existence not about those choices that assure it of that meaning Moreover it is only when one does this that one experiences for the first time the

terror implicit in the oft-quoted Sartrean statement existence precedes essence (6) Ethics must engage and derive from the dread that defines choice Let me illustrate this proposition by contrasting Hamlets choice with the situation in Styrons Sophies Choice The horrifying choice Sophie facesmdashto choose which of her children will be sent to the gas chambermdashis a forced choice and thus extreme and exceptional in a way that deprives it of the possibility of being normative17 Hamlets choice in contrast is a free one that issues from nothing but his freedom and the readiness with which he accepts the selftorture that existence entails Sophie is tortured from without by the madness of the other and the inhuman logic that madness requires in order to know itself (Styron calls the officer who forces the choice on Sophie a genius of the Reich) Hamlet is tortured from within by the logic of self-criticism and self-overcoming that informs the existentializing process We are fortunate if we never face a situation like Sophies nor suffer the death-in-life that is the result of such choices But insofar as we have a psyche Hamlets situation is the general one that defines us Or to put it in properly ethical terms engaging the kind of situation he faces is the act that activates the inherent possibility that defines us The choice that founds such an ethic must therefore be distinguished both from the a priori choice made by the apostle of duty and Sophies forced choice All three refer to extreme choices and situations In only one however is guilt toward oneself both the origin of the choice and its result That is only one of the three choices is the ground of its own possibility and thereby the source of an existentialization that issues in values bound to the tragic contingencies of our situatedness

2AC

A2 ndash Realism

We control the internal link to their impacts The psychoanalysis of the affirmative forces an internal investigation of the ways in which the subjectrsquos subconscious desires rationalize what we would consider self-interest This means that we can only make sense of realism through a lens of psychoanalysis Sucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 17-18)

The psychological turn that international relations took with the rise of behavioralism in the 1960s has begun to expand beyond focusing on cognitionmdashhow individuals thinkmdashto a wider appreciation of the role of emotional determinants of action one of many factors that were long dismissed as unscientific Part of the reason for this hesitant courtship is no doubt the long strides that international relations theory has taken toward refining its investigative lenses such that less easily observable phenomena can be more confidently incorporated into the solid theoretical infrastructure that the discipline has now adopted A central example of this evolution is the analytical watershed inaugurated by neorealism which fashioned a conceptual playing field where little had existed before Neorealism a theoretical school that views international relations as taking place within an anarchical state system with no overarching authority in turn spawned the constructivist turn in international relationsmdashthe approach that stresses the importance of social identity in determining international outcomesmdashand subsequent counterarguments that built on yet other social and psychological preceptsmdash all of which agree that there is such a thing as an international systemmdashthough they understand the effects of anarchy differently Introducing psychoanalysis to international relations can therefore be seen as the next logical step for a relatively young discipline that seeks to understand why political actors behave the way they do While all psychoanalysts draw on Freuds unique contribution subsequent approaches have altered many of his assumptions This trend has kept pace with the embracing of new epistemological and ontological perspectives by other scientific and social scientific fields such as the quantum revolution in physics -a paradigm shift that has since influenced other disciplines The form of psychoanalytic theory that I use here is the contemporary relational strand one that analysts have alternately termed relational-model theorizing a dyadic systems perspective and intersubjectivity theory This approach shares an ontology basic to constructivism in international relations the psychology (identity) of the person (state) is not hard-wired into the unit but develops in part from the actions of other actors in the social environment (the family the therapeutic setting the international system) and in part through the shared assumptions that permeate that system As an approach centered on the individual mind contemporary psychoanalysis takes into account the broader social context within which actors act Psychoanalysis also provides a coherent theory of behavior incorporating three elements that have mostly been invisible in international relations theory but that provide a fuller understanding of how states and nonstate actors interact emotion the unconscious and the possibility for actors own cognitive and emotional insight to be a source of behavior change In drawing on these principles perhaps the most significant contribution that psychoanalysis can make to international relations is in improving on prevailing theories of identity which in turn illuminate questions about international action Within international relations constructivism has been criticized for neglecting the question of how identity is in fact created Cognitive psychologymdashwhich international relations has begun to draw on liberallymdashin part helps to fill this gap Yet with its assumption that the emotional legacy of early interpersonal relationships is essential in shaping personality and subsequent behavior psychoanalysis offers a more comprehensive model of identity creation than those put forth by cognitive theorists Recognizing these explanatory benefits contructivists have recently called for exploring the potential that psychoanalysis holds for understanding international politics Thus unlike the prevailing psychoanalytic approaches in international relationsmdashnamely psychohistories of individual leaders and the focus-group potential of micro-level conflict resolution the psychoanalytic approach I use here is meant to coexist happily alongside other streams of systemic theory in international relations

Forcing the state away from what it considers a core tenet of national defense in the exact opposite way it desires creates the conditions necessary for reflection of the efficacy of the initial policies of surveillance which changes future policySucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 32-)

Like most individuals states possess a complex arsenal of motivations that are not all palatable to the politys sense of self mdashnot least of which is due to the discrepant voices vying for influence in any society Yet the dominant self mdashthat overarching group ethos that does not necessarily reflect each single (sub)voicemdashimplicitly prescribes a set of normatively acceptable behaviors Should a state adopt a policy course that contradicts the states role-identity we can expect some sort of cognitive dissonance to arise leading to a radical realignment between actions and identity Just as a man who once struck his wife might offer the apologetic plea that I dont know what got into me it is up to the analyst to help the subject come to terms with the aggression that has evidently been very much inside of him all along The policy shift therefore results from the force of the role-identity prodding the self back into behavioral consistency However acting in contradiction to ones role-identity does not necessarily result in a behavior shift The dissonance between role-identity and behavior must be both unbearable and experienced at an emotional level in order for such a shift to result If the dissonance remained at a cognitive level it is likely that the subject would employ one of a number of cognitive biases in order to rationalize the discrepancy42 The dredging up of the unconscious counternarrative assures that the dissonance is experienced deeply enough to result in the taking of radical action to realign actions with identity 43 This hypothesis of cognitive-emotional realization is grounded in the clinical findings of psychoanalytic theory that suggest that under certain conditions actors may become consciously aware of previously unconscious processes44 The classic understanding of cognitive dissonancemdashas articulated by Leon Festingermdashis that inconsistency between behavior and belief results in psychological discomfort that leads to activity oriented toward dissonance reduction just as hunger leads to activity oriented toward hunger reduction45 In line with psychoanalysis the actual cognitive-emotional realization brings to light what had previously been stored in the unconscious areas of the states subjective world In actuality the assumption here is that the role-challenging behavior (paired with domestic challenges) causes elites to reflect on the states role- identity Moreover my use of cognitive-emotional realization imbues the concept with a distinctively emotional component as well Whereas pure cognitive dissonance refers to the challenging of an individuals worldview (ie the revelation of new facts)46 I am introducing the more ontologically powerful notion of challenges to the self47 When this behavior undermines the very legitimacy buttressing the states raison detat the dissonance is particularly acute Catalysts for Realization Once decision-makers come to realize that the states foreign-policy actions have contradicted the states role-identity a policy shift may result The important question that remains is what contributes to this realization Numerous sources may act as the mirror necessary for the state to reflect on its behavior For clarity I have divided them into three categories domestic elements (including the military the peace movement revisionist historians artists and the domestic media) other states (including allies and adversaries as well as those states news media) and international structures (including international organizations norms and regimes) Domestic Elements The Military If the military acts in a way that the populace sees as contradicting the states self-image (even if the military is merely carrying out governmental policies) society can experience a corresponding cognitive

dissonance In a democracy the military takes its directives from the government however military culture is instrumental in shaping the broader strategic culture encompassing foreign-policy decisions mdashand role-identitymdashmore generally Most of the time the relationship between the civilian and military spheres resembles a symbiosis commands are given by civilians and implemented by the military which in turn will advise and reshape subsequent policies In some cases ex-military personnel will pursue a career in government on being discharged However it is possible for the military to experience a sense of dissonance between a particular policy and its overall defense doctrine or ethic Soldiers might articulate discomfort in carrying out a particular mission or the number of conscientious objectors may rise In a country in which conscientious objection is previously unheard of the founding of such a movement will therefore signal an even higher degree of dissonance between behavior and institutional role-identity In examining foreign-policy shifts the role of the military is crucial in representing the degree of concordance between national role-identity and foreign policy In states where the military has particular salience for establishing national identitymdashthose states with mandatory and universal conscription for instancemdashthat institution will be particularly salient

Their dependence on pragmatism to justify unrealistic internal link chains and counter psychological methods creates the worst type of moral tunnel vision in which we become incapable of understanding the carnage of our ideology ndash this makes ethics impossibleDavis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg47-48)

But its always a good idea when seeking an explanation of the human motives behind actions to stick with the empirical With stated intentions and official rationales Otherwise we give ourselves over to psychobabble Despite official denial by the Department of Defense that DU is harmful a series of explanations are now in place to account for the development and use of DU weapons DU is cost-effective militarily efficient and turns to productive use a waste product wed otherwise have to dispose of at great cost In a variety of ways for the past two days We who leave here in sorrow know that we will one day be reunited with her in joy My concern here is not with the ontological status of this preposterous belief but with its psychological function as a guarantee that offers human beings a way to deprive death of its finality And the terror that prospect entails The function of guarantees is to enable human beings to bear events and contingencies that would otherwise be too traumatic There is much that we can face apparently only by denying Such perhaps is one accurate estimation of what it means lo be a human being to remain a child of ones needs and desires disguising that fact in the form of beliefs and ideas The primary purpose of religion philosophy and culture has been to provide conceptual psychological and emotional guarantees so I hat traumatic events become part of a larger framework that assures the realization of our hopes and dreams Without such supports most people supposedly would find life unlivable Through the ministry of the guarantees we banish those thoughts and feelings that we are convinced would deprive life of meaning plunging us into despair Experience accordingly becomes the movement from and to the affirmation of the guarantees through their imposition on events The main line of Western philosophy can most profitably be seen as I series of efforts to provide a ground for the guarantees That effort achieves one of its culminations in Hegel who defined the purpose of philosophy as the elimination of the contingent As father of the philosophy of history he offered that new discipline a single goal to demonstrate that the rational is real and the real rational that history is the story of progress liberty the realization of a universal humanity Or to put it in vulgar terms democracy and civilization are on the march and will soon sweep the entire Middle East In order to triumph over the contingencies of existencemdashdoubt about oneself ones place in the world and ones final endmdashmany guarantees are needed Moreover they must form a system of reinforcing beliefs such that if one guarantee is threatened other guarantees come in to fill the breach Thereby the function of the system as a whole is assured Within the system of guarantees one guarantee however is superordinate The belief that human nature is basically good As animal rationale we are endowed with an ahistorical essence that cannot be lost Evil is an aberration Consequently I heres always reason for hope and the belief that no matter how bad things get well always find a way to recover everything that I lie guarantees assure Psyche Its all a matter of pragmatic efficiency with a little capitalist profit motive thrown in for good measure Theres only one thing wrong with this explanation It leaves out the basis for the calculus Theres every reason to use DU and no reason not to use it if and only if one rationale informs all decisions How to maximize death regardless of consequences or alternatives Introduce any countervailing motives and the entire chain of decisions becomes questionable Conscious stated intentions then reveal themselves as functions of something else that

has been conveniently rendered unconscious What looks like a purely pragmatic matter devoid of psychological motives now reveals the opposite the fact that Thanatos so inhabits the system that the absence of anything opposed to it goes without saying Thanatos has become what Wittgenstein called a form of life7 a way of being so deeply rooted that it operates automatically habitually and of necessity It has become a collective unconscious And as such it is no longer accessible to those whose intentions conceal and reveal it The reason for sticking with the empirical is now clear There is something insane in the empirical That is what the historian must uncover Before we ask ourselves how this situation came to pass we need to ask another question For its easy to claim we dont know about such things because the media refuses to tell us about them Theres another reason for our ignorance however and its the one we need to confront I refer to the possibility that we choose our ignorance because otherwise wed lose the system of guarantees we depend on for our identity and our understanding of history As Barbara Bush put it in telling Diane Sawyer why she doesnt watch the news Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many what day its gonna happen and how many this or what do you suppose Or I mean its its not relevant So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that8 It would be easy to deride Mrs Bush to congratulate oneself on not sharing her attitude What I hope to show however is that on an essential level one determinative in the last instance we are in full agreement with her and delude ourselves as long as we think otherwise

IR SPECIFIC ndash The method of the affirmative best supplements our understanding of international relations by including elements that are absent in normal policy examinations of international relations Sucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 18-20)

It has long been argued that even within the confines of rational-choice approaches the nature of a decision-makers preferences cannot be assumed a priori and indeed their distinctiveness derives from factors ranging from emotions to personality to the selective use of historical analogies Emotion in short can be considered the sine qua non of social life a realization that has recently begun to permeate international relations theory Moreover the concept of the unconscious that anchors psychoanalysis can illuminate the question of why an individual experiences a sense of dissonance when her actions do not conform to her identity the mechanism by which the dissonance between action and identity can become unbearable and therefore why humans experience the need to match the two The unconscious is that aspect of the self that remains the most untapped yet potentially the most satisfying determinant of action coming as it does early in the causal chain At its most basic the unconscious is simply the repository for those characteristics that an actor fears adopting in other words action fantasies that the actor despises but can plausibly entertain This fundamental tension between the feared and the imaginable is what normally keeps these fantasies in check and is what makes the unconscious so potentially powerful as an explanatory tool And while the unconscious is an admittedly contested concept scholars from various fields have issued tentative calls for its exploration and convincing deductive and empirical research certainly justify its consideration One theoretical perspective that has been criticized for ignoring the unconscious is sociologys symbolic interactionism an approach that underpins constructivism in international relations Part of the reason for the tension between sociology including symbolic interactionism and psychoanalysis arguably lies in an antiquated understanding of psychology the false belief that to employ psychology as an explanatory approach one must ignore the impact that ones social environment has on ones personality self-image and behavior However contemporary psychoanalysis presents a view of the self that is more relational than what Freudian drive theory had suggested A psychoanalytic approach does not have to assume that unconscious or otherwise emotional factors arise from the actor independent of the shared understandings that define the social environment Admitting an explanatory role for the unconscious therefore does not imply a rejection of intersubjectivity mutual-constitution or any of the other organizing principles of sociology and constructivism Rather it simply means that ideas held in the unconscious serve as one filter through which actors interpret social interaction The unconscious therefore may be understood either as one element of agency that the actor brings to interpreting his social script or as itself the product of social forces that interpret and constrain action The first perspective assumes that agency does not have to be conscious to be meaningful agency at its most basic can simply imply action and intentionality can therefore encompass an unconscious component The second view means that the unconscious does not have to be understood as a pre-wired component of the unit that in turn shapes behavior rather it can be viewed as an emergent and mediating phenomenon We can therefore understand cognition as being inherently situated within social processes This is consistent with a relational view of social life and yet it is an important theoretical addition to the prevailing wisdom in international relations about how social understandings

ultimately shape behavior A final contribution that psychoanalysis can make to our understanding of international relationsmdashand conflict resolution in particularmdashis its assumption that entrenched behavior patterns can be altered through cognitive and emotional insight In addition to challenging the static conception of human nature that underpinned classical realism (arguably the first theory of international relations) and that provided a rather pessimistic view of human affairs this assumption is a valuable addition to any theory of international relations in which the prevailing theories of actionmdashmaterial power in the case of states polarity in the case of state systemsmdashare difficult if not impossible to manipulate As a result many of the most prominent international relations theories have lacked meaningful policy implications Conversely psychoanalytic theory suggests tools for ameliorating some of the most pressing global problems including protracted conflict and war While some psychoanalytically based conflict-resolution approaches use the focus-group format to simulate the healing function of the therapy setting this book demonstrates that the gaining of conscious insight into ones role deviationmdasha prerequisite for policy changemdashcan come about through real-life international interaction that requires neither a skilled conflict practitioner nor the willingness of elites to participate in such an exercise Rather under certain conditions role conflict can prompt domestic and international elements to hold a mirror to the face of elites resulting in a collective cognitive dissonance that can lead to policy change This mirror can take a number of formsmdashacts of protest by domestic groups media coverage and actions by allies adversaries or international structures These sources will be discussed further

IR SPECIFIC ndash What their internal links consider to be ldquoself-interestrdquo for a state doesnrsquot actually exist States are not sentient Instead they are composed by a collection of minds that act in self-interest which means that psychoanalytic evaluation of the self is a prior question to understanding the interests of the state Sucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 21-22)

Rather than referring to a notion of collective selfhood that is shared by multiple states- as some constructivist theorists of collective identity would maintainmdashthe title of this book the international self is meant to suggest not only that each state possesses a distinctive identity but that this identity develops out of the states relationship with other international actors This concept also implies that decisions emanating from the polity are derived from a process not simply the sum of the states parts Yet while we have already shown that psychoanalysis can accommodate a role for environmental processes in shaping behavior we still need to be aware of the risks of anthropomorphizing the state a practice that gets to the heart of the debate between two analytical positions that cut across the social sciences methodological individualism and holism While methodological individualism views social life as the product of actions taken by individuals holism understands the group to be a meaningful unit in and of itself Yet to an extent the debate between the two perspectives is already fixed While the holists have in their favor a precedent of semantic habitmdash we tend to anthropomorphize the state in everyday speech more often than not (eg Washington decided to wage war against al-Qaeda)mdashmethodological individualism is allied with the rich literature of rational choice and more prosaically the commonsense discomfort that arises when we ascribe human characteristics to things including groups Groups do not have minds any more than do other social facts and group behavior is after all the product of individuals acting on the groups behalf Finally given the presence of disparate individuals and subgroups constituting any society it can be misleading to attribute a single group consciousness to a political entity In a foreign-policy context accordingly adherents of this view would focus on elite attitudes bureaucratic politics andor interest group activities to tease out the causal relationship between Intentions and outcomes Yet a strong case can be made for the emergent properties of states and their policy processes something happens between the point at which citizens articulate preferences and those preferences are translated into policies Insofar as elite decisions do not always reflect the opinion of the majority there remains some degree of independent agency that may very well accrue to the state as a whole Under this reasoning it would be plausible to assert the existence of an overarching group self as Alexander Wendt does when he claims that states are people too In addition to the views of significant strands of psychoanalytic thought (which would not necessarily be expected to assume that units other than the individual can be psychoanalyzed) the idea of a group self enjoys far-reaching support across the social sciencesmdashinternational relations included This includes neorealisms assumption that the state is a unitary actor the Collective self hood implied by social identity theory the concept of political culture early psychoanalytic assumptions about the group as well as studies on obedience group-think and the crowd phenomenon There is a reason why scholars are drawn to the group as a unit of analysismdashwitness anthropologists concern with tribes and civilizations sociologists focus on street gangs and societies and political scientists emphasis on states and

transnational actors Group behavior and individual behavior are not necessarily identical Nor can an individual be expected to behave the same way in the context of a group as he or she would alone Moreover constructivism goes so far as to assume the possibility of shared norms across states a claim that has enjoyed much empirical support during the first active decade of constructivist research It is much more defensible to argue the existence of a collective identity within a state the boundaries of which contain degrees of centralized media language and other discursive channels for cultural dissemination and which prescribe the roles that the groups members are expected to perform within the context of that group And if different subgroups within the state disseminate disparate narratives we can assume that the most dominant group within society (as defined by some combination of ethnicity class or gender) has custody over a single consequential dominant narrative Finally even if we choose to ascribe a states national ethos to its elites we need to remember that state leaders are the product of the society in which they were reared This view would effectively mitigate the tension between elite- and mass-level phenomena in international relations since both elites and masses are socialized by the overarching structure of the collective

A2 ndash DisadvantagesThe internal linkrsquos dependence on rationality only serves to protect us from the unknown that the future holds This ultimately reduces all forms of knowledge to something that can be calculated which ensures violence The only way to reverse this trend is to force a confrontation with tragedy and the unknownDavis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg51-52)

Emotional The innermost need of human beings is to feel good about themselves Whatever threatens that feeling must be exorcised Health normalcy and productivity depend on avoiding negative feelings Hope and optimism arent just healthy attitudes they are requirements of our nature Biologically wired We cannot remain for long in trauma Recovery moreover must restore our faith in the guarantees and our hopes for the future The need for hope is In fact the capstone of the entire system of guarantees Yet it too apparently has a history Today over 10 million of our children are on prescription drugs to prevent depression and anxiety Informed of this fact by Bill Maher the French actress Julie Delphy spoke the spontaneous wisdom of an archaic culture Dont they know that depression is a good thing that its something you have to go through in order to grow Not anymoreThe key to understanding the power of the guarantees is to understand the fears that they exorcise Thanks to religion death suffering and evil are deprived of their power Through the attainment of reason all other forms of consciousness and what they might reveal are put in their place Poetic knowing is deprived both of its legitimacy and its terror Science as fulfillment of reason assures us of domination over nature What Heidegger termed technoscientific rationality becomes the measure of what is real Belief in historical progress banishes the recurrent suspicion that history may lack direction or even worse move to the darkest of ends The condition is thereby set that makes it impossible for us to experience traumatic events such as 9-11 except as occasions to take whatever actions are needed to reaffirm our goodness and restore our guarantees It is in the personal order however that the guarantees do their deepest work Psychologically belief in the self or self-identity exorcises the most frightening contingency that there is a void at the center of the American psyche with panic anxiety and its corollary compulsive consumption the expression of a desperate non-identity That specter brings us before the greatest fear that our psyche not our conscious deliberative intentions is the author of our actions an author who will do anything in order to feel safe secure and righteous All of our emotional needs then stand forth under the rule of a single necessity the need to feel good about oneself at whatever cost and to sustain hope by banishing anything that would trouble us Resolution catharsis (ie the discharge of painful tensions or awareness) and renewal emerge as the needs that bind us with an iron necessity to the guarantees and all that they make it impossible for us to know It is easy to deprecate Dubya and apparently to hold onto the idea that hes a temporary aberration But the problem goes deeper To revive a battle cry from the 1960s insofar as one is wedded to any one of the guarantees one is part of the problem and not the solution For the grandest function of the system of guarantees as a whole and in each one of its parts is to blind us to historyAnd so to take up again the question stated previously how did the situation now being created in Iraq come about The next three sections constitute an attempt to answer that question by constructing for America a repressed history

The negative is attempting to apply reason to ethics and psychology This only creates a hard understanding of our inner psyche which is a loss of the self that outweighs every other impact Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg174-175)

This recognition implies a primary question What is the nature and extent of the ethical responsibility human beings have for such a condition To what extent can evil and the actions that flow from it be said to be chosen in the exercise of a freedom for which one bears ethical responsibility Traditionally ethical responsibility only applies to actions that are taken after deliberation and with full knowledge of the consequences actions where choice is a function of our ability to reason where the moral law is known and where one chooses to violate it for motives that can be specified as functions of a self- interest that overrides all other motives and considerations Mitigate any of these factors and one mitigates ethical responsibility Ethical responsibility is compromised or eliminated for example if ones action is determined by forces outside ones control if one acts without premeditation under duress in blind obedience to customs or authorities as the result of a pathology because of some limitation in the ability to think or to understand the consequences of ones action or because one acted without any conscious intention to do wrong However deplorable their deeds the mad for example are not evil Evil requires consciousness choice freedom If evil is to be a human possibility on a par with the possibility of goodness it must be something that is determined within the order of freedom The trouble with the traditional understanding of these conditions however is the effort to confine them within the limits of rationalism and a purely cognitive model of the mind Rationality is noble but single-minded devotion to it leaves the true life of the psyche undetected Focusing on it prematurely shifts discussion to a rarefied mode of mentation that is then cut off from the rest of the personality To sustain and deny that split reason is then given disproportionate weight in determining what we are and do But the dream of reason is precisely that A dream a desiremdashto bring ones being into correspondence with reason and thereby eliminate everything else especially in determining the questions of ethics No one brought this dream to bear on moral experience more rigorously than Immanuel Kant That effort is the sublime beauty of his thought But experiencing oneself in terms of a priori rationality comes at a terrible cost Life becomes a process in which we sleepwalk our way through most of what we do because weve cut ourselves off from the actual bases of our actions Our psyche becomes a stranger to us We fixate on giving rational accounts of ourselves and in the process alienate ourselves from everything else Emotions become irrationalities breaks with reason things we must overcome or worse things we can only acknowledge when they are good proper and in tune with reason The rest of our being becomes brute inclinations frailties of our nature desires that disrupt an otherwise rational identity As a result in terms of ethics whether we know it or not under the guise of reason weve made an offer that most human beings cannot refuse Claiming not to consciously intend what one does has become the grand excuse Traditional definitions of the three cardinal categories of ethics are a monument to that motive Restricting intention motive and choice to the canons of rationality fashions them to the designs of human mendacity For if by intention we mean a deliberate rational choice with full knowledge of the consequences evil as Ive described it is not chosen If along the same lines we restrict motive lo purposes for which we bear responsibility because they issue not from frailties of our nature or the force of circumstances but from an explicit knowledge of what one is doing and why evil as thus far described does not exist within the order of human motivation One can identify self-interest careerism and happiness as motives but to say that many agents act in order to advance Thanatos is hard to fathom Unless that is we expand the category of motive to include purposes that derive from the psyche in all its inherent conflictedness But once posit such a possibility choice becomes a concept that must be rethought in a radically new way

Their internal links are symptoms of the fantasy that we strive to maintain This logic becomes used to justify atrocity The affirmativersquos rejection of attempting to control the future allows alternate practices to emerge Vote affirmative to traverse the fantasy of their internal link chains Even if you donrsquot think we can solve the 1AC is a more productive through experiment than their disad Davis 2006(Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg63-65)

Is there anything more evil than shooting children in a school yard or flying planes into buildings One hears this rhetorical question often today Getting it firmly implanted in our minds seems to be one of the current ideological functions of the media A correct response requires careful reflection on the circumstance that underlies the knee-jerk response thanks to the power of the image it conjures up The promise inherent in Technoscientificrationality is deliverance from images Killing for it like everything else occurs at a distance In the inaugural moment Tibbets in the cockpit of the Enola Gay unable to imagine what he has just done as a human act It was all impersonal12 And today in the silent secret midnight ways that radiation poisoning works from within like a deed without a doer separated in space and time from its absent cause Perhaps killing at a distance is the greater evil precisely because it abrogates the image and the human connection between slayer and slain If I kill another man with my bare hands my deed is immediate to my embodied consciousness To kill that way you have to feel hate fear anguish remorse etc whereas to kill from a distance or through an invisible contamination is to render the whole thing impersonal With the desired result the ability for example of the man who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima incinerating 600000 people in a second and condemning another 300000 to the condition of hibakusha the walking dead to boast for over 59 years now that he has never felt a moment of regret or remorse Tibbets lack of moral imagination is one with his representative status as precursor For now its easy to litter a landscape with DU while denying that the stuff has any long-term medical or environmental effects13 The evil of killing at a distance is that it makes death unreal Protected from the image all who participate in the deed are delivered over to a pure and impersonal calculus (An aside if we really want to support our troops we must achieve for them a new Bill of Rights No one should ever be ordered to use weapons without being given a full knowledge of the long-term human and environmental consequences of those weapons To do otherwise is to deprive our soldiers of the choice that makes them human) The powers that be learned one lesson from Vietnam No more images The mistake was to let us see the carnage up close every night on TV The news as image entered our consciousness at the register where genuine change begins Where horror is felt free of the tyranny of the concept and the hypnotic power of the guarantees Desert Storm was the corrective the Nintendo war a war broadcast to look just like one of the video games wed been programmed to love Prohibition of the image is now a fundamental article of faith No images are allowed to come back to us from Iraq II (Michael Moores real crime was to give us a brief glimpse at what the mainstream media proscribe) Abolition of the image is one of the primary conditions of ecocide Everything must be rendered abstract invisible unreal No image can be allowed to trouble our sleep to lacerate our soul For then we might begin to know that there is indeed an evil far worse than shooting children in schoolyards or flying airplanes into buildings To move us toward that knowledge let me end with the forbidden which I must here attempt to convey solely through the more abstract medium of words since Ive not yet gained permission to reproduce a photograph I saw not long ago Its the picture of an Iraqi baby a victim of DU who was born with no nose mouth eyes

anus or genitals and with flipper limbs a common result of radiation exposure in utero That childs body full of red open ulcers is twisted in knots its ulcerated face contorted in a look of unspeakable suffering An authentic image of the sacredness of human life Of the preciousness of every breath To look at that child is to realize ones duty to mourn it to give voice to its right to invade Our consciousness and expose the evil of those who prate on about being pro-life while refusing to let us see what theyve reduced life to Luke 171-2 The image of that child must become the force in our minds that motivates us to deracinate all guarantees that shield us from the reality of that childs situation Or to put it another way every time one demands catharsis resolution and renewal that child is born again condemned to its writhing That is why its image must embolden us to question the most hallowed of the guarantees the one Ive refrained from discussing until now In the face of such evil what is to be done Is resistance ever justified in resorting to violence No we are told because if we do so we become just like them This ethical principle supposedly applies universally and atemporally It does so however because it assures t he guarantee that no matter what happens well never get our hands dirty History cant intrude on the categorical imperative Whatever action one takes one must maintain ones ethical purity Even if that means there is nothing one can do and after its been demonstrated I hat there are no non-violent ways to change the situation Perhaps we can no longer allow ourselves the luxury of such an ethic Bush did the moral imagination one favor His pre-emptive unilateralism made official what has been clear for so long but denied due to its implications There is no body to which we can turn for Justice not the UN the World Court or any other framework of international law The US will flaunt its contempt for such bodies whenever it suits its purpose And thus another mode of peaceful non-violent praxis is deprived of its guarantee

A2 ndash CounterplansTheir counterplan still attempts to maintain some type of guarantee for the future Their obsession with security and the future fail to force a confrontation with the trauma of the unknown - this means that only the aff can solve Anything else results in a return to the ideology of security Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg38-39)

But to undertake that task we must purge ourselves of the thing in ourselves that stands in the way I have termed it the guarantees By that term I refer to all those assurances we set up a priori to protect ourselves from the reality of historical trauma The significance of eventsmdashthe Shoah Hiroshima 9-11mdash is their power to call such guarantees into question by exposing cherished beliefs to the claims of darker views and by forcing us to think in radically new ways considering things about the human being that weve persistently denied or marginalized One dimension of any traumatic event is the shock it brings to traditional ways of thinking Thats why the dominant response to any historical trauma is the attempt to restore the guarantees by finding a way t o impose them on the event in order to contain and interpret it The ideological function of the guarantee is thereby demonstrated A way has been found to limit the impact of the event by picturing it as an aberration a temporary departure from values and beliefs that can always be recovered because they constitute something essentialistic or universal about human nature Something trans-historical History may disrupt our essence but it cannot destroy it The concept of human naturemdashin all t h e variants constituting the philosophic and psychological history of that idea from Plato and Aristotle through American self psychologymdashis the primary way in which we endeavor to deny history An event is traumatic precisely because it suggests that history occurs beyond the limits we want to impose on it and therefore may move in directions that have nothing to do with human nature or the cherished beliefs and values we derive from that concept Events put us as subjectsmdashand as thinkersmdash into a traumatic relationship to both ourselves and our world The anxiety at the center of thought is revealed Ideologists rush in to fill that void and restore the guarantees Our effort must be t o do the opposite and thereby sustain the vital possibility implicit in an event That possibility is to sustain a break with the guarantees and thereby find for history a radically different way of thinking To put it concretely a trauma cannot be resolved until its been constituted The Western Logos is a monument to t he effort to avoid t h a t task indeed to render it impossible a priori To reverse that tradition the things above all we must rid ourselves of are the desire and demand for resolution The recycling of the guarantees must give way to a n existentializing imperative to constitute and work within trauma in a way that addresses the psyche at the same register as Gibson and Abu Ghraib do by creating images symbolic actions and emotions that are of equal depth but that move us in an antithetical directionmdashtoward the inner transformation needed to purge ourselves of Thanatos Such an effort however cannot itself be yet another variant of the guarantees as happens when Love and Eros are posited as ahistorical values If anything the possibility of Love is far more difficult and exacting than death because it can only arise by reversing the prior force that death has within us The following two sections offer a brief picture of the kind of agonistic process such an effort entails in order to whet our appetite for something that should by now be evident The critique of ideology cannot be a merely intellectual exercise It must be the activation within our psyche of a countervailing drama

Any risk of ldquosolvencyrdquo for the counterplan is a reason to vote aff because it is an attempt to guarantee the future by pre-emptive action Even claims of a ldquonet-benefitrdquo are a link to the affirmative criticism Only the aff forcibly confronts the unknownDavis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg51-52)

Emotional The innermost need of human beings is to feel good about themselves Whatever threatens that feeling must be exorcised Health normalcy and productivity depend on avoiding negative feelings Hope and optimism arent just healthy attitudes they are requirements of our nature Biologically wired We cannot remain for long in trauma Recovery moreover must restore our faith in the guarantees and our hopes for the future The need for hope is In fact the capstone of the entire system of guarantees Yet it too apparently has a history Today over 10 million of our children are on prescription drugs to prevent depression and anxiety Informed of this fact by Bill Maher the French actress Julie Delphy spoke the spontaneous wisdom of an archaic culture Dont they know that depression is a good thing that its something you have to go through in order to grow Not anymore The key to understanding the power of the guarantees is to understand the fears that they exorcise Thanks to religion death suffering and evil are deprived of their power Through the attainment of reason all other forms of consciousness and what they might reveal are put in their place Poetic knowing is deprived both of its legitimacy and its terror Science as fulfillment of reason assures us of domination over nature What Heidegger termed technoscientific rationality becomes the measure of what is real Belief in historical progress banishes the recurrent suspicion that history may lack direction or even worse move to the darkest of ends The condition is thereby set that makes it impossible for us to experience traumatic events such as 9-11 except as occasions to take whatever actions are needed to reaffirm our goodness and restore our guarantees It is in the personal order however that the guarantees do their deepest work Psychologically belief in the self or self-identity exorcises the most frightening contingency that there is a void at the center of the American psyche with panic anxiety and its corollary compulsive consumption the expression of a desperate non-identity That specter brings us before the greatest fear that our psyche not our conscious deliberative intentions is the author of our actions an author who will do anything in order to feel safe secure and righteous All of our emotional needs then stand forth under the rule of a single necessity the need to feel good about oneself at whatever cost and to sustain hope by banishing anything that would trouble us Resolution catharsis (ie the discharge of painful tensions or awareness) and renewal emerge as the needs that bind us with an iron necessity to the guarantees and all that they make it impossible for us to know It is easy to deprecate Dubya and apparently to hold onto the idea that hes a temporary aberration But the problem goes deeper To revive a battle cry from the 1960s insofar as one is wedded to any one of the guarantees one is part of the problem and not the solution For the grandest function of the system of guarantees as a whole and in each one of its parts is to blind us to history And so to take up again the question stated previously how did the situation now being created in Iraq come about The next three sections constitute an attempt to answer that question by constructing for America a repressed history

Any net benefit to the counterplan links to the criticism of the affirmative and is a reason that the counterplan cannot solve the affirmative We must confront the unknown to solve Davis 2001Watler A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative Pg 38-39

One upshoot of that act is a recovery of the dialectic of Eros and Thanatos as a way of thinking about history In anticipation of later developments (chapter 4 part 2) I only present the basic lines of this idea here The depth-charge sounded by an Event is its ability to reveal that the relationship of Eros and Thanatos is not eternal but historical to the core with the end of that dialectic entailing the possible extinction of one of the terms This is the spectre Freud exorcized by establishing a dualistic way of conceptualizing the two categories The alternative is an immanent dialectic one where history as contingency subjects everything to irreversible change with Thanatos a force in culture dedicated to the extinction of Eros and with the power to bring about that closure to the eternal dialectic Traumatic events constitute an abrupt and painful reversal of the eternal dialectic because in them we fund Eros deprived of all assurances Contra Freud there is nothing universal biological or ahistorical about the eternal battle Both terms are fully implicated in history caught up in processes Capable of producing irreversible transformations Forces in the psyche opposed to life which we have persistently marginalized in proclaiming our humanism rise up in the Event to challenge all we believe about human nature and history Rather than a world grounded in love the primacy of goodness in human nature the achievement of rationality and the ameliorative virtues of the social process the Event reveals a world in which envy and hate stalk life seeking a final solution that can only come with the extinction of the antagonist After such knowledge we can never begin again cleansed of history restored through its narration to some essential humanistic identity with all our fundamental beliefs in essential goodness reaffirmed Eros again pristine and empowered Feeling the pressure of death as it weighs upon and works within us becomes the gauge that measures the depth of our participation in history The Event rends all the masks that enable us to conceive evil as an aberrance Existential contingency unseats all essentializing views of human nature revealing historicity as a process in which Thanatos may be the drive informing the reality principle There is nothing in human nature that protects us from this eventuality Positing an essential and always recoverable nature outside history is not the solution but part of the problem the way we blind ourselves a priori to our situation

Only a complete withdrawal from psychological guarantees can force us to confront trauma The counterplanrsquos insistence that there is something tangible that can be manipulated or solved for is a link Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg38-39)

But to undertake that task we must purge ourselves of the thing in ourselves that stands in the way I have termed it the guarantees By that term I refer to all those assurances we set up a priori to protect ourselves from the reality of historical trauma The significance of eventsmdashthe Shoah Hiroshima 9-11mdash is their power to call such guarantees into question by exposing cherished beliefs to the claims of darker views and by forcing us to think in radically new ways considering things about the human being that weve persistently denied or marginalized One dimension of any traumatic event is the shock it brings

to traditional ways of thinking Thats why the dominant response to any historical trauma is the attempt to restore the guarantees by finding a way t o impose them on the event in order to contain and interpret it The ideological function of the guarantee is thereby demonstrated A way has been found to limit the impact of the event by picturing it as an aberration a temporary departure from values and beliefs that can always be recovered because they constitute something essentialistic or universal about human nature Something trans-historical History may disrupt our essence but it cannot destroy it The concept of human naturemdashin all t h e variants constituting the philosophic and psychological history of that idea from Plato and Aristotle through American self psychologymdashis the primary way in which we endeavor to deny history An event is traumatic precisely because it suggests that history occurs beyond the limits we want to impose on it and therefore may move in directions that have nothing to do with human nature or the cherished beliefs and values we derive from that concept Events put us as subjectsmdashand as thinkersmdash into a traumatic relationship to both ourselves and our world The anxiety at the center of thought is revealed Ideologists rush in to fill that void and restore the guarantees Our effort must be t o do the opposite and thereby sustain the vital possibility implicit in an event That possibility is to sustain a break with the guarantees and thereby find for history a radically different way of thinking To put it concretely a trauma cannot be resolved until its been constituted The Western Logos is a monument to t he effort to avoid t h a t task indeed to render it impossible a priori To reverse that tradition the things above all we must rid ourselves of are the desire and demand for resolution The recycling of the guarantees must give way to a n existentializing imperative to constitute and work within trauma in a way that addresses the psyche at the same register as Gibson and Abu Ghraib do by creating images symbolic actions and emotions that are of equal depth but that move us in an antithetical directionmdashtoward the inner transformation needed to purge ourselves of Thanatos Such an effort however cannot itself be yet another variant of the guarantees as happens when Love and Eros are posited as ahistorical values If anything the possibility of Love is far more difficult and exacting than death because it can only arise by reversing the prior force that death has within us The following two sections offer a brief picture of the kind of agonistic process such an effort entails in order to whet our appetite for something that should by now be evident The critique of ideology cannot be a merely intellectual exercise It must be the activation within our psyche of a countervailing drama

A2 ndash KritiksOur ethics come first -- Discovery of the unconscious is crucial to the recognition of responsibility by every subject- only our framework opens space for agency and recognition of our choices- our ethics are crucial to understand the historical contingencies that make up the status quo and open space for change Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg182-185)

Freud discovered more than the Unconscious He discovered our responsibility for it for becoming aware of how what we repress rules our life and therefore our duty to gain knowledge of our unconscious as the precondition for becoming an ethically responsible agent In terms of ethics theres a quick way to summarize the significance of the Unconscious What we dont know about ourselves is what we domdashto the other In calling us to such a reflection on ourselves Freud also taught us a new way to reflect one that forces us to move beyond the rational world of conscious deliberations and intentions Once make the psychoanalytic turn and the sources of self-knowledge increase exponentially Every time one understands a dream a paraphraxis an aesthetic experience a fantasy one suffers in principle a revolution in ones life For such experiences put one in touch with the deep conflicts that define the psyche A dream for example does not tell us about something outside the realm of our conscious grasp though this view of repression typifies how a convenient misunderstanding blunts the force of psychoanalysis A good dream reveals the desires and conflicts structuring our life It thereby opens our quotidian life to an in-depth exploration Listen to a dream rightly and one finds that one must confront something one has been avoidingmdashor doing Such is what it would mean to assume responsibility for ones dreams One would start to live from an awareness of ones psyche rather than in a continued attempt to escape that awareness Freud doesnt abolish intention he expands it by showing how often consciousness is defense mechanism and rationality the cover that conceals the actual motives on which we act and how often accordingly insistence on conscious intentions is the lie we cling to in order to deny our responsibility The seductive or prohibitive way of relating that a parent adopts toward a child for example may carry as its primary repressed intention the desire to wound that child in their sexuality This is why its so necessary at a later point in time for such parents to deny that they ever harbored let alone acted on such an intention And yet our actions do indeed speak louder than words in conveying our actual intentions Action is concrete intentionality because it is through it that we live out our feelings desires and conflicts And they are what the other invariably receives as a message that is often sharply different from what we say especially when through the exercise of intentionality we reassure ourselves about what good loving human beings we are The psyche is a lonely hunter avid in the pursuit of purposes it carefully conceals from itself The ethical greatness of Sigmund Freud is the crisis he introduced into that practice Rather than getting us off the hook psychoanalysis sticks it far deeper in us than any previous ethic Intentionality is convenient because it absolves us of the greatest responsibilitymdashresponsibility for who we are Everything stays in the safely guarded space of deliberative discursive quasi-judicial rationality as if this were the primary way we relate to ourselves or to turn the screw a peg further as if when we arent relating to ourselves this way we arent fully moral agents fully responsible for our actions But once let responsibility expand into the inner life of the psyche and we take on a new ethical burden to know oneself in depth and not recoil in horror from what one learns or persist in virtuous denial of the hidden motives one must confront in order to become responsible for ones psyche Indeed deliberation is itself transformed by l he psychoanalytic turn Freud shows that to deliberate correctly one must focus the inquiry on those motives that one tries to conceal from oneself since they are where the truth of ones conduct may lie

In terms of the problem of evil this line of thought has an obvious implication Our primary responsibility which we continually shirk is to find the evil in ourselves Theoretically and emotionally the same thing prevents that discovery the desire to uphold the idea that human nature is inherently or basically good with evil an aberration a fall a break with the natural order of things an exception to the rule of human decency Psychoanalysis like history renders such sentiments questionable at best And irrelevant to where inquiry must beginmdashwith psychological conflict the primary fact that defines us To be human is to live denned by wounds and disorders that are prior to the mediations (themselves rare) that result in a moral character that can be termed good Goodness is not something essentialistically guaranteed in a nature its an achievement that comes through the overcoming of ways of being that have a foothold in us long before some human beings take up the effort to reverse them Psychoanalysis from this point of view is neither pessimistic nor relativistic It is humanistic in the deepest way seeing the human as an achievement and valuing it by demonstrating what that achievement requires Psychoanalysis doesnt point to ethical relativism It points instead to an order of rank among human beings based on the degree to which a knowledge of ones psyche has become the basis of ones actions Ethically to know ones psyche is of necessity to engage in an effort to transform it since inner change is the only way to halt the projection of what otherwise does harm to others Psychological change is the primary task ethics the result

Their alternative misses the point In lieu of a criticism of the affirmative it is a much better act to internalize our anxiety and explore the effects within the psyche This allows us an uncastrated interaction with reality Davis 2001Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative pg xviii-xix

Virginia Woolf said that in or about December 1910 human nature changed She would have recorded a similar shock in August of 1945 The change Woolf witnessed has now of course been safely domesticated and has a local habitation and a name modernism The second change also has a namemdashpostmodernismmdashbut the ideologies most closely associated with its development remain mired in the first moment of an arrested dialectic12 Irony and aporia dominate the postmodern sensibility because its considerable energies are devoted to a displacement of the Event that remains at the center of our collective historical Unconsciousmdashthe referent that serves as the motive behind the denial of reference Reference must be continually deferred then rendered impossible because anxiety and flight from that anxiety define our actual response to the one referent that will continue to weigh on our consciousness until we restore the proper dialectical direction and move from the delights of skeptical play to a recovery of the demands of unhappy consciousness Einstein said the Bomb changed everythingmdashexcept the ways we think As such it is the inwardness of our inwardness never more so perhaps than when we use deconstructive irony as the master trope that delivers us from the burden of a historically situated subjectivity or at that opposite extreme that amounts to the same thing when we reassert an essentialist humanism as the fixed and universal system of understanding and explanation that washes us clean of history and its contingencies What if we broke with both strategiesmdashand rather than deconstructing the Bomb or containing it we tried to internalize it and then trace the ways it explodes and implodes within the psyche Such an effort would take as its goal a reconstitution of the tragic as the dialectical category that provides the only adequate idea for comprehendingmdashand existingmdashin the present Such a humanism however confronts as its prior and primary task a deracination of the system of guarantees on which previous humanisms have depended For the function of that system with respect to history has been to establish as canons of research and explanation a set of essentialistic concepts of meaning logic and human nature that function to insulate historians and their

audiences so that horror can never be more than the temporary aberration from which we always of necessity recover The narration of History thereby becomes yet another occasion for deployingmdashand thereby reinforcingmdashthe central beliefs and Values of the humanistic tradition That tradition thus provides the ego or identity-principle that we (the community of humanistic interpreters) move from and to in dealing with events that challenge our certainties13 We love to read and write histories because such stories tell us who we already know we are while conveniently exorcizing the threat of those accounts that would hold up a different mirror to our nature History is indeed a fiction the corpse over which we warm ourselves so that we may rise cleansed catharted the system of needs beliefs and guarantees restoredmdashwith existence the self-reference perpetually deferred What if instead we approached history as a realitymdashand a disciplinemdash in which we must risk ourselves utterly One in which to know is to suffer irreversible change in ones beliefs values and even in ones identity with nothing in the logos of thought able to protect us from that possibility The reign of the a priori would thereby come to an end the principle of hope a category wed risk not one wed need to renew at whatever cost Could such an engagement constitute the true force and signification of Hiroshima16 and thereby evidence that events in history are the true Absolute that abide with usmdashthe gift of the past to the future as that call of conscience requiring of us no less than a fundamentally new understanding of the human psyche and the human condition

The permutation solves ndash psychoanalytical evaluation of our anxiety and our reliance on stability and security are prior questions to the alternative and the framework of the criticism The alternative is still castrated by desire which means that it does not access proper historical contextDavis 2006Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative pg 1-3

In August 1945 Elias Canetti writes the following in his journal A tormenting thought as of a certain point history was no longer real Without noticing it all mankind suddenly left reality everything happening since then was supposedly not true but we supposedly didnt notice Our task would now be to find that point and as long as we didnt have it we would be forced to abide in our present destruction1 What Canetti cant see is that the point he refers to is the one he inhabits He cant see it because it is too close and blinds him (as it would soon the inhabitants of two cities) with a light not of this world The proliferation of new theories of history in recent decades is itself a response to a historical situationmdashthat defined by the Bomb That connection is also what these theories cannot know about themselves and ceaselessly displace in teaching us all the new ways we can know and write about the past What they do know is that the assumptions and guarantees on which historians have traditionally relied in constituting their subject and the needs that histories fulfill in offering us an account of events structured by these guarantees are no longer adequate to a contemporary awareness of history and historicity2 To cite the major developments (though in no necessary order of importance)3 1 Foucaults concept of genealogical history and the archeology of knowledge and its creative extension in the new historicist methodologies developed by Stephen Greenblatt and his circle 2 The hermeneutic theories of history and historical explanation developed by Gadamer Habermas and Ricoeur with special note given to Ricoeurs development of a complex theory of time and narrative 3 Derridas recent work on Marx and Benjamin and his continuing effort to expose the Hegelian assumptions about history progress and the logos which structure the way history is narrated by historians who know little or nothing of Hegel 4 Althusser Sartre Gramsci and the many often sharply opposed approaches to history developed in recent years by Marxists as different as Frederic Jameson G A Cohen Perry Anderson and Stuart Hall 5 The recovery of Kants speculations on history and its recent extension in Lyotards theory of the differend 6 The attempts by Slavoj Zizek Joan Copjec and Teresa Brennan to articulate the theory of history implicit in Lacan 7 The massive significance of Walter Benjamins speculations the continued vitality of Adorno and the Frankfurt school and the renewed interest in the thought of Kenneth Burke 8 The work of Louis O Mink Hayden White Dominick LaCapra Roy Schafer and others on the narrative and tropological principles that shape the writing of history To this list one can add Collingwood and McKeons earlier theorizing about history the work of Braudel Baudrillard deCerteau Calinescu and Bourdieu and the new modes of historical writing and historical investigation developed by anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz James Clifford and Natalie Zemon Davis The list is by no means complete because one must add to it two developments that may be of

greater significance and that complicate the issue of the historical I refer first to the number of alternative histories that have emerged in recent years thanks to feminist multicultural postcolonial subaltern and queer studies Such works have contributed more than new knowledge to our understanding of the past They have broken with the logic the procedures and the ruling assumptions of traditional historical methodologies by showing how that logic has as its primary function the exclusion (or marginalization) of voices that challenge its hegemony and the motives that inform its explanations Such studies are not merely of local interest They entail a theoretical crisis the recognition that the principles of historical explanation that we regard as true rational objective and universal are cultural conventional ideological and deeply implicated in power and the repressions required for its maintenance Ways of thinking derived from other cultures or voices silenced by the dominant culture may provide precisely the critical handle required to understand what is really at work in the privileging of certain canons of reasoning and explanation as scientific and objective and the rejection of other experiences and ways of thinking as illegitimate and unfounded The true bite of the multiculturalmdash seldom honored because it cuts in every directionmdashis the idea that none of us are locked into privileging our own culture and subject position(s) We can gain distance from our frameworks by immersing ourselves in other ways of thinking We can then use that experience to become aware of things that our culture and its dominant interest groups do not want to know about themselves The implication of such an orientation for history is considerable since historical explanation is perhaps the primary way in which a community establishes the structures of belief mind and feeling on which it depends in giving an identity to its members4 Thanks to the explosion of the multicultural we now have a way to internally distance ourselves from such beliefs and practices even perhaps following Nietzsche to touch all that goes without saying with the hammer as with a tuning fork

Case Stuff

War on Terror BadThe myth of effective security fosters a violent project that necessitates the creation of terrorists to be sacrificed on the altar of societyMcGowan 2013Associate Professor at the University of Vermont (Todd Enjoying What We Donrsquot Have Project Muse)

The fundamental barrier to the establishment of an authentic social bond is the resistance to avowing the traumatic nature of that bond We use the pleasure that accompanies the bombing of Afghanistan to disguise the shared enjoyment we experience through the traumatic experience of loss But this pleasure inevitably disappoints us and triggers the belief that someone has stolen the complete pleasure that we expected to experience This is why there can properly be no end to the War on Terror no end to the list of countries that the United States plans to invade to attain complete security no end to the number of terrorist leaders executed 31

Complete security like complete pleasure is mythical It attempts to bypass the one experience that cannot be bypassed mdash the foundational experience of loss mdash and it is this experience that holds the key to an authentic social bond The structure of society (which is the result of the structure of signification) is such that it blinds the subject to the possibility of shared sacrifice and the social bond that results from it No matter how often children hear the ideology of sharing or how many times we repeat to them the gospel of fairness they will inevitably believe that their sacrifice has enabled others to enjoy more than their proper share or unfairly

Loss of the SelfSurveillance devastates the gap between the Self and our informaticized bodies ndash the total knowledge it provides deprives one of the ability to function as a subject eradicating onersquos identity ndash this results in complete annihilationFriesen et al 2012 Dr Norm Friesen is Canada Research Chair in E-Learning Practices at Thompson Rivers University His academic credentials include a PhD in Education from the University of Alberta Andrew Feenberg School of Communication Simon Fraser University Grace Smith Arapiki Solutions Inc (Norm Friesen Andrew Feenberg Grace Smith and Shannon Lowe 2012 ldquoExperiencing Surveillancerdquo pp 82-83 (Re)Inventing The Internet httplinkspringercomchapter1010072F978-94-6091-734-9_4)

Students of surveillance have been so impressed by the ever-growing completeness of this data image that they animate it as though it were an actual person Identity is seen as coeval with an assemblage of traces rather than with actual presence Thus van der Ploeg writes of ldquothe

inability to distinguish between rsquothe body itselfrsquo and rsquobody informationrdquorsquo (van der Ploeg 2003 p 69) Haggerty and Ericson similarly write the surveillance assemblage standardizes the capture of fleshinformation flows of the human body It is not

so much immediately concerned with the direct physical relocation of the human body (although this may be an ultimate consequence)

but with transforming the body into pure information such that it can be rendered more mobile and comparable (Haggerty amp Ericson 2000 p 613) There is something right about this turn in surveillance theory and yet it is obvious that we are still able to distinguish the real person from the traces that person leaves behind The trace is bound to us by its origin and often by internal signs of various sorts so we do not quite leave it behind after all And yet we do not want to drag along every trace of our passage through life We count on the erasure of most traces It is this erasure that enables us to face the world afresh each day and to face it with a self-image we

construct at least partially anew for each new situation in which we find ourselves In existentialndashphenomenological terms privacy and secrecy are centrally constitutive of self and selfhood Holding something private or secret emphasizes the difference between self and other and confirms the autonomy of onersquos interiority and individuality ldquoSecrecy secures so to speak the possibility of a second world alongside of the obvious worldrdquo as Simmel (1906 p 462) puts it In contemporary conditions of surveillance and dataveillance subjectivity itself is dependent on maintaining the gap between our embodied selves and our informaticized bodies It would be intolerable for everyone to have full access to our salary the details of our relations to our family our medical histories sexual proclivities and so on Such knowledge would completely objectify us and force us to live up to (or down to) the image of ourselves implied in this knowledge Like Sartrersquos spy at the keyhole

himself espied we would be evacuated of those aspects of identity and interiority concealed within us frozen in the objectifying gaze of the other and essentially deprived of our ability to function as a subject We could no longer choose to project an identity appropriate to our inclination and situation as everything having to do with our identity would have been pre-empted Truly to be completely ldquooutedrdquo is to be annihilated

The gaze of surveillance invades and traps one psychologically rendering one enslavedVaz 1995 (Angelina Fall 1995 Dalhousie French Studies Vol 32 Mises en scegravene du regard (Fall 1995) pp 37-38 ldquoWhos Got the Look Sartres Gaze and Foucaults Panopticismrdquo JSTOR httpwwwjstororgstable40837004)

This grand formula is even applicable at the level of an encounter between two individuals where the theme of ldquosubjection by exposurerdquo is

dominant As Sartre says ldquobeing-seen constitutes me as a defenseless being for a freedom which is not my freedom [hellip] I am a slave to the degree that my being is dependent at my center of a freedom which is not mine and which is the very condition of my beingrdquo (Being p 358) In this sense the gaze does not just create and invade physical spaces there is a sense in which the gaze invades and traps me psychologically As a temporal-spatial object in the world being locked at forces me to apprehend myself as the

anxietymdashthe inability to reverse inner destructivenessmdashby becoming the power to destroy unbound raining judgment down on a mass of subjects who are indifferently bound together as fragments of pure suffering unable after that action to ever form any identity except as walking corpses hibakusha deadened affect delivered over to the condition of death-in-life10 Projection here succeeds because in that shattered mirror one sees oneself reflected as the equal

of the power within that originally proclaimed ones utter worthlessness Malign reversal has grown to the event All inner anxiety about ones power to be resolves itself in the power to act free of restraint We have become the thing we feared Its destructiveness is now ours and nothing else has being The Contradiction The SublimemdashFrom the Crypt The mediation

traced above is driven by a contradiction about which it circles endlessly That is what the sublime object of the ego-ratio reveals when read from its crypt Sublime action seeks an absolute reversal of catastrophic anxiety in the absolute affirmation of unshakable guarantees Catastrophe must be reversed because it is that experience of contingency that underlies the horror of contingency in all its forms the lone driving the search for the guarantees needed to contain it In

catastrophe contingency is the others will as unbounded unlimited destructiveness The threat of extinction is the restraint here placed on subject This restraint is prior to the dialectic of desire restrained and checked on which Hegel grounds his phenomenology Desire here isnt restrained and checkedmdashit is turned back against itself in torment The other requires my destruction for their pleasure and assures that end by colonizing the psyche with an aggression that renders impotent every effort to make a beginning a tentative move toward independence or self-cohesion There is no exit but one apparently identification with the aggressor I become a self by turning someone or something else into an object delivered over to the true golden rule do onto others what was once done onto you This logic maintains because catastrophic anxiety internalized is death-work as the self-

mediation whereby we enact the command of the Other The only way out the only way to finalize this process is evacuation through a lasting exorcism It alone confers on the psyche a certitude beyond all cogitos It is also the mediation that finds it in flight forward already in its primitive imaginary one with the Bomb In its inner world the catastrophic subject experiences itself as full of death disease corruption The Bomb alone has the power to cast all nuclear waste outside and beneath oneself in a way that indefinitely extends the temporality of that act Radiation disease is a death that works inwardmdashinvisibly yet inexorably Death thereby breeds itself forth into an indefinite future omnipresent in a working a differance that begets delayed effects as further insurance against Nachtraglichkeit The extension of deaths dominion attained in the Bomb serves one grand function to prevent the return of projections by extending the temporality of the deed into a future that is lived by its victims as a judgment that is inevitable irreversible the antithesis of Benjamins messianic time tickingmdasha plea to delay death that can only be answered by death The Bomb thus serves as felix culpa to

an inner necessity To do its job a sublime event must exorcize everything within the subject that makes it an object of its own contempt What better way than Orwells boot brought down in an act of splitting that magnifies the distance between the terror

on the ground and the view from above Catastrophe is now fully outside oneself located in an other who has become nothing but matter body become spectacle of pain frozen forever in charred sculptures strewn across a devastated landscape Laocoon Munched but with the Howl silenced and deferred until it erupts later from within the survivors in a semiosis that can only be read by the scientists who planted it there and have now come (as biopowerknowledge) to study their handiwork as it blooms and bursts from deep within the body of the hibakusha as further testimony of ones powerjouissance Evacuation is complete Death-work has been lodged securely in the Other In the hibakusha one gets to see ones Thanatos as a narrative principle a force in history One gets to see over time what it is like to live death Soul-murder as the innermost reality of the crypt produces and finds in the

hibakusha its dialectical image As the expressive figura of death incarnate a terrifying verveilledoch here attains its objective correlative To purge oneself of catastrophic anxiety an utterly dehumanized object is not enough Neither the Sartrean look nor the Nazi act suffice The disorder of the psyche is deeper prior to desire (Sartre) and demand (Nazism) The projection of death-work can never rest by simply investing ones self-contempt in another For evacuation to work the

object must become something one can study inspect perform operations upon Catastrophic anxiety is the a proiri that gives Auschwitz and Hiroshima their necessity in the genocidal imagination The Bomb constitutes an Event because the psyche

reverses its core conditionmdashits cardiac arrest in inner self-loathingmdashthrough a projection that is total and irreversible If the evacuation of trauma is the abiding motive atop the crypt there is nothing abstract or Lacanian about the Real that results from its projection Evacuation is that malevolent reversal that condemns one to endless repetition One blows ones self-hatred and ones rage over that state fully out into the world but is thereby rendered powerless to do anything but gape in rapt amazement at ones creation That is perhaps why for over fifty years now whenever given the opportunity Paul Tibbets has proudly repeated the declaration that he has not had a moments remorse or regret Death-work externalized leaves one a spent and reified subject lacking any power other than the endless repetition of ones deed The wheel thus comes full circle in the only justice granted such subjects When catastrophic anxiety is only mediated by death-work the affects that compose subjectivity are rent assunder and scattered in pockets of pure persecution With each attempt to compose an inner self-cohesion death-work as internal saboteur rises up in a renewed attack on the effort to be Using the Bomb to reverse this disorder produces as its result a perfect attic justice Guilt and remorse are denied the doers of the deed because to feel such things is to renew a process of self-unraveling What the Bomb was meant to deliver one from has become the guardian

of untroubled sleep With the call of conscience rendered impossible the subject becomes overtly psychotic and must cling ever more desperately to an untroubled memory of the sublime event The subject thereby pronounces without being able to comprehend or mediate it the truth about itself in the ravaged landscape of Hiroshima the founding inner world of the psychotic-a world of utter fragmentation and the obliteration of every term of reference-has finally found a home to which it must say stay thou art so fair a home in which nothing inhuman is unheimlich

The moralization of anxiety manifests itself in our inability confront evil To displace this anxiety we make ourselves ldquogoodrdquo to protect ourselves from danger Failure to confront this psychical conflict reifies the original trauma and makes the destruction of the self meaninglessDavis 2001Walter A Davis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative Pg 86-87

No wonder resistance becomes the key term in the first stage of the unfolding drama This time however Kant canrsquot shift everything onto a plane of conceptual defenses and controls Affect weighs too heavily Intermediate moves immanent within that register are required Opposing affects must be created and marshaled as a first line of defense For the first time in Kant rationalistic mediation gives way to dramatic self-mediation Kant will finally attempt an agon that moves solely within the medium of affect To resist psychic unraveling he must

establish a countervailing force within the order of affect itself For Kant however affective self-mediation is equivalent to bending everything in a moral direction In doing so the author of the ethic of pure duty gives us the true genealogy of morals

That dubious ascent begins once the force threatening destruction is characterized as ldquoevilrdquo Anxiety is thereby transformed into a moralizing fear that we lack the power to resist ldquoevilrdquo Moralizing then structures the subsequent discourse but without exorcizing the psychological subtext that will undercut it This contradiction is in fact what ethics will here reveal about itselfIn making ourselves ldquogoodrdquo subjects we make ourselves beings unworthy of destruction That

transformation also requires the resources of rhetoric since we must ldquopersuaderdquo a tough audience The true goal in remaking ourselves is to tame the power that threatens us by tapping its conscience To do so we create within ourselves a new agency one that recognizing our virtue promises protection We thereby create the illusion that the threatening force has been softened and then transformed into a voice that warmly supports the good intentions of the nascent ego The superego as ego-ideal has been created So ends the founding self-mediation in the genealogy of an ethical ration By staging this internal drama the psyche has taken the action within required to create the space needed to assert control over affect The necessary act follows ndash the attempt to affect a complete reversal of the psychersquos initial condition Kant asserts repeatedly that we can only judge the sublime and experience its proper ldquopleasurerdquo if we view things from ldquoa safe placerdquo But in the psyche as opposed to mind the safe place doesnrsquot exist a priori It has to be invented and with it the most revealing picture of the genesis of what we now call the ldquoegordquo It is a difficult birth to a dubious and troubled function The problem of the ego is one of generating a transformation from impotence to power within affect itself through an agon immanent to that register But Kant is unable to sustain such an agon We get instead a displacement toward concepts through a use of the defensive mechanism known as splitting Ego and inner world divide in an unbridgeable rift thus establishing this condition as the true ldquoidentityrdquo of the ego The ego is the effort to repress the conflicts in the psyche from which it derives But while displacement and intellectualization offer a handle the egorsquos work is far from done The continuing pressure of inner conflicts requires a further battle In that struggle moralizing interpretations do yeoman service by splitting the psychersquos original trauma into a longed-for reificationmdashthe opposition of the ego to the drives

We have become creatures full of instincts The crucial task of the aff is to open up the unconscious counter narrative to provide a mirror to reflect upon the presupposed American identitySucharov 2005Mira M Sucharov assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli Palestinian Peacerdquo Pg 27-28

Just as individuals and groups possess consciousness and an unconscious I argue that every society maintains not only a dominant (conscious) narrative but an unconscious counternarrative as well which

the former has in part arisen to conceal As the counternarrative represents the role that society most fears adopting it resides in the unconscious where it will not interfere with the day-to-day transmission and fulfillment of the dominant narratives and the dominant roles For instance a defensive states counternarrative would encapsulate the view that we are not only defensive but sometimes we can be aggressive 35 Narratives and counternarratives can coexist in two waysmdash either with the counternarrative being simply an unactualized fear or with the counternarrative corresponding to an actual role being enacted alongside the dominant role-identity Thus while an actor may consciously be aware of a counterrole that she abhors (eg the good student who avoids cheating on exams) the unconscious reminds us that the cheater is latent in the self-portfolio of the good student In the event that this student cheats radical change can only come about once the self has

been reconciled with its unconscious opposite Actors will not become aware of the divergence from their dominant identity without the aid of a mirror however Only with the help of outside forces drawing attention to the clash between the two narratives will elites experience a cognitive dissonance necessitating a realignment between actions and role-identity One of the most salient transmission belts for the creation of state narratives is collective memory Memorymdashactive or latent recall of things occurring in the pastmdashhas begun to be understood as not solely a private activity but as representing a group phenomenon as well 36 On the collective level memory can be either experience-near-active one-step removed or distantly removed Active memory would be represented by Holocaust survivors in Israel and the Diaspora for instance One step removed would be the surrogate memories that their immediate Offspring carry with them37 and distantly removed would be exemplified by the Rabbinic injunction that Jews experience the annual telling of the Exodus from Egypt as if they were there While a case could be made for discounting the importance of actual experiences in favor of the way

those experiences arc remembered both of these are crucial for ascertaining role identity Just as traumatic events in a persons life may be repressed in memory but still shape that persons identity the international observer needs to account for actual experiences yet view these as embedded within a narrative context Similarly some historical events undergo a process of memory revision in these cases the observer must be sensitive to the effect that the new discourse has on the societys perception of these events whether or not these stories accord with fact The clinical parallel in psychoanalysis is that while the analysands relationship with her parents is considered crucial to uncovering the contours of her psychology the analyst as a rule does not attempt to meet the parents firsthand rather the patients recounting of these experiences is considered to be the most important channel of investigationmdash and hence transformation Since we are talking about collections of individuals memory needs to be actively transmitted to the societys members in order for it to influence the citizens sense of collective identity One of the ways this can be done is through ritual Being repetitive while symbolically imbued ritual gains meaning only through the symbols attributed to it by the group and is a collective process that serves to link actors to a series of past events for which they may not have been physically present Moreover private rituals that are collectively prescribed such as prayer serve to bind the individual to the collective particularly when there is a formalized liturgy Most collective rituals occur according to the calendar and therefore can encompass regular ceremonies that come to act as markers for the individuals personal time cycle38Sometimes particular collective memories that have been sustained over time are ruptured with citizens contemplating new facts about their countrys past Revisionist history is an example of an attempt to bring forth these sorts of new facts When history is reinterpreted the society can either shun the dissenting voices or else gradually reevaluate the original narratives When this reevaluation occurs society is more apt to uncover the hitherto unconscious counternarratives a discovery that can

lead to the realization that the states behavior might be contradicting the states role-identity In other words revisionist historians and other domestic dissenters can serve as the mirror referred to later

Vote affirmative to give up hope in the face of guarantees - only holding yourself completely open in the face of the promise of a sustainable status quo can open space for self-overcoming that allows us to engage in new forms of praxisDavis 2006 Walter A Davis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deathrsquos Dream Kingdom Pg 63

To know this situation for what it is challenges what is finally the deepest and most fundamental of the guarantees The principle of Hope To appropriate Eliot After such knowledge what forgiveness There is perhaps nothing that can be done to change the situation Ive described But then what is the purpose of knowing such things if they only produce meaningless suffering Is despair the end result of a life shorn of the guarantees Or are we finally like the drunks in ONeills The Iceman Cometh knowing that in order to sustain the illusions required to go on living they must pronounce Hickey mad and reject everything he revealed to them about

their lives as a product of that madness Perhaps its time to admit what the need for Hope really signifies Denial of responsibility for certain situations under the assumption that knowing them correctly would lead to despair Raising that specter is of course the rhetorical ploy invoked to prematurely terminate inquiry lest it impinge on

emotional and psychological needs Despair thus remains an empty concept We dont know what it is and never will as long as we use the need for hope to prevent discovery of our capacities to endure Whether despair is what we will find on the other side of hope is something we cant know For all hope really signifies is a testament to our weakness and our fears Perhaps we are called to something beyond it What Shakespeare called tragic

readiness For in opening ourselves to the possibility of despair we also open ourselves to the possibility of self-overcoming and through it the discovery of a praxis that lies on the other side of the conceptual and existential paralyses created by the guarantees We cant know what is to be done as long as we continue to respond to our situation by invoking ahistorical values and guarantees that are grounded in an essentialistic and ahistorical theory of human nature

PlanThe United States federal government should substantially curtail its domestic surveillance by ceasing all domestic surveillance

Contention 2 is FramingAn ethics of existence forecloses the tragic struggle in which we never confront our inner trauma- only our affirmative can open new ways of relating to ourselves that can overcome these limitations- the 1AC is a precondition for any meaning to our livesDavis 2006 Walter ADavis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg238-240)

In her critique of Kantian ethics Alenka Zupancic often refers to the Lacanian idea that there is a loss deeper than ones life The loss of ones reason for living The apostle of duty offers a heroic example of how one escapes the threat of that loss What Im suggesting here is that ethics actually begins on the other side of it With the possibility that first exists when one discovers that one has already lost or violated or fatally compromised ones reason for living because the values one thinks one honors and the actual truth of ones life are thoroughly at odds The traumatic event that brings one to this recognition is the origin of ethics This is the ethical task it establishes to see if one can pay the price for having violated oneself by assuming the full burden of the situation one has thereby createdThe ethical situation accordingly confronts the subject with the necessity to choose to be in a radically new way or die inside Nothing less is demanded than a totally new way of relating to oneself for the guilt one experiences in such a situation is existentializing One is guilty toward oneself for having failed to honor the duties that one bears to oneself for having so thoroughly lied to oneself about ones life As Hamlet learns it is through that recognition that one first discovers that one has tragic responsibilities toward oneself that can no longer be evaded because one with this situation is the even deeper discovery that there are failures that can be irreversible That is the possibility defining the situation one is now in What one does will reveal the truth of who one is Guilt toward oneself has overtaken all possibilities of displacement and denial Fail now and one dies within Most people will of course do just about anything to avoid guilt or to get cleansed of it as quickly as possible That is why so many fail the test when it comes to them shrinking inside rather than expanding to the demands of our innermost possibility the one defining our humanity An ethics of existence begins with the traumatic experience in which everything weve tried to escape about ourselves catches up with us One then knows that ones prior life has been a flight And all ones brave ideas and bright ethical claims airy nothingmdashthe indulgence in comforting and self-alienating lies But now one

is finally like Hamlet in the situation from which there is no exit An ethics grounded in the possibility of freedom depends on the actions one performs within oneself when one finds oneself in a crisis that can no longer be denied This is precisely the kind of situation Kant is unable to consider which is why he constructs in Duty the principle of choice that renders it impossible In serving Duty one is delivered from the repressed thought that now can never arise that ones whole life and all its choices especially the ethical ones may be no more than a flight from things in oneself that one flees because one fears that if one is ever forced to face oneself one will suffer a destruction worse than death Destruction within An existentializing ethic begins on the other side of all the things we do to delay that event For it is when the thing one fears happens that one first discovers the truth of ones life the depth of ones inauthenticity The trauma that will measure ones humanity has arrived Nothing else now exists but the lonely struggle of the psyche with itself Suicide (including the primary form of suicide inner death) is one term of that situation Ethics is the other An ethics of existence is what one does when one finally finds oneself in the traumatic situation that brings one before oneself There is one lesson in this a lesson that probably cant be learned Rather than running from the trauma we should plunge toward it since it is only through it that we can discover both the truth about ourselves and what we are able to do in the face of that truth To activate that possibility all thats needed perhaps is to drown out the noise and chatter one keeps running in ones head Perhaps the truth is that the truth about ourselves is not deeply repressed and unknown Its closer than we think available to introspection if we but dared But thats what makes the kind of impassioned reflection Hamlet engages in so terrifying It exemplifies everything we know and dont want to know about ourselves18 Here is an attempt to offer an image that describes in depth the existential-psychoanalytic condition from which the possibility of ethics derives In George Orwells 1984 Winston Smith when tortured with the thing he most fears betrays the thing he loves To save his life he sacrifices what gives it meaning He capitulates before an inner torment that reduces the psyche to a condition of catastrophic anxiety (The image of the cage of rats placed over the head they will raven externalizes in a perfect objective correlative the terror that has the power to dissolve the psyche What is a phobia after all but an inner condition displaced into an external fear) What I want to suggest here is that Winston Smiths phobia describes the inner condition that defines any subject traumatized by itself Such a subject lives tortured by the struggle not to betray the thing one loves the thing that could give ones life meaning But one saves it only if one is willing to sacrifice everything to the

acceptance of the suffering and inner torment that service to it entails This is the ethical act whereby a subject attains tragic agency Becoming an existentially autonomous agent is the process of engaging the disorders of ones psyche in the effort of active reversal The wish to escape that effort to soften it or to insist that suffering must always have a happy resolution is the voice of self-betrayal If one gives in to it one loses with Winston the thing one has finally found the thing one can love more than ones life but only by suffering all that it demands That thing more precious than life is the tragic struggle that gives life perhaps the only meaning it can have

The ethic of the aff is key - only an ethical act that confronts our inner trauma with a constant and inner openness can we create the conditions for self-overcoming necessary to open ourselves to a meaningful existence - the only ethical choice is to fully confront contingencyDavis 2006 Walter A Davis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg235-238

What follows attempts to distill the ethic of existence in to its fundamental principles I also try here to present those thesis in a way that will engage the readers psyche and emotions at precisely the place within us where each of us makes a basic decision about ourselves Thats the only self that matters The others are selfreifying defenses The argument thus constitutes both an appeal to the readers freedom and an attempt to impinge on that freedom to bring each reader before him or herself by challenging defenses with the power that some ideas have to light a fire in the soul (1) We concur with Kant that if a choice is not free its not moral The possibility of freedom depends however on an in-depth analysis of ones psyche Such an analysis leads from the destruction of ego identity to the need to bring about a complete reversal in ones relationship to oneself by deracinating the voice of the other Thinking is ethical insofar as it engages one thing the battle of a subject with itself over the meaning of its being (2) There is no way to abridge that process nor to provide guarantees that will secure a safe outcome To sustain the psychoanalytic turn the psyche must continually throw itself into question and root out the emotions that bind it to a pattern of lies An ethic of the existential subject depends on maximizing what Keats termed negative capability the ability to be in uncertainties Mysteries doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason Rather than resolving doubts the purpose of thought and action is to deepen them An act is ethical insofar as it deepens the conflict of the subject with itself (3) One acts ethically only when all symbolic and ideological supports have collapsed Only then can one take on responsibility for oneself because only then is one at issue and at risk The ethical act must radically open itself to contingency in a situation where one must create values yet where those values can derive from nothing but the depth of ones engagement in the situation By the same token such values cannot be a final solution but must open themselves to later contingencies Ethics must always allow itself to be measured by contingency because contingency is precisely what calls up ethical responsibility The primary ethical situation is not one where there is a clear course of duty but where a subject trembles before its responsibility to create new values in a situation that reduces received values to rubble (4) Ethics begins when there is a genuine crisis of values even perhaps the need for a re-valuation of all values For Kant there was not nor could there be such a crisis The values were known immutable and generally agreed upon The only question was what kind of principle they would be grounded in which meant for Kant and the Aufklarung how could they be grounded in Reason For us in contrast the primary fact is a historicity that bites into the very possibility of the ethical Every ethical value must be willing to historicize itself That recognition entails the following considerations The desert grows Under the guise of fundamentalist crusades herd moralities dominate The extent of inhumanity is appalling So many values that once seemed so solid have been so thoroughly debunked The possibility of ethics now begins with a systematic exposure of all superego pathologies all the ethical ideologies that societies use to introduce a fundamental passivity into subjects while convincing those same subjects that they are good in a goodness that depends on willed ignorance An existential ethic is radically destructive of received beliefs radically disruptive of the desires of the normal subject Refusing and exposing all Symbolic supports it seeks in the struggle of the psyche with its disorders the source of value (5) Ethics is a matter of extremity It begins in the most extreme actmdashthe act of radical individuation in which one opens ones psyche to an interrogation that must be sustained in its extremity Ethics is about a choice in which a subject risks the value and meaning of its existence not about those choices that assure it of that meaning Moreover it is only when one does this that one experiences for the first time the

terror implicit in the oft-quoted Sartrean statement existence precedes essence (6) Ethics must engage and derive from the dread that defines choice Let me illustrate this proposition by contrasting Hamlets choice with the situation in Styrons Sophies Choice The horrifying choice Sophie facesmdashto choose which of her children will be sent to the gas chambermdashis a forced choice and thus extreme and exceptional in a way that deprives it of the possibility of being normative17 Hamlets choice in contrast is a free one that issues from nothing but his freedom and the readiness with which he accepts the selftorture that existence entails Sophie is tortured from without by the madness of the other and the inhuman logic that madness requires in order to know itself (Styron calls the officer who forces the choice on Sophie a genius of the Reich) Hamlet is tortured from within by the logic of self-criticism and self-overcoming that informs the existentializing process We are fortunate if we never face a situation like Sophies nor suffer the death-in-life that is the result of such choices But insofar as we have a psyche Hamlets situation is the general one that defines us Or to put it in properly ethical terms engaging the kind of situation he faces is the act that activates the inherent possibility that defines us The choice that founds such an ethic must therefore be distinguished both from the a priori choice made by the apostle of duty and Sophies forced choice All three refer to extreme choices and situations In only one however is guilt toward oneself both the origin of the choice and its result That is only one of the three choices is the ground of its own possibility and thereby the source of an existentialization that issues in values bound to the tragic contingencies of our situatedness

2AC

A2 ndash Realism

We control the internal link to their impacts The psychoanalysis of the affirmative forces an internal investigation of the ways in which the subjectrsquos subconscious desires rationalize what we would consider self-interest This means that we can only make sense of realism through a lens of psychoanalysis Sucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 17-18)

The psychological turn that international relations took with the rise of behavioralism in the 1960s has begun to expand beyond focusing on cognitionmdashhow individuals thinkmdashto a wider appreciation of the role of emotional determinants of action one of many factors that were long dismissed as unscientific Part of the reason for this hesitant courtship is no doubt the long strides that international relations theory has taken toward refining its investigative lenses such that less easily observable phenomena can be more confidently incorporated into the solid theoretical infrastructure that the discipline has now adopted A central example of this evolution is the analytical watershed inaugurated by neorealism which fashioned a conceptual playing field where little had existed before Neorealism a theoretical school that views international relations as taking place within an anarchical state system with no overarching authority in turn spawned the constructivist turn in international relationsmdashthe approach that stresses the importance of social identity in determining international outcomesmdashand subsequent counterarguments that built on yet other social and psychological preceptsmdash all of which agree that there is such a thing as an international systemmdashthough they understand the effects of anarchy differently Introducing psychoanalysis to international relations can therefore be seen as the next logical step for a relatively young discipline that seeks to understand why political actors behave the way they do While all psychoanalysts draw on Freuds unique contribution subsequent approaches have altered many of his assumptions This trend has kept pace with the embracing of new epistemological and ontological perspectives by other scientific and social scientific fields such as the quantum revolution in physics -a paradigm shift that has since influenced other disciplines The form of psychoanalytic theory that I use here is the contemporary relational strand one that analysts have alternately termed relational-model theorizing a dyadic systems perspective and intersubjectivity theory This approach shares an ontology basic to constructivism in international relations the psychology (identity) of the person (state) is not hard-wired into the unit but develops in part from the actions of other actors in the social environment (the family the therapeutic setting the international system) and in part through the shared assumptions that permeate that system As an approach centered on the individual mind contemporary psychoanalysis takes into account the broader social context within which actors act Psychoanalysis also provides a coherent theory of behavior incorporating three elements that have mostly been invisible in international relations theory but that provide a fuller understanding of how states and nonstate actors interact emotion the unconscious and the possibility for actors own cognitive and emotional insight to be a source of behavior change In drawing on these principles perhaps the most significant contribution that psychoanalysis can make to international relations is in improving on prevailing theories of identity which in turn illuminate questions about international action Within international relations constructivism has been criticized for neglecting the question of how identity is in fact created Cognitive psychologymdashwhich international relations has begun to draw on liberallymdashin part helps to fill this gap Yet with its assumption that the emotional legacy of early interpersonal relationships is essential in shaping personality and subsequent behavior psychoanalysis offers a more comprehensive model of identity creation than those put forth by cognitive theorists Recognizing these explanatory benefits contructivists have recently called for exploring the potential that psychoanalysis holds for understanding international politics Thus unlike the prevailing psychoanalytic approaches in international relationsmdashnamely psychohistories of individual leaders and the focus-group potential of micro-level conflict resolution the psychoanalytic approach I use here is meant to coexist happily alongside other streams of systemic theory in international relations

Forcing the state away from what it considers a core tenet of national defense in the exact opposite way it desires creates the conditions necessary for reflection of the efficacy of the initial policies of surveillance which changes future policySucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 32-)

Like most individuals states possess a complex arsenal of motivations that are not all palatable to the politys sense of self mdashnot least of which is due to the discrepant voices vying for influence in any society Yet the dominant self mdashthat overarching group ethos that does not necessarily reflect each single (sub)voicemdashimplicitly prescribes a set of normatively acceptable behaviors Should a state adopt a policy course that contradicts the states role-identity we can expect some sort of cognitive dissonance to arise leading to a radical realignment between actions and identity Just as a man who once struck his wife might offer the apologetic plea that I dont know what got into me it is up to the analyst to help the subject come to terms with the aggression that has evidently been very much inside of him all along The policy shift therefore results from the force of the role-identity prodding the self back into behavioral consistency However acting in contradiction to ones role-identity does not necessarily result in a behavior shift The dissonance between role-identity and behavior must be both unbearable and experienced at an emotional level in order for such a shift to result If the dissonance remained at a cognitive level it is likely that the subject would employ one of a number of cognitive biases in order to rationalize the discrepancy42 The dredging up of the unconscious counternarrative assures that the dissonance is experienced deeply enough to result in the taking of radical action to realign actions with identity 43 This hypothesis of cognitive-emotional realization is grounded in the clinical findings of psychoanalytic theory that suggest that under certain conditions actors may become consciously aware of previously unconscious processes44 The classic understanding of cognitive dissonancemdashas articulated by Leon Festingermdashis that inconsistency between behavior and belief results in psychological discomfort that leads to activity oriented toward dissonance reduction just as hunger leads to activity oriented toward hunger reduction45 In line with psychoanalysis the actual cognitive-emotional realization brings to light what had previously been stored in the unconscious areas of the states subjective world In actuality the assumption here is that the role-challenging behavior (paired with domestic challenges) causes elites to reflect on the states role- identity Moreover my use of cognitive-emotional realization imbues the concept with a distinctively emotional component as well Whereas pure cognitive dissonance refers to the challenging of an individuals worldview (ie the revelation of new facts)46 I am introducing the more ontologically powerful notion of challenges to the self47 When this behavior undermines the very legitimacy buttressing the states raison detat the dissonance is particularly acute Catalysts for Realization Once decision-makers come to realize that the states foreign-policy actions have contradicted the states role-identity a policy shift may result The important question that remains is what contributes to this realization Numerous sources may act as the mirror necessary for the state to reflect on its behavior For clarity I have divided them into three categories domestic elements (including the military the peace movement revisionist historians artists and the domestic media) other states (including allies and adversaries as well as those states news media) and international structures (including international organizations norms and regimes) Domestic Elements The Military If the military acts in a way that the populace sees as contradicting the states self-image (even if the military is merely carrying out governmental policies) society can experience a corresponding cognitive

dissonance In a democracy the military takes its directives from the government however military culture is instrumental in shaping the broader strategic culture encompassing foreign-policy decisions mdashand role-identitymdashmore generally Most of the time the relationship between the civilian and military spheres resembles a symbiosis commands are given by civilians and implemented by the military which in turn will advise and reshape subsequent policies In some cases ex-military personnel will pursue a career in government on being discharged However it is possible for the military to experience a sense of dissonance between a particular policy and its overall defense doctrine or ethic Soldiers might articulate discomfort in carrying out a particular mission or the number of conscientious objectors may rise In a country in which conscientious objection is previously unheard of the founding of such a movement will therefore signal an even higher degree of dissonance between behavior and institutional role-identity In examining foreign-policy shifts the role of the military is crucial in representing the degree of concordance between national role-identity and foreign policy In states where the military has particular salience for establishing national identitymdashthose states with mandatory and universal conscription for instancemdashthat institution will be particularly salient

Their dependence on pragmatism to justify unrealistic internal link chains and counter psychological methods creates the worst type of moral tunnel vision in which we become incapable of understanding the carnage of our ideology ndash this makes ethics impossibleDavis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg47-48)

But its always a good idea when seeking an explanation of the human motives behind actions to stick with the empirical With stated intentions and official rationales Otherwise we give ourselves over to psychobabble Despite official denial by the Department of Defense that DU is harmful a series of explanations are now in place to account for the development and use of DU weapons DU is cost-effective militarily efficient and turns to productive use a waste product wed otherwise have to dispose of at great cost In a variety of ways for the past two days We who leave here in sorrow know that we will one day be reunited with her in joy My concern here is not with the ontological status of this preposterous belief but with its psychological function as a guarantee that offers human beings a way to deprive death of its finality And the terror that prospect entails The function of guarantees is to enable human beings to bear events and contingencies that would otherwise be too traumatic There is much that we can face apparently only by denying Such perhaps is one accurate estimation of what it means lo be a human being to remain a child of ones needs and desires disguising that fact in the form of beliefs and ideas The primary purpose of religion philosophy and culture has been to provide conceptual psychological and emotional guarantees so I hat traumatic events become part of a larger framework that assures the realization of our hopes and dreams Without such supports most people supposedly would find life unlivable Through the ministry of the guarantees we banish those thoughts and feelings that we are convinced would deprive life of meaning plunging us into despair Experience accordingly becomes the movement from and to the affirmation of the guarantees through their imposition on events The main line of Western philosophy can most profitably be seen as I series of efforts to provide a ground for the guarantees That effort achieves one of its culminations in Hegel who defined the purpose of philosophy as the elimination of the contingent As father of the philosophy of history he offered that new discipline a single goal to demonstrate that the rational is real and the real rational that history is the story of progress liberty the realization of a universal humanity Or to put it in vulgar terms democracy and civilization are on the march and will soon sweep the entire Middle East In order to triumph over the contingencies of existencemdashdoubt about oneself ones place in the world and ones final endmdashmany guarantees are needed Moreover they must form a system of reinforcing beliefs such that if one guarantee is threatened other guarantees come in to fill the breach Thereby the function of the system as a whole is assured Within the system of guarantees one guarantee however is superordinate The belief that human nature is basically good As animal rationale we are endowed with an ahistorical essence that cannot be lost Evil is an aberration Consequently I heres always reason for hope and the belief that no matter how bad things get well always find a way to recover everything that I lie guarantees assure Psyche Its all a matter of pragmatic efficiency with a little capitalist profit motive thrown in for good measure Theres only one thing wrong with this explanation It leaves out the basis for the calculus Theres every reason to use DU and no reason not to use it if and only if one rationale informs all decisions How to maximize death regardless of consequences or alternatives Introduce any countervailing motives and the entire chain of decisions becomes questionable Conscious stated intentions then reveal themselves as functions of something else that

has been conveniently rendered unconscious What looks like a purely pragmatic matter devoid of psychological motives now reveals the opposite the fact that Thanatos so inhabits the system that the absence of anything opposed to it goes without saying Thanatos has become what Wittgenstein called a form of life7 a way of being so deeply rooted that it operates automatically habitually and of necessity It has become a collective unconscious And as such it is no longer accessible to those whose intentions conceal and reveal it The reason for sticking with the empirical is now clear There is something insane in the empirical That is what the historian must uncover Before we ask ourselves how this situation came to pass we need to ask another question For its easy to claim we dont know about such things because the media refuses to tell us about them Theres another reason for our ignorance however and its the one we need to confront I refer to the possibility that we choose our ignorance because otherwise wed lose the system of guarantees we depend on for our identity and our understanding of history As Barbara Bush put it in telling Diane Sawyer why she doesnt watch the news Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many what day its gonna happen and how many this or what do you suppose Or I mean its its not relevant So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that8 It would be easy to deride Mrs Bush to congratulate oneself on not sharing her attitude What I hope to show however is that on an essential level one determinative in the last instance we are in full agreement with her and delude ourselves as long as we think otherwise

IR SPECIFIC ndash The method of the affirmative best supplements our understanding of international relations by including elements that are absent in normal policy examinations of international relations Sucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 18-20)

It has long been argued that even within the confines of rational-choice approaches the nature of a decision-makers preferences cannot be assumed a priori and indeed their distinctiveness derives from factors ranging from emotions to personality to the selective use of historical analogies Emotion in short can be considered the sine qua non of social life a realization that has recently begun to permeate international relations theory Moreover the concept of the unconscious that anchors psychoanalysis can illuminate the question of why an individual experiences a sense of dissonance when her actions do not conform to her identity the mechanism by which the dissonance between action and identity can become unbearable and therefore why humans experience the need to match the two The unconscious is that aspect of the self that remains the most untapped yet potentially the most satisfying determinant of action coming as it does early in the causal chain At its most basic the unconscious is simply the repository for those characteristics that an actor fears adopting in other words action fantasies that the actor despises but can plausibly entertain This fundamental tension between the feared and the imaginable is what normally keeps these fantasies in check and is what makes the unconscious so potentially powerful as an explanatory tool And while the unconscious is an admittedly contested concept scholars from various fields have issued tentative calls for its exploration and convincing deductive and empirical research certainly justify its consideration One theoretical perspective that has been criticized for ignoring the unconscious is sociologys symbolic interactionism an approach that underpins constructivism in international relations Part of the reason for the tension between sociology including symbolic interactionism and psychoanalysis arguably lies in an antiquated understanding of psychology the false belief that to employ psychology as an explanatory approach one must ignore the impact that ones social environment has on ones personality self-image and behavior However contemporary psychoanalysis presents a view of the self that is more relational than what Freudian drive theory had suggested A psychoanalytic approach does not have to assume that unconscious or otherwise emotional factors arise from the actor independent of the shared understandings that define the social environment Admitting an explanatory role for the unconscious therefore does not imply a rejection of intersubjectivity mutual-constitution or any of the other organizing principles of sociology and constructivism Rather it simply means that ideas held in the unconscious serve as one filter through which actors interpret social interaction The unconscious therefore may be understood either as one element of agency that the actor brings to interpreting his social script or as itself the product of social forces that interpret and constrain action The first perspective assumes that agency does not have to be conscious to be meaningful agency at its most basic can simply imply action and intentionality can therefore encompass an unconscious component The second view means that the unconscious does not have to be understood as a pre-wired component of the unit that in turn shapes behavior rather it can be viewed as an emergent and mediating phenomenon We can therefore understand cognition as being inherently situated within social processes This is consistent with a relational view of social life and yet it is an important theoretical addition to the prevailing wisdom in international relations about how social understandings

ultimately shape behavior A final contribution that psychoanalysis can make to our understanding of international relationsmdashand conflict resolution in particularmdashis its assumption that entrenched behavior patterns can be altered through cognitive and emotional insight In addition to challenging the static conception of human nature that underpinned classical realism (arguably the first theory of international relations) and that provided a rather pessimistic view of human affairs this assumption is a valuable addition to any theory of international relations in which the prevailing theories of actionmdashmaterial power in the case of states polarity in the case of state systemsmdashare difficult if not impossible to manipulate As a result many of the most prominent international relations theories have lacked meaningful policy implications Conversely psychoanalytic theory suggests tools for ameliorating some of the most pressing global problems including protracted conflict and war While some psychoanalytically based conflict-resolution approaches use the focus-group format to simulate the healing function of the therapy setting this book demonstrates that the gaining of conscious insight into ones role deviationmdasha prerequisite for policy changemdashcan come about through real-life international interaction that requires neither a skilled conflict practitioner nor the willingness of elites to participate in such an exercise Rather under certain conditions role conflict can prompt domestic and international elements to hold a mirror to the face of elites resulting in a collective cognitive dissonance that can lead to policy change This mirror can take a number of formsmdashacts of protest by domestic groups media coverage and actions by allies adversaries or international structures These sources will be discussed further

IR SPECIFIC ndash What their internal links consider to be ldquoself-interestrdquo for a state doesnrsquot actually exist States are not sentient Instead they are composed by a collection of minds that act in self-interest which means that psychoanalytic evaluation of the self is a prior question to understanding the interests of the state Sucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 21-22)

Rather than referring to a notion of collective selfhood that is shared by multiple states- as some constructivist theorists of collective identity would maintainmdashthe title of this book the international self is meant to suggest not only that each state possesses a distinctive identity but that this identity develops out of the states relationship with other international actors This concept also implies that decisions emanating from the polity are derived from a process not simply the sum of the states parts Yet while we have already shown that psychoanalysis can accommodate a role for environmental processes in shaping behavior we still need to be aware of the risks of anthropomorphizing the state a practice that gets to the heart of the debate between two analytical positions that cut across the social sciences methodological individualism and holism While methodological individualism views social life as the product of actions taken by individuals holism understands the group to be a meaningful unit in and of itself Yet to an extent the debate between the two perspectives is already fixed While the holists have in their favor a precedent of semantic habitmdash we tend to anthropomorphize the state in everyday speech more often than not (eg Washington decided to wage war against al-Qaeda)mdashmethodological individualism is allied with the rich literature of rational choice and more prosaically the commonsense discomfort that arises when we ascribe human characteristics to things including groups Groups do not have minds any more than do other social facts and group behavior is after all the product of individuals acting on the groups behalf Finally given the presence of disparate individuals and subgroups constituting any society it can be misleading to attribute a single group consciousness to a political entity In a foreign-policy context accordingly adherents of this view would focus on elite attitudes bureaucratic politics andor interest group activities to tease out the causal relationship between Intentions and outcomes Yet a strong case can be made for the emergent properties of states and their policy processes something happens between the point at which citizens articulate preferences and those preferences are translated into policies Insofar as elite decisions do not always reflect the opinion of the majority there remains some degree of independent agency that may very well accrue to the state as a whole Under this reasoning it would be plausible to assert the existence of an overarching group self as Alexander Wendt does when he claims that states are people too In addition to the views of significant strands of psychoanalytic thought (which would not necessarily be expected to assume that units other than the individual can be psychoanalyzed) the idea of a group self enjoys far-reaching support across the social sciencesmdashinternational relations included This includes neorealisms assumption that the state is a unitary actor the Collective self hood implied by social identity theory the concept of political culture early psychoanalytic assumptions about the group as well as studies on obedience group-think and the crowd phenomenon There is a reason why scholars are drawn to the group as a unit of analysismdashwitness anthropologists concern with tribes and civilizations sociologists focus on street gangs and societies and political scientists emphasis on states and

transnational actors Group behavior and individual behavior are not necessarily identical Nor can an individual be expected to behave the same way in the context of a group as he or she would alone Moreover constructivism goes so far as to assume the possibility of shared norms across states a claim that has enjoyed much empirical support during the first active decade of constructivist research It is much more defensible to argue the existence of a collective identity within a state the boundaries of which contain degrees of centralized media language and other discursive channels for cultural dissemination and which prescribe the roles that the groups members are expected to perform within the context of that group And if different subgroups within the state disseminate disparate narratives we can assume that the most dominant group within society (as defined by some combination of ethnicity class or gender) has custody over a single consequential dominant narrative Finally even if we choose to ascribe a states national ethos to its elites we need to remember that state leaders are the product of the society in which they were reared This view would effectively mitigate the tension between elite- and mass-level phenomena in international relations since both elites and masses are socialized by the overarching structure of the collective

A2 ndash DisadvantagesThe internal linkrsquos dependence on rationality only serves to protect us from the unknown that the future holds This ultimately reduces all forms of knowledge to something that can be calculated which ensures violence The only way to reverse this trend is to force a confrontation with tragedy and the unknownDavis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg51-52)

Emotional The innermost need of human beings is to feel good about themselves Whatever threatens that feeling must be exorcised Health normalcy and productivity depend on avoiding negative feelings Hope and optimism arent just healthy attitudes they are requirements of our nature Biologically wired We cannot remain for long in trauma Recovery moreover must restore our faith in the guarantees and our hopes for the future The need for hope is In fact the capstone of the entire system of guarantees Yet it too apparently has a history Today over 10 million of our children are on prescription drugs to prevent depression and anxiety Informed of this fact by Bill Maher the French actress Julie Delphy spoke the spontaneous wisdom of an archaic culture Dont they know that depression is a good thing that its something you have to go through in order to grow Not anymoreThe key to understanding the power of the guarantees is to understand the fears that they exorcise Thanks to religion death suffering and evil are deprived of their power Through the attainment of reason all other forms of consciousness and what they might reveal are put in their place Poetic knowing is deprived both of its legitimacy and its terror Science as fulfillment of reason assures us of domination over nature What Heidegger termed technoscientific rationality becomes the measure of what is real Belief in historical progress banishes the recurrent suspicion that history may lack direction or even worse move to the darkest of ends The condition is thereby set that makes it impossible for us to experience traumatic events such as 9-11 except as occasions to take whatever actions are needed to reaffirm our goodness and restore our guarantees It is in the personal order however that the guarantees do their deepest work Psychologically belief in the self or self-identity exorcises the most frightening contingency that there is a void at the center of the American psyche with panic anxiety and its corollary compulsive consumption the expression of a desperate non-identity That specter brings us before the greatest fear that our psyche not our conscious deliberative intentions is the author of our actions an author who will do anything in order to feel safe secure and righteous All of our emotional needs then stand forth under the rule of a single necessity the need to feel good about oneself at whatever cost and to sustain hope by banishing anything that would trouble us Resolution catharsis (ie the discharge of painful tensions or awareness) and renewal emerge as the needs that bind us with an iron necessity to the guarantees and all that they make it impossible for us to know It is easy to deprecate Dubya and apparently to hold onto the idea that hes a temporary aberration But the problem goes deeper To revive a battle cry from the 1960s insofar as one is wedded to any one of the guarantees one is part of the problem and not the solution For the grandest function of the system of guarantees as a whole and in each one of its parts is to blind us to historyAnd so to take up again the question stated previously how did the situation now being created in Iraq come about The next three sections constitute an attempt to answer that question by constructing for America a repressed history

The negative is attempting to apply reason to ethics and psychology This only creates a hard understanding of our inner psyche which is a loss of the self that outweighs every other impact Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg174-175)

This recognition implies a primary question What is the nature and extent of the ethical responsibility human beings have for such a condition To what extent can evil and the actions that flow from it be said to be chosen in the exercise of a freedom for which one bears ethical responsibility Traditionally ethical responsibility only applies to actions that are taken after deliberation and with full knowledge of the consequences actions where choice is a function of our ability to reason where the moral law is known and where one chooses to violate it for motives that can be specified as functions of a self- interest that overrides all other motives and considerations Mitigate any of these factors and one mitigates ethical responsibility Ethical responsibility is compromised or eliminated for example if ones action is determined by forces outside ones control if one acts without premeditation under duress in blind obedience to customs or authorities as the result of a pathology because of some limitation in the ability to think or to understand the consequences of ones action or because one acted without any conscious intention to do wrong However deplorable their deeds the mad for example are not evil Evil requires consciousness choice freedom If evil is to be a human possibility on a par with the possibility of goodness it must be something that is determined within the order of freedom The trouble with the traditional understanding of these conditions however is the effort to confine them within the limits of rationalism and a purely cognitive model of the mind Rationality is noble but single-minded devotion to it leaves the true life of the psyche undetected Focusing on it prematurely shifts discussion to a rarefied mode of mentation that is then cut off from the rest of the personality To sustain and deny that split reason is then given disproportionate weight in determining what we are and do But the dream of reason is precisely that A dream a desiremdashto bring ones being into correspondence with reason and thereby eliminate everything else especially in determining the questions of ethics No one brought this dream to bear on moral experience more rigorously than Immanuel Kant That effort is the sublime beauty of his thought But experiencing oneself in terms of a priori rationality comes at a terrible cost Life becomes a process in which we sleepwalk our way through most of what we do because weve cut ourselves off from the actual bases of our actions Our psyche becomes a stranger to us We fixate on giving rational accounts of ourselves and in the process alienate ourselves from everything else Emotions become irrationalities breaks with reason things we must overcome or worse things we can only acknowledge when they are good proper and in tune with reason The rest of our being becomes brute inclinations frailties of our nature desires that disrupt an otherwise rational identity As a result in terms of ethics whether we know it or not under the guise of reason weve made an offer that most human beings cannot refuse Claiming not to consciously intend what one does has become the grand excuse Traditional definitions of the three cardinal categories of ethics are a monument to that motive Restricting intention motive and choice to the canons of rationality fashions them to the designs of human mendacity For if by intention we mean a deliberate rational choice with full knowledge of the consequences evil as Ive described it is not chosen If along the same lines we restrict motive lo purposes for which we bear responsibility because they issue not from frailties of our nature or the force of circumstances but from an explicit knowledge of what one is doing and why evil as thus far described does not exist within the order of human motivation One can identify self-interest careerism and happiness as motives but to say that many agents act in order to advance Thanatos is hard to fathom Unless that is we expand the category of motive to include purposes that derive from the psyche in all its inherent conflictedness But once posit such a possibility choice becomes a concept that must be rethought in a radically new way

Their internal links are symptoms of the fantasy that we strive to maintain This logic becomes used to justify atrocity The affirmativersquos rejection of attempting to control the future allows alternate practices to emerge Vote affirmative to traverse the fantasy of their internal link chains Even if you donrsquot think we can solve the 1AC is a more productive through experiment than their disad Davis 2006(Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg63-65)

Is there anything more evil than shooting children in a school yard or flying planes into buildings One hears this rhetorical question often today Getting it firmly implanted in our minds seems to be one of the current ideological functions of the media A correct response requires careful reflection on the circumstance that underlies the knee-jerk response thanks to the power of the image it conjures up The promise inherent in Technoscientificrationality is deliverance from images Killing for it like everything else occurs at a distance In the inaugural moment Tibbets in the cockpit of the Enola Gay unable to imagine what he has just done as a human act It was all impersonal12 And today in the silent secret midnight ways that radiation poisoning works from within like a deed without a doer separated in space and time from its absent cause Perhaps killing at a distance is the greater evil precisely because it abrogates the image and the human connection between slayer and slain If I kill another man with my bare hands my deed is immediate to my embodied consciousness To kill that way you have to feel hate fear anguish remorse etc whereas to kill from a distance or through an invisible contamination is to render the whole thing impersonal With the desired result the ability for example of the man who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima incinerating 600000 people in a second and condemning another 300000 to the condition of hibakusha the walking dead to boast for over 59 years now that he has never felt a moment of regret or remorse Tibbets lack of moral imagination is one with his representative status as precursor For now its easy to litter a landscape with DU while denying that the stuff has any long-term medical or environmental effects13 The evil of killing at a distance is that it makes death unreal Protected from the image all who participate in the deed are delivered over to a pure and impersonal calculus (An aside if we really want to support our troops we must achieve for them a new Bill of Rights No one should ever be ordered to use weapons without being given a full knowledge of the long-term human and environmental consequences of those weapons To do otherwise is to deprive our soldiers of the choice that makes them human) The powers that be learned one lesson from Vietnam No more images The mistake was to let us see the carnage up close every night on TV The news as image entered our consciousness at the register where genuine change begins Where horror is felt free of the tyranny of the concept and the hypnotic power of the guarantees Desert Storm was the corrective the Nintendo war a war broadcast to look just like one of the video games wed been programmed to love Prohibition of the image is now a fundamental article of faith No images are allowed to come back to us from Iraq II (Michael Moores real crime was to give us a brief glimpse at what the mainstream media proscribe) Abolition of the image is one of the primary conditions of ecocide Everything must be rendered abstract invisible unreal No image can be allowed to trouble our sleep to lacerate our soul For then we might begin to know that there is indeed an evil far worse than shooting children in schoolyards or flying airplanes into buildings To move us toward that knowledge let me end with the forbidden which I must here attempt to convey solely through the more abstract medium of words since Ive not yet gained permission to reproduce a photograph I saw not long ago Its the picture of an Iraqi baby a victim of DU who was born with no nose mouth eyes

anus or genitals and with flipper limbs a common result of radiation exposure in utero That childs body full of red open ulcers is twisted in knots its ulcerated face contorted in a look of unspeakable suffering An authentic image of the sacredness of human life Of the preciousness of every breath To look at that child is to realize ones duty to mourn it to give voice to its right to invade Our consciousness and expose the evil of those who prate on about being pro-life while refusing to let us see what theyve reduced life to Luke 171-2 The image of that child must become the force in our minds that motivates us to deracinate all guarantees that shield us from the reality of that childs situation Or to put it another way every time one demands catharsis resolution and renewal that child is born again condemned to its writhing That is why its image must embolden us to question the most hallowed of the guarantees the one Ive refrained from discussing until now In the face of such evil what is to be done Is resistance ever justified in resorting to violence No we are told because if we do so we become just like them This ethical principle supposedly applies universally and atemporally It does so however because it assures t he guarantee that no matter what happens well never get our hands dirty History cant intrude on the categorical imperative Whatever action one takes one must maintain ones ethical purity Even if that means there is nothing one can do and after its been demonstrated I hat there are no non-violent ways to change the situation Perhaps we can no longer allow ourselves the luxury of such an ethic Bush did the moral imagination one favor His pre-emptive unilateralism made official what has been clear for so long but denied due to its implications There is no body to which we can turn for Justice not the UN the World Court or any other framework of international law The US will flaunt its contempt for such bodies whenever it suits its purpose And thus another mode of peaceful non-violent praxis is deprived of its guarantee

A2 ndash CounterplansTheir counterplan still attempts to maintain some type of guarantee for the future Their obsession with security and the future fail to force a confrontation with the trauma of the unknown - this means that only the aff can solve Anything else results in a return to the ideology of security Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg38-39)

But to undertake that task we must purge ourselves of the thing in ourselves that stands in the way I have termed it the guarantees By that term I refer to all those assurances we set up a priori to protect ourselves from the reality of historical trauma The significance of eventsmdashthe Shoah Hiroshima 9-11mdash is their power to call such guarantees into question by exposing cherished beliefs to the claims of darker views and by forcing us to think in radically new ways considering things about the human being that weve persistently denied or marginalized One dimension of any traumatic event is the shock it brings to traditional ways of thinking Thats why the dominant response to any historical trauma is the attempt to restore the guarantees by finding a way t o impose them on the event in order to contain and interpret it The ideological function of the guarantee is thereby demonstrated A way has been found to limit the impact of the event by picturing it as an aberration a temporary departure from values and beliefs that can always be recovered because they constitute something essentialistic or universal about human nature Something trans-historical History may disrupt our essence but it cannot destroy it The concept of human naturemdashin all t h e variants constituting the philosophic and psychological history of that idea from Plato and Aristotle through American self psychologymdashis the primary way in which we endeavor to deny history An event is traumatic precisely because it suggests that history occurs beyond the limits we want to impose on it and therefore may move in directions that have nothing to do with human nature or the cherished beliefs and values we derive from that concept Events put us as subjectsmdashand as thinkersmdash into a traumatic relationship to both ourselves and our world The anxiety at the center of thought is revealed Ideologists rush in to fill that void and restore the guarantees Our effort must be t o do the opposite and thereby sustain the vital possibility implicit in an event That possibility is to sustain a break with the guarantees and thereby find for history a radically different way of thinking To put it concretely a trauma cannot be resolved until its been constituted The Western Logos is a monument to t he effort to avoid t h a t task indeed to render it impossible a priori To reverse that tradition the things above all we must rid ourselves of are the desire and demand for resolution The recycling of the guarantees must give way to a n existentializing imperative to constitute and work within trauma in a way that addresses the psyche at the same register as Gibson and Abu Ghraib do by creating images symbolic actions and emotions that are of equal depth but that move us in an antithetical directionmdashtoward the inner transformation needed to purge ourselves of Thanatos Such an effort however cannot itself be yet another variant of the guarantees as happens when Love and Eros are posited as ahistorical values If anything the possibility of Love is far more difficult and exacting than death because it can only arise by reversing the prior force that death has within us The following two sections offer a brief picture of the kind of agonistic process such an effort entails in order to whet our appetite for something that should by now be evident The critique of ideology cannot be a merely intellectual exercise It must be the activation within our psyche of a countervailing drama

Any risk of ldquosolvencyrdquo for the counterplan is a reason to vote aff because it is an attempt to guarantee the future by pre-emptive action Even claims of a ldquonet-benefitrdquo are a link to the affirmative criticism Only the aff forcibly confronts the unknownDavis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg51-52)

Emotional The innermost need of human beings is to feel good about themselves Whatever threatens that feeling must be exorcised Health normalcy and productivity depend on avoiding negative feelings Hope and optimism arent just healthy attitudes they are requirements of our nature Biologically wired We cannot remain for long in trauma Recovery moreover must restore our faith in the guarantees and our hopes for the future The need for hope is In fact the capstone of the entire system of guarantees Yet it too apparently has a history Today over 10 million of our children are on prescription drugs to prevent depression and anxiety Informed of this fact by Bill Maher the French actress Julie Delphy spoke the spontaneous wisdom of an archaic culture Dont they know that depression is a good thing that its something you have to go through in order to grow Not anymore The key to understanding the power of the guarantees is to understand the fears that they exorcise Thanks to religion death suffering and evil are deprived of their power Through the attainment of reason all other forms of consciousness and what they might reveal are put in their place Poetic knowing is deprived both of its legitimacy and its terror Science as fulfillment of reason assures us of domination over nature What Heidegger termed technoscientific rationality becomes the measure of what is real Belief in historical progress banishes the recurrent suspicion that history may lack direction or even worse move to the darkest of ends The condition is thereby set that makes it impossible for us to experience traumatic events such as 9-11 except as occasions to take whatever actions are needed to reaffirm our goodness and restore our guarantees It is in the personal order however that the guarantees do their deepest work Psychologically belief in the self or self-identity exorcises the most frightening contingency that there is a void at the center of the American psyche with panic anxiety and its corollary compulsive consumption the expression of a desperate non-identity That specter brings us before the greatest fear that our psyche not our conscious deliberative intentions is the author of our actions an author who will do anything in order to feel safe secure and righteous All of our emotional needs then stand forth under the rule of a single necessity the need to feel good about oneself at whatever cost and to sustain hope by banishing anything that would trouble us Resolution catharsis (ie the discharge of painful tensions or awareness) and renewal emerge as the needs that bind us with an iron necessity to the guarantees and all that they make it impossible for us to know It is easy to deprecate Dubya and apparently to hold onto the idea that hes a temporary aberration But the problem goes deeper To revive a battle cry from the 1960s insofar as one is wedded to any one of the guarantees one is part of the problem and not the solution For the grandest function of the system of guarantees as a whole and in each one of its parts is to blind us to history And so to take up again the question stated previously how did the situation now being created in Iraq come about The next three sections constitute an attempt to answer that question by constructing for America a repressed history

Any net benefit to the counterplan links to the criticism of the affirmative and is a reason that the counterplan cannot solve the affirmative We must confront the unknown to solve Davis 2001Watler A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative Pg 38-39

One upshoot of that act is a recovery of the dialectic of Eros and Thanatos as a way of thinking about history In anticipation of later developments (chapter 4 part 2) I only present the basic lines of this idea here The depth-charge sounded by an Event is its ability to reveal that the relationship of Eros and Thanatos is not eternal but historical to the core with the end of that dialectic entailing the possible extinction of one of the terms This is the spectre Freud exorcized by establishing a dualistic way of conceptualizing the two categories The alternative is an immanent dialectic one where history as contingency subjects everything to irreversible change with Thanatos a force in culture dedicated to the extinction of Eros and with the power to bring about that closure to the eternal dialectic Traumatic events constitute an abrupt and painful reversal of the eternal dialectic because in them we fund Eros deprived of all assurances Contra Freud there is nothing universal biological or ahistorical about the eternal battle Both terms are fully implicated in history caught up in processes Capable of producing irreversible transformations Forces in the psyche opposed to life which we have persistently marginalized in proclaiming our humanism rise up in the Event to challenge all we believe about human nature and history Rather than a world grounded in love the primacy of goodness in human nature the achievement of rationality and the ameliorative virtues of the social process the Event reveals a world in which envy and hate stalk life seeking a final solution that can only come with the extinction of the antagonist After such knowledge we can never begin again cleansed of history restored through its narration to some essential humanistic identity with all our fundamental beliefs in essential goodness reaffirmed Eros again pristine and empowered Feeling the pressure of death as it weighs upon and works within us becomes the gauge that measures the depth of our participation in history The Event rends all the masks that enable us to conceive evil as an aberrance Existential contingency unseats all essentializing views of human nature revealing historicity as a process in which Thanatos may be the drive informing the reality principle There is nothing in human nature that protects us from this eventuality Positing an essential and always recoverable nature outside history is not the solution but part of the problem the way we blind ourselves a priori to our situation

Only a complete withdrawal from psychological guarantees can force us to confront trauma The counterplanrsquos insistence that there is something tangible that can be manipulated or solved for is a link Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg38-39)

But to undertake that task we must purge ourselves of the thing in ourselves that stands in the way I have termed it the guarantees By that term I refer to all those assurances we set up a priori to protect ourselves from the reality of historical trauma The significance of eventsmdashthe Shoah Hiroshima 9-11mdash is their power to call such guarantees into question by exposing cherished beliefs to the claims of darker views and by forcing us to think in radically new ways considering things about the human being that weve persistently denied or marginalized One dimension of any traumatic event is the shock it brings

to traditional ways of thinking Thats why the dominant response to any historical trauma is the attempt to restore the guarantees by finding a way t o impose them on the event in order to contain and interpret it The ideological function of the guarantee is thereby demonstrated A way has been found to limit the impact of the event by picturing it as an aberration a temporary departure from values and beliefs that can always be recovered because they constitute something essentialistic or universal about human nature Something trans-historical History may disrupt our essence but it cannot destroy it The concept of human naturemdashin all t h e variants constituting the philosophic and psychological history of that idea from Plato and Aristotle through American self psychologymdashis the primary way in which we endeavor to deny history An event is traumatic precisely because it suggests that history occurs beyond the limits we want to impose on it and therefore may move in directions that have nothing to do with human nature or the cherished beliefs and values we derive from that concept Events put us as subjectsmdashand as thinkersmdash into a traumatic relationship to both ourselves and our world The anxiety at the center of thought is revealed Ideologists rush in to fill that void and restore the guarantees Our effort must be t o do the opposite and thereby sustain the vital possibility implicit in an event That possibility is to sustain a break with the guarantees and thereby find for history a radically different way of thinking To put it concretely a trauma cannot be resolved until its been constituted The Western Logos is a monument to t he effort to avoid t h a t task indeed to render it impossible a priori To reverse that tradition the things above all we must rid ourselves of are the desire and demand for resolution The recycling of the guarantees must give way to a n existentializing imperative to constitute and work within trauma in a way that addresses the psyche at the same register as Gibson and Abu Ghraib do by creating images symbolic actions and emotions that are of equal depth but that move us in an antithetical directionmdashtoward the inner transformation needed to purge ourselves of Thanatos Such an effort however cannot itself be yet another variant of the guarantees as happens when Love and Eros are posited as ahistorical values If anything the possibility of Love is far more difficult and exacting than death because it can only arise by reversing the prior force that death has within us The following two sections offer a brief picture of the kind of agonistic process such an effort entails in order to whet our appetite for something that should by now be evident The critique of ideology cannot be a merely intellectual exercise It must be the activation within our psyche of a countervailing drama

A2 ndash KritiksOur ethics come first -- Discovery of the unconscious is crucial to the recognition of responsibility by every subject- only our framework opens space for agency and recognition of our choices- our ethics are crucial to understand the historical contingencies that make up the status quo and open space for change Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg182-185)

Freud discovered more than the Unconscious He discovered our responsibility for it for becoming aware of how what we repress rules our life and therefore our duty to gain knowledge of our unconscious as the precondition for becoming an ethically responsible agent In terms of ethics theres a quick way to summarize the significance of the Unconscious What we dont know about ourselves is what we domdashto the other In calling us to such a reflection on ourselves Freud also taught us a new way to reflect one that forces us to move beyond the rational world of conscious deliberations and intentions Once make the psychoanalytic turn and the sources of self-knowledge increase exponentially Every time one understands a dream a paraphraxis an aesthetic experience a fantasy one suffers in principle a revolution in ones life For such experiences put one in touch with the deep conflicts that define the psyche A dream for example does not tell us about something outside the realm of our conscious grasp though this view of repression typifies how a convenient misunderstanding blunts the force of psychoanalysis A good dream reveals the desires and conflicts structuring our life It thereby opens our quotidian life to an in-depth exploration Listen to a dream rightly and one finds that one must confront something one has been avoidingmdashor doing Such is what it would mean to assume responsibility for ones dreams One would start to live from an awareness of ones psyche rather than in a continued attempt to escape that awareness Freud doesnt abolish intention he expands it by showing how often consciousness is defense mechanism and rationality the cover that conceals the actual motives on which we act and how often accordingly insistence on conscious intentions is the lie we cling to in order to deny our responsibility The seductive or prohibitive way of relating that a parent adopts toward a child for example may carry as its primary repressed intention the desire to wound that child in their sexuality This is why its so necessary at a later point in time for such parents to deny that they ever harbored let alone acted on such an intention And yet our actions do indeed speak louder than words in conveying our actual intentions Action is concrete intentionality because it is through it that we live out our feelings desires and conflicts And they are what the other invariably receives as a message that is often sharply different from what we say especially when through the exercise of intentionality we reassure ourselves about what good loving human beings we are The psyche is a lonely hunter avid in the pursuit of purposes it carefully conceals from itself The ethical greatness of Sigmund Freud is the crisis he introduced into that practice Rather than getting us off the hook psychoanalysis sticks it far deeper in us than any previous ethic Intentionality is convenient because it absolves us of the greatest responsibilitymdashresponsibility for who we are Everything stays in the safely guarded space of deliberative discursive quasi-judicial rationality as if this were the primary way we relate to ourselves or to turn the screw a peg further as if when we arent relating to ourselves this way we arent fully moral agents fully responsible for our actions But once let responsibility expand into the inner life of the psyche and we take on a new ethical burden to know oneself in depth and not recoil in horror from what one learns or persist in virtuous denial of the hidden motives one must confront in order to become responsible for ones psyche Indeed deliberation is itself transformed by l he psychoanalytic turn Freud shows that to deliberate correctly one must focus the inquiry on those motives that one tries to conceal from oneself since they are where the truth of ones conduct may lie

In terms of the problem of evil this line of thought has an obvious implication Our primary responsibility which we continually shirk is to find the evil in ourselves Theoretically and emotionally the same thing prevents that discovery the desire to uphold the idea that human nature is inherently or basically good with evil an aberration a fall a break with the natural order of things an exception to the rule of human decency Psychoanalysis like history renders such sentiments questionable at best And irrelevant to where inquiry must beginmdashwith psychological conflict the primary fact that defines us To be human is to live denned by wounds and disorders that are prior to the mediations (themselves rare) that result in a moral character that can be termed good Goodness is not something essentialistically guaranteed in a nature its an achievement that comes through the overcoming of ways of being that have a foothold in us long before some human beings take up the effort to reverse them Psychoanalysis from this point of view is neither pessimistic nor relativistic It is humanistic in the deepest way seeing the human as an achievement and valuing it by demonstrating what that achievement requires Psychoanalysis doesnt point to ethical relativism It points instead to an order of rank among human beings based on the degree to which a knowledge of ones psyche has become the basis of ones actions Ethically to know ones psyche is of necessity to engage in an effort to transform it since inner change is the only way to halt the projection of what otherwise does harm to others Psychological change is the primary task ethics the result

Their alternative misses the point In lieu of a criticism of the affirmative it is a much better act to internalize our anxiety and explore the effects within the psyche This allows us an uncastrated interaction with reality Davis 2001Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative pg xviii-xix

Virginia Woolf said that in or about December 1910 human nature changed She would have recorded a similar shock in August of 1945 The change Woolf witnessed has now of course been safely domesticated and has a local habitation and a name modernism The second change also has a namemdashpostmodernismmdashbut the ideologies most closely associated with its development remain mired in the first moment of an arrested dialectic12 Irony and aporia dominate the postmodern sensibility because its considerable energies are devoted to a displacement of the Event that remains at the center of our collective historical Unconsciousmdashthe referent that serves as the motive behind the denial of reference Reference must be continually deferred then rendered impossible because anxiety and flight from that anxiety define our actual response to the one referent that will continue to weigh on our consciousness until we restore the proper dialectical direction and move from the delights of skeptical play to a recovery of the demands of unhappy consciousness Einstein said the Bomb changed everythingmdashexcept the ways we think As such it is the inwardness of our inwardness never more so perhaps than when we use deconstructive irony as the master trope that delivers us from the burden of a historically situated subjectivity or at that opposite extreme that amounts to the same thing when we reassert an essentialist humanism as the fixed and universal system of understanding and explanation that washes us clean of history and its contingencies What if we broke with both strategiesmdashand rather than deconstructing the Bomb or containing it we tried to internalize it and then trace the ways it explodes and implodes within the psyche Such an effort would take as its goal a reconstitution of the tragic as the dialectical category that provides the only adequate idea for comprehendingmdashand existingmdashin the present Such a humanism however confronts as its prior and primary task a deracination of the system of guarantees on which previous humanisms have depended For the function of that system with respect to history has been to establish as canons of research and explanation a set of essentialistic concepts of meaning logic and human nature that function to insulate historians and their

audiences so that horror can never be more than the temporary aberration from which we always of necessity recover The narration of History thereby becomes yet another occasion for deployingmdashand thereby reinforcingmdashthe central beliefs and Values of the humanistic tradition That tradition thus provides the ego or identity-principle that we (the community of humanistic interpreters) move from and to in dealing with events that challenge our certainties13 We love to read and write histories because such stories tell us who we already know we are while conveniently exorcizing the threat of those accounts that would hold up a different mirror to our nature History is indeed a fiction the corpse over which we warm ourselves so that we may rise cleansed catharted the system of needs beliefs and guarantees restoredmdashwith existence the self-reference perpetually deferred What if instead we approached history as a realitymdashand a disciplinemdash in which we must risk ourselves utterly One in which to know is to suffer irreversible change in ones beliefs values and even in ones identity with nothing in the logos of thought able to protect us from that possibility The reign of the a priori would thereby come to an end the principle of hope a category wed risk not one wed need to renew at whatever cost Could such an engagement constitute the true force and signification of Hiroshima16 and thereby evidence that events in history are the true Absolute that abide with usmdashthe gift of the past to the future as that call of conscience requiring of us no less than a fundamentally new understanding of the human psyche and the human condition

The permutation solves ndash psychoanalytical evaluation of our anxiety and our reliance on stability and security are prior questions to the alternative and the framework of the criticism The alternative is still castrated by desire which means that it does not access proper historical contextDavis 2006Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative pg 1-3

In August 1945 Elias Canetti writes the following in his journal A tormenting thought as of a certain point history was no longer real Without noticing it all mankind suddenly left reality everything happening since then was supposedly not true but we supposedly didnt notice Our task would now be to find that point and as long as we didnt have it we would be forced to abide in our present destruction1 What Canetti cant see is that the point he refers to is the one he inhabits He cant see it because it is too close and blinds him (as it would soon the inhabitants of two cities) with a light not of this world The proliferation of new theories of history in recent decades is itself a response to a historical situationmdashthat defined by the Bomb That connection is also what these theories cannot know about themselves and ceaselessly displace in teaching us all the new ways we can know and write about the past What they do know is that the assumptions and guarantees on which historians have traditionally relied in constituting their subject and the needs that histories fulfill in offering us an account of events structured by these guarantees are no longer adequate to a contemporary awareness of history and historicity2 To cite the major developments (though in no necessary order of importance)3 1 Foucaults concept of genealogical history and the archeology of knowledge and its creative extension in the new historicist methodologies developed by Stephen Greenblatt and his circle 2 The hermeneutic theories of history and historical explanation developed by Gadamer Habermas and Ricoeur with special note given to Ricoeurs development of a complex theory of time and narrative 3 Derridas recent work on Marx and Benjamin and his continuing effort to expose the Hegelian assumptions about history progress and the logos which structure the way history is narrated by historians who know little or nothing of Hegel 4 Althusser Sartre Gramsci and the many often sharply opposed approaches to history developed in recent years by Marxists as different as Frederic Jameson G A Cohen Perry Anderson and Stuart Hall 5 The recovery of Kants speculations on history and its recent extension in Lyotards theory of the differend 6 The attempts by Slavoj Zizek Joan Copjec and Teresa Brennan to articulate the theory of history implicit in Lacan 7 The massive significance of Walter Benjamins speculations the continued vitality of Adorno and the Frankfurt school and the renewed interest in the thought of Kenneth Burke 8 The work of Louis O Mink Hayden White Dominick LaCapra Roy Schafer and others on the narrative and tropological principles that shape the writing of history To this list one can add Collingwood and McKeons earlier theorizing about history the work of Braudel Baudrillard deCerteau Calinescu and Bourdieu and the new modes of historical writing and historical investigation developed by anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz James Clifford and Natalie Zemon Davis The list is by no means complete because one must add to it two developments that may be of

greater significance and that complicate the issue of the historical I refer first to the number of alternative histories that have emerged in recent years thanks to feminist multicultural postcolonial subaltern and queer studies Such works have contributed more than new knowledge to our understanding of the past They have broken with the logic the procedures and the ruling assumptions of traditional historical methodologies by showing how that logic has as its primary function the exclusion (or marginalization) of voices that challenge its hegemony and the motives that inform its explanations Such studies are not merely of local interest They entail a theoretical crisis the recognition that the principles of historical explanation that we regard as true rational objective and universal are cultural conventional ideological and deeply implicated in power and the repressions required for its maintenance Ways of thinking derived from other cultures or voices silenced by the dominant culture may provide precisely the critical handle required to understand what is really at work in the privileging of certain canons of reasoning and explanation as scientific and objective and the rejection of other experiences and ways of thinking as illegitimate and unfounded The true bite of the multiculturalmdash seldom honored because it cuts in every directionmdashis the idea that none of us are locked into privileging our own culture and subject position(s) We can gain distance from our frameworks by immersing ourselves in other ways of thinking We can then use that experience to become aware of things that our culture and its dominant interest groups do not want to know about themselves The implication of such an orientation for history is considerable since historical explanation is perhaps the primary way in which a community establishes the structures of belief mind and feeling on which it depends in giving an identity to its members4 Thanks to the explosion of the multicultural we now have a way to internally distance ourselves from such beliefs and practices even perhaps following Nietzsche to touch all that goes without saying with the hammer as with a tuning fork

Case Stuff

War on Terror BadThe myth of effective security fosters a violent project that necessitates the creation of terrorists to be sacrificed on the altar of societyMcGowan 2013Associate Professor at the University of Vermont (Todd Enjoying What We Donrsquot Have Project Muse)

The fundamental barrier to the establishment of an authentic social bond is the resistance to avowing the traumatic nature of that bond We use the pleasure that accompanies the bombing of Afghanistan to disguise the shared enjoyment we experience through the traumatic experience of loss But this pleasure inevitably disappoints us and triggers the belief that someone has stolen the complete pleasure that we expected to experience This is why there can properly be no end to the War on Terror no end to the list of countries that the United States plans to invade to attain complete security no end to the number of terrorist leaders executed 31

Complete security like complete pleasure is mythical It attempts to bypass the one experience that cannot be bypassed mdash the foundational experience of loss mdash and it is this experience that holds the key to an authentic social bond The structure of society (which is the result of the structure of signification) is such that it blinds the subject to the possibility of shared sacrifice and the social bond that results from it No matter how often children hear the ideology of sharing or how many times we repeat to them the gospel of fairness they will inevitably believe that their sacrifice has enabled others to enjoy more than their proper share or unfairly

Loss of the SelfSurveillance devastates the gap between the Self and our informaticized bodies ndash the total knowledge it provides deprives one of the ability to function as a subject eradicating onersquos identity ndash this results in complete annihilationFriesen et al 2012 Dr Norm Friesen is Canada Research Chair in E-Learning Practices at Thompson Rivers University His academic credentials include a PhD in Education from the University of Alberta Andrew Feenberg School of Communication Simon Fraser University Grace Smith Arapiki Solutions Inc (Norm Friesen Andrew Feenberg Grace Smith and Shannon Lowe 2012 ldquoExperiencing Surveillancerdquo pp 82-83 (Re)Inventing The Internet httplinkspringercomchapter1010072F978-94-6091-734-9_4)

Students of surveillance have been so impressed by the ever-growing completeness of this data image that they animate it as though it were an actual person Identity is seen as coeval with an assemblage of traces rather than with actual presence Thus van der Ploeg writes of ldquothe

inability to distinguish between rsquothe body itselfrsquo and rsquobody informationrdquorsquo (van der Ploeg 2003 p 69) Haggerty and Ericson similarly write the surveillance assemblage standardizes the capture of fleshinformation flows of the human body It is not

so much immediately concerned with the direct physical relocation of the human body (although this may be an ultimate consequence)

but with transforming the body into pure information such that it can be rendered more mobile and comparable (Haggerty amp Ericson 2000 p 613) There is something right about this turn in surveillance theory and yet it is obvious that we are still able to distinguish the real person from the traces that person leaves behind The trace is bound to us by its origin and often by internal signs of various sorts so we do not quite leave it behind after all And yet we do not want to drag along every trace of our passage through life We count on the erasure of most traces It is this erasure that enables us to face the world afresh each day and to face it with a self-image we

construct at least partially anew for each new situation in which we find ourselves In existentialndashphenomenological terms privacy and secrecy are centrally constitutive of self and selfhood Holding something private or secret emphasizes the difference between self and other and confirms the autonomy of onersquos interiority and individuality ldquoSecrecy secures so to speak the possibility of a second world alongside of the obvious worldrdquo as Simmel (1906 p 462) puts it In contemporary conditions of surveillance and dataveillance subjectivity itself is dependent on maintaining the gap between our embodied selves and our informaticized bodies It would be intolerable for everyone to have full access to our salary the details of our relations to our family our medical histories sexual proclivities and so on Such knowledge would completely objectify us and force us to live up to (or down to) the image of ourselves implied in this knowledge Like Sartrersquos spy at the keyhole

himself espied we would be evacuated of those aspects of identity and interiority concealed within us frozen in the objectifying gaze of the other and essentially deprived of our ability to function as a subject We could no longer choose to project an identity appropriate to our inclination and situation as everything having to do with our identity would have been pre-empted Truly to be completely ldquooutedrdquo is to be annihilated

The gaze of surveillance invades and traps one psychologically rendering one enslavedVaz 1995 (Angelina Fall 1995 Dalhousie French Studies Vol 32 Mises en scegravene du regard (Fall 1995) pp 37-38 ldquoWhos Got the Look Sartres Gaze and Foucaults Panopticismrdquo JSTOR httpwwwjstororgstable40837004)

This grand formula is even applicable at the level of an encounter between two individuals where the theme of ldquosubjection by exposurerdquo is

dominant As Sartre says ldquobeing-seen constitutes me as a defenseless being for a freedom which is not my freedom [hellip] I am a slave to the degree that my being is dependent at my center of a freedom which is not mine and which is the very condition of my beingrdquo (Being p 358) In this sense the gaze does not just create and invade physical spaces there is a sense in which the gaze invades and traps me psychologically As a temporal-spatial object in the world being locked at forces me to apprehend myself as the

The moralization of anxiety manifests itself in our inability confront evil To displace this anxiety we make ourselves ldquogoodrdquo to protect ourselves from danger Failure to confront this psychical conflict reifies the original trauma and makes the destruction of the self meaninglessDavis 2001Walter A Davis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative Pg 86-87

No wonder resistance becomes the key term in the first stage of the unfolding drama This time however Kant canrsquot shift everything onto a plane of conceptual defenses and controls Affect weighs too heavily Intermediate moves immanent within that register are required Opposing affects must be created and marshaled as a first line of defense For the first time in Kant rationalistic mediation gives way to dramatic self-mediation Kant will finally attempt an agon that moves solely within the medium of affect To resist psychic unraveling he must

establish a countervailing force within the order of affect itself For Kant however affective self-mediation is equivalent to bending everything in a moral direction In doing so the author of the ethic of pure duty gives us the true genealogy of morals

That dubious ascent begins once the force threatening destruction is characterized as ldquoevilrdquo Anxiety is thereby transformed into a moralizing fear that we lack the power to resist ldquoevilrdquo Moralizing then structures the subsequent discourse but without exorcizing the psychological subtext that will undercut it This contradiction is in fact what ethics will here reveal about itselfIn making ourselves ldquogoodrdquo subjects we make ourselves beings unworthy of destruction That

transformation also requires the resources of rhetoric since we must ldquopersuaderdquo a tough audience The true goal in remaking ourselves is to tame the power that threatens us by tapping its conscience To do so we create within ourselves a new agency one that recognizing our virtue promises protection We thereby create the illusion that the threatening force has been softened and then transformed into a voice that warmly supports the good intentions of the nascent ego The superego as ego-ideal has been created So ends the founding self-mediation in the genealogy of an ethical ration By staging this internal drama the psyche has taken the action within required to create the space needed to assert control over affect The necessary act follows ndash the attempt to affect a complete reversal of the psychersquos initial condition Kant asserts repeatedly that we can only judge the sublime and experience its proper ldquopleasurerdquo if we view things from ldquoa safe placerdquo But in the psyche as opposed to mind the safe place doesnrsquot exist a priori It has to be invented and with it the most revealing picture of the genesis of what we now call the ldquoegordquo It is a difficult birth to a dubious and troubled function The problem of the ego is one of generating a transformation from impotence to power within affect itself through an agon immanent to that register But Kant is unable to sustain such an agon We get instead a displacement toward concepts through a use of the defensive mechanism known as splitting Ego and inner world divide in an unbridgeable rift thus establishing this condition as the true ldquoidentityrdquo of the ego The ego is the effort to repress the conflicts in the psyche from which it derives But while displacement and intellectualization offer a handle the egorsquos work is far from done The continuing pressure of inner conflicts requires a further battle In that struggle moralizing interpretations do yeoman service by splitting the psychersquos original trauma into a longed-for reificationmdashthe opposition of the ego to the drives

We have become creatures full of instincts The crucial task of the aff is to open up the unconscious counter narrative to provide a mirror to reflect upon the presupposed American identitySucharov 2005Mira M Sucharov assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli Palestinian Peacerdquo Pg 27-28

Just as individuals and groups possess consciousness and an unconscious I argue that every society maintains not only a dominant (conscious) narrative but an unconscious counternarrative as well which

the former has in part arisen to conceal As the counternarrative represents the role that society most fears adopting it resides in the unconscious where it will not interfere with the day-to-day transmission and fulfillment of the dominant narratives and the dominant roles For instance a defensive states counternarrative would encapsulate the view that we are not only defensive but sometimes we can be aggressive 35 Narratives and counternarratives can coexist in two waysmdash either with the counternarrative being simply an unactualized fear or with the counternarrative corresponding to an actual role being enacted alongside the dominant role-identity Thus while an actor may consciously be aware of a counterrole that she abhors (eg the good student who avoids cheating on exams) the unconscious reminds us that the cheater is latent in the self-portfolio of the good student In the event that this student cheats radical change can only come about once the self has

been reconciled with its unconscious opposite Actors will not become aware of the divergence from their dominant identity without the aid of a mirror however Only with the help of outside forces drawing attention to the clash between the two narratives will elites experience a cognitive dissonance necessitating a realignment between actions and role-identity One of the most salient transmission belts for the creation of state narratives is collective memory Memorymdashactive or latent recall of things occurring in the pastmdashhas begun to be understood as not solely a private activity but as representing a group phenomenon as well 36 On the collective level memory can be either experience-near-active one-step removed or distantly removed Active memory would be represented by Holocaust survivors in Israel and the Diaspora for instance One step removed would be the surrogate memories that their immediate Offspring carry with them37 and distantly removed would be exemplified by the Rabbinic injunction that Jews experience the annual telling of the Exodus from Egypt as if they were there While a case could be made for discounting the importance of actual experiences in favor of the way

those experiences arc remembered both of these are crucial for ascertaining role identity Just as traumatic events in a persons life may be repressed in memory but still shape that persons identity the international observer needs to account for actual experiences yet view these as embedded within a narrative context Similarly some historical events undergo a process of memory revision in these cases the observer must be sensitive to the effect that the new discourse has on the societys perception of these events whether or not these stories accord with fact The clinical parallel in psychoanalysis is that while the analysands relationship with her parents is considered crucial to uncovering the contours of her psychology the analyst as a rule does not attempt to meet the parents firsthand rather the patients recounting of these experiences is considered to be the most important channel of investigationmdash and hence transformation Since we are talking about collections of individuals memory needs to be actively transmitted to the societys members in order for it to influence the citizens sense of collective identity One of the ways this can be done is through ritual Being repetitive while symbolically imbued ritual gains meaning only through the symbols attributed to it by the group and is a collective process that serves to link actors to a series of past events for which they may not have been physically present Moreover private rituals that are collectively prescribed such as prayer serve to bind the individual to the collective particularly when there is a formalized liturgy Most collective rituals occur according to the calendar and therefore can encompass regular ceremonies that come to act as markers for the individuals personal time cycle38Sometimes particular collective memories that have been sustained over time are ruptured with citizens contemplating new facts about their countrys past Revisionist history is an example of an attempt to bring forth these sorts of new facts When history is reinterpreted the society can either shun the dissenting voices or else gradually reevaluate the original narratives When this reevaluation occurs society is more apt to uncover the hitherto unconscious counternarratives a discovery that can

lead to the realization that the states behavior might be contradicting the states role-identity In other words revisionist historians and other domestic dissenters can serve as the mirror referred to later

Vote affirmative to give up hope in the face of guarantees - only holding yourself completely open in the face of the promise of a sustainable status quo can open space for self-overcoming that allows us to engage in new forms of praxisDavis 2006 Walter A Davis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deathrsquos Dream Kingdom Pg 63

To know this situation for what it is challenges what is finally the deepest and most fundamental of the guarantees The principle of Hope To appropriate Eliot After such knowledge what forgiveness There is perhaps nothing that can be done to change the situation Ive described But then what is the purpose of knowing such things if they only produce meaningless suffering Is despair the end result of a life shorn of the guarantees Or are we finally like the drunks in ONeills The Iceman Cometh knowing that in order to sustain the illusions required to go on living they must pronounce Hickey mad and reject everything he revealed to them about

their lives as a product of that madness Perhaps its time to admit what the need for Hope really signifies Denial of responsibility for certain situations under the assumption that knowing them correctly would lead to despair Raising that specter is of course the rhetorical ploy invoked to prematurely terminate inquiry lest it impinge on

emotional and psychological needs Despair thus remains an empty concept We dont know what it is and never will as long as we use the need for hope to prevent discovery of our capacities to endure Whether despair is what we will find on the other side of hope is something we cant know For all hope really signifies is a testament to our weakness and our fears Perhaps we are called to something beyond it What Shakespeare called tragic

readiness For in opening ourselves to the possibility of despair we also open ourselves to the possibility of self-overcoming and through it the discovery of a praxis that lies on the other side of the conceptual and existential paralyses created by the guarantees We cant know what is to be done as long as we continue to respond to our situation by invoking ahistorical values and guarantees that are grounded in an essentialistic and ahistorical theory of human nature

PlanThe United States federal government should substantially curtail its domestic surveillance by ceasing all domestic surveillance

Contention 2 is FramingAn ethics of existence forecloses the tragic struggle in which we never confront our inner trauma- only our affirmative can open new ways of relating to ourselves that can overcome these limitations- the 1AC is a precondition for any meaning to our livesDavis 2006 Walter ADavis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg238-240)

In her critique of Kantian ethics Alenka Zupancic often refers to the Lacanian idea that there is a loss deeper than ones life The loss of ones reason for living The apostle of duty offers a heroic example of how one escapes the threat of that loss What Im suggesting here is that ethics actually begins on the other side of it With the possibility that first exists when one discovers that one has already lost or violated or fatally compromised ones reason for living because the values one thinks one honors and the actual truth of ones life are thoroughly at odds The traumatic event that brings one to this recognition is the origin of ethics This is the ethical task it establishes to see if one can pay the price for having violated oneself by assuming the full burden of the situation one has thereby createdThe ethical situation accordingly confronts the subject with the necessity to choose to be in a radically new way or die inside Nothing less is demanded than a totally new way of relating to oneself for the guilt one experiences in such a situation is existentializing One is guilty toward oneself for having failed to honor the duties that one bears to oneself for having so thoroughly lied to oneself about ones life As Hamlet learns it is through that recognition that one first discovers that one has tragic responsibilities toward oneself that can no longer be evaded because one with this situation is the even deeper discovery that there are failures that can be irreversible That is the possibility defining the situation one is now in What one does will reveal the truth of who one is Guilt toward oneself has overtaken all possibilities of displacement and denial Fail now and one dies within Most people will of course do just about anything to avoid guilt or to get cleansed of it as quickly as possible That is why so many fail the test when it comes to them shrinking inside rather than expanding to the demands of our innermost possibility the one defining our humanity An ethics of existence begins with the traumatic experience in which everything weve tried to escape about ourselves catches up with us One then knows that ones prior life has been a flight And all ones brave ideas and bright ethical claims airy nothingmdashthe indulgence in comforting and self-alienating lies But now one

is finally like Hamlet in the situation from which there is no exit An ethics grounded in the possibility of freedom depends on the actions one performs within oneself when one finds oneself in a crisis that can no longer be denied This is precisely the kind of situation Kant is unable to consider which is why he constructs in Duty the principle of choice that renders it impossible In serving Duty one is delivered from the repressed thought that now can never arise that ones whole life and all its choices especially the ethical ones may be no more than a flight from things in oneself that one flees because one fears that if one is ever forced to face oneself one will suffer a destruction worse than death Destruction within An existentializing ethic begins on the other side of all the things we do to delay that event For it is when the thing one fears happens that one first discovers the truth of ones life the depth of ones inauthenticity The trauma that will measure ones humanity has arrived Nothing else now exists but the lonely struggle of the psyche with itself Suicide (including the primary form of suicide inner death) is one term of that situation Ethics is the other An ethics of existence is what one does when one finally finds oneself in the traumatic situation that brings one before oneself There is one lesson in this a lesson that probably cant be learned Rather than running from the trauma we should plunge toward it since it is only through it that we can discover both the truth about ourselves and what we are able to do in the face of that truth To activate that possibility all thats needed perhaps is to drown out the noise and chatter one keeps running in ones head Perhaps the truth is that the truth about ourselves is not deeply repressed and unknown Its closer than we think available to introspection if we but dared But thats what makes the kind of impassioned reflection Hamlet engages in so terrifying It exemplifies everything we know and dont want to know about ourselves18 Here is an attempt to offer an image that describes in depth the existential-psychoanalytic condition from which the possibility of ethics derives In George Orwells 1984 Winston Smith when tortured with the thing he most fears betrays the thing he loves To save his life he sacrifices what gives it meaning He capitulates before an inner torment that reduces the psyche to a condition of catastrophic anxiety (The image of the cage of rats placed over the head they will raven externalizes in a perfect objective correlative the terror that has the power to dissolve the psyche What is a phobia after all but an inner condition displaced into an external fear) What I want to suggest here is that Winston Smiths phobia describes the inner condition that defines any subject traumatized by itself Such a subject lives tortured by the struggle not to betray the thing one loves the thing that could give ones life meaning But one saves it only if one is willing to sacrifice everything to the

acceptance of the suffering and inner torment that service to it entails This is the ethical act whereby a subject attains tragic agency Becoming an existentially autonomous agent is the process of engaging the disorders of ones psyche in the effort of active reversal The wish to escape that effort to soften it or to insist that suffering must always have a happy resolution is the voice of self-betrayal If one gives in to it one loses with Winston the thing one has finally found the thing one can love more than ones life but only by suffering all that it demands That thing more precious than life is the tragic struggle that gives life perhaps the only meaning it can have

The ethic of the aff is key - only an ethical act that confronts our inner trauma with a constant and inner openness can we create the conditions for self-overcoming necessary to open ourselves to a meaningful existence - the only ethical choice is to fully confront contingencyDavis 2006 Walter A Davis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg235-238

What follows attempts to distill the ethic of existence in to its fundamental principles I also try here to present those thesis in a way that will engage the readers psyche and emotions at precisely the place within us where each of us makes a basic decision about ourselves Thats the only self that matters The others are selfreifying defenses The argument thus constitutes both an appeal to the readers freedom and an attempt to impinge on that freedom to bring each reader before him or herself by challenging defenses with the power that some ideas have to light a fire in the soul (1) We concur with Kant that if a choice is not free its not moral The possibility of freedom depends however on an in-depth analysis of ones psyche Such an analysis leads from the destruction of ego identity to the need to bring about a complete reversal in ones relationship to oneself by deracinating the voice of the other Thinking is ethical insofar as it engages one thing the battle of a subject with itself over the meaning of its being (2) There is no way to abridge that process nor to provide guarantees that will secure a safe outcome To sustain the psychoanalytic turn the psyche must continually throw itself into question and root out the emotions that bind it to a pattern of lies An ethic of the existential subject depends on maximizing what Keats termed negative capability the ability to be in uncertainties Mysteries doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason Rather than resolving doubts the purpose of thought and action is to deepen them An act is ethical insofar as it deepens the conflict of the subject with itself (3) One acts ethically only when all symbolic and ideological supports have collapsed Only then can one take on responsibility for oneself because only then is one at issue and at risk The ethical act must radically open itself to contingency in a situation where one must create values yet where those values can derive from nothing but the depth of ones engagement in the situation By the same token such values cannot be a final solution but must open themselves to later contingencies Ethics must always allow itself to be measured by contingency because contingency is precisely what calls up ethical responsibility The primary ethical situation is not one where there is a clear course of duty but where a subject trembles before its responsibility to create new values in a situation that reduces received values to rubble (4) Ethics begins when there is a genuine crisis of values even perhaps the need for a re-valuation of all values For Kant there was not nor could there be such a crisis The values were known immutable and generally agreed upon The only question was what kind of principle they would be grounded in which meant for Kant and the Aufklarung how could they be grounded in Reason For us in contrast the primary fact is a historicity that bites into the very possibility of the ethical Every ethical value must be willing to historicize itself That recognition entails the following considerations The desert grows Under the guise of fundamentalist crusades herd moralities dominate The extent of inhumanity is appalling So many values that once seemed so solid have been so thoroughly debunked The possibility of ethics now begins with a systematic exposure of all superego pathologies all the ethical ideologies that societies use to introduce a fundamental passivity into subjects while convincing those same subjects that they are good in a goodness that depends on willed ignorance An existential ethic is radically destructive of received beliefs radically disruptive of the desires of the normal subject Refusing and exposing all Symbolic supports it seeks in the struggle of the psyche with its disorders the source of value (5) Ethics is a matter of extremity It begins in the most extreme actmdashthe act of radical individuation in which one opens ones psyche to an interrogation that must be sustained in its extremity Ethics is about a choice in which a subject risks the value and meaning of its existence not about those choices that assure it of that meaning Moreover it is only when one does this that one experiences for the first time the

terror implicit in the oft-quoted Sartrean statement existence precedes essence (6) Ethics must engage and derive from the dread that defines choice Let me illustrate this proposition by contrasting Hamlets choice with the situation in Styrons Sophies Choice The horrifying choice Sophie facesmdashto choose which of her children will be sent to the gas chambermdashis a forced choice and thus extreme and exceptional in a way that deprives it of the possibility of being normative17 Hamlets choice in contrast is a free one that issues from nothing but his freedom and the readiness with which he accepts the selftorture that existence entails Sophie is tortured from without by the madness of the other and the inhuman logic that madness requires in order to know itself (Styron calls the officer who forces the choice on Sophie a genius of the Reich) Hamlet is tortured from within by the logic of self-criticism and self-overcoming that informs the existentializing process We are fortunate if we never face a situation like Sophies nor suffer the death-in-life that is the result of such choices But insofar as we have a psyche Hamlets situation is the general one that defines us Or to put it in properly ethical terms engaging the kind of situation he faces is the act that activates the inherent possibility that defines us The choice that founds such an ethic must therefore be distinguished both from the a priori choice made by the apostle of duty and Sophies forced choice All three refer to extreme choices and situations In only one however is guilt toward oneself both the origin of the choice and its result That is only one of the three choices is the ground of its own possibility and thereby the source of an existentialization that issues in values bound to the tragic contingencies of our situatedness

2AC

A2 ndash Realism

We control the internal link to their impacts The psychoanalysis of the affirmative forces an internal investigation of the ways in which the subjectrsquos subconscious desires rationalize what we would consider self-interest This means that we can only make sense of realism through a lens of psychoanalysis Sucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 17-18)

The psychological turn that international relations took with the rise of behavioralism in the 1960s has begun to expand beyond focusing on cognitionmdashhow individuals thinkmdashto a wider appreciation of the role of emotional determinants of action one of many factors that were long dismissed as unscientific Part of the reason for this hesitant courtship is no doubt the long strides that international relations theory has taken toward refining its investigative lenses such that less easily observable phenomena can be more confidently incorporated into the solid theoretical infrastructure that the discipline has now adopted A central example of this evolution is the analytical watershed inaugurated by neorealism which fashioned a conceptual playing field where little had existed before Neorealism a theoretical school that views international relations as taking place within an anarchical state system with no overarching authority in turn spawned the constructivist turn in international relationsmdashthe approach that stresses the importance of social identity in determining international outcomesmdashand subsequent counterarguments that built on yet other social and psychological preceptsmdash all of which agree that there is such a thing as an international systemmdashthough they understand the effects of anarchy differently Introducing psychoanalysis to international relations can therefore be seen as the next logical step for a relatively young discipline that seeks to understand why political actors behave the way they do While all psychoanalysts draw on Freuds unique contribution subsequent approaches have altered many of his assumptions This trend has kept pace with the embracing of new epistemological and ontological perspectives by other scientific and social scientific fields such as the quantum revolution in physics -a paradigm shift that has since influenced other disciplines The form of psychoanalytic theory that I use here is the contemporary relational strand one that analysts have alternately termed relational-model theorizing a dyadic systems perspective and intersubjectivity theory This approach shares an ontology basic to constructivism in international relations the psychology (identity) of the person (state) is not hard-wired into the unit but develops in part from the actions of other actors in the social environment (the family the therapeutic setting the international system) and in part through the shared assumptions that permeate that system As an approach centered on the individual mind contemporary psychoanalysis takes into account the broader social context within which actors act Psychoanalysis also provides a coherent theory of behavior incorporating three elements that have mostly been invisible in international relations theory but that provide a fuller understanding of how states and nonstate actors interact emotion the unconscious and the possibility for actors own cognitive and emotional insight to be a source of behavior change In drawing on these principles perhaps the most significant contribution that psychoanalysis can make to international relations is in improving on prevailing theories of identity which in turn illuminate questions about international action Within international relations constructivism has been criticized for neglecting the question of how identity is in fact created Cognitive psychologymdashwhich international relations has begun to draw on liberallymdashin part helps to fill this gap Yet with its assumption that the emotional legacy of early interpersonal relationships is essential in shaping personality and subsequent behavior psychoanalysis offers a more comprehensive model of identity creation than those put forth by cognitive theorists Recognizing these explanatory benefits contructivists have recently called for exploring the potential that psychoanalysis holds for understanding international politics Thus unlike the prevailing psychoanalytic approaches in international relationsmdashnamely psychohistories of individual leaders and the focus-group potential of micro-level conflict resolution the psychoanalytic approach I use here is meant to coexist happily alongside other streams of systemic theory in international relations

Forcing the state away from what it considers a core tenet of national defense in the exact opposite way it desires creates the conditions necessary for reflection of the efficacy of the initial policies of surveillance which changes future policySucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 32-)

Like most individuals states possess a complex arsenal of motivations that are not all palatable to the politys sense of self mdashnot least of which is due to the discrepant voices vying for influence in any society Yet the dominant self mdashthat overarching group ethos that does not necessarily reflect each single (sub)voicemdashimplicitly prescribes a set of normatively acceptable behaviors Should a state adopt a policy course that contradicts the states role-identity we can expect some sort of cognitive dissonance to arise leading to a radical realignment between actions and identity Just as a man who once struck his wife might offer the apologetic plea that I dont know what got into me it is up to the analyst to help the subject come to terms with the aggression that has evidently been very much inside of him all along The policy shift therefore results from the force of the role-identity prodding the self back into behavioral consistency However acting in contradiction to ones role-identity does not necessarily result in a behavior shift The dissonance between role-identity and behavior must be both unbearable and experienced at an emotional level in order for such a shift to result If the dissonance remained at a cognitive level it is likely that the subject would employ one of a number of cognitive biases in order to rationalize the discrepancy42 The dredging up of the unconscious counternarrative assures that the dissonance is experienced deeply enough to result in the taking of radical action to realign actions with identity 43 This hypothesis of cognitive-emotional realization is grounded in the clinical findings of psychoanalytic theory that suggest that under certain conditions actors may become consciously aware of previously unconscious processes44 The classic understanding of cognitive dissonancemdashas articulated by Leon Festingermdashis that inconsistency between behavior and belief results in psychological discomfort that leads to activity oriented toward dissonance reduction just as hunger leads to activity oriented toward hunger reduction45 In line with psychoanalysis the actual cognitive-emotional realization brings to light what had previously been stored in the unconscious areas of the states subjective world In actuality the assumption here is that the role-challenging behavior (paired with domestic challenges) causes elites to reflect on the states role- identity Moreover my use of cognitive-emotional realization imbues the concept with a distinctively emotional component as well Whereas pure cognitive dissonance refers to the challenging of an individuals worldview (ie the revelation of new facts)46 I am introducing the more ontologically powerful notion of challenges to the self47 When this behavior undermines the very legitimacy buttressing the states raison detat the dissonance is particularly acute Catalysts for Realization Once decision-makers come to realize that the states foreign-policy actions have contradicted the states role-identity a policy shift may result The important question that remains is what contributes to this realization Numerous sources may act as the mirror necessary for the state to reflect on its behavior For clarity I have divided them into three categories domestic elements (including the military the peace movement revisionist historians artists and the domestic media) other states (including allies and adversaries as well as those states news media) and international structures (including international organizations norms and regimes) Domestic Elements The Military If the military acts in a way that the populace sees as contradicting the states self-image (even if the military is merely carrying out governmental policies) society can experience a corresponding cognitive

dissonance In a democracy the military takes its directives from the government however military culture is instrumental in shaping the broader strategic culture encompassing foreign-policy decisions mdashand role-identitymdashmore generally Most of the time the relationship between the civilian and military spheres resembles a symbiosis commands are given by civilians and implemented by the military which in turn will advise and reshape subsequent policies In some cases ex-military personnel will pursue a career in government on being discharged However it is possible for the military to experience a sense of dissonance between a particular policy and its overall defense doctrine or ethic Soldiers might articulate discomfort in carrying out a particular mission or the number of conscientious objectors may rise In a country in which conscientious objection is previously unheard of the founding of such a movement will therefore signal an even higher degree of dissonance between behavior and institutional role-identity In examining foreign-policy shifts the role of the military is crucial in representing the degree of concordance between national role-identity and foreign policy In states where the military has particular salience for establishing national identitymdashthose states with mandatory and universal conscription for instancemdashthat institution will be particularly salient

Their dependence on pragmatism to justify unrealistic internal link chains and counter psychological methods creates the worst type of moral tunnel vision in which we become incapable of understanding the carnage of our ideology ndash this makes ethics impossibleDavis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg47-48)

But its always a good idea when seeking an explanation of the human motives behind actions to stick with the empirical With stated intentions and official rationales Otherwise we give ourselves over to psychobabble Despite official denial by the Department of Defense that DU is harmful a series of explanations are now in place to account for the development and use of DU weapons DU is cost-effective militarily efficient and turns to productive use a waste product wed otherwise have to dispose of at great cost In a variety of ways for the past two days We who leave here in sorrow know that we will one day be reunited with her in joy My concern here is not with the ontological status of this preposterous belief but with its psychological function as a guarantee that offers human beings a way to deprive death of its finality And the terror that prospect entails The function of guarantees is to enable human beings to bear events and contingencies that would otherwise be too traumatic There is much that we can face apparently only by denying Such perhaps is one accurate estimation of what it means lo be a human being to remain a child of ones needs and desires disguising that fact in the form of beliefs and ideas The primary purpose of religion philosophy and culture has been to provide conceptual psychological and emotional guarantees so I hat traumatic events become part of a larger framework that assures the realization of our hopes and dreams Without such supports most people supposedly would find life unlivable Through the ministry of the guarantees we banish those thoughts and feelings that we are convinced would deprive life of meaning plunging us into despair Experience accordingly becomes the movement from and to the affirmation of the guarantees through their imposition on events The main line of Western philosophy can most profitably be seen as I series of efforts to provide a ground for the guarantees That effort achieves one of its culminations in Hegel who defined the purpose of philosophy as the elimination of the contingent As father of the philosophy of history he offered that new discipline a single goal to demonstrate that the rational is real and the real rational that history is the story of progress liberty the realization of a universal humanity Or to put it in vulgar terms democracy and civilization are on the march and will soon sweep the entire Middle East In order to triumph over the contingencies of existencemdashdoubt about oneself ones place in the world and ones final endmdashmany guarantees are needed Moreover they must form a system of reinforcing beliefs such that if one guarantee is threatened other guarantees come in to fill the breach Thereby the function of the system as a whole is assured Within the system of guarantees one guarantee however is superordinate The belief that human nature is basically good As animal rationale we are endowed with an ahistorical essence that cannot be lost Evil is an aberration Consequently I heres always reason for hope and the belief that no matter how bad things get well always find a way to recover everything that I lie guarantees assure Psyche Its all a matter of pragmatic efficiency with a little capitalist profit motive thrown in for good measure Theres only one thing wrong with this explanation It leaves out the basis for the calculus Theres every reason to use DU and no reason not to use it if and only if one rationale informs all decisions How to maximize death regardless of consequences or alternatives Introduce any countervailing motives and the entire chain of decisions becomes questionable Conscious stated intentions then reveal themselves as functions of something else that

has been conveniently rendered unconscious What looks like a purely pragmatic matter devoid of psychological motives now reveals the opposite the fact that Thanatos so inhabits the system that the absence of anything opposed to it goes without saying Thanatos has become what Wittgenstein called a form of life7 a way of being so deeply rooted that it operates automatically habitually and of necessity It has become a collective unconscious And as such it is no longer accessible to those whose intentions conceal and reveal it The reason for sticking with the empirical is now clear There is something insane in the empirical That is what the historian must uncover Before we ask ourselves how this situation came to pass we need to ask another question For its easy to claim we dont know about such things because the media refuses to tell us about them Theres another reason for our ignorance however and its the one we need to confront I refer to the possibility that we choose our ignorance because otherwise wed lose the system of guarantees we depend on for our identity and our understanding of history As Barbara Bush put it in telling Diane Sawyer why she doesnt watch the news Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many what day its gonna happen and how many this or what do you suppose Or I mean its its not relevant So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that8 It would be easy to deride Mrs Bush to congratulate oneself on not sharing her attitude What I hope to show however is that on an essential level one determinative in the last instance we are in full agreement with her and delude ourselves as long as we think otherwise

IR SPECIFIC ndash The method of the affirmative best supplements our understanding of international relations by including elements that are absent in normal policy examinations of international relations Sucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 18-20)

It has long been argued that even within the confines of rational-choice approaches the nature of a decision-makers preferences cannot be assumed a priori and indeed their distinctiveness derives from factors ranging from emotions to personality to the selective use of historical analogies Emotion in short can be considered the sine qua non of social life a realization that has recently begun to permeate international relations theory Moreover the concept of the unconscious that anchors psychoanalysis can illuminate the question of why an individual experiences a sense of dissonance when her actions do not conform to her identity the mechanism by which the dissonance between action and identity can become unbearable and therefore why humans experience the need to match the two The unconscious is that aspect of the self that remains the most untapped yet potentially the most satisfying determinant of action coming as it does early in the causal chain At its most basic the unconscious is simply the repository for those characteristics that an actor fears adopting in other words action fantasies that the actor despises but can plausibly entertain This fundamental tension between the feared and the imaginable is what normally keeps these fantasies in check and is what makes the unconscious so potentially powerful as an explanatory tool And while the unconscious is an admittedly contested concept scholars from various fields have issued tentative calls for its exploration and convincing deductive and empirical research certainly justify its consideration One theoretical perspective that has been criticized for ignoring the unconscious is sociologys symbolic interactionism an approach that underpins constructivism in international relations Part of the reason for the tension between sociology including symbolic interactionism and psychoanalysis arguably lies in an antiquated understanding of psychology the false belief that to employ psychology as an explanatory approach one must ignore the impact that ones social environment has on ones personality self-image and behavior However contemporary psychoanalysis presents a view of the self that is more relational than what Freudian drive theory had suggested A psychoanalytic approach does not have to assume that unconscious or otherwise emotional factors arise from the actor independent of the shared understandings that define the social environment Admitting an explanatory role for the unconscious therefore does not imply a rejection of intersubjectivity mutual-constitution or any of the other organizing principles of sociology and constructivism Rather it simply means that ideas held in the unconscious serve as one filter through which actors interpret social interaction The unconscious therefore may be understood either as one element of agency that the actor brings to interpreting his social script or as itself the product of social forces that interpret and constrain action The first perspective assumes that agency does not have to be conscious to be meaningful agency at its most basic can simply imply action and intentionality can therefore encompass an unconscious component The second view means that the unconscious does not have to be understood as a pre-wired component of the unit that in turn shapes behavior rather it can be viewed as an emergent and mediating phenomenon We can therefore understand cognition as being inherently situated within social processes This is consistent with a relational view of social life and yet it is an important theoretical addition to the prevailing wisdom in international relations about how social understandings

ultimately shape behavior A final contribution that psychoanalysis can make to our understanding of international relationsmdashand conflict resolution in particularmdashis its assumption that entrenched behavior patterns can be altered through cognitive and emotional insight In addition to challenging the static conception of human nature that underpinned classical realism (arguably the first theory of international relations) and that provided a rather pessimistic view of human affairs this assumption is a valuable addition to any theory of international relations in which the prevailing theories of actionmdashmaterial power in the case of states polarity in the case of state systemsmdashare difficult if not impossible to manipulate As a result many of the most prominent international relations theories have lacked meaningful policy implications Conversely psychoanalytic theory suggests tools for ameliorating some of the most pressing global problems including protracted conflict and war While some psychoanalytically based conflict-resolution approaches use the focus-group format to simulate the healing function of the therapy setting this book demonstrates that the gaining of conscious insight into ones role deviationmdasha prerequisite for policy changemdashcan come about through real-life international interaction that requires neither a skilled conflict practitioner nor the willingness of elites to participate in such an exercise Rather under certain conditions role conflict can prompt domestic and international elements to hold a mirror to the face of elites resulting in a collective cognitive dissonance that can lead to policy change This mirror can take a number of formsmdashacts of protest by domestic groups media coverage and actions by allies adversaries or international structures These sources will be discussed further

IR SPECIFIC ndash What their internal links consider to be ldquoself-interestrdquo for a state doesnrsquot actually exist States are not sentient Instead they are composed by a collection of minds that act in self-interest which means that psychoanalytic evaluation of the self is a prior question to understanding the interests of the state Sucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 21-22)

Rather than referring to a notion of collective selfhood that is shared by multiple states- as some constructivist theorists of collective identity would maintainmdashthe title of this book the international self is meant to suggest not only that each state possesses a distinctive identity but that this identity develops out of the states relationship with other international actors This concept also implies that decisions emanating from the polity are derived from a process not simply the sum of the states parts Yet while we have already shown that psychoanalysis can accommodate a role for environmental processes in shaping behavior we still need to be aware of the risks of anthropomorphizing the state a practice that gets to the heart of the debate between two analytical positions that cut across the social sciences methodological individualism and holism While methodological individualism views social life as the product of actions taken by individuals holism understands the group to be a meaningful unit in and of itself Yet to an extent the debate between the two perspectives is already fixed While the holists have in their favor a precedent of semantic habitmdash we tend to anthropomorphize the state in everyday speech more often than not (eg Washington decided to wage war against al-Qaeda)mdashmethodological individualism is allied with the rich literature of rational choice and more prosaically the commonsense discomfort that arises when we ascribe human characteristics to things including groups Groups do not have minds any more than do other social facts and group behavior is after all the product of individuals acting on the groups behalf Finally given the presence of disparate individuals and subgroups constituting any society it can be misleading to attribute a single group consciousness to a political entity In a foreign-policy context accordingly adherents of this view would focus on elite attitudes bureaucratic politics andor interest group activities to tease out the causal relationship between Intentions and outcomes Yet a strong case can be made for the emergent properties of states and their policy processes something happens between the point at which citizens articulate preferences and those preferences are translated into policies Insofar as elite decisions do not always reflect the opinion of the majority there remains some degree of independent agency that may very well accrue to the state as a whole Under this reasoning it would be plausible to assert the existence of an overarching group self as Alexander Wendt does when he claims that states are people too In addition to the views of significant strands of psychoanalytic thought (which would not necessarily be expected to assume that units other than the individual can be psychoanalyzed) the idea of a group self enjoys far-reaching support across the social sciencesmdashinternational relations included This includes neorealisms assumption that the state is a unitary actor the Collective self hood implied by social identity theory the concept of political culture early psychoanalytic assumptions about the group as well as studies on obedience group-think and the crowd phenomenon There is a reason why scholars are drawn to the group as a unit of analysismdashwitness anthropologists concern with tribes and civilizations sociologists focus on street gangs and societies and political scientists emphasis on states and

transnational actors Group behavior and individual behavior are not necessarily identical Nor can an individual be expected to behave the same way in the context of a group as he or she would alone Moreover constructivism goes so far as to assume the possibility of shared norms across states a claim that has enjoyed much empirical support during the first active decade of constructivist research It is much more defensible to argue the existence of a collective identity within a state the boundaries of which contain degrees of centralized media language and other discursive channels for cultural dissemination and which prescribe the roles that the groups members are expected to perform within the context of that group And if different subgroups within the state disseminate disparate narratives we can assume that the most dominant group within society (as defined by some combination of ethnicity class or gender) has custody over a single consequential dominant narrative Finally even if we choose to ascribe a states national ethos to its elites we need to remember that state leaders are the product of the society in which they were reared This view would effectively mitigate the tension between elite- and mass-level phenomena in international relations since both elites and masses are socialized by the overarching structure of the collective

A2 ndash DisadvantagesThe internal linkrsquos dependence on rationality only serves to protect us from the unknown that the future holds This ultimately reduces all forms of knowledge to something that can be calculated which ensures violence The only way to reverse this trend is to force a confrontation with tragedy and the unknownDavis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg51-52)

Emotional The innermost need of human beings is to feel good about themselves Whatever threatens that feeling must be exorcised Health normalcy and productivity depend on avoiding negative feelings Hope and optimism arent just healthy attitudes they are requirements of our nature Biologically wired We cannot remain for long in trauma Recovery moreover must restore our faith in the guarantees and our hopes for the future The need for hope is In fact the capstone of the entire system of guarantees Yet it too apparently has a history Today over 10 million of our children are on prescription drugs to prevent depression and anxiety Informed of this fact by Bill Maher the French actress Julie Delphy spoke the spontaneous wisdom of an archaic culture Dont they know that depression is a good thing that its something you have to go through in order to grow Not anymoreThe key to understanding the power of the guarantees is to understand the fears that they exorcise Thanks to religion death suffering and evil are deprived of their power Through the attainment of reason all other forms of consciousness and what they might reveal are put in their place Poetic knowing is deprived both of its legitimacy and its terror Science as fulfillment of reason assures us of domination over nature What Heidegger termed technoscientific rationality becomes the measure of what is real Belief in historical progress banishes the recurrent suspicion that history may lack direction or even worse move to the darkest of ends The condition is thereby set that makes it impossible for us to experience traumatic events such as 9-11 except as occasions to take whatever actions are needed to reaffirm our goodness and restore our guarantees It is in the personal order however that the guarantees do their deepest work Psychologically belief in the self or self-identity exorcises the most frightening contingency that there is a void at the center of the American psyche with panic anxiety and its corollary compulsive consumption the expression of a desperate non-identity That specter brings us before the greatest fear that our psyche not our conscious deliberative intentions is the author of our actions an author who will do anything in order to feel safe secure and righteous All of our emotional needs then stand forth under the rule of a single necessity the need to feel good about oneself at whatever cost and to sustain hope by banishing anything that would trouble us Resolution catharsis (ie the discharge of painful tensions or awareness) and renewal emerge as the needs that bind us with an iron necessity to the guarantees and all that they make it impossible for us to know It is easy to deprecate Dubya and apparently to hold onto the idea that hes a temporary aberration But the problem goes deeper To revive a battle cry from the 1960s insofar as one is wedded to any one of the guarantees one is part of the problem and not the solution For the grandest function of the system of guarantees as a whole and in each one of its parts is to blind us to historyAnd so to take up again the question stated previously how did the situation now being created in Iraq come about The next three sections constitute an attempt to answer that question by constructing for America a repressed history

The negative is attempting to apply reason to ethics and psychology This only creates a hard understanding of our inner psyche which is a loss of the self that outweighs every other impact Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg174-175)

This recognition implies a primary question What is the nature and extent of the ethical responsibility human beings have for such a condition To what extent can evil and the actions that flow from it be said to be chosen in the exercise of a freedom for which one bears ethical responsibility Traditionally ethical responsibility only applies to actions that are taken after deliberation and with full knowledge of the consequences actions where choice is a function of our ability to reason where the moral law is known and where one chooses to violate it for motives that can be specified as functions of a self- interest that overrides all other motives and considerations Mitigate any of these factors and one mitigates ethical responsibility Ethical responsibility is compromised or eliminated for example if ones action is determined by forces outside ones control if one acts without premeditation under duress in blind obedience to customs or authorities as the result of a pathology because of some limitation in the ability to think or to understand the consequences of ones action or because one acted without any conscious intention to do wrong However deplorable their deeds the mad for example are not evil Evil requires consciousness choice freedom If evil is to be a human possibility on a par with the possibility of goodness it must be something that is determined within the order of freedom The trouble with the traditional understanding of these conditions however is the effort to confine them within the limits of rationalism and a purely cognitive model of the mind Rationality is noble but single-minded devotion to it leaves the true life of the psyche undetected Focusing on it prematurely shifts discussion to a rarefied mode of mentation that is then cut off from the rest of the personality To sustain and deny that split reason is then given disproportionate weight in determining what we are and do But the dream of reason is precisely that A dream a desiremdashto bring ones being into correspondence with reason and thereby eliminate everything else especially in determining the questions of ethics No one brought this dream to bear on moral experience more rigorously than Immanuel Kant That effort is the sublime beauty of his thought But experiencing oneself in terms of a priori rationality comes at a terrible cost Life becomes a process in which we sleepwalk our way through most of what we do because weve cut ourselves off from the actual bases of our actions Our psyche becomes a stranger to us We fixate on giving rational accounts of ourselves and in the process alienate ourselves from everything else Emotions become irrationalities breaks with reason things we must overcome or worse things we can only acknowledge when they are good proper and in tune with reason The rest of our being becomes brute inclinations frailties of our nature desires that disrupt an otherwise rational identity As a result in terms of ethics whether we know it or not under the guise of reason weve made an offer that most human beings cannot refuse Claiming not to consciously intend what one does has become the grand excuse Traditional definitions of the three cardinal categories of ethics are a monument to that motive Restricting intention motive and choice to the canons of rationality fashions them to the designs of human mendacity For if by intention we mean a deliberate rational choice with full knowledge of the consequences evil as Ive described it is not chosen If along the same lines we restrict motive lo purposes for which we bear responsibility because they issue not from frailties of our nature or the force of circumstances but from an explicit knowledge of what one is doing and why evil as thus far described does not exist within the order of human motivation One can identify self-interest careerism and happiness as motives but to say that many agents act in order to advance Thanatos is hard to fathom Unless that is we expand the category of motive to include purposes that derive from the psyche in all its inherent conflictedness But once posit such a possibility choice becomes a concept that must be rethought in a radically new way

Their internal links are symptoms of the fantasy that we strive to maintain This logic becomes used to justify atrocity The affirmativersquos rejection of attempting to control the future allows alternate practices to emerge Vote affirmative to traverse the fantasy of their internal link chains Even if you donrsquot think we can solve the 1AC is a more productive through experiment than their disad Davis 2006(Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg63-65)

Is there anything more evil than shooting children in a school yard or flying planes into buildings One hears this rhetorical question often today Getting it firmly implanted in our minds seems to be one of the current ideological functions of the media A correct response requires careful reflection on the circumstance that underlies the knee-jerk response thanks to the power of the image it conjures up The promise inherent in Technoscientificrationality is deliverance from images Killing for it like everything else occurs at a distance In the inaugural moment Tibbets in the cockpit of the Enola Gay unable to imagine what he has just done as a human act It was all impersonal12 And today in the silent secret midnight ways that radiation poisoning works from within like a deed without a doer separated in space and time from its absent cause Perhaps killing at a distance is the greater evil precisely because it abrogates the image and the human connection between slayer and slain If I kill another man with my bare hands my deed is immediate to my embodied consciousness To kill that way you have to feel hate fear anguish remorse etc whereas to kill from a distance or through an invisible contamination is to render the whole thing impersonal With the desired result the ability for example of the man who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima incinerating 600000 people in a second and condemning another 300000 to the condition of hibakusha the walking dead to boast for over 59 years now that he has never felt a moment of regret or remorse Tibbets lack of moral imagination is one with his representative status as precursor For now its easy to litter a landscape with DU while denying that the stuff has any long-term medical or environmental effects13 The evil of killing at a distance is that it makes death unreal Protected from the image all who participate in the deed are delivered over to a pure and impersonal calculus (An aside if we really want to support our troops we must achieve for them a new Bill of Rights No one should ever be ordered to use weapons without being given a full knowledge of the long-term human and environmental consequences of those weapons To do otherwise is to deprive our soldiers of the choice that makes them human) The powers that be learned one lesson from Vietnam No more images The mistake was to let us see the carnage up close every night on TV The news as image entered our consciousness at the register where genuine change begins Where horror is felt free of the tyranny of the concept and the hypnotic power of the guarantees Desert Storm was the corrective the Nintendo war a war broadcast to look just like one of the video games wed been programmed to love Prohibition of the image is now a fundamental article of faith No images are allowed to come back to us from Iraq II (Michael Moores real crime was to give us a brief glimpse at what the mainstream media proscribe) Abolition of the image is one of the primary conditions of ecocide Everything must be rendered abstract invisible unreal No image can be allowed to trouble our sleep to lacerate our soul For then we might begin to know that there is indeed an evil far worse than shooting children in schoolyards or flying airplanes into buildings To move us toward that knowledge let me end with the forbidden which I must here attempt to convey solely through the more abstract medium of words since Ive not yet gained permission to reproduce a photograph I saw not long ago Its the picture of an Iraqi baby a victim of DU who was born with no nose mouth eyes

anus or genitals and with flipper limbs a common result of radiation exposure in utero That childs body full of red open ulcers is twisted in knots its ulcerated face contorted in a look of unspeakable suffering An authentic image of the sacredness of human life Of the preciousness of every breath To look at that child is to realize ones duty to mourn it to give voice to its right to invade Our consciousness and expose the evil of those who prate on about being pro-life while refusing to let us see what theyve reduced life to Luke 171-2 The image of that child must become the force in our minds that motivates us to deracinate all guarantees that shield us from the reality of that childs situation Or to put it another way every time one demands catharsis resolution and renewal that child is born again condemned to its writhing That is why its image must embolden us to question the most hallowed of the guarantees the one Ive refrained from discussing until now In the face of such evil what is to be done Is resistance ever justified in resorting to violence No we are told because if we do so we become just like them This ethical principle supposedly applies universally and atemporally It does so however because it assures t he guarantee that no matter what happens well never get our hands dirty History cant intrude on the categorical imperative Whatever action one takes one must maintain ones ethical purity Even if that means there is nothing one can do and after its been demonstrated I hat there are no non-violent ways to change the situation Perhaps we can no longer allow ourselves the luxury of such an ethic Bush did the moral imagination one favor His pre-emptive unilateralism made official what has been clear for so long but denied due to its implications There is no body to which we can turn for Justice not the UN the World Court or any other framework of international law The US will flaunt its contempt for such bodies whenever it suits its purpose And thus another mode of peaceful non-violent praxis is deprived of its guarantee

A2 ndash CounterplansTheir counterplan still attempts to maintain some type of guarantee for the future Their obsession with security and the future fail to force a confrontation with the trauma of the unknown - this means that only the aff can solve Anything else results in a return to the ideology of security Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg38-39)

But to undertake that task we must purge ourselves of the thing in ourselves that stands in the way I have termed it the guarantees By that term I refer to all those assurances we set up a priori to protect ourselves from the reality of historical trauma The significance of eventsmdashthe Shoah Hiroshima 9-11mdash is their power to call such guarantees into question by exposing cherished beliefs to the claims of darker views and by forcing us to think in radically new ways considering things about the human being that weve persistently denied or marginalized One dimension of any traumatic event is the shock it brings to traditional ways of thinking Thats why the dominant response to any historical trauma is the attempt to restore the guarantees by finding a way t o impose them on the event in order to contain and interpret it The ideological function of the guarantee is thereby demonstrated A way has been found to limit the impact of the event by picturing it as an aberration a temporary departure from values and beliefs that can always be recovered because they constitute something essentialistic or universal about human nature Something trans-historical History may disrupt our essence but it cannot destroy it The concept of human naturemdashin all t h e variants constituting the philosophic and psychological history of that idea from Plato and Aristotle through American self psychologymdashis the primary way in which we endeavor to deny history An event is traumatic precisely because it suggests that history occurs beyond the limits we want to impose on it and therefore may move in directions that have nothing to do with human nature or the cherished beliefs and values we derive from that concept Events put us as subjectsmdashand as thinkersmdash into a traumatic relationship to both ourselves and our world The anxiety at the center of thought is revealed Ideologists rush in to fill that void and restore the guarantees Our effort must be t o do the opposite and thereby sustain the vital possibility implicit in an event That possibility is to sustain a break with the guarantees and thereby find for history a radically different way of thinking To put it concretely a trauma cannot be resolved until its been constituted The Western Logos is a monument to t he effort to avoid t h a t task indeed to render it impossible a priori To reverse that tradition the things above all we must rid ourselves of are the desire and demand for resolution The recycling of the guarantees must give way to a n existentializing imperative to constitute and work within trauma in a way that addresses the psyche at the same register as Gibson and Abu Ghraib do by creating images symbolic actions and emotions that are of equal depth but that move us in an antithetical directionmdashtoward the inner transformation needed to purge ourselves of Thanatos Such an effort however cannot itself be yet another variant of the guarantees as happens when Love and Eros are posited as ahistorical values If anything the possibility of Love is far more difficult and exacting than death because it can only arise by reversing the prior force that death has within us The following two sections offer a brief picture of the kind of agonistic process such an effort entails in order to whet our appetite for something that should by now be evident The critique of ideology cannot be a merely intellectual exercise It must be the activation within our psyche of a countervailing drama

Any risk of ldquosolvencyrdquo for the counterplan is a reason to vote aff because it is an attempt to guarantee the future by pre-emptive action Even claims of a ldquonet-benefitrdquo are a link to the affirmative criticism Only the aff forcibly confronts the unknownDavis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg51-52)

Emotional The innermost need of human beings is to feel good about themselves Whatever threatens that feeling must be exorcised Health normalcy and productivity depend on avoiding negative feelings Hope and optimism arent just healthy attitudes they are requirements of our nature Biologically wired We cannot remain for long in trauma Recovery moreover must restore our faith in the guarantees and our hopes for the future The need for hope is In fact the capstone of the entire system of guarantees Yet it too apparently has a history Today over 10 million of our children are on prescription drugs to prevent depression and anxiety Informed of this fact by Bill Maher the French actress Julie Delphy spoke the spontaneous wisdom of an archaic culture Dont they know that depression is a good thing that its something you have to go through in order to grow Not anymore The key to understanding the power of the guarantees is to understand the fears that they exorcise Thanks to religion death suffering and evil are deprived of their power Through the attainment of reason all other forms of consciousness and what they might reveal are put in their place Poetic knowing is deprived both of its legitimacy and its terror Science as fulfillment of reason assures us of domination over nature What Heidegger termed technoscientific rationality becomes the measure of what is real Belief in historical progress banishes the recurrent suspicion that history may lack direction or even worse move to the darkest of ends The condition is thereby set that makes it impossible for us to experience traumatic events such as 9-11 except as occasions to take whatever actions are needed to reaffirm our goodness and restore our guarantees It is in the personal order however that the guarantees do their deepest work Psychologically belief in the self or self-identity exorcises the most frightening contingency that there is a void at the center of the American psyche with panic anxiety and its corollary compulsive consumption the expression of a desperate non-identity That specter brings us before the greatest fear that our psyche not our conscious deliberative intentions is the author of our actions an author who will do anything in order to feel safe secure and righteous All of our emotional needs then stand forth under the rule of a single necessity the need to feel good about oneself at whatever cost and to sustain hope by banishing anything that would trouble us Resolution catharsis (ie the discharge of painful tensions or awareness) and renewal emerge as the needs that bind us with an iron necessity to the guarantees and all that they make it impossible for us to know It is easy to deprecate Dubya and apparently to hold onto the idea that hes a temporary aberration But the problem goes deeper To revive a battle cry from the 1960s insofar as one is wedded to any one of the guarantees one is part of the problem and not the solution For the grandest function of the system of guarantees as a whole and in each one of its parts is to blind us to history And so to take up again the question stated previously how did the situation now being created in Iraq come about The next three sections constitute an attempt to answer that question by constructing for America a repressed history

Any net benefit to the counterplan links to the criticism of the affirmative and is a reason that the counterplan cannot solve the affirmative We must confront the unknown to solve Davis 2001Watler A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative Pg 38-39

One upshoot of that act is a recovery of the dialectic of Eros and Thanatos as a way of thinking about history In anticipation of later developments (chapter 4 part 2) I only present the basic lines of this idea here The depth-charge sounded by an Event is its ability to reveal that the relationship of Eros and Thanatos is not eternal but historical to the core with the end of that dialectic entailing the possible extinction of one of the terms This is the spectre Freud exorcized by establishing a dualistic way of conceptualizing the two categories The alternative is an immanent dialectic one where history as contingency subjects everything to irreversible change with Thanatos a force in culture dedicated to the extinction of Eros and with the power to bring about that closure to the eternal dialectic Traumatic events constitute an abrupt and painful reversal of the eternal dialectic because in them we fund Eros deprived of all assurances Contra Freud there is nothing universal biological or ahistorical about the eternal battle Both terms are fully implicated in history caught up in processes Capable of producing irreversible transformations Forces in the psyche opposed to life which we have persistently marginalized in proclaiming our humanism rise up in the Event to challenge all we believe about human nature and history Rather than a world grounded in love the primacy of goodness in human nature the achievement of rationality and the ameliorative virtues of the social process the Event reveals a world in which envy and hate stalk life seeking a final solution that can only come with the extinction of the antagonist After such knowledge we can never begin again cleansed of history restored through its narration to some essential humanistic identity with all our fundamental beliefs in essential goodness reaffirmed Eros again pristine and empowered Feeling the pressure of death as it weighs upon and works within us becomes the gauge that measures the depth of our participation in history The Event rends all the masks that enable us to conceive evil as an aberrance Existential contingency unseats all essentializing views of human nature revealing historicity as a process in which Thanatos may be the drive informing the reality principle There is nothing in human nature that protects us from this eventuality Positing an essential and always recoverable nature outside history is not the solution but part of the problem the way we blind ourselves a priori to our situation

Only a complete withdrawal from psychological guarantees can force us to confront trauma The counterplanrsquos insistence that there is something tangible that can be manipulated or solved for is a link Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg38-39)

But to undertake that task we must purge ourselves of the thing in ourselves that stands in the way I have termed it the guarantees By that term I refer to all those assurances we set up a priori to protect ourselves from the reality of historical trauma The significance of eventsmdashthe Shoah Hiroshima 9-11mdash is their power to call such guarantees into question by exposing cherished beliefs to the claims of darker views and by forcing us to think in radically new ways considering things about the human being that weve persistently denied or marginalized One dimension of any traumatic event is the shock it brings

to traditional ways of thinking Thats why the dominant response to any historical trauma is the attempt to restore the guarantees by finding a way t o impose them on the event in order to contain and interpret it The ideological function of the guarantee is thereby demonstrated A way has been found to limit the impact of the event by picturing it as an aberration a temporary departure from values and beliefs that can always be recovered because they constitute something essentialistic or universal about human nature Something trans-historical History may disrupt our essence but it cannot destroy it The concept of human naturemdashin all t h e variants constituting the philosophic and psychological history of that idea from Plato and Aristotle through American self psychologymdashis the primary way in which we endeavor to deny history An event is traumatic precisely because it suggests that history occurs beyond the limits we want to impose on it and therefore may move in directions that have nothing to do with human nature or the cherished beliefs and values we derive from that concept Events put us as subjectsmdashand as thinkersmdash into a traumatic relationship to both ourselves and our world The anxiety at the center of thought is revealed Ideologists rush in to fill that void and restore the guarantees Our effort must be t o do the opposite and thereby sustain the vital possibility implicit in an event That possibility is to sustain a break with the guarantees and thereby find for history a radically different way of thinking To put it concretely a trauma cannot be resolved until its been constituted The Western Logos is a monument to t he effort to avoid t h a t task indeed to render it impossible a priori To reverse that tradition the things above all we must rid ourselves of are the desire and demand for resolution The recycling of the guarantees must give way to a n existentializing imperative to constitute and work within trauma in a way that addresses the psyche at the same register as Gibson and Abu Ghraib do by creating images symbolic actions and emotions that are of equal depth but that move us in an antithetical directionmdashtoward the inner transformation needed to purge ourselves of Thanatos Such an effort however cannot itself be yet another variant of the guarantees as happens when Love and Eros are posited as ahistorical values If anything the possibility of Love is far more difficult and exacting than death because it can only arise by reversing the prior force that death has within us The following two sections offer a brief picture of the kind of agonistic process such an effort entails in order to whet our appetite for something that should by now be evident The critique of ideology cannot be a merely intellectual exercise It must be the activation within our psyche of a countervailing drama

A2 ndash KritiksOur ethics come first -- Discovery of the unconscious is crucial to the recognition of responsibility by every subject- only our framework opens space for agency and recognition of our choices- our ethics are crucial to understand the historical contingencies that make up the status quo and open space for change Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg182-185)

Freud discovered more than the Unconscious He discovered our responsibility for it for becoming aware of how what we repress rules our life and therefore our duty to gain knowledge of our unconscious as the precondition for becoming an ethically responsible agent In terms of ethics theres a quick way to summarize the significance of the Unconscious What we dont know about ourselves is what we domdashto the other In calling us to such a reflection on ourselves Freud also taught us a new way to reflect one that forces us to move beyond the rational world of conscious deliberations and intentions Once make the psychoanalytic turn and the sources of self-knowledge increase exponentially Every time one understands a dream a paraphraxis an aesthetic experience a fantasy one suffers in principle a revolution in ones life For such experiences put one in touch with the deep conflicts that define the psyche A dream for example does not tell us about something outside the realm of our conscious grasp though this view of repression typifies how a convenient misunderstanding blunts the force of psychoanalysis A good dream reveals the desires and conflicts structuring our life It thereby opens our quotidian life to an in-depth exploration Listen to a dream rightly and one finds that one must confront something one has been avoidingmdashor doing Such is what it would mean to assume responsibility for ones dreams One would start to live from an awareness of ones psyche rather than in a continued attempt to escape that awareness Freud doesnt abolish intention he expands it by showing how often consciousness is defense mechanism and rationality the cover that conceals the actual motives on which we act and how often accordingly insistence on conscious intentions is the lie we cling to in order to deny our responsibility The seductive or prohibitive way of relating that a parent adopts toward a child for example may carry as its primary repressed intention the desire to wound that child in their sexuality This is why its so necessary at a later point in time for such parents to deny that they ever harbored let alone acted on such an intention And yet our actions do indeed speak louder than words in conveying our actual intentions Action is concrete intentionality because it is through it that we live out our feelings desires and conflicts And they are what the other invariably receives as a message that is often sharply different from what we say especially when through the exercise of intentionality we reassure ourselves about what good loving human beings we are The psyche is a lonely hunter avid in the pursuit of purposes it carefully conceals from itself The ethical greatness of Sigmund Freud is the crisis he introduced into that practice Rather than getting us off the hook psychoanalysis sticks it far deeper in us than any previous ethic Intentionality is convenient because it absolves us of the greatest responsibilitymdashresponsibility for who we are Everything stays in the safely guarded space of deliberative discursive quasi-judicial rationality as if this were the primary way we relate to ourselves or to turn the screw a peg further as if when we arent relating to ourselves this way we arent fully moral agents fully responsible for our actions But once let responsibility expand into the inner life of the psyche and we take on a new ethical burden to know oneself in depth and not recoil in horror from what one learns or persist in virtuous denial of the hidden motives one must confront in order to become responsible for ones psyche Indeed deliberation is itself transformed by l he psychoanalytic turn Freud shows that to deliberate correctly one must focus the inquiry on those motives that one tries to conceal from oneself since they are where the truth of ones conduct may lie

In terms of the problem of evil this line of thought has an obvious implication Our primary responsibility which we continually shirk is to find the evil in ourselves Theoretically and emotionally the same thing prevents that discovery the desire to uphold the idea that human nature is inherently or basically good with evil an aberration a fall a break with the natural order of things an exception to the rule of human decency Psychoanalysis like history renders such sentiments questionable at best And irrelevant to where inquiry must beginmdashwith psychological conflict the primary fact that defines us To be human is to live denned by wounds and disorders that are prior to the mediations (themselves rare) that result in a moral character that can be termed good Goodness is not something essentialistically guaranteed in a nature its an achievement that comes through the overcoming of ways of being that have a foothold in us long before some human beings take up the effort to reverse them Psychoanalysis from this point of view is neither pessimistic nor relativistic It is humanistic in the deepest way seeing the human as an achievement and valuing it by demonstrating what that achievement requires Psychoanalysis doesnt point to ethical relativism It points instead to an order of rank among human beings based on the degree to which a knowledge of ones psyche has become the basis of ones actions Ethically to know ones psyche is of necessity to engage in an effort to transform it since inner change is the only way to halt the projection of what otherwise does harm to others Psychological change is the primary task ethics the result

Their alternative misses the point In lieu of a criticism of the affirmative it is a much better act to internalize our anxiety and explore the effects within the psyche This allows us an uncastrated interaction with reality Davis 2001Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative pg xviii-xix

Virginia Woolf said that in or about December 1910 human nature changed She would have recorded a similar shock in August of 1945 The change Woolf witnessed has now of course been safely domesticated and has a local habitation and a name modernism The second change also has a namemdashpostmodernismmdashbut the ideologies most closely associated with its development remain mired in the first moment of an arrested dialectic12 Irony and aporia dominate the postmodern sensibility because its considerable energies are devoted to a displacement of the Event that remains at the center of our collective historical Unconsciousmdashthe referent that serves as the motive behind the denial of reference Reference must be continually deferred then rendered impossible because anxiety and flight from that anxiety define our actual response to the one referent that will continue to weigh on our consciousness until we restore the proper dialectical direction and move from the delights of skeptical play to a recovery of the demands of unhappy consciousness Einstein said the Bomb changed everythingmdashexcept the ways we think As such it is the inwardness of our inwardness never more so perhaps than when we use deconstructive irony as the master trope that delivers us from the burden of a historically situated subjectivity or at that opposite extreme that amounts to the same thing when we reassert an essentialist humanism as the fixed and universal system of understanding and explanation that washes us clean of history and its contingencies What if we broke with both strategiesmdashand rather than deconstructing the Bomb or containing it we tried to internalize it and then trace the ways it explodes and implodes within the psyche Such an effort would take as its goal a reconstitution of the tragic as the dialectical category that provides the only adequate idea for comprehendingmdashand existingmdashin the present Such a humanism however confronts as its prior and primary task a deracination of the system of guarantees on which previous humanisms have depended For the function of that system with respect to history has been to establish as canons of research and explanation a set of essentialistic concepts of meaning logic and human nature that function to insulate historians and their

audiences so that horror can never be more than the temporary aberration from which we always of necessity recover The narration of History thereby becomes yet another occasion for deployingmdashand thereby reinforcingmdashthe central beliefs and Values of the humanistic tradition That tradition thus provides the ego or identity-principle that we (the community of humanistic interpreters) move from and to in dealing with events that challenge our certainties13 We love to read and write histories because such stories tell us who we already know we are while conveniently exorcizing the threat of those accounts that would hold up a different mirror to our nature History is indeed a fiction the corpse over which we warm ourselves so that we may rise cleansed catharted the system of needs beliefs and guarantees restoredmdashwith existence the self-reference perpetually deferred What if instead we approached history as a realitymdashand a disciplinemdash in which we must risk ourselves utterly One in which to know is to suffer irreversible change in ones beliefs values and even in ones identity with nothing in the logos of thought able to protect us from that possibility The reign of the a priori would thereby come to an end the principle of hope a category wed risk not one wed need to renew at whatever cost Could such an engagement constitute the true force and signification of Hiroshima16 and thereby evidence that events in history are the true Absolute that abide with usmdashthe gift of the past to the future as that call of conscience requiring of us no less than a fundamentally new understanding of the human psyche and the human condition

The permutation solves ndash psychoanalytical evaluation of our anxiety and our reliance on stability and security are prior questions to the alternative and the framework of the criticism The alternative is still castrated by desire which means that it does not access proper historical contextDavis 2006Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative pg 1-3

In August 1945 Elias Canetti writes the following in his journal A tormenting thought as of a certain point history was no longer real Without noticing it all mankind suddenly left reality everything happening since then was supposedly not true but we supposedly didnt notice Our task would now be to find that point and as long as we didnt have it we would be forced to abide in our present destruction1 What Canetti cant see is that the point he refers to is the one he inhabits He cant see it because it is too close and blinds him (as it would soon the inhabitants of two cities) with a light not of this world The proliferation of new theories of history in recent decades is itself a response to a historical situationmdashthat defined by the Bomb That connection is also what these theories cannot know about themselves and ceaselessly displace in teaching us all the new ways we can know and write about the past What they do know is that the assumptions and guarantees on which historians have traditionally relied in constituting their subject and the needs that histories fulfill in offering us an account of events structured by these guarantees are no longer adequate to a contemporary awareness of history and historicity2 To cite the major developments (though in no necessary order of importance)3 1 Foucaults concept of genealogical history and the archeology of knowledge and its creative extension in the new historicist methodologies developed by Stephen Greenblatt and his circle 2 The hermeneutic theories of history and historical explanation developed by Gadamer Habermas and Ricoeur with special note given to Ricoeurs development of a complex theory of time and narrative 3 Derridas recent work on Marx and Benjamin and his continuing effort to expose the Hegelian assumptions about history progress and the logos which structure the way history is narrated by historians who know little or nothing of Hegel 4 Althusser Sartre Gramsci and the many often sharply opposed approaches to history developed in recent years by Marxists as different as Frederic Jameson G A Cohen Perry Anderson and Stuart Hall 5 The recovery of Kants speculations on history and its recent extension in Lyotards theory of the differend 6 The attempts by Slavoj Zizek Joan Copjec and Teresa Brennan to articulate the theory of history implicit in Lacan 7 The massive significance of Walter Benjamins speculations the continued vitality of Adorno and the Frankfurt school and the renewed interest in the thought of Kenneth Burke 8 The work of Louis O Mink Hayden White Dominick LaCapra Roy Schafer and others on the narrative and tropological principles that shape the writing of history To this list one can add Collingwood and McKeons earlier theorizing about history the work of Braudel Baudrillard deCerteau Calinescu and Bourdieu and the new modes of historical writing and historical investigation developed by anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz James Clifford and Natalie Zemon Davis The list is by no means complete because one must add to it two developments that may be of

greater significance and that complicate the issue of the historical I refer first to the number of alternative histories that have emerged in recent years thanks to feminist multicultural postcolonial subaltern and queer studies Such works have contributed more than new knowledge to our understanding of the past They have broken with the logic the procedures and the ruling assumptions of traditional historical methodologies by showing how that logic has as its primary function the exclusion (or marginalization) of voices that challenge its hegemony and the motives that inform its explanations Such studies are not merely of local interest They entail a theoretical crisis the recognition that the principles of historical explanation that we regard as true rational objective and universal are cultural conventional ideological and deeply implicated in power and the repressions required for its maintenance Ways of thinking derived from other cultures or voices silenced by the dominant culture may provide precisely the critical handle required to understand what is really at work in the privileging of certain canons of reasoning and explanation as scientific and objective and the rejection of other experiences and ways of thinking as illegitimate and unfounded The true bite of the multiculturalmdash seldom honored because it cuts in every directionmdashis the idea that none of us are locked into privileging our own culture and subject position(s) We can gain distance from our frameworks by immersing ourselves in other ways of thinking We can then use that experience to become aware of things that our culture and its dominant interest groups do not want to know about themselves The implication of such an orientation for history is considerable since historical explanation is perhaps the primary way in which a community establishes the structures of belief mind and feeling on which it depends in giving an identity to its members4 Thanks to the explosion of the multicultural we now have a way to internally distance ourselves from such beliefs and practices even perhaps following Nietzsche to touch all that goes without saying with the hammer as with a tuning fork

Case Stuff

War on Terror BadThe myth of effective security fosters a violent project that necessitates the creation of terrorists to be sacrificed on the altar of societyMcGowan 2013Associate Professor at the University of Vermont (Todd Enjoying What We Donrsquot Have Project Muse)

The fundamental barrier to the establishment of an authentic social bond is the resistance to avowing the traumatic nature of that bond We use the pleasure that accompanies the bombing of Afghanistan to disguise the shared enjoyment we experience through the traumatic experience of loss But this pleasure inevitably disappoints us and triggers the belief that someone has stolen the complete pleasure that we expected to experience This is why there can properly be no end to the War on Terror no end to the list of countries that the United States plans to invade to attain complete security no end to the number of terrorist leaders executed 31

Complete security like complete pleasure is mythical It attempts to bypass the one experience that cannot be bypassed mdash the foundational experience of loss mdash and it is this experience that holds the key to an authentic social bond The structure of society (which is the result of the structure of signification) is such that it blinds the subject to the possibility of shared sacrifice and the social bond that results from it No matter how often children hear the ideology of sharing or how many times we repeat to them the gospel of fairness they will inevitably believe that their sacrifice has enabled others to enjoy more than their proper share or unfairly

Loss of the SelfSurveillance devastates the gap between the Self and our informaticized bodies ndash the total knowledge it provides deprives one of the ability to function as a subject eradicating onersquos identity ndash this results in complete annihilationFriesen et al 2012 Dr Norm Friesen is Canada Research Chair in E-Learning Practices at Thompson Rivers University His academic credentials include a PhD in Education from the University of Alberta Andrew Feenberg School of Communication Simon Fraser University Grace Smith Arapiki Solutions Inc (Norm Friesen Andrew Feenberg Grace Smith and Shannon Lowe 2012 ldquoExperiencing Surveillancerdquo pp 82-83 (Re)Inventing The Internet httplinkspringercomchapter1010072F978-94-6091-734-9_4)

Students of surveillance have been so impressed by the ever-growing completeness of this data image that they animate it as though it were an actual person Identity is seen as coeval with an assemblage of traces rather than with actual presence Thus van der Ploeg writes of ldquothe

inability to distinguish between rsquothe body itselfrsquo and rsquobody informationrdquorsquo (van der Ploeg 2003 p 69) Haggerty and Ericson similarly write the surveillance assemblage standardizes the capture of fleshinformation flows of the human body It is not

so much immediately concerned with the direct physical relocation of the human body (although this may be an ultimate consequence)

but with transforming the body into pure information such that it can be rendered more mobile and comparable (Haggerty amp Ericson 2000 p 613) There is something right about this turn in surveillance theory and yet it is obvious that we are still able to distinguish the real person from the traces that person leaves behind The trace is bound to us by its origin and often by internal signs of various sorts so we do not quite leave it behind after all And yet we do not want to drag along every trace of our passage through life We count on the erasure of most traces It is this erasure that enables us to face the world afresh each day and to face it with a self-image we

construct at least partially anew for each new situation in which we find ourselves In existentialndashphenomenological terms privacy and secrecy are centrally constitutive of self and selfhood Holding something private or secret emphasizes the difference between self and other and confirms the autonomy of onersquos interiority and individuality ldquoSecrecy secures so to speak the possibility of a second world alongside of the obvious worldrdquo as Simmel (1906 p 462) puts it In contemporary conditions of surveillance and dataveillance subjectivity itself is dependent on maintaining the gap between our embodied selves and our informaticized bodies It would be intolerable for everyone to have full access to our salary the details of our relations to our family our medical histories sexual proclivities and so on Such knowledge would completely objectify us and force us to live up to (or down to) the image of ourselves implied in this knowledge Like Sartrersquos spy at the keyhole

himself espied we would be evacuated of those aspects of identity and interiority concealed within us frozen in the objectifying gaze of the other and essentially deprived of our ability to function as a subject We could no longer choose to project an identity appropriate to our inclination and situation as everything having to do with our identity would have been pre-empted Truly to be completely ldquooutedrdquo is to be annihilated

The gaze of surveillance invades and traps one psychologically rendering one enslavedVaz 1995 (Angelina Fall 1995 Dalhousie French Studies Vol 32 Mises en scegravene du regard (Fall 1995) pp 37-38 ldquoWhos Got the Look Sartres Gaze and Foucaults Panopticismrdquo JSTOR httpwwwjstororgstable40837004)

This grand formula is even applicable at the level of an encounter between two individuals where the theme of ldquosubjection by exposurerdquo is

dominant As Sartre says ldquobeing-seen constitutes me as a defenseless being for a freedom which is not my freedom [hellip] I am a slave to the degree that my being is dependent at my center of a freedom which is not mine and which is the very condition of my beingrdquo (Being p 358) In this sense the gaze does not just create and invade physical spaces there is a sense in which the gaze invades and traps me psychologically As a temporal-spatial object in the world being locked at forces me to apprehend myself as the

We have become creatures full of instincts The crucial task of the aff is to open up the unconscious counter narrative to provide a mirror to reflect upon the presupposed American identitySucharov 2005Mira M Sucharov assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli Palestinian Peacerdquo Pg 27-28

Just as individuals and groups possess consciousness and an unconscious I argue that every society maintains not only a dominant (conscious) narrative but an unconscious counternarrative as well which

the former has in part arisen to conceal As the counternarrative represents the role that society most fears adopting it resides in the unconscious where it will not interfere with the day-to-day transmission and fulfillment of the dominant narratives and the dominant roles For instance a defensive states counternarrative would encapsulate the view that we are not only defensive but sometimes we can be aggressive 35 Narratives and counternarratives can coexist in two waysmdash either with the counternarrative being simply an unactualized fear or with the counternarrative corresponding to an actual role being enacted alongside the dominant role-identity Thus while an actor may consciously be aware of a counterrole that she abhors (eg the good student who avoids cheating on exams) the unconscious reminds us that the cheater is latent in the self-portfolio of the good student In the event that this student cheats radical change can only come about once the self has

been reconciled with its unconscious opposite Actors will not become aware of the divergence from their dominant identity without the aid of a mirror however Only with the help of outside forces drawing attention to the clash between the two narratives will elites experience a cognitive dissonance necessitating a realignment between actions and role-identity One of the most salient transmission belts for the creation of state narratives is collective memory Memorymdashactive or latent recall of things occurring in the pastmdashhas begun to be understood as not solely a private activity but as representing a group phenomenon as well 36 On the collective level memory can be either experience-near-active one-step removed or distantly removed Active memory would be represented by Holocaust survivors in Israel and the Diaspora for instance One step removed would be the surrogate memories that their immediate Offspring carry with them37 and distantly removed would be exemplified by the Rabbinic injunction that Jews experience the annual telling of the Exodus from Egypt as if they were there While a case could be made for discounting the importance of actual experiences in favor of the way

those experiences arc remembered both of these are crucial for ascertaining role identity Just as traumatic events in a persons life may be repressed in memory but still shape that persons identity the international observer needs to account for actual experiences yet view these as embedded within a narrative context Similarly some historical events undergo a process of memory revision in these cases the observer must be sensitive to the effect that the new discourse has on the societys perception of these events whether or not these stories accord with fact The clinical parallel in psychoanalysis is that while the analysands relationship with her parents is considered crucial to uncovering the contours of her psychology the analyst as a rule does not attempt to meet the parents firsthand rather the patients recounting of these experiences is considered to be the most important channel of investigationmdash and hence transformation Since we are talking about collections of individuals memory needs to be actively transmitted to the societys members in order for it to influence the citizens sense of collective identity One of the ways this can be done is through ritual Being repetitive while symbolically imbued ritual gains meaning only through the symbols attributed to it by the group and is a collective process that serves to link actors to a series of past events for which they may not have been physically present Moreover private rituals that are collectively prescribed such as prayer serve to bind the individual to the collective particularly when there is a formalized liturgy Most collective rituals occur according to the calendar and therefore can encompass regular ceremonies that come to act as markers for the individuals personal time cycle38Sometimes particular collective memories that have been sustained over time are ruptured with citizens contemplating new facts about their countrys past Revisionist history is an example of an attempt to bring forth these sorts of new facts When history is reinterpreted the society can either shun the dissenting voices or else gradually reevaluate the original narratives When this reevaluation occurs society is more apt to uncover the hitherto unconscious counternarratives a discovery that can

lead to the realization that the states behavior might be contradicting the states role-identity In other words revisionist historians and other domestic dissenters can serve as the mirror referred to later

Vote affirmative to give up hope in the face of guarantees - only holding yourself completely open in the face of the promise of a sustainable status quo can open space for self-overcoming that allows us to engage in new forms of praxisDavis 2006 Walter A Davis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deathrsquos Dream Kingdom Pg 63

To know this situation for what it is challenges what is finally the deepest and most fundamental of the guarantees The principle of Hope To appropriate Eliot After such knowledge what forgiveness There is perhaps nothing that can be done to change the situation Ive described But then what is the purpose of knowing such things if they only produce meaningless suffering Is despair the end result of a life shorn of the guarantees Or are we finally like the drunks in ONeills The Iceman Cometh knowing that in order to sustain the illusions required to go on living they must pronounce Hickey mad and reject everything he revealed to them about

their lives as a product of that madness Perhaps its time to admit what the need for Hope really signifies Denial of responsibility for certain situations under the assumption that knowing them correctly would lead to despair Raising that specter is of course the rhetorical ploy invoked to prematurely terminate inquiry lest it impinge on

emotional and psychological needs Despair thus remains an empty concept We dont know what it is and never will as long as we use the need for hope to prevent discovery of our capacities to endure Whether despair is what we will find on the other side of hope is something we cant know For all hope really signifies is a testament to our weakness and our fears Perhaps we are called to something beyond it What Shakespeare called tragic

readiness For in opening ourselves to the possibility of despair we also open ourselves to the possibility of self-overcoming and through it the discovery of a praxis that lies on the other side of the conceptual and existential paralyses created by the guarantees We cant know what is to be done as long as we continue to respond to our situation by invoking ahistorical values and guarantees that are grounded in an essentialistic and ahistorical theory of human nature

PlanThe United States federal government should substantially curtail its domestic surveillance by ceasing all domestic surveillance

Contention 2 is FramingAn ethics of existence forecloses the tragic struggle in which we never confront our inner trauma- only our affirmative can open new ways of relating to ourselves that can overcome these limitations- the 1AC is a precondition for any meaning to our livesDavis 2006 Walter ADavis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg238-240)

In her critique of Kantian ethics Alenka Zupancic often refers to the Lacanian idea that there is a loss deeper than ones life The loss of ones reason for living The apostle of duty offers a heroic example of how one escapes the threat of that loss What Im suggesting here is that ethics actually begins on the other side of it With the possibility that first exists when one discovers that one has already lost or violated or fatally compromised ones reason for living because the values one thinks one honors and the actual truth of ones life are thoroughly at odds The traumatic event that brings one to this recognition is the origin of ethics This is the ethical task it establishes to see if one can pay the price for having violated oneself by assuming the full burden of the situation one has thereby createdThe ethical situation accordingly confronts the subject with the necessity to choose to be in a radically new way or die inside Nothing less is demanded than a totally new way of relating to oneself for the guilt one experiences in such a situation is existentializing One is guilty toward oneself for having failed to honor the duties that one bears to oneself for having so thoroughly lied to oneself about ones life As Hamlet learns it is through that recognition that one first discovers that one has tragic responsibilities toward oneself that can no longer be evaded because one with this situation is the even deeper discovery that there are failures that can be irreversible That is the possibility defining the situation one is now in What one does will reveal the truth of who one is Guilt toward oneself has overtaken all possibilities of displacement and denial Fail now and one dies within Most people will of course do just about anything to avoid guilt or to get cleansed of it as quickly as possible That is why so many fail the test when it comes to them shrinking inside rather than expanding to the demands of our innermost possibility the one defining our humanity An ethics of existence begins with the traumatic experience in which everything weve tried to escape about ourselves catches up with us One then knows that ones prior life has been a flight And all ones brave ideas and bright ethical claims airy nothingmdashthe indulgence in comforting and self-alienating lies But now one

is finally like Hamlet in the situation from which there is no exit An ethics grounded in the possibility of freedom depends on the actions one performs within oneself when one finds oneself in a crisis that can no longer be denied This is precisely the kind of situation Kant is unable to consider which is why he constructs in Duty the principle of choice that renders it impossible In serving Duty one is delivered from the repressed thought that now can never arise that ones whole life and all its choices especially the ethical ones may be no more than a flight from things in oneself that one flees because one fears that if one is ever forced to face oneself one will suffer a destruction worse than death Destruction within An existentializing ethic begins on the other side of all the things we do to delay that event For it is when the thing one fears happens that one first discovers the truth of ones life the depth of ones inauthenticity The trauma that will measure ones humanity has arrived Nothing else now exists but the lonely struggle of the psyche with itself Suicide (including the primary form of suicide inner death) is one term of that situation Ethics is the other An ethics of existence is what one does when one finally finds oneself in the traumatic situation that brings one before oneself There is one lesson in this a lesson that probably cant be learned Rather than running from the trauma we should plunge toward it since it is only through it that we can discover both the truth about ourselves and what we are able to do in the face of that truth To activate that possibility all thats needed perhaps is to drown out the noise and chatter one keeps running in ones head Perhaps the truth is that the truth about ourselves is not deeply repressed and unknown Its closer than we think available to introspection if we but dared But thats what makes the kind of impassioned reflection Hamlet engages in so terrifying It exemplifies everything we know and dont want to know about ourselves18 Here is an attempt to offer an image that describes in depth the existential-psychoanalytic condition from which the possibility of ethics derives In George Orwells 1984 Winston Smith when tortured with the thing he most fears betrays the thing he loves To save his life he sacrifices what gives it meaning He capitulates before an inner torment that reduces the psyche to a condition of catastrophic anxiety (The image of the cage of rats placed over the head they will raven externalizes in a perfect objective correlative the terror that has the power to dissolve the psyche What is a phobia after all but an inner condition displaced into an external fear) What I want to suggest here is that Winston Smiths phobia describes the inner condition that defines any subject traumatized by itself Such a subject lives tortured by the struggle not to betray the thing one loves the thing that could give ones life meaning But one saves it only if one is willing to sacrifice everything to the

acceptance of the suffering and inner torment that service to it entails This is the ethical act whereby a subject attains tragic agency Becoming an existentially autonomous agent is the process of engaging the disorders of ones psyche in the effort of active reversal The wish to escape that effort to soften it or to insist that suffering must always have a happy resolution is the voice of self-betrayal If one gives in to it one loses with Winston the thing one has finally found the thing one can love more than ones life but only by suffering all that it demands That thing more precious than life is the tragic struggle that gives life perhaps the only meaning it can have

The ethic of the aff is key - only an ethical act that confronts our inner trauma with a constant and inner openness can we create the conditions for self-overcoming necessary to open ourselves to a meaningful existence - the only ethical choice is to fully confront contingencyDavis 2006 Walter A Davis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg235-238

What follows attempts to distill the ethic of existence in to its fundamental principles I also try here to present those thesis in a way that will engage the readers psyche and emotions at precisely the place within us where each of us makes a basic decision about ourselves Thats the only self that matters The others are selfreifying defenses The argument thus constitutes both an appeal to the readers freedom and an attempt to impinge on that freedom to bring each reader before him or herself by challenging defenses with the power that some ideas have to light a fire in the soul (1) We concur with Kant that if a choice is not free its not moral The possibility of freedom depends however on an in-depth analysis of ones psyche Such an analysis leads from the destruction of ego identity to the need to bring about a complete reversal in ones relationship to oneself by deracinating the voice of the other Thinking is ethical insofar as it engages one thing the battle of a subject with itself over the meaning of its being (2) There is no way to abridge that process nor to provide guarantees that will secure a safe outcome To sustain the psychoanalytic turn the psyche must continually throw itself into question and root out the emotions that bind it to a pattern of lies An ethic of the existential subject depends on maximizing what Keats termed negative capability the ability to be in uncertainties Mysteries doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason Rather than resolving doubts the purpose of thought and action is to deepen them An act is ethical insofar as it deepens the conflict of the subject with itself (3) One acts ethically only when all symbolic and ideological supports have collapsed Only then can one take on responsibility for oneself because only then is one at issue and at risk The ethical act must radically open itself to contingency in a situation where one must create values yet where those values can derive from nothing but the depth of ones engagement in the situation By the same token such values cannot be a final solution but must open themselves to later contingencies Ethics must always allow itself to be measured by contingency because contingency is precisely what calls up ethical responsibility The primary ethical situation is not one where there is a clear course of duty but where a subject trembles before its responsibility to create new values in a situation that reduces received values to rubble (4) Ethics begins when there is a genuine crisis of values even perhaps the need for a re-valuation of all values For Kant there was not nor could there be such a crisis The values were known immutable and generally agreed upon The only question was what kind of principle they would be grounded in which meant for Kant and the Aufklarung how could they be grounded in Reason For us in contrast the primary fact is a historicity that bites into the very possibility of the ethical Every ethical value must be willing to historicize itself That recognition entails the following considerations The desert grows Under the guise of fundamentalist crusades herd moralities dominate The extent of inhumanity is appalling So many values that once seemed so solid have been so thoroughly debunked The possibility of ethics now begins with a systematic exposure of all superego pathologies all the ethical ideologies that societies use to introduce a fundamental passivity into subjects while convincing those same subjects that they are good in a goodness that depends on willed ignorance An existential ethic is radically destructive of received beliefs radically disruptive of the desires of the normal subject Refusing and exposing all Symbolic supports it seeks in the struggle of the psyche with its disorders the source of value (5) Ethics is a matter of extremity It begins in the most extreme actmdashthe act of radical individuation in which one opens ones psyche to an interrogation that must be sustained in its extremity Ethics is about a choice in which a subject risks the value and meaning of its existence not about those choices that assure it of that meaning Moreover it is only when one does this that one experiences for the first time the

terror implicit in the oft-quoted Sartrean statement existence precedes essence (6) Ethics must engage and derive from the dread that defines choice Let me illustrate this proposition by contrasting Hamlets choice with the situation in Styrons Sophies Choice The horrifying choice Sophie facesmdashto choose which of her children will be sent to the gas chambermdashis a forced choice and thus extreme and exceptional in a way that deprives it of the possibility of being normative17 Hamlets choice in contrast is a free one that issues from nothing but his freedom and the readiness with which he accepts the selftorture that existence entails Sophie is tortured from without by the madness of the other and the inhuman logic that madness requires in order to know itself (Styron calls the officer who forces the choice on Sophie a genius of the Reich) Hamlet is tortured from within by the logic of self-criticism and self-overcoming that informs the existentializing process We are fortunate if we never face a situation like Sophies nor suffer the death-in-life that is the result of such choices But insofar as we have a psyche Hamlets situation is the general one that defines us Or to put it in properly ethical terms engaging the kind of situation he faces is the act that activates the inherent possibility that defines us The choice that founds such an ethic must therefore be distinguished both from the a priori choice made by the apostle of duty and Sophies forced choice All three refer to extreme choices and situations In only one however is guilt toward oneself both the origin of the choice and its result That is only one of the three choices is the ground of its own possibility and thereby the source of an existentialization that issues in values bound to the tragic contingencies of our situatedness

2AC

A2 ndash Realism

We control the internal link to their impacts The psychoanalysis of the affirmative forces an internal investigation of the ways in which the subjectrsquos subconscious desires rationalize what we would consider self-interest This means that we can only make sense of realism through a lens of psychoanalysis Sucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 17-18)

The psychological turn that international relations took with the rise of behavioralism in the 1960s has begun to expand beyond focusing on cognitionmdashhow individuals thinkmdashto a wider appreciation of the role of emotional determinants of action one of many factors that were long dismissed as unscientific Part of the reason for this hesitant courtship is no doubt the long strides that international relations theory has taken toward refining its investigative lenses such that less easily observable phenomena can be more confidently incorporated into the solid theoretical infrastructure that the discipline has now adopted A central example of this evolution is the analytical watershed inaugurated by neorealism which fashioned a conceptual playing field where little had existed before Neorealism a theoretical school that views international relations as taking place within an anarchical state system with no overarching authority in turn spawned the constructivist turn in international relationsmdashthe approach that stresses the importance of social identity in determining international outcomesmdashand subsequent counterarguments that built on yet other social and psychological preceptsmdash all of which agree that there is such a thing as an international systemmdashthough they understand the effects of anarchy differently Introducing psychoanalysis to international relations can therefore be seen as the next logical step for a relatively young discipline that seeks to understand why political actors behave the way they do While all psychoanalysts draw on Freuds unique contribution subsequent approaches have altered many of his assumptions This trend has kept pace with the embracing of new epistemological and ontological perspectives by other scientific and social scientific fields such as the quantum revolution in physics -a paradigm shift that has since influenced other disciplines The form of psychoanalytic theory that I use here is the contemporary relational strand one that analysts have alternately termed relational-model theorizing a dyadic systems perspective and intersubjectivity theory This approach shares an ontology basic to constructivism in international relations the psychology (identity) of the person (state) is not hard-wired into the unit but develops in part from the actions of other actors in the social environment (the family the therapeutic setting the international system) and in part through the shared assumptions that permeate that system As an approach centered on the individual mind contemporary psychoanalysis takes into account the broader social context within which actors act Psychoanalysis also provides a coherent theory of behavior incorporating three elements that have mostly been invisible in international relations theory but that provide a fuller understanding of how states and nonstate actors interact emotion the unconscious and the possibility for actors own cognitive and emotional insight to be a source of behavior change In drawing on these principles perhaps the most significant contribution that psychoanalysis can make to international relations is in improving on prevailing theories of identity which in turn illuminate questions about international action Within international relations constructivism has been criticized for neglecting the question of how identity is in fact created Cognitive psychologymdashwhich international relations has begun to draw on liberallymdashin part helps to fill this gap Yet with its assumption that the emotional legacy of early interpersonal relationships is essential in shaping personality and subsequent behavior psychoanalysis offers a more comprehensive model of identity creation than those put forth by cognitive theorists Recognizing these explanatory benefits contructivists have recently called for exploring the potential that psychoanalysis holds for understanding international politics Thus unlike the prevailing psychoanalytic approaches in international relationsmdashnamely psychohistories of individual leaders and the focus-group potential of micro-level conflict resolution the psychoanalytic approach I use here is meant to coexist happily alongside other streams of systemic theory in international relations

Forcing the state away from what it considers a core tenet of national defense in the exact opposite way it desires creates the conditions necessary for reflection of the efficacy of the initial policies of surveillance which changes future policySucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 32-)

Like most individuals states possess a complex arsenal of motivations that are not all palatable to the politys sense of self mdashnot least of which is due to the discrepant voices vying for influence in any society Yet the dominant self mdashthat overarching group ethos that does not necessarily reflect each single (sub)voicemdashimplicitly prescribes a set of normatively acceptable behaviors Should a state adopt a policy course that contradicts the states role-identity we can expect some sort of cognitive dissonance to arise leading to a radical realignment between actions and identity Just as a man who once struck his wife might offer the apologetic plea that I dont know what got into me it is up to the analyst to help the subject come to terms with the aggression that has evidently been very much inside of him all along The policy shift therefore results from the force of the role-identity prodding the self back into behavioral consistency However acting in contradiction to ones role-identity does not necessarily result in a behavior shift The dissonance between role-identity and behavior must be both unbearable and experienced at an emotional level in order for such a shift to result If the dissonance remained at a cognitive level it is likely that the subject would employ one of a number of cognitive biases in order to rationalize the discrepancy42 The dredging up of the unconscious counternarrative assures that the dissonance is experienced deeply enough to result in the taking of radical action to realign actions with identity 43 This hypothesis of cognitive-emotional realization is grounded in the clinical findings of psychoanalytic theory that suggest that under certain conditions actors may become consciously aware of previously unconscious processes44 The classic understanding of cognitive dissonancemdashas articulated by Leon Festingermdashis that inconsistency between behavior and belief results in psychological discomfort that leads to activity oriented toward dissonance reduction just as hunger leads to activity oriented toward hunger reduction45 In line with psychoanalysis the actual cognitive-emotional realization brings to light what had previously been stored in the unconscious areas of the states subjective world In actuality the assumption here is that the role-challenging behavior (paired with domestic challenges) causes elites to reflect on the states role- identity Moreover my use of cognitive-emotional realization imbues the concept with a distinctively emotional component as well Whereas pure cognitive dissonance refers to the challenging of an individuals worldview (ie the revelation of new facts)46 I am introducing the more ontologically powerful notion of challenges to the self47 When this behavior undermines the very legitimacy buttressing the states raison detat the dissonance is particularly acute Catalysts for Realization Once decision-makers come to realize that the states foreign-policy actions have contradicted the states role-identity a policy shift may result The important question that remains is what contributes to this realization Numerous sources may act as the mirror necessary for the state to reflect on its behavior For clarity I have divided them into three categories domestic elements (including the military the peace movement revisionist historians artists and the domestic media) other states (including allies and adversaries as well as those states news media) and international structures (including international organizations norms and regimes) Domestic Elements The Military If the military acts in a way that the populace sees as contradicting the states self-image (even if the military is merely carrying out governmental policies) society can experience a corresponding cognitive

dissonance In a democracy the military takes its directives from the government however military culture is instrumental in shaping the broader strategic culture encompassing foreign-policy decisions mdashand role-identitymdashmore generally Most of the time the relationship between the civilian and military spheres resembles a symbiosis commands are given by civilians and implemented by the military which in turn will advise and reshape subsequent policies In some cases ex-military personnel will pursue a career in government on being discharged However it is possible for the military to experience a sense of dissonance between a particular policy and its overall defense doctrine or ethic Soldiers might articulate discomfort in carrying out a particular mission or the number of conscientious objectors may rise In a country in which conscientious objection is previously unheard of the founding of such a movement will therefore signal an even higher degree of dissonance between behavior and institutional role-identity In examining foreign-policy shifts the role of the military is crucial in representing the degree of concordance between national role-identity and foreign policy In states where the military has particular salience for establishing national identitymdashthose states with mandatory and universal conscription for instancemdashthat institution will be particularly salient

Their dependence on pragmatism to justify unrealistic internal link chains and counter psychological methods creates the worst type of moral tunnel vision in which we become incapable of understanding the carnage of our ideology ndash this makes ethics impossibleDavis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg47-48)

But its always a good idea when seeking an explanation of the human motives behind actions to stick with the empirical With stated intentions and official rationales Otherwise we give ourselves over to psychobabble Despite official denial by the Department of Defense that DU is harmful a series of explanations are now in place to account for the development and use of DU weapons DU is cost-effective militarily efficient and turns to productive use a waste product wed otherwise have to dispose of at great cost In a variety of ways for the past two days We who leave here in sorrow know that we will one day be reunited with her in joy My concern here is not with the ontological status of this preposterous belief but with its psychological function as a guarantee that offers human beings a way to deprive death of its finality And the terror that prospect entails The function of guarantees is to enable human beings to bear events and contingencies that would otherwise be too traumatic There is much that we can face apparently only by denying Such perhaps is one accurate estimation of what it means lo be a human being to remain a child of ones needs and desires disguising that fact in the form of beliefs and ideas The primary purpose of religion philosophy and culture has been to provide conceptual psychological and emotional guarantees so I hat traumatic events become part of a larger framework that assures the realization of our hopes and dreams Without such supports most people supposedly would find life unlivable Through the ministry of the guarantees we banish those thoughts and feelings that we are convinced would deprive life of meaning plunging us into despair Experience accordingly becomes the movement from and to the affirmation of the guarantees through their imposition on events The main line of Western philosophy can most profitably be seen as I series of efforts to provide a ground for the guarantees That effort achieves one of its culminations in Hegel who defined the purpose of philosophy as the elimination of the contingent As father of the philosophy of history he offered that new discipline a single goal to demonstrate that the rational is real and the real rational that history is the story of progress liberty the realization of a universal humanity Or to put it in vulgar terms democracy and civilization are on the march and will soon sweep the entire Middle East In order to triumph over the contingencies of existencemdashdoubt about oneself ones place in the world and ones final endmdashmany guarantees are needed Moreover they must form a system of reinforcing beliefs such that if one guarantee is threatened other guarantees come in to fill the breach Thereby the function of the system as a whole is assured Within the system of guarantees one guarantee however is superordinate The belief that human nature is basically good As animal rationale we are endowed with an ahistorical essence that cannot be lost Evil is an aberration Consequently I heres always reason for hope and the belief that no matter how bad things get well always find a way to recover everything that I lie guarantees assure Psyche Its all a matter of pragmatic efficiency with a little capitalist profit motive thrown in for good measure Theres only one thing wrong with this explanation It leaves out the basis for the calculus Theres every reason to use DU and no reason not to use it if and only if one rationale informs all decisions How to maximize death regardless of consequences or alternatives Introduce any countervailing motives and the entire chain of decisions becomes questionable Conscious stated intentions then reveal themselves as functions of something else that

has been conveniently rendered unconscious What looks like a purely pragmatic matter devoid of psychological motives now reveals the opposite the fact that Thanatos so inhabits the system that the absence of anything opposed to it goes without saying Thanatos has become what Wittgenstein called a form of life7 a way of being so deeply rooted that it operates automatically habitually and of necessity It has become a collective unconscious And as such it is no longer accessible to those whose intentions conceal and reveal it The reason for sticking with the empirical is now clear There is something insane in the empirical That is what the historian must uncover Before we ask ourselves how this situation came to pass we need to ask another question For its easy to claim we dont know about such things because the media refuses to tell us about them Theres another reason for our ignorance however and its the one we need to confront I refer to the possibility that we choose our ignorance because otherwise wed lose the system of guarantees we depend on for our identity and our understanding of history As Barbara Bush put it in telling Diane Sawyer why she doesnt watch the news Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many what day its gonna happen and how many this or what do you suppose Or I mean its its not relevant So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that8 It would be easy to deride Mrs Bush to congratulate oneself on not sharing her attitude What I hope to show however is that on an essential level one determinative in the last instance we are in full agreement with her and delude ourselves as long as we think otherwise

IR SPECIFIC ndash The method of the affirmative best supplements our understanding of international relations by including elements that are absent in normal policy examinations of international relations Sucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 18-20)

It has long been argued that even within the confines of rational-choice approaches the nature of a decision-makers preferences cannot be assumed a priori and indeed their distinctiveness derives from factors ranging from emotions to personality to the selective use of historical analogies Emotion in short can be considered the sine qua non of social life a realization that has recently begun to permeate international relations theory Moreover the concept of the unconscious that anchors psychoanalysis can illuminate the question of why an individual experiences a sense of dissonance when her actions do not conform to her identity the mechanism by which the dissonance between action and identity can become unbearable and therefore why humans experience the need to match the two The unconscious is that aspect of the self that remains the most untapped yet potentially the most satisfying determinant of action coming as it does early in the causal chain At its most basic the unconscious is simply the repository for those characteristics that an actor fears adopting in other words action fantasies that the actor despises but can plausibly entertain This fundamental tension between the feared and the imaginable is what normally keeps these fantasies in check and is what makes the unconscious so potentially powerful as an explanatory tool And while the unconscious is an admittedly contested concept scholars from various fields have issued tentative calls for its exploration and convincing deductive and empirical research certainly justify its consideration One theoretical perspective that has been criticized for ignoring the unconscious is sociologys symbolic interactionism an approach that underpins constructivism in international relations Part of the reason for the tension between sociology including symbolic interactionism and psychoanalysis arguably lies in an antiquated understanding of psychology the false belief that to employ psychology as an explanatory approach one must ignore the impact that ones social environment has on ones personality self-image and behavior However contemporary psychoanalysis presents a view of the self that is more relational than what Freudian drive theory had suggested A psychoanalytic approach does not have to assume that unconscious or otherwise emotional factors arise from the actor independent of the shared understandings that define the social environment Admitting an explanatory role for the unconscious therefore does not imply a rejection of intersubjectivity mutual-constitution or any of the other organizing principles of sociology and constructivism Rather it simply means that ideas held in the unconscious serve as one filter through which actors interpret social interaction The unconscious therefore may be understood either as one element of agency that the actor brings to interpreting his social script or as itself the product of social forces that interpret and constrain action The first perspective assumes that agency does not have to be conscious to be meaningful agency at its most basic can simply imply action and intentionality can therefore encompass an unconscious component The second view means that the unconscious does not have to be understood as a pre-wired component of the unit that in turn shapes behavior rather it can be viewed as an emergent and mediating phenomenon We can therefore understand cognition as being inherently situated within social processes This is consistent with a relational view of social life and yet it is an important theoretical addition to the prevailing wisdom in international relations about how social understandings

ultimately shape behavior A final contribution that psychoanalysis can make to our understanding of international relationsmdashand conflict resolution in particularmdashis its assumption that entrenched behavior patterns can be altered through cognitive and emotional insight In addition to challenging the static conception of human nature that underpinned classical realism (arguably the first theory of international relations) and that provided a rather pessimistic view of human affairs this assumption is a valuable addition to any theory of international relations in which the prevailing theories of actionmdashmaterial power in the case of states polarity in the case of state systemsmdashare difficult if not impossible to manipulate As a result many of the most prominent international relations theories have lacked meaningful policy implications Conversely psychoanalytic theory suggests tools for ameliorating some of the most pressing global problems including protracted conflict and war While some psychoanalytically based conflict-resolution approaches use the focus-group format to simulate the healing function of the therapy setting this book demonstrates that the gaining of conscious insight into ones role deviationmdasha prerequisite for policy changemdashcan come about through real-life international interaction that requires neither a skilled conflict practitioner nor the willingness of elites to participate in such an exercise Rather under certain conditions role conflict can prompt domestic and international elements to hold a mirror to the face of elites resulting in a collective cognitive dissonance that can lead to policy change This mirror can take a number of formsmdashacts of protest by domestic groups media coverage and actions by allies adversaries or international structures These sources will be discussed further

IR SPECIFIC ndash What their internal links consider to be ldquoself-interestrdquo for a state doesnrsquot actually exist States are not sentient Instead they are composed by a collection of minds that act in self-interest which means that psychoanalytic evaluation of the self is a prior question to understanding the interests of the state Sucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 21-22)

Rather than referring to a notion of collective selfhood that is shared by multiple states- as some constructivist theorists of collective identity would maintainmdashthe title of this book the international self is meant to suggest not only that each state possesses a distinctive identity but that this identity develops out of the states relationship with other international actors This concept also implies that decisions emanating from the polity are derived from a process not simply the sum of the states parts Yet while we have already shown that psychoanalysis can accommodate a role for environmental processes in shaping behavior we still need to be aware of the risks of anthropomorphizing the state a practice that gets to the heart of the debate between two analytical positions that cut across the social sciences methodological individualism and holism While methodological individualism views social life as the product of actions taken by individuals holism understands the group to be a meaningful unit in and of itself Yet to an extent the debate between the two perspectives is already fixed While the holists have in their favor a precedent of semantic habitmdash we tend to anthropomorphize the state in everyday speech more often than not (eg Washington decided to wage war against al-Qaeda)mdashmethodological individualism is allied with the rich literature of rational choice and more prosaically the commonsense discomfort that arises when we ascribe human characteristics to things including groups Groups do not have minds any more than do other social facts and group behavior is after all the product of individuals acting on the groups behalf Finally given the presence of disparate individuals and subgroups constituting any society it can be misleading to attribute a single group consciousness to a political entity In a foreign-policy context accordingly adherents of this view would focus on elite attitudes bureaucratic politics andor interest group activities to tease out the causal relationship between Intentions and outcomes Yet a strong case can be made for the emergent properties of states and their policy processes something happens between the point at which citizens articulate preferences and those preferences are translated into policies Insofar as elite decisions do not always reflect the opinion of the majority there remains some degree of independent agency that may very well accrue to the state as a whole Under this reasoning it would be plausible to assert the existence of an overarching group self as Alexander Wendt does when he claims that states are people too In addition to the views of significant strands of psychoanalytic thought (which would not necessarily be expected to assume that units other than the individual can be psychoanalyzed) the idea of a group self enjoys far-reaching support across the social sciencesmdashinternational relations included This includes neorealisms assumption that the state is a unitary actor the Collective self hood implied by social identity theory the concept of political culture early psychoanalytic assumptions about the group as well as studies on obedience group-think and the crowd phenomenon There is a reason why scholars are drawn to the group as a unit of analysismdashwitness anthropologists concern with tribes and civilizations sociologists focus on street gangs and societies and political scientists emphasis on states and

transnational actors Group behavior and individual behavior are not necessarily identical Nor can an individual be expected to behave the same way in the context of a group as he or she would alone Moreover constructivism goes so far as to assume the possibility of shared norms across states a claim that has enjoyed much empirical support during the first active decade of constructivist research It is much more defensible to argue the existence of a collective identity within a state the boundaries of which contain degrees of centralized media language and other discursive channels for cultural dissemination and which prescribe the roles that the groups members are expected to perform within the context of that group And if different subgroups within the state disseminate disparate narratives we can assume that the most dominant group within society (as defined by some combination of ethnicity class or gender) has custody over a single consequential dominant narrative Finally even if we choose to ascribe a states national ethos to its elites we need to remember that state leaders are the product of the society in which they were reared This view would effectively mitigate the tension between elite- and mass-level phenomena in international relations since both elites and masses are socialized by the overarching structure of the collective

A2 ndash DisadvantagesThe internal linkrsquos dependence on rationality only serves to protect us from the unknown that the future holds This ultimately reduces all forms of knowledge to something that can be calculated which ensures violence The only way to reverse this trend is to force a confrontation with tragedy and the unknownDavis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg51-52)

Emotional The innermost need of human beings is to feel good about themselves Whatever threatens that feeling must be exorcised Health normalcy and productivity depend on avoiding negative feelings Hope and optimism arent just healthy attitudes they are requirements of our nature Biologically wired We cannot remain for long in trauma Recovery moreover must restore our faith in the guarantees and our hopes for the future The need for hope is In fact the capstone of the entire system of guarantees Yet it too apparently has a history Today over 10 million of our children are on prescription drugs to prevent depression and anxiety Informed of this fact by Bill Maher the French actress Julie Delphy spoke the spontaneous wisdom of an archaic culture Dont they know that depression is a good thing that its something you have to go through in order to grow Not anymoreThe key to understanding the power of the guarantees is to understand the fears that they exorcise Thanks to religion death suffering and evil are deprived of their power Through the attainment of reason all other forms of consciousness and what they might reveal are put in their place Poetic knowing is deprived both of its legitimacy and its terror Science as fulfillment of reason assures us of domination over nature What Heidegger termed technoscientific rationality becomes the measure of what is real Belief in historical progress banishes the recurrent suspicion that history may lack direction or even worse move to the darkest of ends The condition is thereby set that makes it impossible for us to experience traumatic events such as 9-11 except as occasions to take whatever actions are needed to reaffirm our goodness and restore our guarantees It is in the personal order however that the guarantees do their deepest work Psychologically belief in the self or self-identity exorcises the most frightening contingency that there is a void at the center of the American psyche with panic anxiety and its corollary compulsive consumption the expression of a desperate non-identity That specter brings us before the greatest fear that our psyche not our conscious deliberative intentions is the author of our actions an author who will do anything in order to feel safe secure and righteous All of our emotional needs then stand forth under the rule of a single necessity the need to feel good about oneself at whatever cost and to sustain hope by banishing anything that would trouble us Resolution catharsis (ie the discharge of painful tensions or awareness) and renewal emerge as the needs that bind us with an iron necessity to the guarantees and all that they make it impossible for us to know It is easy to deprecate Dubya and apparently to hold onto the idea that hes a temporary aberration But the problem goes deeper To revive a battle cry from the 1960s insofar as one is wedded to any one of the guarantees one is part of the problem and not the solution For the grandest function of the system of guarantees as a whole and in each one of its parts is to blind us to historyAnd so to take up again the question stated previously how did the situation now being created in Iraq come about The next three sections constitute an attempt to answer that question by constructing for America a repressed history

The negative is attempting to apply reason to ethics and psychology This only creates a hard understanding of our inner psyche which is a loss of the self that outweighs every other impact Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg174-175)

This recognition implies a primary question What is the nature and extent of the ethical responsibility human beings have for such a condition To what extent can evil and the actions that flow from it be said to be chosen in the exercise of a freedom for which one bears ethical responsibility Traditionally ethical responsibility only applies to actions that are taken after deliberation and with full knowledge of the consequences actions where choice is a function of our ability to reason where the moral law is known and where one chooses to violate it for motives that can be specified as functions of a self- interest that overrides all other motives and considerations Mitigate any of these factors and one mitigates ethical responsibility Ethical responsibility is compromised or eliminated for example if ones action is determined by forces outside ones control if one acts without premeditation under duress in blind obedience to customs or authorities as the result of a pathology because of some limitation in the ability to think or to understand the consequences of ones action or because one acted without any conscious intention to do wrong However deplorable their deeds the mad for example are not evil Evil requires consciousness choice freedom If evil is to be a human possibility on a par with the possibility of goodness it must be something that is determined within the order of freedom The trouble with the traditional understanding of these conditions however is the effort to confine them within the limits of rationalism and a purely cognitive model of the mind Rationality is noble but single-minded devotion to it leaves the true life of the psyche undetected Focusing on it prematurely shifts discussion to a rarefied mode of mentation that is then cut off from the rest of the personality To sustain and deny that split reason is then given disproportionate weight in determining what we are and do But the dream of reason is precisely that A dream a desiremdashto bring ones being into correspondence with reason and thereby eliminate everything else especially in determining the questions of ethics No one brought this dream to bear on moral experience more rigorously than Immanuel Kant That effort is the sublime beauty of his thought But experiencing oneself in terms of a priori rationality comes at a terrible cost Life becomes a process in which we sleepwalk our way through most of what we do because weve cut ourselves off from the actual bases of our actions Our psyche becomes a stranger to us We fixate on giving rational accounts of ourselves and in the process alienate ourselves from everything else Emotions become irrationalities breaks with reason things we must overcome or worse things we can only acknowledge when they are good proper and in tune with reason The rest of our being becomes brute inclinations frailties of our nature desires that disrupt an otherwise rational identity As a result in terms of ethics whether we know it or not under the guise of reason weve made an offer that most human beings cannot refuse Claiming not to consciously intend what one does has become the grand excuse Traditional definitions of the three cardinal categories of ethics are a monument to that motive Restricting intention motive and choice to the canons of rationality fashions them to the designs of human mendacity For if by intention we mean a deliberate rational choice with full knowledge of the consequences evil as Ive described it is not chosen If along the same lines we restrict motive lo purposes for which we bear responsibility because they issue not from frailties of our nature or the force of circumstances but from an explicit knowledge of what one is doing and why evil as thus far described does not exist within the order of human motivation One can identify self-interest careerism and happiness as motives but to say that many agents act in order to advance Thanatos is hard to fathom Unless that is we expand the category of motive to include purposes that derive from the psyche in all its inherent conflictedness But once posit such a possibility choice becomes a concept that must be rethought in a radically new way

Their internal links are symptoms of the fantasy that we strive to maintain This logic becomes used to justify atrocity The affirmativersquos rejection of attempting to control the future allows alternate practices to emerge Vote affirmative to traverse the fantasy of their internal link chains Even if you donrsquot think we can solve the 1AC is a more productive through experiment than their disad Davis 2006(Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg63-65)

Is there anything more evil than shooting children in a school yard or flying planes into buildings One hears this rhetorical question often today Getting it firmly implanted in our minds seems to be one of the current ideological functions of the media A correct response requires careful reflection on the circumstance that underlies the knee-jerk response thanks to the power of the image it conjures up The promise inherent in Technoscientificrationality is deliverance from images Killing for it like everything else occurs at a distance In the inaugural moment Tibbets in the cockpit of the Enola Gay unable to imagine what he has just done as a human act It was all impersonal12 And today in the silent secret midnight ways that radiation poisoning works from within like a deed without a doer separated in space and time from its absent cause Perhaps killing at a distance is the greater evil precisely because it abrogates the image and the human connection between slayer and slain If I kill another man with my bare hands my deed is immediate to my embodied consciousness To kill that way you have to feel hate fear anguish remorse etc whereas to kill from a distance or through an invisible contamination is to render the whole thing impersonal With the desired result the ability for example of the man who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima incinerating 600000 people in a second and condemning another 300000 to the condition of hibakusha the walking dead to boast for over 59 years now that he has never felt a moment of regret or remorse Tibbets lack of moral imagination is one with his representative status as precursor For now its easy to litter a landscape with DU while denying that the stuff has any long-term medical or environmental effects13 The evil of killing at a distance is that it makes death unreal Protected from the image all who participate in the deed are delivered over to a pure and impersonal calculus (An aside if we really want to support our troops we must achieve for them a new Bill of Rights No one should ever be ordered to use weapons without being given a full knowledge of the long-term human and environmental consequences of those weapons To do otherwise is to deprive our soldiers of the choice that makes them human) The powers that be learned one lesson from Vietnam No more images The mistake was to let us see the carnage up close every night on TV The news as image entered our consciousness at the register where genuine change begins Where horror is felt free of the tyranny of the concept and the hypnotic power of the guarantees Desert Storm was the corrective the Nintendo war a war broadcast to look just like one of the video games wed been programmed to love Prohibition of the image is now a fundamental article of faith No images are allowed to come back to us from Iraq II (Michael Moores real crime was to give us a brief glimpse at what the mainstream media proscribe) Abolition of the image is one of the primary conditions of ecocide Everything must be rendered abstract invisible unreal No image can be allowed to trouble our sleep to lacerate our soul For then we might begin to know that there is indeed an evil far worse than shooting children in schoolyards or flying airplanes into buildings To move us toward that knowledge let me end with the forbidden which I must here attempt to convey solely through the more abstract medium of words since Ive not yet gained permission to reproduce a photograph I saw not long ago Its the picture of an Iraqi baby a victim of DU who was born with no nose mouth eyes

anus or genitals and with flipper limbs a common result of radiation exposure in utero That childs body full of red open ulcers is twisted in knots its ulcerated face contorted in a look of unspeakable suffering An authentic image of the sacredness of human life Of the preciousness of every breath To look at that child is to realize ones duty to mourn it to give voice to its right to invade Our consciousness and expose the evil of those who prate on about being pro-life while refusing to let us see what theyve reduced life to Luke 171-2 The image of that child must become the force in our minds that motivates us to deracinate all guarantees that shield us from the reality of that childs situation Or to put it another way every time one demands catharsis resolution and renewal that child is born again condemned to its writhing That is why its image must embolden us to question the most hallowed of the guarantees the one Ive refrained from discussing until now In the face of such evil what is to be done Is resistance ever justified in resorting to violence No we are told because if we do so we become just like them This ethical principle supposedly applies universally and atemporally It does so however because it assures t he guarantee that no matter what happens well never get our hands dirty History cant intrude on the categorical imperative Whatever action one takes one must maintain ones ethical purity Even if that means there is nothing one can do and after its been demonstrated I hat there are no non-violent ways to change the situation Perhaps we can no longer allow ourselves the luxury of such an ethic Bush did the moral imagination one favor His pre-emptive unilateralism made official what has been clear for so long but denied due to its implications There is no body to which we can turn for Justice not the UN the World Court or any other framework of international law The US will flaunt its contempt for such bodies whenever it suits its purpose And thus another mode of peaceful non-violent praxis is deprived of its guarantee

A2 ndash CounterplansTheir counterplan still attempts to maintain some type of guarantee for the future Their obsession with security and the future fail to force a confrontation with the trauma of the unknown - this means that only the aff can solve Anything else results in a return to the ideology of security Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg38-39)

But to undertake that task we must purge ourselves of the thing in ourselves that stands in the way I have termed it the guarantees By that term I refer to all those assurances we set up a priori to protect ourselves from the reality of historical trauma The significance of eventsmdashthe Shoah Hiroshima 9-11mdash is their power to call such guarantees into question by exposing cherished beliefs to the claims of darker views and by forcing us to think in radically new ways considering things about the human being that weve persistently denied or marginalized One dimension of any traumatic event is the shock it brings to traditional ways of thinking Thats why the dominant response to any historical trauma is the attempt to restore the guarantees by finding a way t o impose them on the event in order to contain and interpret it The ideological function of the guarantee is thereby demonstrated A way has been found to limit the impact of the event by picturing it as an aberration a temporary departure from values and beliefs that can always be recovered because they constitute something essentialistic or universal about human nature Something trans-historical History may disrupt our essence but it cannot destroy it The concept of human naturemdashin all t h e variants constituting the philosophic and psychological history of that idea from Plato and Aristotle through American self psychologymdashis the primary way in which we endeavor to deny history An event is traumatic precisely because it suggests that history occurs beyond the limits we want to impose on it and therefore may move in directions that have nothing to do with human nature or the cherished beliefs and values we derive from that concept Events put us as subjectsmdashand as thinkersmdash into a traumatic relationship to both ourselves and our world The anxiety at the center of thought is revealed Ideologists rush in to fill that void and restore the guarantees Our effort must be t o do the opposite and thereby sustain the vital possibility implicit in an event That possibility is to sustain a break with the guarantees and thereby find for history a radically different way of thinking To put it concretely a trauma cannot be resolved until its been constituted The Western Logos is a monument to t he effort to avoid t h a t task indeed to render it impossible a priori To reverse that tradition the things above all we must rid ourselves of are the desire and demand for resolution The recycling of the guarantees must give way to a n existentializing imperative to constitute and work within trauma in a way that addresses the psyche at the same register as Gibson and Abu Ghraib do by creating images symbolic actions and emotions that are of equal depth but that move us in an antithetical directionmdashtoward the inner transformation needed to purge ourselves of Thanatos Such an effort however cannot itself be yet another variant of the guarantees as happens when Love and Eros are posited as ahistorical values If anything the possibility of Love is far more difficult and exacting than death because it can only arise by reversing the prior force that death has within us The following two sections offer a brief picture of the kind of agonistic process such an effort entails in order to whet our appetite for something that should by now be evident The critique of ideology cannot be a merely intellectual exercise It must be the activation within our psyche of a countervailing drama

Any risk of ldquosolvencyrdquo for the counterplan is a reason to vote aff because it is an attempt to guarantee the future by pre-emptive action Even claims of a ldquonet-benefitrdquo are a link to the affirmative criticism Only the aff forcibly confronts the unknownDavis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg51-52)

Emotional The innermost need of human beings is to feel good about themselves Whatever threatens that feeling must be exorcised Health normalcy and productivity depend on avoiding negative feelings Hope and optimism arent just healthy attitudes they are requirements of our nature Biologically wired We cannot remain for long in trauma Recovery moreover must restore our faith in the guarantees and our hopes for the future The need for hope is In fact the capstone of the entire system of guarantees Yet it too apparently has a history Today over 10 million of our children are on prescription drugs to prevent depression and anxiety Informed of this fact by Bill Maher the French actress Julie Delphy spoke the spontaneous wisdom of an archaic culture Dont they know that depression is a good thing that its something you have to go through in order to grow Not anymore The key to understanding the power of the guarantees is to understand the fears that they exorcise Thanks to religion death suffering and evil are deprived of their power Through the attainment of reason all other forms of consciousness and what they might reveal are put in their place Poetic knowing is deprived both of its legitimacy and its terror Science as fulfillment of reason assures us of domination over nature What Heidegger termed technoscientific rationality becomes the measure of what is real Belief in historical progress banishes the recurrent suspicion that history may lack direction or even worse move to the darkest of ends The condition is thereby set that makes it impossible for us to experience traumatic events such as 9-11 except as occasions to take whatever actions are needed to reaffirm our goodness and restore our guarantees It is in the personal order however that the guarantees do their deepest work Psychologically belief in the self or self-identity exorcises the most frightening contingency that there is a void at the center of the American psyche with panic anxiety and its corollary compulsive consumption the expression of a desperate non-identity That specter brings us before the greatest fear that our psyche not our conscious deliberative intentions is the author of our actions an author who will do anything in order to feel safe secure and righteous All of our emotional needs then stand forth under the rule of a single necessity the need to feel good about oneself at whatever cost and to sustain hope by banishing anything that would trouble us Resolution catharsis (ie the discharge of painful tensions or awareness) and renewal emerge as the needs that bind us with an iron necessity to the guarantees and all that they make it impossible for us to know It is easy to deprecate Dubya and apparently to hold onto the idea that hes a temporary aberration But the problem goes deeper To revive a battle cry from the 1960s insofar as one is wedded to any one of the guarantees one is part of the problem and not the solution For the grandest function of the system of guarantees as a whole and in each one of its parts is to blind us to history And so to take up again the question stated previously how did the situation now being created in Iraq come about The next three sections constitute an attempt to answer that question by constructing for America a repressed history

Any net benefit to the counterplan links to the criticism of the affirmative and is a reason that the counterplan cannot solve the affirmative We must confront the unknown to solve Davis 2001Watler A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative Pg 38-39

One upshoot of that act is a recovery of the dialectic of Eros and Thanatos as a way of thinking about history In anticipation of later developments (chapter 4 part 2) I only present the basic lines of this idea here The depth-charge sounded by an Event is its ability to reveal that the relationship of Eros and Thanatos is not eternal but historical to the core with the end of that dialectic entailing the possible extinction of one of the terms This is the spectre Freud exorcized by establishing a dualistic way of conceptualizing the two categories The alternative is an immanent dialectic one where history as contingency subjects everything to irreversible change with Thanatos a force in culture dedicated to the extinction of Eros and with the power to bring about that closure to the eternal dialectic Traumatic events constitute an abrupt and painful reversal of the eternal dialectic because in them we fund Eros deprived of all assurances Contra Freud there is nothing universal biological or ahistorical about the eternal battle Both terms are fully implicated in history caught up in processes Capable of producing irreversible transformations Forces in the psyche opposed to life which we have persistently marginalized in proclaiming our humanism rise up in the Event to challenge all we believe about human nature and history Rather than a world grounded in love the primacy of goodness in human nature the achievement of rationality and the ameliorative virtues of the social process the Event reveals a world in which envy and hate stalk life seeking a final solution that can only come with the extinction of the antagonist After such knowledge we can never begin again cleansed of history restored through its narration to some essential humanistic identity with all our fundamental beliefs in essential goodness reaffirmed Eros again pristine and empowered Feeling the pressure of death as it weighs upon and works within us becomes the gauge that measures the depth of our participation in history The Event rends all the masks that enable us to conceive evil as an aberrance Existential contingency unseats all essentializing views of human nature revealing historicity as a process in which Thanatos may be the drive informing the reality principle There is nothing in human nature that protects us from this eventuality Positing an essential and always recoverable nature outside history is not the solution but part of the problem the way we blind ourselves a priori to our situation

Only a complete withdrawal from psychological guarantees can force us to confront trauma The counterplanrsquos insistence that there is something tangible that can be manipulated or solved for is a link Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg38-39)

But to undertake that task we must purge ourselves of the thing in ourselves that stands in the way I have termed it the guarantees By that term I refer to all those assurances we set up a priori to protect ourselves from the reality of historical trauma The significance of eventsmdashthe Shoah Hiroshima 9-11mdash is their power to call such guarantees into question by exposing cherished beliefs to the claims of darker views and by forcing us to think in radically new ways considering things about the human being that weve persistently denied or marginalized One dimension of any traumatic event is the shock it brings

to traditional ways of thinking Thats why the dominant response to any historical trauma is the attempt to restore the guarantees by finding a way t o impose them on the event in order to contain and interpret it The ideological function of the guarantee is thereby demonstrated A way has been found to limit the impact of the event by picturing it as an aberration a temporary departure from values and beliefs that can always be recovered because they constitute something essentialistic or universal about human nature Something trans-historical History may disrupt our essence but it cannot destroy it The concept of human naturemdashin all t h e variants constituting the philosophic and psychological history of that idea from Plato and Aristotle through American self psychologymdashis the primary way in which we endeavor to deny history An event is traumatic precisely because it suggests that history occurs beyond the limits we want to impose on it and therefore may move in directions that have nothing to do with human nature or the cherished beliefs and values we derive from that concept Events put us as subjectsmdashand as thinkersmdash into a traumatic relationship to both ourselves and our world The anxiety at the center of thought is revealed Ideologists rush in to fill that void and restore the guarantees Our effort must be t o do the opposite and thereby sustain the vital possibility implicit in an event That possibility is to sustain a break with the guarantees and thereby find for history a radically different way of thinking To put it concretely a trauma cannot be resolved until its been constituted The Western Logos is a monument to t he effort to avoid t h a t task indeed to render it impossible a priori To reverse that tradition the things above all we must rid ourselves of are the desire and demand for resolution The recycling of the guarantees must give way to a n existentializing imperative to constitute and work within trauma in a way that addresses the psyche at the same register as Gibson and Abu Ghraib do by creating images symbolic actions and emotions that are of equal depth but that move us in an antithetical directionmdashtoward the inner transformation needed to purge ourselves of Thanatos Such an effort however cannot itself be yet another variant of the guarantees as happens when Love and Eros are posited as ahistorical values If anything the possibility of Love is far more difficult and exacting than death because it can only arise by reversing the prior force that death has within us The following two sections offer a brief picture of the kind of agonistic process such an effort entails in order to whet our appetite for something that should by now be evident The critique of ideology cannot be a merely intellectual exercise It must be the activation within our psyche of a countervailing drama

A2 ndash KritiksOur ethics come first -- Discovery of the unconscious is crucial to the recognition of responsibility by every subject- only our framework opens space for agency and recognition of our choices- our ethics are crucial to understand the historical contingencies that make up the status quo and open space for change Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg182-185)

Freud discovered more than the Unconscious He discovered our responsibility for it for becoming aware of how what we repress rules our life and therefore our duty to gain knowledge of our unconscious as the precondition for becoming an ethically responsible agent In terms of ethics theres a quick way to summarize the significance of the Unconscious What we dont know about ourselves is what we domdashto the other In calling us to such a reflection on ourselves Freud also taught us a new way to reflect one that forces us to move beyond the rational world of conscious deliberations and intentions Once make the psychoanalytic turn and the sources of self-knowledge increase exponentially Every time one understands a dream a paraphraxis an aesthetic experience a fantasy one suffers in principle a revolution in ones life For such experiences put one in touch with the deep conflicts that define the psyche A dream for example does not tell us about something outside the realm of our conscious grasp though this view of repression typifies how a convenient misunderstanding blunts the force of psychoanalysis A good dream reveals the desires and conflicts structuring our life It thereby opens our quotidian life to an in-depth exploration Listen to a dream rightly and one finds that one must confront something one has been avoidingmdashor doing Such is what it would mean to assume responsibility for ones dreams One would start to live from an awareness of ones psyche rather than in a continued attempt to escape that awareness Freud doesnt abolish intention he expands it by showing how often consciousness is defense mechanism and rationality the cover that conceals the actual motives on which we act and how often accordingly insistence on conscious intentions is the lie we cling to in order to deny our responsibility The seductive or prohibitive way of relating that a parent adopts toward a child for example may carry as its primary repressed intention the desire to wound that child in their sexuality This is why its so necessary at a later point in time for such parents to deny that they ever harbored let alone acted on such an intention And yet our actions do indeed speak louder than words in conveying our actual intentions Action is concrete intentionality because it is through it that we live out our feelings desires and conflicts And they are what the other invariably receives as a message that is often sharply different from what we say especially when through the exercise of intentionality we reassure ourselves about what good loving human beings we are The psyche is a lonely hunter avid in the pursuit of purposes it carefully conceals from itself The ethical greatness of Sigmund Freud is the crisis he introduced into that practice Rather than getting us off the hook psychoanalysis sticks it far deeper in us than any previous ethic Intentionality is convenient because it absolves us of the greatest responsibilitymdashresponsibility for who we are Everything stays in the safely guarded space of deliberative discursive quasi-judicial rationality as if this were the primary way we relate to ourselves or to turn the screw a peg further as if when we arent relating to ourselves this way we arent fully moral agents fully responsible for our actions But once let responsibility expand into the inner life of the psyche and we take on a new ethical burden to know oneself in depth and not recoil in horror from what one learns or persist in virtuous denial of the hidden motives one must confront in order to become responsible for ones psyche Indeed deliberation is itself transformed by l he psychoanalytic turn Freud shows that to deliberate correctly one must focus the inquiry on those motives that one tries to conceal from oneself since they are where the truth of ones conduct may lie

In terms of the problem of evil this line of thought has an obvious implication Our primary responsibility which we continually shirk is to find the evil in ourselves Theoretically and emotionally the same thing prevents that discovery the desire to uphold the idea that human nature is inherently or basically good with evil an aberration a fall a break with the natural order of things an exception to the rule of human decency Psychoanalysis like history renders such sentiments questionable at best And irrelevant to where inquiry must beginmdashwith psychological conflict the primary fact that defines us To be human is to live denned by wounds and disorders that are prior to the mediations (themselves rare) that result in a moral character that can be termed good Goodness is not something essentialistically guaranteed in a nature its an achievement that comes through the overcoming of ways of being that have a foothold in us long before some human beings take up the effort to reverse them Psychoanalysis from this point of view is neither pessimistic nor relativistic It is humanistic in the deepest way seeing the human as an achievement and valuing it by demonstrating what that achievement requires Psychoanalysis doesnt point to ethical relativism It points instead to an order of rank among human beings based on the degree to which a knowledge of ones psyche has become the basis of ones actions Ethically to know ones psyche is of necessity to engage in an effort to transform it since inner change is the only way to halt the projection of what otherwise does harm to others Psychological change is the primary task ethics the result

Their alternative misses the point In lieu of a criticism of the affirmative it is a much better act to internalize our anxiety and explore the effects within the psyche This allows us an uncastrated interaction with reality Davis 2001Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative pg xviii-xix

Virginia Woolf said that in or about December 1910 human nature changed She would have recorded a similar shock in August of 1945 The change Woolf witnessed has now of course been safely domesticated and has a local habitation and a name modernism The second change also has a namemdashpostmodernismmdashbut the ideologies most closely associated with its development remain mired in the first moment of an arrested dialectic12 Irony and aporia dominate the postmodern sensibility because its considerable energies are devoted to a displacement of the Event that remains at the center of our collective historical Unconsciousmdashthe referent that serves as the motive behind the denial of reference Reference must be continually deferred then rendered impossible because anxiety and flight from that anxiety define our actual response to the one referent that will continue to weigh on our consciousness until we restore the proper dialectical direction and move from the delights of skeptical play to a recovery of the demands of unhappy consciousness Einstein said the Bomb changed everythingmdashexcept the ways we think As such it is the inwardness of our inwardness never more so perhaps than when we use deconstructive irony as the master trope that delivers us from the burden of a historically situated subjectivity or at that opposite extreme that amounts to the same thing when we reassert an essentialist humanism as the fixed and universal system of understanding and explanation that washes us clean of history and its contingencies What if we broke with both strategiesmdashand rather than deconstructing the Bomb or containing it we tried to internalize it and then trace the ways it explodes and implodes within the psyche Such an effort would take as its goal a reconstitution of the tragic as the dialectical category that provides the only adequate idea for comprehendingmdashand existingmdashin the present Such a humanism however confronts as its prior and primary task a deracination of the system of guarantees on which previous humanisms have depended For the function of that system with respect to history has been to establish as canons of research and explanation a set of essentialistic concepts of meaning logic and human nature that function to insulate historians and their

audiences so that horror can never be more than the temporary aberration from which we always of necessity recover The narration of History thereby becomes yet another occasion for deployingmdashand thereby reinforcingmdashthe central beliefs and Values of the humanistic tradition That tradition thus provides the ego or identity-principle that we (the community of humanistic interpreters) move from and to in dealing with events that challenge our certainties13 We love to read and write histories because such stories tell us who we already know we are while conveniently exorcizing the threat of those accounts that would hold up a different mirror to our nature History is indeed a fiction the corpse over which we warm ourselves so that we may rise cleansed catharted the system of needs beliefs and guarantees restoredmdashwith existence the self-reference perpetually deferred What if instead we approached history as a realitymdashand a disciplinemdash in which we must risk ourselves utterly One in which to know is to suffer irreversible change in ones beliefs values and even in ones identity with nothing in the logos of thought able to protect us from that possibility The reign of the a priori would thereby come to an end the principle of hope a category wed risk not one wed need to renew at whatever cost Could such an engagement constitute the true force and signification of Hiroshima16 and thereby evidence that events in history are the true Absolute that abide with usmdashthe gift of the past to the future as that call of conscience requiring of us no less than a fundamentally new understanding of the human psyche and the human condition

The permutation solves ndash psychoanalytical evaluation of our anxiety and our reliance on stability and security are prior questions to the alternative and the framework of the criticism The alternative is still castrated by desire which means that it does not access proper historical contextDavis 2006Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative pg 1-3

In August 1945 Elias Canetti writes the following in his journal A tormenting thought as of a certain point history was no longer real Without noticing it all mankind suddenly left reality everything happening since then was supposedly not true but we supposedly didnt notice Our task would now be to find that point and as long as we didnt have it we would be forced to abide in our present destruction1 What Canetti cant see is that the point he refers to is the one he inhabits He cant see it because it is too close and blinds him (as it would soon the inhabitants of two cities) with a light not of this world The proliferation of new theories of history in recent decades is itself a response to a historical situationmdashthat defined by the Bomb That connection is also what these theories cannot know about themselves and ceaselessly displace in teaching us all the new ways we can know and write about the past What they do know is that the assumptions and guarantees on which historians have traditionally relied in constituting their subject and the needs that histories fulfill in offering us an account of events structured by these guarantees are no longer adequate to a contemporary awareness of history and historicity2 To cite the major developments (though in no necessary order of importance)3 1 Foucaults concept of genealogical history and the archeology of knowledge and its creative extension in the new historicist methodologies developed by Stephen Greenblatt and his circle 2 The hermeneutic theories of history and historical explanation developed by Gadamer Habermas and Ricoeur with special note given to Ricoeurs development of a complex theory of time and narrative 3 Derridas recent work on Marx and Benjamin and his continuing effort to expose the Hegelian assumptions about history progress and the logos which structure the way history is narrated by historians who know little or nothing of Hegel 4 Althusser Sartre Gramsci and the many often sharply opposed approaches to history developed in recent years by Marxists as different as Frederic Jameson G A Cohen Perry Anderson and Stuart Hall 5 The recovery of Kants speculations on history and its recent extension in Lyotards theory of the differend 6 The attempts by Slavoj Zizek Joan Copjec and Teresa Brennan to articulate the theory of history implicit in Lacan 7 The massive significance of Walter Benjamins speculations the continued vitality of Adorno and the Frankfurt school and the renewed interest in the thought of Kenneth Burke 8 The work of Louis O Mink Hayden White Dominick LaCapra Roy Schafer and others on the narrative and tropological principles that shape the writing of history To this list one can add Collingwood and McKeons earlier theorizing about history the work of Braudel Baudrillard deCerteau Calinescu and Bourdieu and the new modes of historical writing and historical investigation developed by anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz James Clifford and Natalie Zemon Davis The list is by no means complete because one must add to it two developments that may be of

greater significance and that complicate the issue of the historical I refer first to the number of alternative histories that have emerged in recent years thanks to feminist multicultural postcolonial subaltern and queer studies Such works have contributed more than new knowledge to our understanding of the past They have broken with the logic the procedures and the ruling assumptions of traditional historical methodologies by showing how that logic has as its primary function the exclusion (or marginalization) of voices that challenge its hegemony and the motives that inform its explanations Such studies are not merely of local interest They entail a theoretical crisis the recognition that the principles of historical explanation that we regard as true rational objective and universal are cultural conventional ideological and deeply implicated in power and the repressions required for its maintenance Ways of thinking derived from other cultures or voices silenced by the dominant culture may provide precisely the critical handle required to understand what is really at work in the privileging of certain canons of reasoning and explanation as scientific and objective and the rejection of other experiences and ways of thinking as illegitimate and unfounded The true bite of the multiculturalmdash seldom honored because it cuts in every directionmdashis the idea that none of us are locked into privileging our own culture and subject position(s) We can gain distance from our frameworks by immersing ourselves in other ways of thinking We can then use that experience to become aware of things that our culture and its dominant interest groups do not want to know about themselves The implication of such an orientation for history is considerable since historical explanation is perhaps the primary way in which a community establishes the structures of belief mind and feeling on which it depends in giving an identity to its members4 Thanks to the explosion of the multicultural we now have a way to internally distance ourselves from such beliefs and practices even perhaps following Nietzsche to touch all that goes without saying with the hammer as with a tuning fork

Case Stuff

War on Terror BadThe myth of effective security fosters a violent project that necessitates the creation of terrorists to be sacrificed on the altar of societyMcGowan 2013Associate Professor at the University of Vermont (Todd Enjoying What We Donrsquot Have Project Muse)

The fundamental barrier to the establishment of an authentic social bond is the resistance to avowing the traumatic nature of that bond We use the pleasure that accompanies the bombing of Afghanistan to disguise the shared enjoyment we experience through the traumatic experience of loss But this pleasure inevitably disappoints us and triggers the belief that someone has stolen the complete pleasure that we expected to experience This is why there can properly be no end to the War on Terror no end to the list of countries that the United States plans to invade to attain complete security no end to the number of terrorist leaders executed 31

Complete security like complete pleasure is mythical It attempts to bypass the one experience that cannot be bypassed mdash the foundational experience of loss mdash and it is this experience that holds the key to an authentic social bond The structure of society (which is the result of the structure of signification) is such that it blinds the subject to the possibility of shared sacrifice and the social bond that results from it No matter how often children hear the ideology of sharing or how many times we repeat to them the gospel of fairness they will inevitably believe that their sacrifice has enabled others to enjoy more than their proper share or unfairly

Loss of the SelfSurveillance devastates the gap between the Self and our informaticized bodies ndash the total knowledge it provides deprives one of the ability to function as a subject eradicating onersquos identity ndash this results in complete annihilationFriesen et al 2012 Dr Norm Friesen is Canada Research Chair in E-Learning Practices at Thompson Rivers University His academic credentials include a PhD in Education from the University of Alberta Andrew Feenberg School of Communication Simon Fraser University Grace Smith Arapiki Solutions Inc (Norm Friesen Andrew Feenberg Grace Smith and Shannon Lowe 2012 ldquoExperiencing Surveillancerdquo pp 82-83 (Re)Inventing The Internet httplinkspringercomchapter1010072F978-94-6091-734-9_4)

Students of surveillance have been so impressed by the ever-growing completeness of this data image that they animate it as though it were an actual person Identity is seen as coeval with an assemblage of traces rather than with actual presence Thus van der Ploeg writes of ldquothe

inability to distinguish between rsquothe body itselfrsquo and rsquobody informationrdquorsquo (van der Ploeg 2003 p 69) Haggerty and Ericson similarly write the surveillance assemblage standardizes the capture of fleshinformation flows of the human body It is not

so much immediately concerned with the direct physical relocation of the human body (although this may be an ultimate consequence)

but with transforming the body into pure information such that it can be rendered more mobile and comparable (Haggerty amp Ericson 2000 p 613) There is something right about this turn in surveillance theory and yet it is obvious that we are still able to distinguish the real person from the traces that person leaves behind The trace is bound to us by its origin and often by internal signs of various sorts so we do not quite leave it behind after all And yet we do not want to drag along every trace of our passage through life We count on the erasure of most traces It is this erasure that enables us to face the world afresh each day and to face it with a self-image we

construct at least partially anew for each new situation in which we find ourselves In existentialndashphenomenological terms privacy and secrecy are centrally constitutive of self and selfhood Holding something private or secret emphasizes the difference between self and other and confirms the autonomy of onersquos interiority and individuality ldquoSecrecy secures so to speak the possibility of a second world alongside of the obvious worldrdquo as Simmel (1906 p 462) puts it In contemporary conditions of surveillance and dataveillance subjectivity itself is dependent on maintaining the gap between our embodied selves and our informaticized bodies It would be intolerable for everyone to have full access to our salary the details of our relations to our family our medical histories sexual proclivities and so on Such knowledge would completely objectify us and force us to live up to (or down to) the image of ourselves implied in this knowledge Like Sartrersquos spy at the keyhole

himself espied we would be evacuated of those aspects of identity and interiority concealed within us frozen in the objectifying gaze of the other and essentially deprived of our ability to function as a subject We could no longer choose to project an identity appropriate to our inclination and situation as everything having to do with our identity would have been pre-empted Truly to be completely ldquooutedrdquo is to be annihilated

The gaze of surveillance invades and traps one psychologically rendering one enslavedVaz 1995 (Angelina Fall 1995 Dalhousie French Studies Vol 32 Mises en scegravene du regard (Fall 1995) pp 37-38 ldquoWhos Got the Look Sartres Gaze and Foucaults Panopticismrdquo JSTOR httpwwwjstororgstable40837004)

This grand formula is even applicable at the level of an encounter between two individuals where the theme of ldquosubjection by exposurerdquo is

dominant As Sartre says ldquobeing-seen constitutes me as a defenseless being for a freedom which is not my freedom [hellip] I am a slave to the degree that my being is dependent at my center of a freedom which is not mine and which is the very condition of my beingrdquo (Being p 358) In this sense the gaze does not just create and invade physical spaces there is a sense in which the gaze invades and traps me psychologically As a temporal-spatial object in the world being locked at forces me to apprehend myself as the

Vote affirmative to give up hope in the face of guarantees - only holding yourself completely open in the face of the promise of a sustainable status quo can open space for self-overcoming that allows us to engage in new forms of praxisDavis 2006 Walter A Davis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deathrsquos Dream Kingdom Pg 63

To know this situation for what it is challenges what is finally the deepest and most fundamental of the guarantees The principle of Hope To appropriate Eliot After such knowledge what forgiveness There is perhaps nothing that can be done to change the situation Ive described But then what is the purpose of knowing such things if they only produce meaningless suffering Is despair the end result of a life shorn of the guarantees Or are we finally like the drunks in ONeills The Iceman Cometh knowing that in order to sustain the illusions required to go on living they must pronounce Hickey mad and reject everything he revealed to them about

their lives as a product of that madness Perhaps its time to admit what the need for Hope really signifies Denial of responsibility for certain situations under the assumption that knowing them correctly would lead to despair Raising that specter is of course the rhetorical ploy invoked to prematurely terminate inquiry lest it impinge on

emotional and psychological needs Despair thus remains an empty concept We dont know what it is and never will as long as we use the need for hope to prevent discovery of our capacities to endure Whether despair is what we will find on the other side of hope is something we cant know For all hope really signifies is a testament to our weakness and our fears Perhaps we are called to something beyond it What Shakespeare called tragic

readiness For in opening ourselves to the possibility of despair we also open ourselves to the possibility of self-overcoming and through it the discovery of a praxis that lies on the other side of the conceptual and existential paralyses created by the guarantees We cant know what is to be done as long as we continue to respond to our situation by invoking ahistorical values and guarantees that are grounded in an essentialistic and ahistorical theory of human nature

PlanThe United States federal government should substantially curtail its domestic surveillance by ceasing all domestic surveillance

Contention 2 is FramingAn ethics of existence forecloses the tragic struggle in which we never confront our inner trauma- only our affirmative can open new ways of relating to ourselves that can overcome these limitations- the 1AC is a precondition for any meaning to our livesDavis 2006 Walter ADavis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg238-240)

In her critique of Kantian ethics Alenka Zupancic often refers to the Lacanian idea that there is a loss deeper than ones life The loss of ones reason for living The apostle of duty offers a heroic example of how one escapes the threat of that loss What Im suggesting here is that ethics actually begins on the other side of it With the possibility that first exists when one discovers that one has already lost or violated or fatally compromised ones reason for living because the values one thinks one honors and the actual truth of ones life are thoroughly at odds The traumatic event that brings one to this recognition is the origin of ethics This is the ethical task it establishes to see if one can pay the price for having violated oneself by assuming the full burden of the situation one has thereby createdThe ethical situation accordingly confronts the subject with the necessity to choose to be in a radically new way or die inside Nothing less is demanded than a totally new way of relating to oneself for the guilt one experiences in such a situation is existentializing One is guilty toward oneself for having failed to honor the duties that one bears to oneself for having so thoroughly lied to oneself about ones life As Hamlet learns it is through that recognition that one first discovers that one has tragic responsibilities toward oneself that can no longer be evaded because one with this situation is the even deeper discovery that there are failures that can be irreversible That is the possibility defining the situation one is now in What one does will reveal the truth of who one is Guilt toward oneself has overtaken all possibilities of displacement and denial Fail now and one dies within Most people will of course do just about anything to avoid guilt or to get cleansed of it as quickly as possible That is why so many fail the test when it comes to them shrinking inside rather than expanding to the demands of our innermost possibility the one defining our humanity An ethics of existence begins with the traumatic experience in which everything weve tried to escape about ourselves catches up with us One then knows that ones prior life has been a flight And all ones brave ideas and bright ethical claims airy nothingmdashthe indulgence in comforting and self-alienating lies But now one

is finally like Hamlet in the situation from which there is no exit An ethics grounded in the possibility of freedom depends on the actions one performs within oneself when one finds oneself in a crisis that can no longer be denied This is precisely the kind of situation Kant is unable to consider which is why he constructs in Duty the principle of choice that renders it impossible In serving Duty one is delivered from the repressed thought that now can never arise that ones whole life and all its choices especially the ethical ones may be no more than a flight from things in oneself that one flees because one fears that if one is ever forced to face oneself one will suffer a destruction worse than death Destruction within An existentializing ethic begins on the other side of all the things we do to delay that event For it is when the thing one fears happens that one first discovers the truth of ones life the depth of ones inauthenticity The trauma that will measure ones humanity has arrived Nothing else now exists but the lonely struggle of the psyche with itself Suicide (including the primary form of suicide inner death) is one term of that situation Ethics is the other An ethics of existence is what one does when one finally finds oneself in the traumatic situation that brings one before oneself There is one lesson in this a lesson that probably cant be learned Rather than running from the trauma we should plunge toward it since it is only through it that we can discover both the truth about ourselves and what we are able to do in the face of that truth To activate that possibility all thats needed perhaps is to drown out the noise and chatter one keeps running in ones head Perhaps the truth is that the truth about ourselves is not deeply repressed and unknown Its closer than we think available to introspection if we but dared But thats what makes the kind of impassioned reflection Hamlet engages in so terrifying It exemplifies everything we know and dont want to know about ourselves18 Here is an attempt to offer an image that describes in depth the existential-psychoanalytic condition from which the possibility of ethics derives In George Orwells 1984 Winston Smith when tortured with the thing he most fears betrays the thing he loves To save his life he sacrifices what gives it meaning He capitulates before an inner torment that reduces the psyche to a condition of catastrophic anxiety (The image of the cage of rats placed over the head they will raven externalizes in a perfect objective correlative the terror that has the power to dissolve the psyche What is a phobia after all but an inner condition displaced into an external fear) What I want to suggest here is that Winston Smiths phobia describes the inner condition that defines any subject traumatized by itself Such a subject lives tortured by the struggle not to betray the thing one loves the thing that could give ones life meaning But one saves it only if one is willing to sacrifice everything to the

acceptance of the suffering and inner torment that service to it entails This is the ethical act whereby a subject attains tragic agency Becoming an existentially autonomous agent is the process of engaging the disorders of ones psyche in the effort of active reversal The wish to escape that effort to soften it or to insist that suffering must always have a happy resolution is the voice of self-betrayal If one gives in to it one loses with Winston the thing one has finally found the thing one can love more than ones life but only by suffering all that it demands That thing more precious than life is the tragic struggle that gives life perhaps the only meaning it can have

The ethic of the aff is key - only an ethical act that confronts our inner trauma with a constant and inner openness can we create the conditions for self-overcoming necessary to open ourselves to a meaningful existence - the only ethical choice is to fully confront contingencyDavis 2006 Walter A Davis professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg235-238

What follows attempts to distill the ethic of existence in to its fundamental principles I also try here to present those thesis in a way that will engage the readers psyche and emotions at precisely the place within us where each of us makes a basic decision about ourselves Thats the only self that matters The others are selfreifying defenses The argument thus constitutes both an appeal to the readers freedom and an attempt to impinge on that freedom to bring each reader before him or herself by challenging defenses with the power that some ideas have to light a fire in the soul (1) We concur with Kant that if a choice is not free its not moral The possibility of freedom depends however on an in-depth analysis of ones psyche Such an analysis leads from the destruction of ego identity to the need to bring about a complete reversal in ones relationship to oneself by deracinating the voice of the other Thinking is ethical insofar as it engages one thing the battle of a subject with itself over the meaning of its being (2) There is no way to abridge that process nor to provide guarantees that will secure a safe outcome To sustain the psychoanalytic turn the psyche must continually throw itself into question and root out the emotions that bind it to a pattern of lies An ethic of the existential subject depends on maximizing what Keats termed negative capability the ability to be in uncertainties Mysteries doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason Rather than resolving doubts the purpose of thought and action is to deepen them An act is ethical insofar as it deepens the conflict of the subject with itself (3) One acts ethically only when all symbolic and ideological supports have collapsed Only then can one take on responsibility for oneself because only then is one at issue and at risk The ethical act must radically open itself to contingency in a situation where one must create values yet where those values can derive from nothing but the depth of ones engagement in the situation By the same token such values cannot be a final solution but must open themselves to later contingencies Ethics must always allow itself to be measured by contingency because contingency is precisely what calls up ethical responsibility The primary ethical situation is not one where there is a clear course of duty but where a subject trembles before its responsibility to create new values in a situation that reduces received values to rubble (4) Ethics begins when there is a genuine crisis of values even perhaps the need for a re-valuation of all values For Kant there was not nor could there be such a crisis The values were known immutable and generally agreed upon The only question was what kind of principle they would be grounded in which meant for Kant and the Aufklarung how could they be grounded in Reason For us in contrast the primary fact is a historicity that bites into the very possibility of the ethical Every ethical value must be willing to historicize itself That recognition entails the following considerations The desert grows Under the guise of fundamentalist crusades herd moralities dominate The extent of inhumanity is appalling So many values that once seemed so solid have been so thoroughly debunked The possibility of ethics now begins with a systematic exposure of all superego pathologies all the ethical ideologies that societies use to introduce a fundamental passivity into subjects while convincing those same subjects that they are good in a goodness that depends on willed ignorance An existential ethic is radically destructive of received beliefs radically disruptive of the desires of the normal subject Refusing and exposing all Symbolic supports it seeks in the struggle of the psyche with its disorders the source of value (5) Ethics is a matter of extremity It begins in the most extreme actmdashthe act of radical individuation in which one opens ones psyche to an interrogation that must be sustained in its extremity Ethics is about a choice in which a subject risks the value and meaning of its existence not about those choices that assure it of that meaning Moreover it is only when one does this that one experiences for the first time the

terror implicit in the oft-quoted Sartrean statement existence precedes essence (6) Ethics must engage and derive from the dread that defines choice Let me illustrate this proposition by contrasting Hamlets choice with the situation in Styrons Sophies Choice The horrifying choice Sophie facesmdashto choose which of her children will be sent to the gas chambermdashis a forced choice and thus extreme and exceptional in a way that deprives it of the possibility of being normative17 Hamlets choice in contrast is a free one that issues from nothing but his freedom and the readiness with which he accepts the selftorture that existence entails Sophie is tortured from without by the madness of the other and the inhuman logic that madness requires in order to know itself (Styron calls the officer who forces the choice on Sophie a genius of the Reich) Hamlet is tortured from within by the logic of self-criticism and self-overcoming that informs the existentializing process We are fortunate if we never face a situation like Sophies nor suffer the death-in-life that is the result of such choices But insofar as we have a psyche Hamlets situation is the general one that defines us Or to put it in properly ethical terms engaging the kind of situation he faces is the act that activates the inherent possibility that defines us The choice that founds such an ethic must therefore be distinguished both from the a priori choice made by the apostle of duty and Sophies forced choice All three refer to extreme choices and situations In only one however is guilt toward oneself both the origin of the choice and its result That is only one of the three choices is the ground of its own possibility and thereby the source of an existentialization that issues in values bound to the tragic contingencies of our situatedness

2AC

A2 ndash Realism

We control the internal link to their impacts The psychoanalysis of the affirmative forces an internal investigation of the ways in which the subjectrsquos subconscious desires rationalize what we would consider self-interest This means that we can only make sense of realism through a lens of psychoanalysis Sucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 17-18)

The psychological turn that international relations took with the rise of behavioralism in the 1960s has begun to expand beyond focusing on cognitionmdashhow individuals thinkmdashto a wider appreciation of the role of emotional determinants of action one of many factors that were long dismissed as unscientific Part of the reason for this hesitant courtship is no doubt the long strides that international relations theory has taken toward refining its investigative lenses such that less easily observable phenomena can be more confidently incorporated into the solid theoretical infrastructure that the discipline has now adopted A central example of this evolution is the analytical watershed inaugurated by neorealism which fashioned a conceptual playing field where little had existed before Neorealism a theoretical school that views international relations as taking place within an anarchical state system with no overarching authority in turn spawned the constructivist turn in international relationsmdashthe approach that stresses the importance of social identity in determining international outcomesmdashand subsequent counterarguments that built on yet other social and psychological preceptsmdash all of which agree that there is such a thing as an international systemmdashthough they understand the effects of anarchy differently Introducing psychoanalysis to international relations can therefore be seen as the next logical step for a relatively young discipline that seeks to understand why political actors behave the way they do While all psychoanalysts draw on Freuds unique contribution subsequent approaches have altered many of his assumptions This trend has kept pace with the embracing of new epistemological and ontological perspectives by other scientific and social scientific fields such as the quantum revolution in physics -a paradigm shift that has since influenced other disciplines The form of psychoanalytic theory that I use here is the contemporary relational strand one that analysts have alternately termed relational-model theorizing a dyadic systems perspective and intersubjectivity theory This approach shares an ontology basic to constructivism in international relations the psychology (identity) of the person (state) is not hard-wired into the unit but develops in part from the actions of other actors in the social environment (the family the therapeutic setting the international system) and in part through the shared assumptions that permeate that system As an approach centered on the individual mind contemporary psychoanalysis takes into account the broader social context within which actors act Psychoanalysis also provides a coherent theory of behavior incorporating three elements that have mostly been invisible in international relations theory but that provide a fuller understanding of how states and nonstate actors interact emotion the unconscious and the possibility for actors own cognitive and emotional insight to be a source of behavior change In drawing on these principles perhaps the most significant contribution that psychoanalysis can make to international relations is in improving on prevailing theories of identity which in turn illuminate questions about international action Within international relations constructivism has been criticized for neglecting the question of how identity is in fact created Cognitive psychologymdashwhich international relations has begun to draw on liberallymdashin part helps to fill this gap Yet with its assumption that the emotional legacy of early interpersonal relationships is essential in shaping personality and subsequent behavior psychoanalysis offers a more comprehensive model of identity creation than those put forth by cognitive theorists Recognizing these explanatory benefits contructivists have recently called for exploring the potential that psychoanalysis holds for understanding international politics Thus unlike the prevailing psychoanalytic approaches in international relationsmdashnamely psychohistories of individual leaders and the focus-group potential of micro-level conflict resolution the psychoanalytic approach I use here is meant to coexist happily alongside other streams of systemic theory in international relations

Forcing the state away from what it considers a core tenet of national defense in the exact opposite way it desires creates the conditions necessary for reflection of the efficacy of the initial policies of surveillance which changes future policySucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 32-)

Like most individuals states possess a complex arsenal of motivations that are not all palatable to the politys sense of self mdashnot least of which is due to the discrepant voices vying for influence in any society Yet the dominant self mdashthat overarching group ethos that does not necessarily reflect each single (sub)voicemdashimplicitly prescribes a set of normatively acceptable behaviors Should a state adopt a policy course that contradicts the states role-identity we can expect some sort of cognitive dissonance to arise leading to a radical realignment between actions and identity Just as a man who once struck his wife might offer the apologetic plea that I dont know what got into me it is up to the analyst to help the subject come to terms with the aggression that has evidently been very much inside of him all along The policy shift therefore results from the force of the role-identity prodding the self back into behavioral consistency However acting in contradiction to ones role-identity does not necessarily result in a behavior shift The dissonance between role-identity and behavior must be both unbearable and experienced at an emotional level in order for such a shift to result If the dissonance remained at a cognitive level it is likely that the subject would employ one of a number of cognitive biases in order to rationalize the discrepancy42 The dredging up of the unconscious counternarrative assures that the dissonance is experienced deeply enough to result in the taking of radical action to realign actions with identity 43 This hypothesis of cognitive-emotional realization is grounded in the clinical findings of psychoanalytic theory that suggest that under certain conditions actors may become consciously aware of previously unconscious processes44 The classic understanding of cognitive dissonancemdashas articulated by Leon Festingermdashis that inconsistency between behavior and belief results in psychological discomfort that leads to activity oriented toward dissonance reduction just as hunger leads to activity oriented toward hunger reduction45 In line with psychoanalysis the actual cognitive-emotional realization brings to light what had previously been stored in the unconscious areas of the states subjective world In actuality the assumption here is that the role-challenging behavior (paired with domestic challenges) causes elites to reflect on the states role- identity Moreover my use of cognitive-emotional realization imbues the concept with a distinctively emotional component as well Whereas pure cognitive dissonance refers to the challenging of an individuals worldview (ie the revelation of new facts)46 I am introducing the more ontologically powerful notion of challenges to the self47 When this behavior undermines the very legitimacy buttressing the states raison detat the dissonance is particularly acute Catalysts for Realization Once decision-makers come to realize that the states foreign-policy actions have contradicted the states role-identity a policy shift may result The important question that remains is what contributes to this realization Numerous sources may act as the mirror necessary for the state to reflect on its behavior For clarity I have divided them into three categories domestic elements (including the military the peace movement revisionist historians artists and the domestic media) other states (including allies and adversaries as well as those states news media) and international structures (including international organizations norms and regimes) Domestic Elements The Military If the military acts in a way that the populace sees as contradicting the states self-image (even if the military is merely carrying out governmental policies) society can experience a corresponding cognitive

dissonance In a democracy the military takes its directives from the government however military culture is instrumental in shaping the broader strategic culture encompassing foreign-policy decisions mdashand role-identitymdashmore generally Most of the time the relationship between the civilian and military spheres resembles a symbiosis commands are given by civilians and implemented by the military which in turn will advise and reshape subsequent policies In some cases ex-military personnel will pursue a career in government on being discharged However it is possible for the military to experience a sense of dissonance between a particular policy and its overall defense doctrine or ethic Soldiers might articulate discomfort in carrying out a particular mission or the number of conscientious objectors may rise In a country in which conscientious objection is previously unheard of the founding of such a movement will therefore signal an even higher degree of dissonance between behavior and institutional role-identity In examining foreign-policy shifts the role of the military is crucial in representing the degree of concordance between national role-identity and foreign policy In states where the military has particular salience for establishing national identitymdashthose states with mandatory and universal conscription for instancemdashthat institution will be particularly salient

Their dependence on pragmatism to justify unrealistic internal link chains and counter psychological methods creates the worst type of moral tunnel vision in which we become incapable of understanding the carnage of our ideology ndash this makes ethics impossibleDavis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg47-48)

But its always a good idea when seeking an explanation of the human motives behind actions to stick with the empirical With stated intentions and official rationales Otherwise we give ourselves over to psychobabble Despite official denial by the Department of Defense that DU is harmful a series of explanations are now in place to account for the development and use of DU weapons DU is cost-effective militarily efficient and turns to productive use a waste product wed otherwise have to dispose of at great cost In a variety of ways for the past two days We who leave here in sorrow know that we will one day be reunited with her in joy My concern here is not with the ontological status of this preposterous belief but with its psychological function as a guarantee that offers human beings a way to deprive death of its finality And the terror that prospect entails The function of guarantees is to enable human beings to bear events and contingencies that would otherwise be too traumatic There is much that we can face apparently only by denying Such perhaps is one accurate estimation of what it means lo be a human being to remain a child of ones needs and desires disguising that fact in the form of beliefs and ideas The primary purpose of religion philosophy and culture has been to provide conceptual psychological and emotional guarantees so I hat traumatic events become part of a larger framework that assures the realization of our hopes and dreams Without such supports most people supposedly would find life unlivable Through the ministry of the guarantees we banish those thoughts and feelings that we are convinced would deprive life of meaning plunging us into despair Experience accordingly becomes the movement from and to the affirmation of the guarantees through their imposition on events The main line of Western philosophy can most profitably be seen as I series of efforts to provide a ground for the guarantees That effort achieves one of its culminations in Hegel who defined the purpose of philosophy as the elimination of the contingent As father of the philosophy of history he offered that new discipline a single goal to demonstrate that the rational is real and the real rational that history is the story of progress liberty the realization of a universal humanity Or to put it in vulgar terms democracy and civilization are on the march and will soon sweep the entire Middle East In order to triumph over the contingencies of existencemdashdoubt about oneself ones place in the world and ones final endmdashmany guarantees are needed Moreover they must form a system of reinforcing beliefs such that if one guarantee is threatened other guarantees come in to fill the breach Thereby the function of the system as a whole is assured Within the system of guarantees one guarantee however is superordinate The belief that human nature is basically good As animal rationale we are endowed with an ahistorical essence that cannot be lost Evil is an aberration Consequently I heres always reason for hope and the belief that no matter how bad things get well always find a way to recover everything that I lie guarantees assure Psyche Its all a matter of pragmatic efficiency with a little capitalist profit motive thrown in for good measure Theres only one thing wrong with this explanation It leaves out the basis for the calculus Theres every reason to use DU and no reason not to use it if and only if one rationale informs all decisions How to maximize death regardless of consequences or alternatives Introduce any countervailing motives and the entire chain of decisions becomes questionable Conscious stated intentions then reveal themselves as functions of something else that

has been conveniently rendered unconscious What looks like a purely pragmatic matter devoid of psychological motives now reveals the opposite the fact that Thanatos so inhabits the system that the absence of anything opposed to it goes without saying Thanatos has become what Wittgenstein called a form of life7 a way of being so deeply rooted that it operates automatically habitually and of necessity It has become a collective unconscious And as such it is no longer accessible to those whose intentions conceal and reveal it The reason for sticking with the empirical is now clear There is something insane in the empirical That is what the historian must uncover Before we ask ourselves how this situation came to pass we need to ask another question For its easy to claim we dont know about such things because the media refuses to tell us about them Theres another reason for our ignorance however and its the one we need to confront I refer to the possibility that we choose our ignorance because otherwise wed lose the system of guarantees we depend on for our identity and our understanding of history As Barbara Bush put it in telling Diane Sawyer why she doesnt watch the news Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many what day its gonna happen and how many this or what do you suppose Or I mean its its not relevant So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that8 It would be easy to deride Mrs Bush to congratulate oneself on not sharing her attitude What I hope to show however is that on an essential level one determinative in the last instance we are in full agreement with her and delude ourselves as long as we think otherwise

IR SPECIFIC ndash The method of the affirmative best supplements our understanding of international relations by including elements that are absent in normal policy examinations of international relations Sucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 18-20)

It has long been argued that even within the confines of rational-choice approaches the nature of a decision-makers preferences cannot be assumed a priori and indeed their distinctiveness derives from factors ranging from emotions to personality to the selective use of historical analogies Emotion in short can be considered the sine qua non of social life a realization that has recently begun to permeate international relations theory Moreover the concept of the unconscious that anchors psychoanalysis can illuminate the question of why an individual experiences a sense of dissonance when her actions do not conform to her identity the mechanism by which the dissonance between action and identity can become unbearable and therefore why humans experience the need to match the two The unconscious is that aspect of the self that remains the most untapped yet potentially the most satisfying determinant of action coming as it does early in the causal chain At its most basic the unconscious is simply the repository for those characteristics that an actor fears adopting in other words action fantasies that the actor despises but can plausibly entertain This fundamental tension between the feared and the imaginable is what normally keeps these fantasies in check and is what makes the unconscious so potentially powerful as an explanatory tool And while the unconscious is an admittedly contested concept scholars from various fields have issued tentative calls for its exploration and convincing deductive and empirical research certainly justify its consideration One theoretical perspective that has been criticized for ignoring the unconscious is sociologys symbolic interactionism an approach that underpins constructivism in international relations Part of the reason for the tension between sociology including symbolic interactionism and psychoanalysis arguably lies in an antiquated understanding of psychology the false belief that to employ psychology as an explanatory approach one must ignore the impact that ones social environment has on ones personality self-image and behavior However contemporary psychoanalysis presents a view of the self that is more relational than what Freudian drive theory had suggested A psychoanalytic approach does not have to assume that unconscious or otherwise emotional factors arise from the actor independent of the shared understandings that define the social environment Admitting an explanatory role for the unconscious therefore does not imply a rejection of intersubjectivity mutual-constitution or any of the other organizing principles of sociology and constructivism Rather it simply means that ideas held in the unconscious serve as one filter through which actors interpret social interaction The unconscious therefore may be understood either as one element of agency that the actor brings to interpreting his social script or as itself the product of social forces that interpret and constrain action The first perspective assumes that agency does not have to be conscious to be meaningful agency at its most basic can simply imply action and intentionality can therefore encompass an unconscious component The second view means that the unconscious does not have to be understood as a pre-wired component of the unit that in turn shapes behavior rather it can be viewed as an emergent and mediating phenomenon We can therefore understand cognition as being inherently situated within social processes This is consistent with a relational view of social life and yet it is an important theoretical addition to the prevailing wisdom in international relations about how social understandings

ultimately shape behavior A final contribution that psychoanalysis can make to our understanding of international relationsmdashand conflict resolution in particularmdashis its assumption that entrenched behavior patterns can be altered through cognitive and emotional insight In addition to challenging the static conception of human nature that underpinned classical realism (arguably the first theory of international relations) and that provided a rather pessimistic view of human affairs this assumption is a valuable addition to any theory of international relations in which the prevailing theories of actionmdashmaterial power in the case of states polarity in the case of state systemsmdashare difficult if not impossible to manipulate As a result many of the most prominent international relations theories have lacked meaningful policy implications Conversely psychoanalytic theory suggests tools for ameliorating some of the most pressing global problems including protracted conflict and war While some psychoanalytically based conflict-resolution approaches use the focus-group format to simulate the healing function of the therapy setting this book demonstrates that the gaining of conscious insight into ones role deviationmdasha prerequisite for policy changemdashcan come about through real-life international interaction that requires neither a skilled conflict practitioner nor the willingness of elites to participate in such an exercise Rather under certain conditions role conflict can prompt domestic and international elements to hold a mirror to the face of elites resulting in a collective cognitive dissonance that can lead to policy change This mirror can take a number of formsmdashacts of protest by domestic groups media coverage and actions by allies adversaries or international structures These sources will be discussed further

IR SPECIFIC ndash What their internal links consider to be ldquoself-interestrdquo for a state doesnrsquot actually exist States are not sentient Instead they are composed by a collection of minds that act in self-interest which means that psychoanalytic evaluation of the self is a prior question to understanding the interests of the state Sucharov 2005 (Mira M assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University ldquoThe International Self Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peacerdquo pg 21-22)

Rather than referring to a notion of collective selfhood that is shared by multiple states- as some constructivist theorists of collective identity would maintainmdashthe title of this book the international self is meant to suggest not only that each state possesses a distinctive identity but that this identity develops out of the states relationship with other international actors This concept also implies that decisions emanating from the polity are derived from a process not simply the sum of the states parts Yet while we have already shown that psychoanalysis can accommodate a role for environmental processes in shaping behavior we still need to be aware of the risks of anthropomorphizing the state a practice that gets to the heart of the debate between two analytical positions that cut across the social sciences methodological individualism and holism While methodological individualism views social life as the product of actions taken by individuals holism understands the group to be a meaningful unit in and of itself Yet to an extent the debate between the two perspectives is already fixed While the holists have in their favor a precedent of semantic habitmdash we tend to anthropomorphize the state in everyday speech more often than not (eg Washington decided to wage war against al-Qaeda)mdashmethodological individualism is allied with the rich literature of rational choice and more prosaically the commonsense discomfort that arises when we ascribe human characteristics to things including groups Groups do not have minds any more than do other social facts and group behavior is after all the product of individuals acting on the groups behalf Finally given the presence of disparate individuals and subgroups constituting any society it can be misleading to attribute a single group consciousness to a political entity In a foreign-policy context accordingly adherents of this view would focus on elite attitudes bureaucratic politics andor interest group activities to tease out the causal relationship between Intentions and outcomes Yet a strong case can be made for the emergent properties of states and their policy processes something happens between the point at which citizens articulate preferences and those preferences are translated into policies Insofar as elite decisions do not always reflect the opinion of the majority there remains some degree of independent agency that may very well accrue to the state as a whole Under this reasoning it would be plausible to assert the existence of an overarching group self as Alexander Wendt does when he claims that states are people too In addition to the views of significant strands of psychoanalytic thought (which would not necessarily be expected to assume that units other than the individual can be psychoanalyzed) the idea of a group self enjoys far-reaching support across the social sciencesmdashinternational relations included This includes neorealisms assumption that the state is a unitary actor the Collective self hood implied by social identity theory the concept of political culture early psychoanalytic assumptions about the group as well as studies on obedience group-think and the crowd phenomenon There is a reason why scholars are drawn to the group as a unit of analysismdashwitness anthropologists concern with tribes and civilizations sociologists focus on street gangs and societies and political scientists emphasis on states and

transnational actors Group behavior and individual behavior are not necessarily identical Nor can an individual be expected to behave the same way in the context of a group as he or she would alone Moreover constructivism goes so far as to assume the possibility of shared norms across states a claim that has enjoyed much empirical support during the first active decade of constructivist research It is much more defensible to argue the existence of a collective identity within a state the boundaries of which contain degrees of centralized media language and other discursive channels for cultural dissemination and which prescribe the roles that the groups members are expected to perform within the context of that group And if different subgroups within the state disseminate disparate narratives we can assume that the most dominant group within society (as defined by some combination of ethnicity class or gender) has custody over a single consequential dominant narrative Finally even if we choose to ascribe a states national ethos to its elites we need to remember that state leaders are the product of the society in which they were reared This view would effectively mitigate the tension between elite- and mass-level phenomena in international relations since both elites and masses are socialized by the overarching structure of the collective

A2 ndash DisadvantagesThe internal linkrsquos dependence on rationality only serves to protect us from the unknown that the future holds This ultimately reduces all forms of knowledge to something that can be calculated which ensures violence The only way to reverse this trend is to force a confrontation with tragedy and the unknownDavis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg51-52)

Emotional The innermost need of human beings is to feel good about themselves Whatever threatens that feeling must be exorcised Health normalcy and productivity depend on avoiding negative feelings Hope and optimism arent just healthy attitudes they are requirements of our nature Biologically wired We cannot remain for long in trauma Recovery moreover must restore our faith in the guarantees and our hopes for the future The need for hope is In fact the capstone of the entire system of guarantees Yet it too apparently has a history Today over 10 million of our children are on prescription drugs to prevent depression and anxiety Informed of this fact by Bill Maher the French actress Julie Delphy spoke the spontaneous wisdom of an archaic culture Dont they know that depression is a good thing that its something you have to go through in order to grow Not anymoreThe key to understanding the power of the guarantees is to understand the fears that they exorcise Thanks to religion death suffering and evil are deprived of their power Through the attainment of reason all other forms of consciousness and what they might reveal are put in their place Poetic knowing is deprived both of its legitimacy and its terror Science as fulfillment of reason assures us of domination over nature What Heidegger termed technoscientific rationality becomes the measure of what is real Belief in historical progress banishes the recurrent suspicion that history may lack direction or even worse move to the darkest of ends The condition is thereby set that makes it impossible for us to experience traumatic events such as 9-11 except as occasions to take whatever actions are needed to reaffirm our goodness and restore our guarantees It is in the personal order however that the guarantees do their deepest work Psychologically belief in the self or self-identity exorcises the most frightening contingency that there is a void at the center of the American psyche with panic anxiety and its corollary compulsive consumption the expression of a desperate non-identity That specter brings us before the greatest fear that our psyche not our conscious deliberative intentions is the author of our actions an author who will do anything in order to feel safe secure and righteous All of our emotional needs then stand forth under the rule of a single necessity the need to feel good about oneself at whatever cost and to sustain hope by banishing anything that would trouble us Resolution catharsis (ie the discharge of painful tensions or awareness) and renewal emerge as the needs that bind us with an iron necessity to the guarantees and all that they make it impossible for us to know It is easy to deprecate Dubya and apparently to hold onto the idea that hes a temporary aberration But the problem goes deeper To revive a battle cry from the 1960s insofar as one is wedded to any one of the guarantees one is part of the problem and not the solution For the grandest function of the system of guarantees as a whole and in each one of its parts is to blind us to historyAnd so to take up again the question stated previously how did the situation now being created in Iraq come about The next three sections constitute an attempt to answer that question by constructing for America a repressed history

The negative is attempting to apply reason to ethics and psychology This only creates a hard understanding of our inner psyche which is a loss of the self that outweighs every other impact Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg174-175)

This recognition implies a primary question What is the nature and extent of the ethical responsibility human beings have for such a condition To what extent can evil and the actions that flow from it be said to be chosen in the exercise of a freedom for which one bears ethical responsibility Traditionally ethical responsibility only applies to actions that are taken after deliberation and with full knowledge of the consequences actions where choice is a function of our ability to reason where the moral law is known and where one chooses to violate it for motives that can be specified as functions of a self- interest that overrides all other motives and considerations Mitigate any of these factors and one mitigates ethical responsibility Ethical responsibility is compromised or eliminated for example if ones action is determined by forces outside ones control if one acts without premeditation under duress in blind obedience to customs or authorities as the result of a pathology because of some limitation in the ability to think or to understand the consequences of ones action or because one acted without any conscious intention to do wrong However deplorable their deeds the mad for example are not evil Evil requires consciousness choice freedom If evil is to be a human possibility on a par with the possibility of goodness it must be something that is determined within the order of freedom The trouble with the traditional understanding of these conditions however is the effort to confine them within the limits of rationalism and a purely cognitive model of the mind Rationality is noble but single-minded devotion to it leaves the true life of the psyche undetected Focusing on it prematurely shifts discussion to a rarefied mode of mentation that is then cut off from the rest of the personality To sustain and deny that split reason is then given disproportionate weight in determining what we are and do But the dream of reason is precisely that A dream a desiremdashto bring ones being into correspondence with reason and thereby eliminate everything else especially in determining the questions of ethics No one brought this dream to bear on moral experience more rigorously than Immanuel Kant That effort is the sublime beauty of his thought But experiencing oneself in terms of a priori rationality comes at a terrible cost Life becomes a process in which we sleepwalk our way through most of what we do because weve cut ourselves off from the actual bases of our actions Our psyche becomes a stranger to us We fixate on giving rational accounts of ourselves and in the process alienate ourselves from everything else Emotions become irrationalities breaks with reason things we must overcome or worse things we can only acknowledge when they are good proper and in tune with reason The rest of our being becomes brute inclinations frailties of our nature desires that disrupt an otherwise rational identity As a result in terms of ethics whether we know it or not under the guise of reason weve made an offer that most human beings cannot refuse Claiming not to consciously intend what one does has become the grand excuse Traditional definitions of the three cardinal categories of ethics are a monument to that motive Restricting intention motive and choice to the canons of rationality fashions them to the designs of human mendacity For if by intention we mean a deliberate rational choice with full knowledge of the consequences evil as Ive described it is not chosen If along the same lines we restrict motive lo purposes for which we bear responsibility because they issue not from frailties of our nature or the force of circumstances but from an explicit knowledge of what one is doing and why evil as thus far described does not exist within the order of human motivation One can identify self-interest careerism and happiness as motives but to say that many agents act in order to advance Thanatos is hard to fathom Unless that is we expand the category of motive to include purposes that derive from the psyche in all its inherent conflictedness But once posit such a possibility choice becomes a concept that must be rethought in a radically new way

Their internal links are symptoms of the fantasy that we strive to maintain This logic becomes used to justify atrocity The affirmativersquos rejection of attempting to control the future allows alternate practices to emerge Vote affirmative to traverse the fantasy of their internal link chains Even if you donrsquot think we can solve the 1AC is a more productive through experiment than their disad Davis 2006(Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg63-65)

Is there anything more evil than shooting children in a school yard or flying planes into buildings One hears this rhetorical question often today Getting it firmly implanted in our minds seems to be one of the current ideological functions of the media A correct response requires careful reflection on the circumstance that underlies the knee-jerk response thanks to the power of the image it conjures up The promise inherent in Technoscientificrationality is deliverance from images Killing for it like everything else occurs at a distance In the inaugural moment Tibbets in the cockpit of the Enola Gay unable to imagine what he has just done as a human act It was all impersonal12 And today in the silent secret midnight ways that radiation poisoning works from within like a deed without a doer separated in space and time from its absent cause Perhaps killing at a distance is the greater evil precisely because it abrogates the image and the human connection between slayer and slain If I kill another man with my bare hands my deed is immediate to my embodied consciousness To kill that way you have to feel hate fear anguish remorse etc whereas to kill from a distance or through an invisible contamination is to render the whole thing impersonal With the desired result the ability for example of the man who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima incinerating 600000 people in a second and condemning another 300000 to the condition of hibakusha the walking dead to boast for over 59 years now that he has never felt a moment of regret or remorse Tibbets lack of moral imagination is one with his representative status as precursor For now its easy to litter a landscape with DU while denying that the stuff has any long-term medical or environmental effects13 The evil of killing at a distance is that it makes death unreal Protected from the image all who participate in the deed are delivered over to a pure and impersonal calculus (An aside if we really want to support our troops we must achieve for them a new Bill of Rights No one should ever be ordered to use weapons without being given a full knowledge of the long-term human and environmental consequences of those weapons To do otherwise is to deprive our soldiers of the choice that makes them human) The powers that be learned one lesson from Vietnam No more images The mistake was to let us see the carnage up close every night on TV The news as image entered our consciousness at the register where genuine change begins Where horror is felt free of the tyranny of the concept and the hypnotic power of the guarantees Desert Storm was the corrective the Nintendo war a war broadcast to look just like one of the video games wed been programmed to love Prohibition of the image is now a fundamental article of faith No images are allowed to come back to us from Iraq II (Michael Moores real crime was to give us a brief glimpse at what the mainstream media proscribe) Abolition of the image is one of the primary conditions of ecocide Everything must be rendered abstract invisible unreal No image can be allowed to trouble our sleep to lacerate our soul For then we might begin to know that there is indeed an evil far worse than shooting children in schoolyards or flying airplanes into buildings To move us toward that knowledge let me end with the forbidden which I must here attempt to convey solely through the more abstract medium of words since Ive not yet gained permission to reproduce a photograph I saw not long ago Its the picture of an Iraqi baby a victim of DU who was born with no nose mouth eyes

anus or genitals and with flipper limbs a common result of radiation exposure in utero That childs body full of red open ulcers is twisted in knots its ulcerated face contorted in a look of unspeakable suffering An authentic image of the sacredness of human life Of the preciousness of every breath To look at that child is to realize ones duty to mourn it to give voice to its right to invade Our consciousness and expose the evil of those who prate on about being pro-life while refusing to let us see what theyve reduced life to Luke 171-2 The image of that child must become the force in our minds that motivates us to deracinate all guarantees that shield us from the reality of that childs situation Or to put it another way every time one demands catharsis resolution and renewal that child is born again condemned to its writhing That is why its image must embolden us to question the most hallowed of the guarantees the one Ive refrained from discussing until now In the face of such evil what is to be done Is resistance ever justified in resorting to violence No we are told because if we do so we become just like them This ethical principle supposedly applies universally and atemporally It does so however because it assures t he guarantee that no matter what happens well never get our hands dirty History cant intrude on the categorical imperative Whatever action one takes one must maintain ones ethical purity Even if that means there is nothing one can do and after its been demonstrated I hat there are no non-violent ways to change the situation Perhaps we can no longer allow ourselves the luxury of such an ethic Bush did the moral imagination one favor His pre-emptive unilateralism made official what has been clear for so long but denied due to its implications There is no body to which we can turn for Justice not the UN the World Court or any other framework of international law The US will flaunt its contempt for such bodies whenever it suits its purpose And thus another mode of peaceful non-violent praxis is deprived of its guarantee

A2 ndash CounterplansTheir counterplan still attempts to maintain some type of guarantee for the future Their obsession with security and the future fail to force a confrontation with the trauma of the unknown - this means that only the aff can solve Anything else results in a return to the ideology of security Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg38-39)

But to undertake that task we must purge ourselves of the thing in ourselves that stands in the way I have termed it the guarantees By that term I refer to all those assurances we set up a priori to protect ourselves from the reality of historical trauma The significance of eventsmdashthe Shoah Hiroshima 9-11mdash is their power to call such guarantees into question by exposing cherished beliefs to the claims of darker views and by forcing us to think in radically new ways considering things about the human being that weve persistently denied or marginalized One dimension of any traumatic event is the shock it brings to traditional ways of thinking Thats why the dominant response to any historical trauma is the attempt to restore the guarantees by finding a way t o impose them on the event in order to contain and interpret it The ideological function of the guarantee is thereby demonstrated A way has been found to limit the impact of the event by picturing it as an aberration a temporary departure from values and beliefs that can always be recovered because they constitute something essentialistic or universal about human nature Something trans-historical History may disrupt our essence but it cannot destroy it The concept of human naturemdashin all t h e variants constituting the philosophic and psychological history of that idea from Plato and Aristotle through American self psychologymdashis the primary way in which we endeavor to deny history An event is traumatic precisely because it suggests that history occurs beyond the limits we want to impose on it and therefore may move in directions that have nothing to do with human nature or the cherished beliefs and values we derive from that concept Events put us as subjectsmdashand as thinkersmdash into a traumatic relationship to both ourselves and our world The anxiety at the center of thought is revealed Ideologists rush in to fill that void and restore the guarantees Our effort must be t o do the opposite and thereby sustain the vital possibility implicit in an event That possibility is to sustain a break with the guarantees and thereby find for history a radically different way of thinking To put it concretely a trauma cannot be resolved until its been constituted The Western Logos is a monument to t he effort to avoid t h a t task indeed to render it impossible a priori To reverse that tradition the things above all we must rid ourselves of are the desire and demand for resolution The recycling of the guarantees must give way to a n existentializing imperative to constitute and work within trauma in a way that addresses the psyche at the same register as Gibson and Abu Ghraib do by creating images symbolic actions and emotions that are of equal depth but that move us in an antithetical directionmdashtoward the inner transformation needed to purge ourselves of Thanatos Such an effort however cannot itself be yet another variant of the guarantees as happens when Love and Eros are posited as ahistorical values If anything the possibility of Love is far more difficult and exacting than death because it can only arise by reversing the prior force that death has within us The following two sections offer a brief picture of the kind of agonistic process such an effort entails in order to whet our appetite for something that should by now be evident The critique of ideology cannot be a merely intellectual exercise It must be the activation within our psyche of a countervailing drama

Any risk of ldquosolvencyrdquo for the counterplan is a reason to vote aff because it is an attempt to guarantee the future by pre-emptive action Even claims of a ldquonet-benefitrdquo are a link to the affirmative criticism Only the aff forcibly confronts the unknownDavis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg51-52)

Emotional The innermost need of human beings is to feel good about themselves Whatever threatens that feeling must be exorcised Health normalcy and productivity depend on avoiding negative feelings Hope and optimism arent just healthy attitudes they are requirements of our nature Biologically wired We cannot remain for long in trauma Recovery moreover must restore our faith in the guarantees and our hopes for the future The need for hope is In fact the capstone of the entire system of guarantees Yet it too apparently has a history Today over 10 million of our children are on prescription drugs to prevent depression and anxiety Informed of this fact by Bill Maher the French actress Julie Delphy spoke the spontaneous wisdom of an archaic culture Dont they know that depression is a good thing that its something you have to go through in order to grow Not anymore The key to understanding the power of the guarantees is to understand the fears that they exorcise Thanks to religion death suffering and evil are deprived of their power Through the attainment of reason all other forms of consciousness and what they might reveal are put in their place Poetic knowing is deprived both of its legitimacy and its terror Science as fulfillment of reason assures us of domination over nature What Heidegger termed technoscientific rationality becomes the measure of what is real Belief in historical progress banishes the recurrent suspicion that history may lack direction or even worse move to the darkest of ends The condition is thereby set that makes it impossible for us to experience traumatic events such as 9-11 except as occasions to take whatever actions are needed to reaffirm our goodness and restore our guarantees It is in the personal order however that the guarantees do their deepest work Psychologically belief in the self or self-identity exorcises the most frightening contingency that there is a void at the center of the American psyche with panic anxiety and its corollary compulsive consumption the expression of a desperate non-identity That specter brings us before the greatest fear that our psyche not our conscious deliberative intentions is the author of our actions an author who will do anything in order to feel safe secure and righteous All of our emotional needs then stand forth under the rule of a single necessity the need to feel good about oneself at whatever cost and to sustain hope by banishing anything that would trouble us Resolution catharsis (ie the discharge of painful tensions or awareness) and renewal emerge as the needs that bind us with an iron necessity to the guarantees and all that they make it impossible for us to know It is easy to deprecate Dubya and apparently to hold onto the idea that hes a temporary aberration But the problem goes deeper To revive a battle cry from the 1960s insofar as one is wedded to any one of the guarantees one is part of the problem and not the solution For the grandest function of the system of guarantees as a whole and in each one of its parts is to blind us to history And so to take up again the question stated previously how did the situation now being created in Iraq come about The next three sections constitute an attempt to answer that question by constructing for America a repressed history

Any net benefit to the counterplan links to the criticism of the affirmative and is a reason that the counterplan cannot solve the affirmative We must confront the unknown to solve Davis 2001Watler A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative Pg 38-39

One upshoot of that act is a recovery of the dialectic of Eros and Thanatos as a way of thinking about history In anticipation of later developments (chapter 4 part 2) I only present the basic lines of this idea here The depth-charge sounded by an Event is its ability to reveal that the relationship of Eros and Thanatos is not eternal but historical to the core with the end of that dialectic entailing the possible extinction of one of the terms This is the spectre Freud exorcized by establishing a dualistic way of conceptualizing the two categories The alternative is an immanent dialectic one where history as contingency subjects everything to irreversible change with Thanatos a force in culture dedicated to the extinction of Eros and with the power to bring about that closure to the eternal dialectic Traumatic events constitute an abrupt and painful reversal of the eternal dialectic because in them we fund Eros deprived of all assurances Contra Freud there is nothing universal biological or ahistorical about the eternal battle Both terms are fully implicated in history caught up in processes Capable of producing irreversible transformations Forces in the psyche opposed to life which we have persistently marginalized in proclaiming our humanism rise up in the Event to challenge all we believe about human nature and history Rather than a world grounded in love the primacy of goodness in human nature the achievement of rationality and the ameliorative virtues of the social process the Event reveals a world in which envy and hate stalk life seeking a final solution that can only come with the extinction of the antagonist After such knowledge we can never begin again cleansed of history restored through its narration to some essential humanistic identity with all our fundamental beliefs in essential goodness reaffirmed Eros again pristine and empowered Feeling the pressure of death as it weighs upon and works within us becomes the gauge that measures the depth of our participation in history The Event rends all the masks that enable us to conceive evil as an aberrance Existential contingency unseats all essentializing views of human nature revealing historicity as a process in which Thanatos may be the drive informing the reality principle There is nothing in human nature that protects us from this eventuality Positing an essential and always recoverable nature outside history is not the solution but part of the problem the way we blind ourselves a priori to our situation

Only a complete withdrawal from psychological guarantees can force us to confront trauma The counterplanrsquos insistence that there is something tangible that can be manipulated or solved for is a link Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg38-39)

But to undertake that task we must purge ourselves of the thing in ourselves that stands in the way I have termed it the guarantees By that term I refer to all those assurances we set up a priori to protect ourselves from the reality of historical trauma The significance of eventsmdashthe Shoah Hiroshima 9-11mdash is their power to call such guarantees into question by exposing cherished beliefs to the claims of darker views and by forcing us to think in radically new ways considering things about the human being that weve persistently denied or marginalized One dimension of any traumatic event is the shock it brings

to traditional ways of thinking Thats why the dominant response to any historical trauma is the attempt to restore the guarantees by finding a way t o impose them on the event in order to contain and interpret it The ideological function of the guarantee is thereby demonstrated A way has been found to limit the impact of the event by picturing it as an aberration a temporary departure from values and beliefs that can always be recovered because they constitute something essentialistic or universal about human nature Something trans-historical History may disrupt our essence but it cannot destroy it The concept of human naturemdashin all t h e variants constituting the philosophic and psychological history of that idea from Plato and Aristotle through American self psychologymdashis the primary way in which we endeavor to deny history An event is traumatic precisely because it suggests that history occurs beyond the limits we want to impose on it and therefore may move in directions that have nothing to do with human nature or the cherished beliefs and values we derive from that concept Events put us as subjectsmdashand as thinkersmdash into a traumatic relationship to both ourselves and our world The anxiety at the center of thought is revealed Ideologists rush in to fill that void and restore the guarantees Our effort must be t o do the opposite and thereby sustain the vital possibility implicit in an event That possibility is to sustain a break with the guarantees and thereby find for history a radically different way of thinking To put it concretely a trauma cannot be resolved until its been constituted The Western Logos is a monument to t he effort to avoid t h a t task indeed to render it impossible a priori To reverse that tradition the things above all we must rid ourselves of are the desire and demand for resolution The recycling of the guarantees must give way to a n existentializing imperative to constitute and work within trauma in a way that addresses the psyche at the same register as Gibson and Abu Ghraib do by creating images symbolic actions and emotions that are of equal depth but that move us in an antithetical directionmdashtoward the inner transformation needed to purge ourselves of Thanatos Such an effort however cannot itself be yet another variant of the guarantees as happens when Love and Eros are posited as ahistorical values If anything the possibility of Love is far more difficult and exacting than death because it can only arise by reversing the prior force that death has within us The following two sections offer a brief picture of the kind of agonistic process such an effort entails in order to whet our appetite for something that should by now be evident The critique of ideology cannot be a merely intellectual exercise It must be the activation within our psyche of a countervailing drama

A2 ndash KritiksOur ethics come first -- Discovery of the unconscious is crucial to the recognition of responsibility by every subject- only our framework opens space for agency and recognition of our choices- our ethics are crucial to understand the historical contingencies that make up the status quo and open space for change Davis 2006 (Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deaths Dream Kingdom pg182-185)

Freud discovered more than the Unconscious He discovered our responsibility for it for becoming aware of how what we repress rules our life and therefore our duty to gain knowledge of our unconscious as the precondition for becoming an ethically responsible agent In terms of ethics theres a quick way to summarize the significance of the Unconscious What we dont know about ourselves is what we domdashto the other In calling us to such a reflection on ourselves Freud also taught us a new way to reflect one that forces us to move beyond the rational world of conscious deliberations and intentions Once make the psychoanalytic turn and the sources of self-knowledge increase exponentially Every time one understands a dream a paraphraxis an aesthetic experience a fantasy one suffers in principle a revolution in ones life For such experiences put one in touch with the deep conflicts that define the psyche A dream for example does not tell us about something outside the realm of our conscious grasp though this view of repression typifies how a convenient misunderstanding blunts the force of psychoanalysis A good dream reveals the desires and conflicts structuring our life It thereby opens our quotidian life to an in-depth exploration Listen to a dream rightly and one finds that one must confront something one has been avoidingmdashor doing Such is what it would mean to assume responsibility for ones dreams One would start to live from an awareness of ones psyche rather than in a continued attempt to escape that awareness Freud doesnt abolish intention he expands it by showing how often consciousness is defense mechanism and rationality the cover that conceals the actual motives on which we act and how often accordingly insistence on conscious intentions is the lie we cling to in order to deny our responsibility The seductive or prohibitive way of relating that a parent adopts toward a child for example may carry as its primary repressed intention the desire to wound that child in their sexuality This is why its so necessary at a later point in time for such parents to deny that they ever harbored let alone acted on such an intention And yet our actions do indeed speak louder than words in conveying our actual intentions Action is concrete intentionality because it is through it that we live out our feelings desires and conflicts And they are what the other invariably receives as a message that is often sharply different from what we say especially when through the exercise of intentionality we reassure ourselves about what good loving human beings we are The psyche is a lonely hunter avid in the pursuit of purposes it carefully conceals from itself The ethical greatness of Sigmund Freud is the crisis he introduced into that practice Rather than getting us off the hook psychoanalysis sticks it far deeper in us than any previous ethic Intentionality is convenient because it absolves us of the greatest responsibilitymdashresponsibility for who we are Everything stays in the safely guarded space of deliberative discursive quasi-judicial rationality as if this were the primary way we relate to ourselves or to turn the screw a peg further as if when we arent relating to ourselves this way we arent fully moral agents fully responsible for our actions But once let responsibility expand into the inner life of the psyche and we take on a new ethical burden to know oneself in depth and not recoil in horror from what one learns or persist in virtuous denial of the hidden motives one must confront in order to become responsible for ones psyche Indeed deliberation is itself transformed by l he psychoanalytic turn Freud shows that to deliberate correctly one must focus the inquiry on those motives that one tries to conceal from oneself since they are where the truth of ones conduct may lie

In terms of the problem of evil this line of thought has an obvious implication Our primary responsibility which we continually shirk is to find the evil in ourselves Theoretically and emotionally the same thing prevents that discovery the desire to uphold the idea that human nature is inherently or basically good with evil an aberration a fall a break with the natural order of things an exception to the rule of human decency Psychoanalysis like history renders such sentiments questionable at best And irrelevant to where inquiry must beginmdashwith psychological conflict the primary fact that defines us To be human is to live denned by wounds and disorders that are prior to the mediations (themselves rare) that result in a moral character that can be termed good Goodness is not something essentialistically guaranteed in a nature its an achievement that comes through the overcoming of ways of being that have a foothold in us long before some human beings take up the effort to reverse them Psychoanalysis from this point of view is neither pessimistic nor relativistic It is humanistic in the deepest way seeing the human as an achievement and valuing it by demonstrating what that achievement requires Psychoanalysis doesnt point to ethical relativism It points instead to an order of rank among human beings based on the degree to which a knowledge of ones psyche has become the basis of ones actions Ethically to know ones psyche is of necessity to engage in an effort to transform it since inner change is the only way to halt the projection of what otherwise does harm to others Psychological change is the primary task ethics the result

Their alternative misses the point In lieu of a criticism of the affirmative it is a much better act to internalize our anxiety and explore the effects within the psyche This allows us an uncastrated interaction with reality Davis 2001Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative pg xviii-xix

Virginia Woolf said that in or about December 1910 human nature changed She would have recorded a similar shock in August of 1945 The change Woolf witnessed has now of course been safely domesticated and has a local habitation and a name modernism The second change also has a namemdashpostmodernismmdashbut the ideologies most closely associated with its development remain mired in the first moment of an arrested dialectic12 Irony and aporia dominate the postmodern sensibility because its considerable energies are devoted to a displacement of the Event that remains at the center of our collective historical Unconsciousmdashthe referent that serves as the motive behind the denial of reference Reference must be continually deferred then rendered impossible because anxiety and flight from that anxiety define our actual response to the one referent that will continue to weigh on our consciousness until we restore the proper dialectical direction and move from the delights of skeptical play to a recovery of the demands of unhappy consciousness Einstein said the Bomb changed everythingmdashexcept the ways we think As such it is the inwardness of our inwardness never more so perhaps than when we use deconstructive irony as the master trope that delivers us from the burden of a historically situated subjectivity or at that opposite extreme that amounts to the same thing when we reassert an essentialist humanism as the fixed and universal system of understanding and explanation that washes us clean of history and its contingencies What if we broke with both strategiesmdashand rather than deconstructing the Bomb or containing it we tried to internalize it and then trace the ways it explodes and implodes within the psyche Such an effort would take as its goal a reconstitution of the tragic as the dialectical category that provides the only adequate idea for comprehendingmdashand existingmdashin the present Such a humanism however confronts as its prior and primary task a deracination of the system of guarantees on which previous humanisms have depended For the function of that system with respect to history has been to establish as canons of research and explanation a set of essentialistic concepts of meaning logic and human nature that function to insulate historians and their

audiences so that horror can never be more than the temporary aberration from which we always of necessity recover The narration of History thereby becomes yet another occasion for deployingmdashand thereby reinforcingmdashthe central beliefs and Values of the humanistic tradition That tradition thus provides the ego or identity-principle that we (the community of humanistic interpreters) move from and to in dealing with events that challenge our certainties13 We love to read and write histories because such stories tell us who we already know we are while conveniently exorcizing the threat of those accounts that would hold up a different mirror to our nature History is indeed a fiction the corpse over which we warm ourselves so that we may rise cleansed catharted the system of needs beliefs and guarantees restoredmdashwith existence the self-reference perpetually deferred What if instead we approached history as a realitymdashand a disciplinemdash in which we must risk ourselves utterly One in which to know is to suffer irreversible change in ones beliefs values and even in ones identity with nothing in the logos of thought able to protect us from that possibility The reign of the a priori would thereby come to an end the principle of hope a category wed risk not one wed need to renew at whatever cost Could such an engagement constitute the true force and signification of Hiroshima16 and thereby evidence that events in history are the true Absolute that abide with usmdashthe gift of the past to the future as that call of conscience requiring of us no less than a fundamentally new understanding of the human psyche and the human condition

The permutation solves ndash psychoanalytical evaluation of our anxiety and our reliance on stability and security are prior questions to the alternative and the framework of the criticism The alternative is still castrated by desire which means that it does not access proper historical contextDavis 2006Walter A professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Deracinations Historicity Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative pg 1-3

In August 1945 Elias Canetti writes the following in his journal A tormenting thought as of a certain point history was no longer real Without noticing it all mankind suddenly left reality everything happening since then was supposedly not true but we supposedly didnt notice Our task would now be to find that point and as long as we didnt have it we would be forced to abide in our present destruction1 What Canetti cant see is that the point he refers to is the one he inhabits He cant see it because it is too close and blinds him (as it would soon the inhabitants of two cities) with a light not of this world The proliferation of new theories of history in recent decades is itself a response to a historical situationmdashthat defined by the Bomb That connection is also what these theories cannot know about themselves and ceaselessly displace in teaching us all the new ways we can know and write about the past What they do know is that the assumptions and guarantees on which historians have traditionally relied in constituting their subject and the needs that histories fulfill in offering us an account of events structured by these guarantees are no longer adequate to a contemporary awareness of history and historicity2 To cite the major developments (though in no necessary order of importance)3 1 Foucaults concept of genealogical history and the archeology of knowledge and its creative extension in the new historicist methodologies developed by Stephen Greenblatt and his circle 2 The hermeneutic theories of history and historical explanation developed by Gadamer Habermas and Ricoeur with special note given to Ricoeurs development of a complex theory of time and narrative 3 Derridas recent work on Marx and Benjamin and his continuing effort to expose the Hegelian assumptions about history progress and the logos which structure the way history is narrated by historians who know little or nothing of Hegel 4 Althusser Sartre Gramsci and the many often sharply opposed approaches to history developed in recent years by Marxists as different as Frederic Jameson G A Cohen Perry Anderson and Stuart Hall 5 The recovery of Kants speculations on history and its recent extension in Lyotards theory of the differend 6 The attempts by Slavoj Zizek Joan Copjec and Teresa Brennan to articulate the theory of history implicit in Lacan 7 The massive significance of Walter Benjamins speculations the continued vitality of Adorno and the Frankfurt school and the renewed interest in the thought of Kenneth Burke 8 The work of Louis O Mink Hayden White Dominick LaCapra Roy Schafer and others on the narrative and tropological principles that shape the writing of history To this list one can add Collingwood and McKeons earlier theorizing about history the work of Braudel Baudrillard deCerteau Calinescu and Bourdieu and the new modes of historical writing and historical investigation developed by anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz James Clifford and Natalie Zemon Davis The list is by no means complete because one must add to it two developments that may be of

greater significance and that complicate the issue of the historical I refer first to the number of alternative histories that have emerged in recent years thanks to feminist multicultural postcolonial subaltern and queer studies Such works have contributed more than new knowledge to our understanding of the past They have broken with the logic the procedures and the ruling assumptions of traditional historical methodologies by showing how that logic has as its primary function the exclusion (or marginalization) of voices that challenge its hegemony and the motives that inform its explanations Such studies are not merely of local interest They entail a theoretical crisis the recognition that the principles of historical explanation that we regard as true rational objective and universal are cultural conventional ideological and deeply implicated in power and the repressions required for its maintenance Ways of thinking derived from other cultures or voices silenced by the dominant culture may provide precisely the critical handle required to understand what is really at work in the privileging of certain canons of reasoning and explanation as scientific and objective and the rejection of other experiences and ways of thinking as illegitimate and unfounded The true bite of the multiculturalmdash seldom honored because it cuts in every directionmdashis the idea that none of us are locked into privileging our own culture and subject position(s) We can gain distance from our frameworks by immersing ourselves in other ways of thinking We can then use that experience to become aware of things that our culture and its dominant interest groups do not want to know about themselves The implication of such an orientation for history is considerable since historical explanation is perhaps the primary way in which a community establishes the structures of belief mind and feeling on which it depends in giving an identity to its members4 Thanks to the explosion of the multicultural we now have a way to internally distance ourselves from such beliefs and practices even perhaps following Nietzsche to touch all that goes without saying with the hammer as with a tuning fork

Case Stuff

War on Terror BadThe myth of effective security fosters a violent project that necessitates the creation of terrorists to be sacrificed on the altar of societyMcGowan 2013Associate Professor at the University of Vermont (Todd Enjoying What We Donrsquot Have Project Muse)

The fundamental barrier to the establishment of an authentic social bond is the resistance to avowing the traumatic nature of that bond We use the pleasure that accompanies the bombing of Afghanistan to disguise the shared enjoyment we experience through the traumatic experience of loss But this pleasure inevitably disappoints us and triggers the belief that someone has stolen the complete pleasure that we expected to experience This is why there can properly be no end to the War on Terror no end to the list of countries that the United States plans to invade to attain complete security no end to the number of terrorist leaders executed 31

Complete security like complete pleasure is mythical It attempts to bypass the one experience that cannot be bypassed mdash the foundational experience of loss mdash and it is this experience that holds the key to an authentic social bond The structure of society (which is the result of the structure of signification) is such that it blinds the subject to the possibility of shared sacrifice and the social bond that results from it No matter how often children hear the ideology of sharing or how many times we repeat to them the gospel of fairness they will inevitably believe that their sacrifice has enabled others to enjoy more than their proper share or unfairly

Loss of the SelfSurveillance devastates the gap between the Self and our informaticized bodies ndash the total knowledge it provides deprives one of the ability to function as a subject eradicating onersquos identity ndash this results in complete annihilationFriesen et al 2012 Dr Norm Friesen is Canada Research Chair in E-Learning Practices at Thompson Rivers University His academic credentials include a PhD in Education from the University of Alberta Andrew Feenberg School of Communication Simon Fraser University Grace Smith Arapiki Solutions Inc (Norm Friesen Andrew Feenberg Grace Smith and Shannon Lowe 2012 ldquoExperiencing Surveillancerdquo pp 82-83 (Re)Inventing The Internet httplinkspringercomchapter1010072F978-94-6091-734-9_4)

Students of surveillance have been so impressed by the ever-growing completeness of this data image that they animate it as though it were an actual person Identity is seen as coeval with an assemblage of traces rather than with actual presence Thus van der Ploeg writes of ldquothe

inability to distinguish between rsquothe body itselfrsquo and rsquobody informationrdquorsquo (van der Ploeg 2003 p 69) Haggerty and Ericson similarly write the surveillance assemblage standardizes the capture of fleshinformation flows of the human body It is not

so much immediately concerned with the direct physical relocation of the human body (although this may be an ultimate consequence)

but with transforming the body into pure information such that it can be rendered more mobile and comparable (Haggerty amp Ericson 2000 p 613) There is something right about this turn in surveillance theory and yet it is obvious that we are still able to distinguish the real person from the traces that person leaves behind The trace is bound to us by its origin and often by internal signs of various sorts so we do not quite leave it behind after all And yet we do not want to drag along every trace of our passage through life We count on the erasure of most traces It is this erasure that enables us to face the world afresh each day and to face it with a self-image we

construct at least partially anew for each new situation in which we find ourselves In existentialndashphenomenological terms privacy and secrecy are centrally constitutive of self and selfhood Holding something private or secret emphasizes the difference between self and other and confirms the autonomy of onersquos interiority and individuality ldquoSecrecy secures so to speak the possibility of a second world alongside of the obvious worldrdquo as Simmel (1906 p 462) puts it In contemporary conditions of surveillance and dataveillance subjectivity itself is dependent on maintaining the gap between our embodied selves and our informaticized bodies It would be intolerable for everyone to have full access to our salary the details of our relations to our family our medical histories sexual proclivities and so on Such knowledge would completely objectify us and force us to live up to (or down to) the image of ourselves implied in this knowledge Like Sartrersquos spy at the keyhole

himself espied we would be evacuated of those aspects of identity and interiority concealed within us frozen in the objectifying gaze of the other and essentially deprived of our ability to function as a subject We could no longer choose to project an identity appropriate to our inclination and situation as everything having to do with our identity would have been pre-empted Truly to be completely ldquooutedrdquo is to be annihilated

The gaze of surveillance invades and traps one psychologically rendering one enslavedVaz 1995 (Angelina Fall 1995 Dalhousie French Studies Vol 32 Mises en scegravene du regard (Fall 1995) pp 37-38 ldquoWhos Got the Look Sartres Gaze and Foucaults Panopticismrdquo JSTOR httpwwwjstororgstable40837004)

This grand formula is even applicable at the level of an encounter between two individuals where the theme of ldquosubjection by exposurerdquo is

dominant As Sartre says ldquobeing-seen constitutes me as a defenseless being for a freedom which is not my freedom [hellip] I am a slave to the degree that my being is dependent at my center of a freedom which is not mine and which is the very condition of my beingrdquo (Being p 358) In this sense the gaze does not just create and invade physical spaces there is a sense in which the gaze invades and traps me psychologically As a temporal-spatial object in the world being locked at forces me to apprehend myself as the