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All human relationships are haunted by the possibility of loss – it is thanks to death that a friendship can be declared since finitude creates a limit on what we can experience which makes the few interactions that we do have with others meaningful, if they happened every day they would be banal.

However, the reality of finitude is not present in all politics. Modernity has effaced death, making it into an aberration of life; mourning of others is no longer a requirement since they are never lost to begin with. This creates immortality for some, and accelerates the mortality of others.

This disavowal is the condition of all violence caused by the American exceptionalist project, the binary of life/death is socially engineered to make some lives ungrieveable. The binary must be rejected through a recognition of the specter between life and deathPeterson 7 Christopher, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, “Kindred Specters: Death, Mourning, and American Affinity,” University of Minnesota Press, pp 2-9Mourning, however, is not only implicated in familial or “blood relations.” For our relations to others more generally—whether

biological or nonbiological—are also haunted by the possibility of loss. As Jacques Derrida argues in The Politics of Friendship,

relations between and among friends are necessarily and irrevocably shaped by processes of mourning. This nexus of mourning and friendship, for Derrida, is not to be lamented, but rather welcomed as the necessary condition of friendship: “It is thanks to death that friendship can be declared.” 1 As

Simon Critchley glosses Derrida’s assertion: “One is only a friend of that which is going to die.” 2 Yet, the impending death of the other is always signaled to me by the unbridgeable alterity that no kinship claim can finally surmount. Hence, even when “our” kin are

here, they are not precisely present. Given the originary absence of the other, then, how might I respond to a well-meaning friend who implores—no doubt impatient with such seemingly pessimistic talk about mourning and kinship—“But what about living in the present?” How do I explain to my friend that mourning conditions the possibility of his asking the question at all? That his ontological demand paradoxically forecloses our relation to one another? For the imperative to live in the present ultimately negates the relation to the in any simple present, undivided by absence. And this is not to say that absence is merely destructive, a cruel “fact of life” that always looms large over our most intimate and loving relationships, threatening to rear

its ugly head at any moment. From family to friendship and beyond, mourning and loss initiate our relations to others . The

popularity of Six Feet Under notwithstanding, American culture tends not to acknowledge the intimate relation among death, mourning, and kinship—no doubt because in the modern West we tend to see the barrier that separates the living and the dead as insurmountable . If we follow historian Philippe Ariès on this

subject, however, we see that things were not always so. In contrast to the Middle Ages, in which a certain familiarity with death was displayed,

a promiscuous coexistence of the living and the dead, Ariès argues that the rise of modernity witnessed an effacement

and interdiction of death . Death was to be put in its proper place, whether “its place” be the newly constructed cemeteries on the outside of the city walls or the hospitals where patients now came to die rather than to get well: “Mourning is thus no longer a necessary period on which society imposes respect. It has become a morbid state that needs to be nurtured , abridged , and erased .” 3 According to

Ariès, the interdiction of mourning is nowhere more vigilant than in the U nited S tates, where death is

treated almost as an aberration of life . Indeed, the present study focuses on American culture precisely because the American

disavowal of death is so vehement. Ariès reads the advent of the mortuary business and the practice of embalming in the United States during

the late nineteenth century as a testament to the American denial of mortality. Death could no longer be either too familiar or common, too frightening or painful: “To sell death, one must make it pleasant” (69). This transformation of death into something pleasant—in other words, something that is Laderman traces the emergence of this peculiarly modern interdiction of death specifically to the postbellum era, which bore witness to the “birth of the death industry.” 4 During the Civil War, a doctor by the name of Thomas Holmes claimed to have embalmed thousands of fallen soldiers. Because most Civil War battles were fought on Southern land, the practice of embalming allowed for the preservation and repatriation of the bodies of fallen Union soldiers. Following the wartime emergence of embalming, Abraham Lincoln became the first U.S. president to have his body embalmed. Lincoln’s body, as is well known, was paraded before thousands of mourning citizens on a long, cross-country journey from Washington, D.C. to Springfield, Illinois. As Laderman notes, the parading of Lincoln’s body “ensured that embalming—an unacceptable treatment before the war—would change the practice of American deathways” (163). The living could now “look at the face of death and not be confronted by the gruesome details of decomposition and decay” (174). As Jessica Mitford observed in her well-known expose of the American funeral industry, The American Way of Death (1963), the undertaker “put[s] on a well-oiled performance in which the concept of death...play[s] no part whatsoever....He and his team...score an upset victory over death.”5 While this study accords with the claim that American culture disavows

mortality, I do not argue for any simple reversal of this interdiction with an aim toward affirming finitude per se. If death is beyond our experience (as Heidegger among others has observed), if I am ultimately absent from “my” own death, then strictly speaking there is nothing for me to recognize or avow. Yet dying is something that I do every day.

Indeed, it might be more accurate to say that American culture disavows dying, understood as a process that extends from our birth to our biological demise.6 Even with such an amended formulation, however, it is not entirely clear whether dying can ever be fully affirmed or avowed. That “we live as if we were not going to die,” as Zygmunt Bauman observes, “is a remarkable achievement,” especially given the ease with which we disavow dying on a daily basis. Z Some degree of disavowal would seem both unavoidable and necessary for our survival. Any effort to prolong one’s life, from simply eating well and exercising to taking medications to

prevent or treat illness, evidences this disavowal. For Bauman, however, the disavowal of dying often has violent political

and social consequences . Noting the wartime imperative “‘to limit our casualties,’” for instance, Bauman remarks that “the price of that limiting is multiplying the dead on the other side of the battleline” (34). Drawing from Freud’s claim that, “at bottom no one believes in his own death,” Bauman argues that death is “socially managed” by securing the “immortality” of the few through the mortalization of others (35,

his emphasis).8 The belief in my self-presence, which is also always a belief in my immortality, is thus dialectically conditioned by the

nonpresence of others. Scholars in race and sexuality studies have done much to bring our attention to the ways in which American culture represents racial and sexual minorities as dead—both figuratively and literally. Indeed, this gesture both accompanies and reinforces the larger cultural dissimulation of mortality by making racial and sexual others stand in for the death that haunts every life. The history of American slavery tells a familiar story of how American consciousness

disavows and projects mortality onto its “others.” Orlando Patterson has described the institution of slavery in terms of a process of kinship delegitimation that constructs slaves as “socially dead.”9 For Patterson, slavery—across its various historical forms —emerges as a substitute for death, a forced bargain by which the slave retains his/her life only to enter into the liminal existence of the socially dead. As a substitution for death, slavery does not “absolve or erase the prospect of death,” for the specter of material death looms over the slave’s existence as an irreducible remainder (5). This primary stage in the construction of the socially dead person is followed by what Patterson refers to as the slave’s “natal alienation,” his/her alienation from all rights or claims of birth: in short, a severing of all genealogical ties and claims both to the slave’s living blood relatives, and to his/her remote ancestors and future descendants. Although Patterson does not approach the problem of social death through a psychoanalytic vocabulary of disavowal and projection, one might say that the presumptive ontology of slave-owning, legally recognized kinship, was dependent on a deontologization of slave kinship that worked to deny the death that each life bears within itself. Building on Patterson’s argument, Toni Morrison observes in Playing in the Dark that, “for a people who made much of their ‘newness’—their potential, freedom, and innocence—it is striking how dour, how troubled, how frightened and haunted our early and founding literature truly is.”10 For Morrison, African-American slaves came to shoulder the burden of the darkness (both moral and racial) against which America defined itself. The shadow of a racialized blackness did not so much threaten the ostensible “newness” of American life as it conditioned the latter’s appearance as new and free. Hence “freedom,” she writes, “has no meaning... without the specter of enslavement” (56). Echoing Morrison, Russ Castronovo asserts in Necro Citizenship that nineteenth-century

American politics constructed the citizen in relation to a morbid fascination with ghosts, seances, spirit rappings, and mesmerism. Taking his point of departure from Patrick Henry’s infamous assertion, “give me liberty or give me death,”

Castronovo explores how admission into the domain of citizenship required a certain depoliticization and pacification of the subject: “The afterlife emancipates souls from passionate debates, everyday engagements, and earthly affairs that animate the political field.”11 From Lincoln’s rumored dabbling in spiritualism, to attempts by mediums to contact the departed souls of famous Americans, to a senator’s introduction of a petition in 1854 asking Congress to investigate communications with the “other side”—so numerous are Castronovo’s examples of what he calls “spectral politics” that we would have a difficult time contesting his diagnosis that nineteenth-century American political discourse worked to produce politically and historically dead citizens. That these citizens were constructed in tandem with the production of large slave populations— noncitizens who were urged by slavery proponents and abolitionists

alike to believe that emancipation existed in a promised afterlife—would lend still more credence to the argument that nineteenth-century America propagated a dematerialized politics. One wonders, however, how Castronovo’s argument sits in relation to Aries’s contention that American life tends toward an interdiction of death, and if Castronovo’s rejection of necropolitics, moreover, is not finally symptomatic of this very disavowal. Castronovo maintains that, “for cultures that fear death...necrophilia promotes fascination with and helps tame an unknowable

terror” (5). American necrophilia, according to Castronovo, responds to an overwhelming fear and denial of death . Castronovo thus aims to turn us away from such preoccupation with ghosts, spirits, and the afterlife toward “specific forms of corporeality,” such as the laboring body, the slave body, and the mesmerized body, in order to avoid “reinscribfing] patterns of abstraction”

(17). Yet, this move away from general to specific forms of embodiment still retains the notion of “the

body,” and therefore of a self-contained, selfpresent entity . If nineteenth-century politics required that

the citizen be disembodied and dematerialized , it does not follow that a move toward embodiment

remedies such a spiritualized politics . Although Castronovo cautions that recourse to the body “does not automatically

guarantee resistance,” the overall tenor of his project pathologizes the spectral (18). Indeed, one has the sense that Castronovo would like to untether politics from death altogether — as if political life is not always haunted by

finitude. Reversing the terms of political necrophilia , he offers something like a political necrophobia that sees every intrusion of the spectral as synonymous with depoliticization. If nineteenth-century spiritualism infused American political life with a familiar set of distinctions between spirit/matter,

soul/body, that says nothing about how these binaries might be displaced rather than merely

reversed . Abinaristic approach to the subject of mortality is also legible in Sharon Holland's Raising the Dead, which asserts that “bringing back the dead (or saving the living from the shadow of death) is the ultimate queer act.”12 Drawing from the activist slogan “silence death” from the early years of the AIDS epidemic, and extending this activist

imperative to address the social death of sexual and racial minorities more generally, Holland observes that the deaths of queer and racial subjects serve “to ward off a nation's collective dread of the inevitable” (38). Yet, as in Castronovo’s critique of necropolitics, this imperative to “raise the dead” reverses rather than displaces the logic through which dominant, white, heterosexual culture disavows and projects mortality onto racial and sexual minorities . While -we must address the particular effects that social death has on racial and sexual minorities , this social reality must also be thought in relation to a

more generalizable principle of mourning . For the “shadow of death” haunts all lives, not just queer ones. The “ultimate queer act,” pace Holland, would be to deconstruct rather than reinscribe the binary between life and death, to resist the racist and heterosexist disavowal of finitude. That Americanist literary

criticism on the subject of mortality remains implicated in the larger cultural disavowal of dying suggests that we ought to reassess

our critical energies, particularly as these powers are enlisted to address how American political

ideology produces the “death” of racial and sexual others . Indeed, I would argue that such criticism remains invested—

despite all claims to the contrary—in an American exceptionalist project.13 American exceptionalism names, in part, a fetishization of novelty

and futurity that initially defined America against an ostensibly decaying and moribund Europe. As David Noble has argued, the doctrine of exceptionalism excluded America from “the human experience of birth, death, and rebirth” by figuring Europe in terms of time and America in terms of timeless space.14 If, as George Berkeley put it, America is

“time’s noblest offspring,” history gives birth to its final progeny in order that the latter might escape time altogether. America thus becomes eternally present while “Europe breeds in her decay.”15 If the “new world” qua new must deny mortality, then reanimating the excluded from within the terms of a dialectical reversal renews rather than dismantles the American exceptionalist project. Challenging the ideology of American exceptionalism is particularly crucial for a post-9/11 politics that aims to resist the transformation of

American exposure to injury and death into a newly reconsolidated sense of innocence and

immortality . As Donald Pease has argued, 9/11 transformed “virgin land” into “ground zero,” effecting an ideological shift from a

“secured innocent nation to a wounded, insecure emergency state.”16 Drawing from the work of Giorgio Agamben, Pease describes the emergency state as a nation that—by exempting itself from its own democratic rules of free speech, due process, and above all, the rules

of war—marks a division between those whom the state protects from injury and those whom the state is free to injure and kill with impunity (13). The reduction of the Arab other to that which cannot be killed because it is already dead works to cover over the wound that ground zero opens up under the surface of virgin land. The emergency state (or what Agamben calls the “state of exception”) thus also names a nation that attempts to except itself from the universal condition of mortality. As Bauman notes, “if mortality and

transience are the norm among humans, durability may be attained only as an exception” (67, his emphasis). To displace the dialectic of immortality/mortality requires the introduction of a third term, the specter , which cannot be

reduced to either spirit or body. Derrida characterizes the specter as being “of the spiritappearing as

“its phantom double.” 17 As the ghost of spirit, the specter is neither present nor absent, neither immortal nor mortal. Speciality thus corresponds to the logic of the revenant, that is , to a “body” that can never fully return to itself as a living presence. Irreducible to the construction of racial and sexual others as abject or socially dead, then, speciality names the condition of being-toward-death to which no-body is immune.18

A relationship with death that attempts to flee from it in favor of prolonging life as long as possible denies the very things that make life joyous, modernity emerges with the bracketing of death's finitude and the belief that there is no barrier to human possibility. Ironically, this suppression of death results in sudden eruptions of it McGowan 13 Todd, Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies @ University of Vermont, “Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis”, pp. 223-227On the level of common sense, this opposition is not symmetrical. What thinking person would not want to side with those who love life rather than death.3 Everyone can readily understand how one might love life, but the love of death is a counterintuitive phenomenon. It seems as if it must be code language for some other desire, which is how Western leftists often view it. Interpreting terrorist attacks as an ultimately life-affirming response to imperialism and impoverishment, they implicitly reject the possibility of being in love with death. But this type of interpretation can't explain why so many suicide bombers are middle-class, educated

subjects and not the most downtrodden victims of imperialist power.4 We must imagine that for subjects such as these there is an appeal in death itself. Those who emphasize the importance of death at the expense of life do so because death is the source of value.5 The fact that life has an end, that we do not have an infinite amount of time to experience every possibility, means that we must value some things above others.

Death creates hierarchies of value , and these hierarchies are not only vehicles for oppression but the pathways through which what we do matters at all. Without the value that death provides, neither

love nor ice cream nor friendship nor anything that we enjoy would have any special worth

whatsoever. Having an infinite amount of time, we would have no incentive to opt for these experiences rather than other ones. We would be left unable to enjoy what seems to make life most worth living.

Even though enjoyment itself is an experience of the infinite, an experience of transcending the limits that regulate everyday activity, it nonetheless depends on the limits of finitude . When one enjoys, one accesses the infinite as a finite subject, and it is this contrast that renders enjoyment enjoyable.

Without the limits of finitude, our experience of the infinite would become as tedious as our everyday lives (and in fact would become our everyday experience). Finitude provides the punctuation through which the infinite emerges as such. The struggle to assert the importance of death – the act of being in love with death, as bin Laden claims that the Muslim youths are – is a mode of avowing one’s allegiance to the infinite enjoyment that death doesn't extinguish but instead spawns.6 This is exactly why Martin Heidegger attacks what he sees as our modern inauthentic relationship to death. In Being and Time Heidegger sees our individual death as an absolute limit that has the effect of creating value for us. As he puts it, "With death, Dasein stands before itself in its ownmost potentiality-for-being. This is a possibility in which the issue is nothing less than Dasein's Being-in-the-world.”7 Without the anticipation of our own death, we flit through the world and fail to take up fully an attitude of care, the attitude most appropriate for our

mode of being, according to Heidegger. Nothing really matters to those who have not recognized the approach of their own death. By depriving us of an authentic relationship to death, an ideology that proclaims life

as the only value creates a valueless world where nothing matters to us . But of course the partisans of life are not

actually eliminating death itself. They simply privilege life over death and see the world in terms of life rather than death, which would seem to leave the value-creating power of death intact . But this is not what happens. By privileging life and seeing death only in terms of life, we change the way we experience the world.

Without the mediation that death provides, the system of pure life becomes a system utterly bereft of value.8 We can see this in the two great systems of modernity – science and capitalism. Both modern science and capitalism are systems structured around pure life.9 Neither recognizes any ontological limit but instead continually embarks on a project of constant change and expansion. The scientific quest for knowledge about the world moves forward without regard for humanitarian or ethical concerns, which is why ethicists incessantly try to reconcile scientific discoveries with morality after the fact. After scientists develop the ability to clone, for instance, we realize what cloning portends for our sense of identity and attempt to police the practice. After Oppenheimer helps to develop the atomic bomb, he addresses the world with pronouncements of its evil. But this rearguard action has nothing to do with science as such. Oppenheimer the humanist is not Oppenheimer the scientist.10 The same dynamic is visible with capitalism. As an economic system, it promotes constant evolution and change just as life itself

does. Nothing can remain the same within the capitalist world because the production of value depends on the creation of the new commodity, and even the old commodities must be constantly given new forms or renewed in some way.11 Capitalism produces crises not because it can't produce enough – crises of scarcity dominate the history of the

noncapitalist world, not the capitalist one – but because it produces too much. The crisis of capitalism is always a crisis of overproduction. The capitalist

economy suffocates from too much life, from excess, not from scarcity or death . Both science and

capitalism move forward without any acknowledged limit , which is why they are synonymous with

modernity .12 Modernity emerges with the bracketing of death's finitude and the belief that there is no barrier to human possibility . The problem with the exclusive focus on life at the expense of death is that it never finds enough life and thus remains perpetually dissatisfied. The limit of this project is ,

paradoxically, its own infinitude. It evokes what Hegel calls the bad infinite – an infinite that is wrongly conceived as having no relation at all to the finite. We succumb to the bad infinite when we pursue an unattainable object and fail to see that the only possible satisfaction rests in the pursuit itself. The bad infinite -the infinite of modernitydepends on a fundamental misrecognition. We continue on this path only as long as we believe that we might attain the final piece of the puzzle, and yet this piece is constitutively denied us by the structure of the system itself. We seek the commodity that would finally bring us complete satisfaction, but dissatisfaction is built into the commodity structure, just as obsolescence is built into the very fabric of our cars and computers. Like capitalism, scientific inquiry cannot find a final answer: beneath atomic theory we find string theory, and beneath string theory we find something else. In both cases, the system prevents us from recognizing where our satisfaction lies; it diverts our focus away from our activity and onto the goal that we pursue. In this way, modernity produces the

dissatisfaction that keeps it going. But it also produces another form of dissatisfaction that wants to arrest its forward movement. The further the project of modernity moves in the direction of life, the more forcefully the specter of fundamentalism will make its presence felt. The exclusive focus on life has the effect of producing eruptions of death .

As the life-affirming logic of science and capitalism structures all societies to an increasing extent, the

space for the creation of value disappears. Modernity attempts to construct a symbolic space where there is no place for death and the limit that death represents. As opposed to the closed world of traditional society,

modernity opens up an infinite universe.14 But this infinite universe is established through the repression of finitude. Explosions

of fundamentalist violence represent the return of what modernity's symbolic structure cannot

accommodate . As Lacan puts it in his seminar on psychosis, "Whatever is refused in the symbolic order, in the sense of Verwerfung, reappears in the

real.”15 Fundamentalist violence is blowback not simply in response to imperialist aggression, as the leftist common sense would have it. This violence

marks the return of what modernity necessarily forecloses .

The social contract of liberalism is built on a politics of survival that valorizes life at all costs. No better example of fleeing from death can be found than the debate about physician assisted suicide. The prohibition against it is based on a belief that life is sacred and must be protected at all cost (this coming from the same Supreme Court that recognizes the government’s right to wage war and sentence persons to death). While the ban is justified by the universal nature of the social contract, the Constitution is by no means universal Hanafin 9 Patrick, Professor of Law @ REF Lead, “Rights of Passage: Law and the Biopolitics of Dying”, Deleuze and Law: Forensic Futures, pp 47-58 The figure who refuses is a particularly troubling one for law. Such a figure engages in a refusal to submit to the biopolitical order. One such figure is the terminally ill person who states that they would prefer not to live. This gesture expresses what Gilles Deleuze has termed the mode of being as if already gone (Boutang, 1995).

To be as if already gone is to accept death and not allow it to become the limit of thinking. This is a living with, or being with death, which sees it not as an intruder but as that without which we cannot live. Those who have exhausted

their end seek the right to die with dignity. This is a choice to die, which allows the body to speak its end rather than have that end dictated by the voice of an expert , legal or medical . The person who seeks to die is, to paraphrase Foucault, ‘the Passenger par excellence: that is, the prisoner of the passage’ (Foucault, 1967, p. 11). This notion of a passenger on

the way to death bespeaks our existence, prisoners of our being, passing towards death. When an individual goes before the law to claim this right not to live, judges, in a futile effort to put death on hold, talk, animatedly and excitedly, about life. It is vital from the point of view of legal and political elites that the insubordinate citizen is seen to be managed. The ultimate threat to a legal order built on death control is the

individual who refuses to accept law’s prohibition and seeks to self-style her death. She refuses to

be styled by law’s speech. In self-styling one’s death one is choosing to affirm one’s life and the

desire not to live a degraded existence . 1 This act is lost on those blinded by a conservative morality which opposes death to

life. This majoritarian politics of survival or ‘vitapolitics’ attempts to arrest death by composing a narrative which valorises Life. In other words, the state’s interest in preserving life becomes the interest in preserving the life of the state. The state attempts to put death to work in the service of life. However, as

Lars Iyer reminds us, every ‘attempt to put death to work is contested by dying itself, that is, by the “other” Lazarus who refuses to rise and come towards us’ (Iyer, 2004, p. 153). The liberal social compact is built on

the desire to survive . In this schema man looks constantly ahead to the moment of his death and his legacy. This becomes the be all

and end all of life in the shadow of death. Indeed it becomes the foundation of the modern liberal order with the

creation of the social contract as a means of survival , as a temporary immunity from death (see further

Cavarero, 1995, pp. 57–90). The legal regulation of choosing how one dies reveals that the individual’s power to decide how she lives or dies is ignored at best or curbed at worst. The power to decide is taken from the individual in the name of an abstract notion of Life. The terminally ill person who desires to die is prevented from doing so by legal obstacles. This is part of a wider management of individual lives or what Jean Baudrillard has termed ‘death control’. In this paradigm what we witness is: a forced ‘life for life’s sake’ … agony prolonged at all costs… whether we execute people or compel their survival… the essential thing is that the decision is withdrawn from them… ‘you shall not die’, not in any old way, anyhow (Baudrillard, 1993, p. 174). I want to look at one legal instantiation of this death bound normative narrative. This example,

along with many others which have been decided in a similar way, displays a tendency in the western legal tradition to

valorise true lif e, the disembodied life of pure and abstract thought over mere incarnate life . With the

exception of a very small number of states (Belgium, the Netherlands, Oregon, Switzerland), the western legal tradition does not

condone a right to die using active means, either in the form of voluntary euthanasia or indeed physician-assisted suicide . On

the other hand, many states allow an individual to make what is commonly called a living will or advance directive, which permits the withdrawal of artificial feeding and hydration in the event that the person ever finds herself or himself in a persistent vegetative state from which there is no hope of recovery. This model is based on the Christian ethical tradition which distinguishes active from passive means of euthanasia. The case I want to look at in some detail is exemplary of the legacy of this normative model. The United States’ Supreme Court’s adjudication in the jointly heard cases of Washington v Glucksberg and Quill v Vacco (521 U.S. 702 (1997)) came about as the result of decisions on the issue of physician-assisted suicide by the Second and Ninth Circuit Courts of Appeal, which gave constitutional protection to physician-assisted suicide, one on the grounds of the right to privacy, the other on the grounds of equal treatment. The Second Circuit Court of Appeal in Quill v Vacco (80 F.3d 716 (2d Cir. 1996) held that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment rendered statutes which prohibit assisted suicide unlawful. Noting that New York legislation permitted a competent person to refuse medical treatment even if this resulted in the individual's death, the Court held that assisted suicide should also be permissible on the ground that like persons be treated alike. An en hone panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal in Compassion in Dying v Washington (79 F.3d 790 (9th Cir. 1996) (en banc)) held that the Washington state statute prohibiting a physician from assisting a patient to die was unconstitutional, as it was contrary to the substantive component of the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause. Both cases were consolidated for hearing by the Supreme Court in January 1997. The Chief Justice delivered two opinions for the Court in June 1997 overruling both the Second and Ninth Circuits' decisions. In these opinions he was joined by Justices O'Connor. Scalia. Kennedy, and Thomas. However, Justice O'Connor filed a separate concurrence joined by

Justices Ginsberg and Breyer. In addition Justices Stevens and Souter filed separate concurrences. When reading the case one is struck by the manner in which the multiple voices in the decision reflect the differing stances on life both as survival and possibility . The Supreme Cousrt majority opinion attempts to compose a narrative of order in the face of these unruly bodies who attempt to die before their time or out of

time . The narrative of the majority attempts to impose, ‘order through judgment' (Uhlmann, 1999. p. 139),

while the plaintiffs seek ‘an always elusive justice' (Uhlmann. 1999. p. 139). Within the judgment the law attempts to summon forth a living figure and refuses to see the dying or dead figures before it. This calling forth of a living figure in the face of death is even more pointed as the plaintiffs had already died by the time the Supreme Court justices issued their opinions. Chief Justice Rehnquist commences his observations in Washington v Glucksberg in defensive rhetorical mode and. in so doing, evinces the law’s failure to recognise those who would wish to die otherwise titan in the legally sanctioned way: our laws have consistently condemned, and continue to prohibit, assisting suicide. Despite changes in medical technology and notwithstanding an increased emphasis on the importance of end of life decision-making, we have not retreated from this prohibition. Against this backdrop of history, tradition, and practice, we now turn to respondents' constitutional claim (521 U.S. 702(1997)719). The backdrop or default is set. The individual is bound by the ‘rights' which also bind her to an impersonal or state-mediated death. Rehnquist speaks in the rhetoric of warfare: ‘we have not retreated'. He goes on to construct a particular legal relation to assisted death and in so doing reveals a certain conception of community: We now enquire whether this asserted right has any place in our Nation's traditions. Here... we are confronted with a consistent and almost universal tradition that has long rejected the asserted right, and continues to reject it today, even for terminally ill. mentally competent adults. To hold for respondents, we would have to reverse centuries of legal doctrine and practice, and strike down the considered policy choice of almost every state (521 U.S. 702(1997) 721-3). In this

passage, the Chief Justice creates the illusion that there is a uniform view on this contested ethical issue.

This, however, does not give due consideration to the several contradictory views and practices which coexist. He is interpreting the Constitution in a manner which would give the appearance of unity. Rehnquist appeals to a particular interpretative

method and. in so doing, is hailing a particular totalising conception of the nation. The language of Rehnquist posits a particular societal model based on immunity and survival. In this case one could argue that what is valued most of all is a totalising transcendent being in common of community.3 This relation is built into the law’s nonnative framework in the natural law model of the sanctity of life . This may help to explain how an inalienable right to life is undone when the body politic needs to defend itself or one of its citizens against transgression. This relation to death can be seen as looking to the enforcement of law and exclusion of mere or embodied life. The type of politics implicit in this approach involves discovering the implicit identity of a nation and setting it to work. This conception of politics as work relies upon and follows from the conception of community as immanent identity. Rehnquist creates the textual illusion of a united homogeneous community. In his judgment he creates the textual boundaries which enclose the citizen in the state. In this regard the law can be seen as a stabilising instrument, a means of suspending in abstract ghostly form identifiable citizens who are simultaneously citizens with an identity. In other words the text of law creates or provokes a symbolic unity where none exists in order to secure the state in its

territorial and textual space. This illusory wholeness or togetherness is permanently under siege in the paranoiac discourse of the state and of law. Rehnquist’s exclusion of physician-assisted suicide from the domain of rights might be explained by his regarding such deaths as an instance of worklessness.

For him such deaths add nothing to the survival of his imagined community. They are pure excess,

deaths which do not sublate into building community. In this model, ironically, state executions and killing in

time of war are approved of because they appear to uphold the integrity of the community . They

maintain societal solidarity , binding it together against the intruder. In the decision of the majority in this case what

is eclipsed is the actual choice facing the individual who goes before the Court to obtain recognition of his desire to die with dignity. This

process is well described by William Connolly as ‘the sedimentation of an ethos into corporeal sensibilities’ (Connolly. 1999. p. 179). In this

model the individual's plea goes unheard. Yet even within t his model of prohibition, the more the law attempts to curb the voice of the individual who seeks to die with dignity, the more it reveals its own contradictory thinking on the matter. To look more closely at how this unravelling operates, let us return to the United States Supreme Court decision in Washington v Glucksberg and Quill v Vacco (521 U.S. 702 (1997)). The Chief Justice's attempt to repress societal disagreement on the issue is not successful. Physician-assisted suicide in Rehnquist's schema would appear to act as a threat to a certain construction of communal identity: one built on a unified body of national history, legal traditions and practices. The Supreme Court's assertion of a universal tradition, which eschews euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, is countered by an alternative tradition of physician assistance in dying, which occurs outside formal legal structures. This gives the lie to the Chief Justice's attempt to create a consensual societal attitude on the issue. In Washington v Glucksberg and Quill v Vacco (521 U.S. 702 (1997)) the Supreme Court is engaged in a simultaneous imposition and questioning of what constitutes legal tradition. This confirms from within the judgment that there is no single history or

tradition. In other words, physician-assisted suicide is not inconsistent with a unified tradition or history but with a particular conception of tradition and history . However, the imbrication of a particular ideology is always contradicted by the operation of law itself as an institutional mechanism of biopolitical management. This requires looking at law not as the guardian of a certain normative framework but. as Foucault has observed, as a means of administering illegalisms. As Foucault noted: ‘Illegalism is not an accident... I'd say that law is not made in order to forbid any particular kind of behaviour, but in order to distinguish between the different ways of getting

around the law itself (cited in Deleuze, 2006. p. 114). Deleuze sums up this interpretation of the operation of law thus: Law is always a structure of illegalisms... laws are not contrasted... with illegality, but... are actually used to find loopholes in others. Law administers illegalisms: some it allows, makes possible or invents as the privilege of the dominating class; others it tolerates as a compensation for the dominated classes , or even uses in the service of the dominating class; others again it forbids, isolates and takes as both its object and its means of domination (Deleuze. 2006. p. 26).

The right to die debate is currently two sides of the same coin. Advocates of the prohibition posit the ‘sanctity of life’ is an incalculable value, whereas the proponents of physician assisted suicide argue dignity in death is also an incalculable value.

This is meant to make the decision about death easier. Yet, there is no such thing as an easy decision, especially one about life and death, all decisions are violent and involve exclusion.

The problem is the status quo tries to decide on the right to die by predetermining death; the only ethical response to this is a deconstruction that will endlessly question the assumptions of sanctity and dignity Shershow 14 Scott, Professor of English at the University of California Davis, “Deconstructing Dignity: A Critique of the Right to Die Debate,” The University of Chicago Press, pp introduction About a “right to die” there is obviously not yet any legal, political, or ethical consensus. But has the very question of such a right been formulated clearly? Despite a long philosophic tradition addressing the question of suicide itself and, more recently, a half-century of legal

decisions, a growing library of scholarly studies across multiple disciplines, and a steady outpouring of polemic from advocacy groups, the debate about a right to die remains marked by contradictions and misrecognitions on every side —if

one can even speak of the “sides” of a debate whose warring positions often seem secretly complicit

with one another . Something still seems to impede our access to a vexed set of decisions about the

end of (human) life —decisions that have never been easy , and that will not become easy even when all the common arguments so far brought to them have been deconstructed, assuming such a thing is possible. My preface title, which already takes from my epigraph a hint of the comic, also gives homage to Georges Bataille’s La Part Maudite—the “cursed part” or, as Robert Hurley translates it, The Accursed Share—to invoke the “burst of laughter” with which (in Derrida's memorable summary) Bataille responds to the very work of philosophy under its privileged name of Hegel. This laughter, which emerges from or perhaps constitutes a certain relation between the finite being and death, seems at once to be the very thing always at stake in this debate, and the very thing that remains entirely unthought within it. I also intend an oblique reminder that what is called deconstruction, as Derrida

acknowledges in an early interview, is often “situated explicitly in relation to Bataille” (Positions 105-6^5). Derrida’s texts, both early and

late, often force us to confront a strange relation of incalculability and calculation (or what Bataillc termed

“general” and “restricted” economy) that emerges in a wide variety of discourse and thought—including, as I suggest here, the debate about a right to die . My preface title also more distantly echoes a term at the center of

another theoretical debate, this one between Derrida and Jcan-Luc Nancy, about the partage: a word that in French can mean both joining and division—as we glimpsed above with part, a noun that similarly means, in French, either “part” or “share.” As J. Hillis Miller suggests, partage might be taken either as “sharing” or as “shearing” (252). I invoke this term here because death itself, or at least any conceivable way to think a certain “right” to death, is the very instance and limit of partage in each of its senses. Partage thus figures, so to speak, that irreducible spacing of time that makes possible a “sharing of singularities” (Nancy, Experience of Freedom 70): a sharing that must, accordingly, always involve “at

once partition and participation” (Derrida, Rogues 45). For any hypothetical right to die , as we shall see, would necessarily involve a certain (social, legal, or political) sharing of the one thing (death) that can never

be shared, and a certain process of division, distribution, and calculation that, however, finally undoes itself by being so shared. In this book, I approach the debate about a right to die as a whole, and my focus may therefore seem at once too large and too small: too large because I will be summarizing a voluminous debate, a debate both ancient and contemporary, only selectively and schematically; and too small, because I offer no final, specific resolution and for the most part refrain from taking sides.

Perhaps the latter will seem especially paradoxical, since what it is always at stake in the question of a hypothetical right to die are life-and-death decisions in the most literal sense of the word: decisions to which individuals , families, doctors, judges, and lawmakers are all alike called , and yet about which it remains today unclear precisely what person , or what principle , is or should be sovereign . But, as

Derrida has repeatedly argued, the structure of any decision , and therefore any possibility of justice, rights, or responsibility, also involves this strange relation of calculation and incalculability . As he writes, “a decision has to be prepared by reflection and knowledge”—and hence by calculation—“but the moment of the decision, and thus the moment of responsibility, supposes a rupture with knowledge, and therefore an opening to the incalculable” (Derrida and Ferraris, "Taste 6l). This aporia or interpretive dilemma, necessarily involved in the structure of any decision, will guide my critique of this vexed question of a right to die. In the first chapter of this book, I begin with some broad methodological observations—though the term “method,” as I acknowledge, cannot really be employed—about the strategy and protocol of deconstruction, observations that will guide my readings throughout. Readers more specifically interested in the political and bioethical questions otherwise central to the book are invited to move past this introductory discussion, which involves a relatively detailed foray into the texts of Jacques Derrida. The first few chapters that follow provide a selective genealogy of the key concept underlying the whole question of a right to die: “human dignity.” I consider the shifting historical and semantic structure that underlies this term, especially its relationship to two other equally difficult concepts—“sanctity” and “sovereignty.” For dignity is often, in various discursive contexts, set in specific opposition to

either one or the other of these who, even as its own semantic structure also forces it into a certain near-identity with both. Across its whole history, and in a variety of different ways, dignity seems always to denote the worth and value of humanity as a strange relation of calculable and incalculable value, in a manner that conceals a certain internal gap or fissure in its own concept. The strange groundlessness of the concept of human dignity proves to be particularly pertinent in considering the modern debate about a “right to die,” as I do in the second half of the book. To consider this debate schematically or structurally will be to bring to light how , here again, a certain relation of calculation and incalculability structures not only

arguments on both sides of the issue, but also the debate as a whole . I then contextualize this modern debate by

considering a few outstanding examples of the philosophic approach to suicide itself. From Plato to Kant, a theological and ethical prohibition of suicide proves always to be troubled by a certain signal exception: the figure of self-sacrifice. Such an insight, in its turn, allows me to return to the contemporary debate, whose shared economy then reveals itself, similarly, as one of sacrificial calculation. But is not sacrifice, some may already object, the very thing that is not at stake in the question of a (legal and political) right to die? In fact, is not sacrifice the very thing that is, in principle, beyond all calculation? Such questions, which will animate the discussion that follows, already perhaps evoke a faint irony, or a burst of laughter, that in pursuing these arguments I have often, despite their solemnity, found impossible to repress. Indeed, considered as a

whole, the contemporary debate about the right to die appears at once (to appropriate Derrida’s description of Heidegger’s text) “horribly

dangerous and wildly funny, certainly grave and a bit comical" {Of Spirit 68). The gravity and danger of this debate are obvious. Perhaps no issue involves so many confusingly entwined political, legal, and theological issues, nor forces so intimate a confrontation with the spatial and temporal conditions and limits of bodily life. Today, even to name or describe the thing itself is to enter a field of controversy. Docs the right to die mean the right to decide the time, place, and circumstances of one’s own death, the right to take one’s own life under any circumstances, the right to be assisted in dying, or the right of some to decide on the death of others? Arc we speaking of euthanasia (a word with its own vexed history, and that merely elides the question of what might constitute a “good” death), of “physician-assisted suicide,” “death on demand,” “death with dignity,” or even, as some have claimed, of “judicial murder”? By each of these definitions and names, a debate about the right to die would demand a different set of arguments and interpretive protocols; yet in no ease would the question of such a right become any easier to decide. The comic note that attends the question of a right to die is, by contrast, subtle, convoluted, and oblique: evoked as much by certain structural or historical contradictions marking the debate as a whole as by any of its specific articulations, and conditioned by a certain embarrassment about its own emergence in a context otherwise so grave. For one thing, can one really conceive of a right to that which comes inescapably to all whether they like it or not? Can the political and legal concepts of “right” or “freedom” apply to something that, so to speak, marks the very limit of all

rights and all freedom? The very idea of death is obviously and absolutely inseparable from the fundamental question of temporality itself—and also, therefore, from what Martin Hagglund calls (in his important reading of Derrida), the time

of life, the fundamental “spacc-timc,” or spacing of time, which is the absolute condition of possibility for mortal being itself. Certain questions of time and history, of evolution or degeneration, have accordingly been among the most contentious in the debate about a right to die, and but one of many examples of a symmetry in which its opposed positions often seem to join. Consider, to begin with, how both the proponents and opponents of a right to die often envision the whole debate as a linear or narrative history. For both, the same succession of watershed events—for example, the eases of Karen Quinlan (l975—85), Nancy Cruzan (1983-90)1 and Terri Schiavo (1990-2005)'; the legalization of physician-assisted suicide in the Netherlands (2002) and in the American states of Oregon (1994) and Washington (2008); the career and eventual conviction for assisting suicide of Dr. Jack Kevorkian (1999)—arc understood as historical signposts of either

emancipatory progress or moral and social decline. Moreover, proponents of a right to die commonly inscribe their cause within an assumed history of techno scientific progress. For example, it is often claimed by proponents of a right to die that recent advances in medical technology, especially techniques for prolonging the biological life of elderly and severely ill patients, have, as Derek Humphrey puts it, “pushed the assisted death issue to the forefront” (Humphrey and Clement 15; cf. Glick 14). William H. Colby (who had served as the attorney

for Nancy Cruzan) declares that “the hard questions raised by a case like Terri Schiavo’s are blindingly new' for humankind” (Colby, Unplugged 95). A right to die is thus not merely a right newly added to the list of those considered indispensible, but a right that only recently emerged as necessary. Such an argument, however, seems to predetermine its own symmetrical refutation, by which one argues (as opponents of the

right to die commonly do) that precisely because of this rapidly changing technoscientific landscape, as Charles Colson puts it, “bioethical reasoning based on the meaning and value of human beings must precede and guide biotechnology” (Colson 17). Now, there can be no doubt that new technologies for prolonging life have created many more cases in which decisions about the end of life seem inescapably to present themselves. A treatment may be accepted even

if it hastens death; another treatment might be refused although it might prolong life. Medical technology has also created (if

this word is the right one, given that such a development appears entirely inadvertent) many more cases in which patients survive in comatose or “vegetative” states, viewed in the popular imagination as a kind of “living death” and understood within a certain theory of biopower as a paradigmatic instance of the “bare life" to which it is the destiny of sovereign power to reduce us all ( Agambcn 186). American jurisprudence, while

not yet recognizing any absolute right to suicide or to have assistance in committing suicide, has moved towards recognizing a partial or implicit “right to die” by affirming an individual’s right to refuse treatment (and to record his or her wishes to this effect in “living wills” or “advance directives"). Yet as E. J. Emmanuel suggests, the major philosophic positions in this debate have not changed significantly since Samuel D. Williams’ essay “Euthanasia” of 1870, commonly identified as the first published text to advocate unequivocally what we would call today

physician-assisted suicide (793)* Moreover, a debate about suicide in general goes back as far as ancient Greece: to take just the most notable example, the Stoic philosophers believed (citing R. S. Guernsey’s summary), that it is “essential to the dignity” of a human being “that he should regard death without dismay, and that he has a right to hasten it if he desires" (Guernsey II). And as Ian Dowbiggin and Shai J. Lavi have shown, the possibility of legalizing some forms of euthanasia was already being debated by doctors, philosophers, and legislators in the early years of the twentieth

century, long before the invention of the respirator or the nasogastric tube.2 Thus the question of a right to die somehow

both is and is not technologically determined, and both does and does not evolve progressively. But if this debate as a whole cannot finally be understood as a simple narrative of progress, still less can it be understood in terms of decadence or decline. Yet opponents of a right to die today doggedly repeat the same fundamental claim: that “modern culture is going” toward a new “philosophy of ‘human life’ that reduces the stature, the worth, and the irreplaceable uniqueness of the individual person” (Ramsey,

“Indignity” 6l); that a “culture of death ... has enveloped our medical and moral world during the last

generation” (Smith, Culture of Death 238); and that “contemporary liberal political theory abets the culture of death” by “justifying and defending euthanasia” (George, Clash 39-40). In the face of such claims about some allegedly new “culture of death,” one can only rub one’s eyes in astonishment and wonder exactly

when or where some contrasting “culture of life” ever prevailed . Is it even necessary to name the brute facts of the

past few centuries of American or world history that suffice to expose the hollowness of such claims? To take just the most proximate example, the Nazi programs of involuntary euthanasia and racial eugenics—the cautionary example commonly cited by opponents of a right to die as the likely consequence of any change in the laws regarding assisted suicide—were inspired and influenced by a whole range of discourse, legislation, experimentation, and political activism in early twentieth-century America.* Would it be

in those years that one should look for a model of the “culture of life”? In all this, and as we will see in other ways

throughout, the symmetry with which the two sides of this debate confront one another and sometimes seem secretly complicit provokes an inescapable laughter that seems to gather itself , in any ease,

around the very possibility of deciding about or even deciding on death. In his early nightclub comedy, Woody

Allen used to joke about majoring in philosophy in college, when, he says, he had taken courses such as “Truth,” “Beauty,” “Intermediate Truth and Beauty”—and, finally, “Death IOI.” In the recorded version of this performance, it is the final possibility that gets the biggest laugh. It would seem that the laughter here confronts our sense that death itself, whatever else that might be said or thought about it, and however much it must always compel our attention and our decisions, somehow remains singular and secret, something that in its totality cannot be organized into a syllabus or subjected to the universality of academic reason. I have spoken already of a laughter that, for B ataille, is perhaps “the ultimate given” of philosophy and thought (Gcmerchak 209) even as it escapes the latter’s incessant aspiration to complete itself, “to include within itself and anticipate all the figures of its beyond, all the forms and resources of its exterior” (Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy” 252). To be sure, as Mikkcl Borch-Jacobscn suggests, in Bataille “there is no theory of laughter” (742). What is referred to as laughter in his fragmentary texts often seems a furtive and ungraspable concept—especially since, indeed, it is not finally a concept or even an object to be theorized but, rather, a kind of experience, yet one that never presents itself in a manner that might be grasped in the form of conceptuality. Nevertheless, let me venture to speak of two laughters, or of what I will call here a comedy and a laughter. My terms, although perhaps not quite consistent with Bataillc’s own shifting deployment of them, can be broadly associated with his theoretical opposition of “restricted” and “general” economics.4 The restricted economy, in its rhythm of investment and return, of deferral and profit, pertains to finite beings defined by their insufficiency and need. Such restricted beings arc bound to necessity, to a daily task of supplying their bodily requirements; and their task thus has the shape of comedy: a sowing followed by a reaping, a planting leading to a fruition, a dispersal or dissemination completed by reconciliation or rcgathcring. This comedy would also designate what B ataille describes in Inner Experience as the impossible aspiration of “ipse seeking to become everything” (89), of the human being seeking to overcome his insufficiency by struggling up to a “summit” where his being might be whole and complete: sovereign both in the sense of supreme and as sufficient unto itself. Comedy is also Bataillc’s name for the evasion or subterfuge constituted by the ritual sacrifice, a mechanism by which, he argues, humanity manages to find a way to witness its own death, to die while actually continuing to live. Since the comic resolution by which ipse would indeed become all in all, attaining an absolute sovereignty beyond need, could only really be possible in death, death itself would have to become (self-) consciousness at the very moment that it annihilates the conscious being. In a sense, this is what takes place (what at least is on the point of taking place, or which takes place in a fugitive, ungrasp-ablc manner) by means of a subterfuge. In the sacrifice, the sacrificcr identifies himself with the animal that is struck down dead. And so he dies in seeing himself die, and even, in a certain way, bv his own will, one in spirit with the sacrificial weapon. (Hataille, “Hegel,

Death and Sacrifice” 19) Death, the very instance of the moment that can never be brought to light, that appears only by disappearing, here parades itself in the broad light of day and even enjoys its own aftermath : thus conscious being finds a way to give itself death by its own will and hand, and yet remain alive . But this performance, Bataille declares immediately after, “is a comedy!” Accordingly, the exclamation point

that concludes this well-known passage itself marks where a certain laughter escapes the completion of this comic movement. The “burst of laughter from Bataille” that follows this sacrificial subterfuge is the same one, in Derrida’s reading of Bataille, provoked by Hegel’s “lord" who

similarly undertakes an absolute risk of death within a philosophic schema in which he is always-already certain to remain alive. This laughter, Derrida writes, “bursts out only on the basis of an absolute renunciation of meaning, an

absolute risking of death, what Hegel calls abstract negativity ” (“From Restricted to General Economy” 255-56); and

laughs at the Hegelian dialectic when it, on the contrary, “re-appropriates all negativity for itself, as it works the ‘putting at stake’ into an investment, as it amortizes absolute expenditure; and as it gives meaning to death” (257). This laughter thus gestures toward the impossible experience of Bataille’s general economy: senseless expenditure , loss without return , the absolute sovereignty which “has little to do with

the sovereignty of states” {Accursed Share 2:197). For the singular being, such sovereignty could be realized only in death ,

for it could only be the property of being as a whole (cf. Borch-Jacobscn 744-45). Indeed, ipse at the summit has in this

supremacy sn*andcd himself in a place where no one else could arrive and nothing could happen (cf. Derrida, Rogues 152): sovereignty’s absolute self-realization is the revelation of an absolute insufficiency that makes it (as Bataille writes in Inner

Experience) “tragic ... in its own eyes,” but in every other way “laughable” (89). In the same book, similarly, Bataille writes of “the comedy—which tragedy is—and vice-versa,” and of “the sacrifice, the comedy which demands that a sole individual die in the place of all the others” (98). Figures of sovereignty—such as the Hegelian lord who claims to master all negativity in philosophic speculation, or the man Bataille describes in an early essay who, “ready to call to mind the grandeurs of his nation, is stopped in mid-flight by an atrocious pain in his big toe,” and whose “viscera, in more or less incessant inflation and upheaval, brusquely put an end to his dignity” {Visions of Excess 22)—

become the very things at which this (sovereign) laughter laughs. Such laughter thus responds or opens to a contestation or transgression so powerful that it can only be grasped as affirmation, or in other words, as a kind of sovereignty against sovereignty, a sovereignty defined by its impossible suspension at the very limit of sovereignty. Such a laughter, as that final quotation indicates, also laughs at dignity itself , which, as I will surest in a

variety of wap throughout, is a concept always locked in a strange relation with sovereignty, and which might finally be considered the name that humanity gives itself in the very moment of its attainment of the summit, just before the belittling burst of laughter. This point shifts our attention to Kant, who inevitably figures in debates about a right to die and whom we will consider twice in the pages that follow. To briefly cite here a few lines of a famous passage from the Groundwork of the Metaphysic (f Morals to which we will return, Kant contrasts “price* and “dignity* as two forms of value: What has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; what on the other hand is raised above all price and therefore admits of no equivalent has a dignity. (4:4.34)' Kant makes this distinction, of course, in order to argue that “morality, and humanity insofar as it is capable of morality, is that which alone has dignity* (4:435). Kant’s humanity is thus constituted by a double economic sn-ucture in which two forms of value arc joined in a strange relation, and about which one might suggest at least a distant analogy to Bataille’s economic opposition of restricted and general economics. In both cases, two economics or value-forms divide in terms of an apparent opposition of calculation and incalculability. Therefore, on the one hand, human beings possess a “natural” or animal life, a life bound to a rhythm of ingestion and growth, and whose limited or contingent value stems from its ability to produce itself: both in this literally bodily

manner and by working to fulfill what Kant calls “general human inclinations and needs” (4:434). This natural life with its calculable value or price would seem to correspond to Bataille’s “restricted economy,” the economy of circulation and deferral, of labor and need, of investment and return. On the other hand, human beings,

insofar as they are capable of reason and moral choice, are also the bearers of an incalculable value

(dignity), a value transcending their specific works and all utility of any kind. Dignity in this sense, as an attempt to designate a value beyond price, a value that cannot be calculated, might seem to correspond to Bataille’s general economy: the economy of the “world” or the “universe” grasped in their greatest possible generality. Or at any rate, in both of these quite heterogeneous schemas, a realm of calculable value and a realm of incalculability arc set against one another in a relation that, however, is not one of simple opposition, since in each ease it might conceivably be said that the term of incalculability docs not merely reverse its counterpart but, rather, opens it, loosens it up, or even explodes it into a new and wider horizon of possibility. Even to suggest this correspondence, however, is to instantaneously reveal its untenabilitv as a reading of either Kant or Bataillc, and to illuminate with peculiar vividness the parameters of Bataillc’s “Copcrnican revolution” in ethics.® As I have argued elsewhere, Bataillc was trying above all to articulate the relation between an individual being, who remains bound to the law of scarcity, and the “general” sphere of existence in which value and energy arc limitless.' For Kant, dignity is finally still a mode of elevation, and thus a kind of achievement—that is, to recall the semantic root of the latter term, a coming-to-a-hcad (a chief venir). Thus human dignity, at least in any convincing reading of Bataillc (who once declared himself to be “violently opposed to all dignity” [Oeuvres 7:460]), must remain under the horizon of the restricted economy: the economy of individual being and of project, achievement,

investment, and return. And, by the same token, it could be only the sovereign whole, the common or community that, beyond or beneath all dignity, might open to the limitlessness of the general economy —either

to death as joyously absolute negativity, or to “life” as a whole: that “general existence whose

resources are in excess and for which death has no meaning” (Accursed State 1:39)• Therefore, as will be apparent in

various ways throughout this book, the laughter that pervades the debate about a right to die , despite the latter’s

obvious gravity and danger, pertains above all to the strange concept of “dignity” that so informs it on every

side . And why not? Dignity has always been a privileged target of every sort of laughter, in more than one of its senses. If we laugh at the

discomfiture of a would-be gentleman or at the unexpected dignity of a tramp, we also laugh more generally at “this vain animal / Who is so proud of being rational.”* Even in all the serious and dangerous contexts in which it figures today, dignity can seem to be at once everywhere and nowhere: a sort of semantic trickster that at one moment refers to an inalienable human essence (what the International Declaration of Human Rights calls “the inherent dignity ... of all members of the human family" [Brownlie and Goodwin-Gill 24], at another moment to something that one can put on or take off (“he behaved with great dignity’”), and at still another moment to something that can be stripped away by’violence or coercion (c.g., the “outrages upon personal dignity” prohibited in the Geneva Conventions [Roberts and Guclff 245]). In the discourse surround-ing the right to die—so often understood, of course, as being about “death with dignity”—the concept plays a similarly devious part. To very briefly consider one initial example among innumerable possibilities, the liberal Protestant theologian and cleric Leslie Weatherhead writes (in 1965): 1 sincerely believe that those who come after us will wonder why on earth we kept a human being alive against his own will, when all the dignify, beaut)- and meaning oflife had vanished; ... 1 for one would be willing to give a patient the Holy Communion and stay with him while a doctor, whose responsibility 1 should thus share, allowed him to lay down his useless body and pass in dignify and peace into the next phase of being, (cited Downing 14, emphases added) Weatherhead makes dear in his own rhetoric that the very occasion in which a right to die would be exercised is often one in which “all the dignity ... of life had vanished.” In other words, a right to die Vlitb dignity is justified by the loss of dignity. Here again, so paradoxical an argument seems to mark out in advance its own symmetrical refutation, which is indeed commonly put forward by opponents. For example, Paul Ramsey argues (in an essay from 1974) that “there is nobility and dignity in caring for the dying, but not in dying itself.” Therefore, Ramsey suggests, the very idea of a death with dignity is a fatal contradiction in terms, because “to deny the indignity of death requires that the dignity of man be refused also” (“Indignity” 48, 56). Thus, even the “with” of the crucial phrase “death With dignity” can only mark a space of controversy and question: it names a condition in which a certain crucial yet indefinable form of value seems always at once, and in multiply contradictory ways, both present and absent. It might be said of the debate I

consider here, to risk one final pun on my own preface title, that on both sides death itself is envisioned as a kind of sacred partage: a sharing that is religious even when understood, as it sometimes is, in wholly secular terms, because it would always involve a rebinding (re-ligare) of singular beings in terms of some determination of their being. That is, both sides approach the possibility of decision with regard to

death by predetermining it (in one direction or another) in terms of an immanent and inalienable

value or characteristic of humanity ( a sanctity or dignity of human life ). If I do not finally take sides in the debate

as currently constituted, I do join Derrida and others in understanding that such a strategy makes a truly ethical decision impossible. As Derrida puts it, “pure ethics, if there is any, begins with the respectable dignity of the other as the absolute unlike, recognized as nonrecognizablc, indeed as unrecognizable, beyond all knowledge, all cognition, and all recognition; far from being the beginning of pure ethics, the neighbor as like or as resembling, as looking like, spells the end or the ruin of such an ethics” (Rogues 60). The lines I have just cited appear in a context in which Derrida is formulating a sympathetic critique of Nancy for, among other things, a certain overreliance on the concept or figure of

fraternity? Without rehearsing the details of that critique any further here, I might add a similar caveat about Derrida’s own use of the word “dignity” in the passage above. To be sure, Derrida uses the word only to transform it, in that he identifies “the absolute unlike” as the ground or origin of “the respectable dignity of the other.” This alone might be a sufficiently large conclusion in the face of a debate whose central concepts of the “dignity” or “sanctity” of (human) life arc by contrast always grounded in some category of likeness, resemblance, or recognition that, at the very least, lifts us above all other natural creatures and then supposedly invites or guarantees our mutual respect. Even

then, however, it might still remain to be questioned whether the word and concept of dignity can indeed be wrested successfully from the anthropological and metaphysical determinations that so obviously condition its meaning and use. Without , obviously, being somehow against human dignity, or opposed to the

emancipatory project so often conducted in its name, one must still subject it to “a rational deconstruction that

will endlessly question [its] limits and presuppositions, the interests and calculations that order [its]

deployment ” (Rogues 151). In the pages that follow, I take some tentative steps toward tracing this strategic, adventurous, and

unfinishable project.

Voting affirmative is a decision for death through just care – this is a call for mutual commitment to allow the other to embrace the very limits of finitude by proclaiming “it is a good day to die.” Shershow 14 Scott, Professor of English @ the University of California Davis, “Deconstructing Dignity: A Critique of the Right to Die Debate,” The University of Chicago Press, 173-176The calculation that would necessarily be involved in any possibility of choosing death now reveals itself in the form of what Bataille called the “restricted economy ” of singular beings, who are, as he puts it, “eternally needy” {Accursed Share 1:23). At the end of life, as at its beginning, the re-sn-icted, mortal being frequently is in need of what can only be

called care. In the debate about a right to die, as we have seen, those who proclaim above all that we must “always care, never kill” often ally themselves to an ethos of market liberalism according to which this care is in practice to be distributed according to the vagaries of birth, employment and fortune.

Among all the vexed permutations of this ongoing debate, the strangest of all, in my view, is the way

in which so obvious a paradox could remain so relatively unthought on both sides . So let me now say it

plainly: only a state or society or community in which all necessary medical attention was absolutely

guarante ed to all —and in which, therefore, anyone ever seeking to extend his or her life to the last instant of bare existence would be both entitled and practically able to do so—could be said to bring a practical rationality to the ethical principle of “always to care.” If it is not possible here to formulate the myriad practical details that such a universal social project would involve, such a conclusion is nevertheless not to be grasped as “merely” theoretical, for it would be the absolute condition of possibility for realizing in practice anything like the incalculable principles (the “sanctity” or “dignity" of human life) centrally affirmed on both sides of this debate. Only in such a state or society would it be possible to ensure, at least to the limit of collective possibility, that no one need ever feel that his or her death is made necessary by anything other than mortality itself, nor fear that his or her “dignity” in either of its senses (bodily soundness versus the self-sovereignty of reasoned choice) might have to be sacrificed to the other. This would be calculating to the limits of calculability itself. In

other words, at those unpredictable moments, perhaps made more common or more frequent by technoscientific progress, when one must decide on life or death, a set of procedures or programs to share and divide, to calculate and measure, would paradoxically make it possible to abjure all the other merely financial or practical calculations that might otherwise tip the scale in one direction or another. The limit that such necessary calculation necessarily reaches—or, that is, the unconditioned or incalculable principle to which such calculation finally opens itself — would be something like

Bataille’s “general economy” of expenditure without return or reserve: the joyous negativity with

which one might embrace the very limits of finitude by proclaiming “it is a good day to die.” This

absolute embrace or affirmation of death has always been, and must in principle always remain,

possible . (Even my quotation—commonly claimed to have been declared by the Sioux warrior Crazy Horse at the outset of a famous battle

that, nevertheless, he both won and survived—indicates both that there is nothing new about this willingness to declare for death, and also how a certain laughter can never be separated from it .) None of the philosophic labors expended to explain why killing one’s self can never be justified has ever been able to spare us the ineluctable possibility that someone might commit to death by the act we call “committing suicide”; and even if we refrain from ever endorsing or approving or esteeming such an act, even if we continue to do all we can to prevent it, it will always in principle be “there,” as a possibility always at

least to be entertained. Let us recall how those most opposed to any right to die claim that their

opponents , whatever their announced programs, are actually advocating an absolute right to suicide ( “death

on demand” ) under any and all conditions . And then let us recall, correspondingly, how those in favor of a right to die commonly observe (as Samuel Williams did as far back as 1870) that if you are willing to shorten life at all (e.g., to alleviate pain) then what is the difference between such shortening of life and a positive ending of it? These two bitterly antagonistic arguments and mutual critiques both appear to be persuasive in their own terms. The opponents of a right to die are clearly correct to suggest that the other side’s logic would lead towards an absolute right to suicide; but the proponents of a right to die are equally right (as I tried to show earlier)

to observe the fatal illogic in this temporal scheme, especially when dealing with beings who are

once finite and rational. As we have also seen, both sides necessarily concede (the one strongly and

enthusiastically, the other hesitatingly and with many qualifications) that bodily weakness might sometimes make death welcome, even as it might make it practically impossible to give death to one’s self. Thus the fundamental opposition at work in this question and this debate as a whole might be construed as one between the necessary and inescapable calculation that must be operative in any practical project of universal care ( including the possibility of “ assisted” suicide ) and the incalculability of death embraced as absolute negativity without any recuperation as value, sacrificial or otherwise. What, then, would be the irruptive quasi-concept that might emerge from the deconstruction, the inversion and displacement, of this opposition? This time we might venture to call it a just care — a mutual commitment to each other

that , having on the one hand made possible the maintenance of life to its mortal limit, could, on the other

hand, also make it possible to think or to recognize a decision for death . Perhaps the decision to die as

we are envisioning it now could not precisely be understood as the product of a “right.” But this

decision and this death could finally be recognizable or thinkable at all only because another whole

mechanism of right would have begun to be formulated and put to work . Given that it could never be

made necessary by anything other than mortal necessity itself, and especially not by what Bataille

calls merely servile reasons (of economy or need), such a death, beyond all reasons that might be given for it and in the utter secret of its coming-to-pass, can perhaps be defined at all only by saying it would be absolutely anything but a “sacrifice.” In the debate as we have followed throughout, the positions on each side proved always to involve a process of calculation , a setting and debating of conditions, a

process always claimed , however, to be anchored and grounded by an incalculable principle ( dignity or

sanctity ) that then, however, proves itself to be groundless, always-already hollowed out by exceptions and by the very impulse of calculation it claims to govern and limit. So here, by contrast, it would be an incessant process of calculation and division that, at its very limit , makes possible an

opening to incalculability , to that absolute secret that is universally shared only by not being shared,

and hence to the chance that always remains of an unconditional escape from all conditions.

Learning to live means learning to die – death is rooted in infinite memories and infinite cultures --only deconstruction can untangle the complexity of the right to die debate. Shershow 14 Scott, Professor of English @ the University of California Davis, “Deconstructing Dignity: A Critique of the Right to Die Debate,” The University of Chicago Press, pp 1-7“Learning to live,” observes Jacques Derrida (in a now-famous interview conducted just weeks before his own death in 2004) ,

should mean learning to die , learning to take into account, so as to accept, absolute mortality (that is, without salvation,

resurrection, or redemption—neither for oneself nor for the other). That’s been the old philosophical injunction since

Plato: to philosophize is to learn to die . And yet, he goes on to concede, I haw never learned to accept it, accept death, that is.

We are all survivors who haw been granted a temporary reprieve. {Learning 24) Derrida’s words, inescapably privileged by their context and occasion, will serve as an vivid reminder that deconstruction remains, both first and last, a thought of what Martin Hagglund calls, with

eloquent simplicity, the time of life. The idea of a hypothetical “right to die” is all-too-obviously inseparable from the difficult questions of mortality and survival of which Derrida speaks above; indeed, one might venture to suggest that what is envisioned under this phrase is no more and no less than a

specific and practical version of the ancient philosophic challenge to learn how to die. It is equally obvious that the idea of a right to die might be approached via almost any mode of philosophy and thought. A right to die might be (and often has been) considered as a question of law , of religion , of

psychoanalysis , or of the emergent fields today referred to as bioethics or biopolitics . I will argue here,

however , that only deconstruction can be adequate to unfold the knot of unexamined assumptions

remaining to be unfolded at the heart of this vexed question, assumptions that invisibly join both

sides of this contemporary debate in a secret complicity . Because , as Hagglund exhaustively demonstrates in his

important reading of Derrida, Radical Atheism, deconstruction always involves “an unconditional affirmation of survival” (Hagglund 2), one might initially suspect that deconstruction should oppose any conceivable possibility of choosing death. Derrida himself, in the remarks he composed to be read at his own funeral, enjoins us to “always prefer life” (Pectcrs 541). Such suspicions would be all the more paradoxical in that deconstruction is sometimes denounced (and often precisely by the kind of thinkers otherwise opposed to any right to die) as a pernicious nihilism or ethical relativism, or at best a sort of quietism

concerned with merely linguistic or semantic questions. But in fact, as Hagglund argues, deconstruction’s affirmation of

survival is actually an affirmation of finitude as (practical) possibility, and a thought of that fundamental Spacing of time that makes possible all that could be encompassed under the name of “life.” Deconstruction is a thought of the time of life and of death: of time as limit and as limiting condition, yet also of time as the condition of possibility for anything and everything like experience, meaning, or thought itself. What Derrida means by survival is something that, as he writes, “structures every instant in a kind of irreducible torsion, that of a retrospective anticipation that introduces the untimely moment and the posthumous into what is most living in the living present”

(Aporias 55). The problem of a hypothetical right to die, therefore, is finally one and the same as the problem or problems of finitude itself: problems that are infinite , as Derrida puts it in a different context, not only

because “they are infinitely numerous , nor because they are rooted in the infinity of memories and

cultures (religious, philosophical, juridical, and so forth) that we shall never master," but also because “they are

infinite, if one may say so, in themselves” (“Force of Law” 244). Deconstruction is necessary in the face of

these limitless questions , therefore, because what one finally refers to under this term is a commitment

to a perpetually renewed interrogation of the axioms , assumptions , and norms that govern our

theories and our practices— and also , by the same token, our lives and our deaths . Even if all this be granted,

however, another possible objection interposes itself in the face of my claim to be “deconstructing” a contemporary debate whose roots so obviously go so deep into this infinity of history and thought. It would be this: does deconstruction provide in any sense a “method” that might be followed or put into practice as I seem to be promising? More broadly, docs this so-called deconstruction, often associated with merely linguistic questions and, indeed, sometimes said to be already superseded by more recent theoretical paradigms, provide any tools or insights that can be brought to bear on an urgently practical question, such as the question of a hypothetical right to die? In this chapter I thus attempt to outline what will be called, for particular reasons, a strategy or protocol of dcconsn-uction, and also a distinctively deconstructive thought of

justice, that will guide the readings that follow in the rest of this book. This double responsibility necessitates a relatively detailed venture into the texts of Derrida. As I briefly mentioned in the preface, readers who would prefer to go straight to the

practical and political questions primarily at stake in this book arc invited to go on to the second chapter. In response to this initial question—is deconstruction a “method”?—even undergraduates could today be expected to cite one or more of the well-known passages where Derrida repeatedly insists that deconstruction is neither a method, nor a mode of analysis , nor “a set of rules and transposable procedures,” nor “even an act or an operation.” Rather, deconstruction merely “takes place,” in the absence of any subject , and each

time with the absolute singularity of an “idiom or a signature” (Derrida, “Letter” 4). As Rodolphe Gasche observes, in the course of a detailed attempt to assess a deconstructive methodology, a method is commonly understood to be “an instrument for representing a given field, and it is applied to that field from the outside” (Gasche I2l); but deconstruction “does not apply itself ... to anything from the outside,” for it is

something that a text “does itself, by itself, on itself” (Derrida, “Force of Law” 264). Deconstruction thus cannot even be definitively linked to some specific history or period such as that of modernity (or, still

less, any so-called postmodernity), for it takes place in what can only be described as an “‘epoch’ of being-in-deconstruction, of a being-in-deconstruction that manifests or dissimulates itself at one and the same time in other ‘epochs’" (Derrida, “Letter” 4-5). Such stipulations arc now entirely familiar. But doesn’t one more or less assume that they will always be followed by the antithesis that I have now duly attached to them? In fact, don’t such assertions sometimes approach, as Derrida puts it in another context, “very close to that at which laughter laughs” (“From Restricted to General Economy” 252). Won’t someone (perhaps the undergraduate imagined above) always observe that even the lines just cited appear in essays and books that were composed, translated, printed, and so forth, and that a whole mechanism of practices, productions, and operations do attend, even if they do not exactly constitute, whatever could possibly be meant by deconstruction? And even if such material questions arc dismissed, couldn’t one further suggest that even to think or write about deconstruction must be to project, at least hypothetically, some procedure or method or operation in at least the sense of a course of action or a path set down to be followed? “Differance plays neither the role of a ‘concept,’ nor simply of a ‘word,’” Derrida told an interviewer in 1971, but went on to concede that “this docs not prevent it from producing conceptual effects” (Positions 40). Jean Wahl, introducing the discussion that followed Derrida’s original presentation of the lecture that became the essay “Differance,” put it like this: “It was said that differance with an a could not be spoken of, and yet, in the most fascinating way, we have heard diffirance with an a discussed for over an hour” (Wood and Bernasconi S3). Nevertheless, to speak this way is by no means simply to subject deconstruction, if there is any such thing, to a belittling reduction. Rather, such questions touch unmistakably on that laughter that, as Derrida argues in his reading of Bataillc, “alone exceeds dialectics” and the recuperative work of meaning (“From Restricted to General Economy” 256), and whose advent marks the very place at which all method or discipline finally exceeds and dislocates itself. Therefore, to continue this terminological play whose necessity we have begun to glimpse not despite but in the faintly comic note that attends it, one will first conclude

that deconstruction could never be a method , procedure, or operation because such terms appear to be inextricably linked to questions of progress and profit , to philosophic “work” and therapeutic intervention. Here, I explore two other terminological possibilities, suggesting that, for Derrida, deconstruction involves a certain strategy and a certain protocol. Although neither term could somehow master the whole field of what is called deconstruction (for the reasons briefly touched on above and for others that further consideration of these terms will bring out), they serve as part of that open, non-taxonomical collage of terms with which a field of deconstruction can be, if not defined, then at least demarcated. I go on to suggest that Derrida’s early critique of logocentrism and his later audacious claim that “deconstruction is justice” (“Force of Law” 243) share—if I may be permitted already to put these terms in play—a fundamentally similar protocol and strategy. In my view, a certain structural similarity of all of Derrida’s arguments both early and late is part of what gives the later ones so urgent a claim on our attention. Although one would never wish to say simply that the method is the message, one should surely notice that the questions of “method” addressed here by no means pertain to a kind

of envelope or package in which some issue or question (such as the right to die) can simply be fitted. But these methodological questions, however carefully we must bracket them, prove to be the very place where deconstruction proves itself to be practical : to be, that is, a thought that can be brought to bear on

practices, textual, philosophic, and political. As Gasche suggests , if there is something about a

deconstructive methodology that limits “the intervention of its strategic dimension to only one

particular discursive space and time,” then such a limitation is precisely what gives deconstruction a

particular power to intervene “in historically specified contexts” (Gasche IJ4). In Derrida’s own text, both terms proposed for consideration here seem both to designate a certain process, a way of proceeding, and to serve as an example of that process. That is, both terms are themselves subjected to something like the semantic displacement given to other well-known deconstructive “terms” such as trace, supplement, mark, and so forth (a process that itself has some claim to be understood as the methodology of deconstruction). Derrida’s explicit invocation of the figure of strategy is perhaps almost as familiar as his renunciation of method. "In the delineation le trace] of differance,” Derrida famously writes in the essay of that name, “everything is strategic and adventurous'* (“Differance” 7). The two words here invoked would usually be understood as near opposites, since strategy (which descends from the Greek strateyos, a general or military commander) conventionally refers to a calculated plan that governs specific actions (or “tactics"). To formulate a strategy is to envision the future in advance so as to minimize the role of chance and avoid unexpected adventures. The “delineation” or tracing-out of differance, however, is both strategic and adventurous, for, as Derrida describes it, it involves a strategy that is “blind,” that cannot master its field, and that cannot even orient “tactics according to a final goal.” Derrida even suggests that this process of delineation is strategic not despite, but because “no transcendent truth present outside the field of writing can govern theologically the totality of the field” (“Differance” 7). How are we to understand such a point, which seems to turn the word strategy inside out? It can only be that, in the absence of any governing power to command the field, what emerges in the field, or in the tracing of the play that constitutes the field, is a kind of sovereignty without sovereignty: a governing power that can exercise itself only by abandoning itself in a sovereign manner to what Derrida elsewhere calls, “the seminal adventure of the trace” ("Structure, Sign and Play” 292).

As such formulations perhaps already will indicate, deconstruction could be said to resemble the

“sovereign operation” evoked by Georges Bataille in which, as Derrida summarizes, one pursues a

particular method (what Bataille called a “methode de meditation”) that finally and essentially “breaks with

method” and “seeks neither to be applied nor propagated ” (Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy” 269). In

early interviews, Derrida also describes himself explicitly as pursuing “a ‘general economy,’ a kind of

general strategy of deconstruction” and speaks , similarly, of the necessity to elaborate “a general,

theoretical, and systematic strategy of philosophical deconstruction ” (Positions 41, 68). The strategy of

deconstruction is called “general” to acknowledge its link to Bataille’s “general economy”: an

economy of loss and excess which is opposed to a “restricted economy” of investment and profit,

and intended, above all, to displace the philosophic privilege of the Hegelian “speculative” dialectic. In multiple ways, therefore, Derrida’s deployment of the term strategy is itself strategic insofar as the term, beyond or before any more specific meaning, indicates and responds to a terminological problem. “We must elaborate,” Derrida writes, “a strategy of the textual work which at ever)' instance borrows an old word from philosophy in order immediately to demarcate it” {Positions 59, emphasis added). The

theoretical exigency outlined here always redoubles because, as soon as one declares the “ ‘strategic’ necessity that requires the occasional maintenance of an old name in order to launch a new concept,” one must also, by the very same necessity, ask “why do we still call strategic an operation that in the last analysis refuses to be governed by a teleo-eschatological horizon”? (Positions 71). Just as, above, Derrida pulls the notion of strategy to its semantic limit and beyond by evoking an “adventurous” strategy, so here again he transmutes the term by making it refer “to the play of the stratagem rather than to the hierarchical organization of the means and the ends” {Positions 71)—the latter being how one would more commonly understand strategy itself.

Our decision is not perfect – which is precisely the point – deconstruction is not a method, it’s a never ending strategy of remembrance of the exclusion and the violence inherent in all decisions that attempt to achieve justice Weber 5 Elisabeth, Professor, Department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies, University of California Santa Barbara, “Deconstruction is Justice,” German Law Journal, Vol. 06 No. 01, 179-184, http://www.germanlawjournal.com/pdfs/Vol06No01/PDF_Vol_06_No_01_179-184_SI_Weber.pdfThis provocative assertion, sharply contrasting with the decades-old criticism of deconstruction as an aesthetisizing apolitical and ahistorical exercise, recapitulated in 1989 the stakes of an infinite task and responsibility that, in spite

of and because of its infinity, cannot be relegated to tomorrow: "[...] justice, however unpresentable it may be, doesn't wait. It is that which must not wait."1 It is in the spirit of such urgency, of a responsibility that cannot be postponed, that Jacques Derrida was an active and outspoken critic and commentator on issues such as South Africa's Apartheid, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the bloody civil war in his native Algeria, human rights abuses, French immigration laws, the death penalty, and on what Richard Falk has termed "the great terror war".2 In our era — the era French historian Annette Wieviorka has called the "era of the witness"3 — questions of answering to the other's call, questions of responsibility have gained, within the humanities, a significance that they never had had in non-Jewish Western thought before. This development would be unthinkable without the immense contribution of Jacques Derrida's writings. Throughout his oeuvre and his life, he witnessed to the unheard, over-shouted or silenced voices of those who have largely been excluded by the dominant currents of Western thought — who have been, as Toni Morrison's novel Beloved puts it, "disremembered and unaccounted for." What is more, Jacques Derrida formulated the necessity of being fully aware of the risk and aporias of this task of memory: that speaking for and

remembering the other carries in itself the seed of a second betrayal. The difficulties surrounding the questions of memory and justice are "not infinite simply because they are infinitely numerous, nor because they are rooted in the infinity of memories and cultures (religious, philosophical, juridical, and so forth) that we shall never

master."4 Rather, they are infinite in themselves , because they are inhabited by a series of "aporias" that make justice "an experience of the impossible" 5, that is , of the incalculable and the unpredictable . Far

from encouraging resignation, or a turning away from politics and history, these aporias actually render more urgent the

demand of justice . One of these aporias can be found in the tension between the uniqueness of the address and the name and the

necessity of the generality of the law: "An address is always singular, idiomatic, and justice, as law (droit), seems always to suppose the generality of a rule, a norm or a universal imperative. How are we to reconcile the act of justice that must always concern singularity, individuals, irreplaceable groups and lives, the other or myself as other, in a unique situation, with rule, norm, value or the imperative of justice which necessarily have a general form, even if this generality prescribes a singular application in each case?"6 As Christoph Menke succinctly

formulates it: The "deconstructive unfolding of the tension between justice and law" occurs "in the name of an experience that no political stance can capture, but that nevertheless affects any politics as its border, and therefore as its interruption."7 Such an "experience" is given in the name, which is why the question of the name is at the very heart of Jacques Derrida's thought. The demand for justice is not separable from the uniqueness of the gift of the name and the implications of this gift. In a reflection on the "final solution", Derrida describes how the experience of the name affects politics as its "border", and as its "interruption": "[...] one cannot think the uniqueness of an event like the final solution, as extreme point of mythic and

representational violence, within its own system. One must try to think it beginning with its other, that is to say, starting from what it tried to exclude and to destroy, to exterminate radically, from that which haunted it at once from without and within. One must try to think it starting from the possibility of singularity, the singularity of the signature and of the name, because what the order of representation tried to exterminate was not only human lives by the millions, natural lives, but also a demand for justice; and also names: and first of all the possibility of giving, inscribing, calling and recalling the name."8

One must try to think it starting from the possibility of singularity not only because "there was a destruction or project of destruction of the name and of the very memory of the name, of the name as memory,"9 but also because this name is in fact indissociable from "bare life."10 The ability to give a name is only given to those who have been called themselves. Naming is intrinsically marked by the fact and the conscious and, more importantly, unconscious recognition that we have been called ourselves, by the inscription, in other words, of a call that, as Emmanuel Levinas put it, preceded our ability to answer. This is the law at the "origin" of all laws: we have been called, and, to use Jean-Franqois Lyotard's formulation, we are hostages to this call, whether we know and affirm it or not. Now more than ever in the era of the witness, one of our tasks is to bear witness to the uncanny strangeness of this call that emanates as much from the Other as from myself, "the bearer of an internal alterity."11 The fact that naming the irreplaceable 'you' is in its very core marked by what Derrida calls "iterability" inscribes the institution in this unique event. It is only in its iterability (in other words, recognizability) that the address can be heard. But this iterability, this paradoxical repetition at the origin, does not contradict unicity: It makes it possible in the first place. It is what could be called the excess of the institution within the call.

We can exhaust the call as little as we can exhaust the fact that we were bom. It has called us into a life of relation and infinite contingency and makes itself heard as the radical openness and vulnerability that is ours, and that is called being alive. This infinite finitude could be called the excess of the call within the institution (the institution of language as well as the institution of laws and rights). Derrida's thought untiringly probes these two "excesses," the excess of the institution within the call, within singularity, and the excess of the call and its singularity within the institution. Put otherwise, it explores a logic of the phantom, a "hauntology" that has far-reaching consequences for a political theory'. The reflection on the 'final solution' is here again exemplary: "I ask myself whether a community that assembles or gathers itself together in order to think what there is to be thought and gathered of this nameless thing that has been called the 'final solution' does not have to show, first of all, its readiness to welcome the law of the phantom, the spectral experience and the memory of the phantom, of that which is neither dead nor living, more than dead and more than living, only surviving, the law of the most commanding memory, even though it is the most effaced and the most effaceable, but for that very' reason the

most demanding."12 The necessity of welcoming the 'memory of the phantom' marks Derrida's commitment to justice in its entirety and finds its philosophical counterpart in concepts, introduced already

in Derrida's earliest writings, such as the "trace", "difference", and the "supplement". If "deconstruction's affair", in Anselm

Haverkamp's words, is not "the proven validity of results, nor the cutting of Gordian knots"; if, rather, deconstruction sets out to find the "most complicated interlacement "13 of these knots, then one locus of a particularly complicated interlacement visited by Derrida over and over again is the question of memory , as memory of the phantom . The question is not so much how to "address the phantom," and whether one can question or address it, as whether "one can address oneself in general if some phantom does not already return."14 And, referring to Shakespeare's Hamlet, Derrida continues: "If, at least, he loves justice, the 'scholar’ of the future, the 'intellectual' of tomorrow would need to learn it [to address himself

to the other], and of him [the phantom]." In order to address oneself to the other in the search for justice, one has first of all "to welcome the law of the phantom," precisely because this "law of the phantom" is the "most effaced and effaceable" and, for that very reason, "the most demanding," the most urgent. "Beloved" is, in Morrison's novel, the name on the tombstone of a dead girl, of whom the reader never learns the living name. The violence of her death and the brutality of slavery that caused it make her haunt the lives of her mother, her brothers, and of all their relations. It is of her, the returned and disappeared ghost, that Morrison writes: "Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking

for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don't know her name?"15 Beloved's memory is, indeed, "the most effaced and effaceable", and, as Morrison's book powerfully shows, "the most demanding." So unbearably demanding that, in the end, her apparition is

chased back into invisibility: "It was not a story to pass on."16 The challenge that Derrida's thought addresses to us is to realize the need to "learn," from the other, from the nameless, from the phantom, how to address ourselves to her; how to learn her name with the keen awareness that looking for that name and learning it bears in itself the risk of "losing," forgetting, betraying it in its singularity. Such "learning" is all but

confined to a philosophical or literary meditation. It requires a wide-awake political awareness of which the following quotes, from more recent texts by Derrida, give a first, and by no means exhaustive, impression: "In our 'wars of religion', violence has two ages. The one (...) appears 'contemporary', in sync or in step with the hypersophistication of military tele-technology - of 'digital' and cyberspaced culture. The other is a 'new archaic violence', if one can put it that way. It counters the first and everything it represents. (...) A new cruelty would thus ally, in wars that are also wars of religion, the most advanced technoscientific calculability with a reactive savagery that would like to attack the body proper directly, the sexual thing, that can be raped, mutilated or simply denied, desexualized - yet another form of the same violence."17 "The dominant power is the one that manages to impose and, thus, to legitimate, indeed to legalize (for it is always a question of law) on a national or world stage, the terminology and thus the interpretation that best suits it in a given situation." In the contemporary context of politics, religion, and the "war against terror", more than ever, "radical changes in international law are necessary (...) I would be tempted to call philosophers those who, in the future, reflect in a responsible fashion on these questions and demand accountability from those in charge of public discourse, those responsible for the language

and institutions of international law. A 'philosopher' (actually I would prefer to say 'philosopher-deconstructor') would be someone who analyzes and then draws the practical and effective consequences of the relationship between our philosophical heritage and the structure of the still dominant juridico-political system that is so clearly undergoing mutation."18 Derrida writes: "We would have to analyze every mutation in the structure of public space, in the interpretation of democracy, theocracy, and their respective relations with international law (in its

current state, in that which compels or calls it to transform itself and, thus, in that which remains largely to come within it), in the concepts of the nation-state and its sovereignty, in the notion of citizenship, in the transformation of public space by the media, which at once serve and threaten democracy, and so on. Our acts of resistance must be, I believe, at once intellectual and political . We must join forces to exert pressure and organize ripostes , and we must do so on an international scale and according to new modalities, though always while analyzing and discussing the very foundations of our responsibility/ its discourses, its heritage, and its axioms."19 "Deconstruction is justice," since it calls for an untiring , in principle infinite, because never "finished," analysis of the philosophical heritage and its juridico-political systems , an analysis that is inseparable from an equally infinite responsibility . If hasty critics construe this doubly "infinite" call as condemning us to paralyzed inaction, they are merely acknowledging that this call is unbearably demanding, so unbearably demanding that its fidelity to the most effaced and effaceable ones should be chased back into invisibility, illegibility, inaudibility. But

that is their problem . Any careful reader of Derrida's texts knows that the work waiting to be done cannot wait.

Our decision is a just one – justice is the only incalculable impact that cannot be deconstructed - this is not a transcendental idea, nor some Kantian regulative ideal – instead, our justice is an interruption that creates freedom without autonomy Shershow 11 Scott, Professor of English at the University of California Davis, “‘A Triangle Open on its Fourth Side’: On the Strategy, Protocol, and ‘Justice’ of Deconstruction,” Derrida Today 4.1: 59–85What then is the emergent and interruptve quasi-concept indicated by the deconstruction of this meta-opposition of two deconstructions, its differatice or common ground? If law is the element of calculation then, correspondingly, ‘justice is incalculable , it demands that one calculate with the incalculable’ (Derrida 2002, 244).But the justice Derrida refers to here, the justice that calculates with the incalculable, cannot simply be incalculability itself, so to speak. Rather, this justice emerges , if it can be put that way, from a kind of

strange differential relation between calculation and incalculability that in effect requires us to think (retaining the old word so as to make possible an intervention within particular discursive and political fields) a sovereignty without sovereignty , a kind of ‘weak’ force. With reference to Benjamin's contrary formulation above, one might also perhaps call this emergent ‘concept’ sovereign justice - provided, however, one grasp it neither as a traditional transcendental idea nor as some normative

or Kantian regulative ideal but only as a kind of interruption or invocation (a ‘burst of laughter’ )

that governs nothing even as it alone makes possible (by inspiring, leading, or simply making sense of)

the very projects of law or politics . This justice or sovereignty is weak because it is never fully

present in itself , and yet, just as the coming of time is also nothing in itself and yet is the condition of

possibility for anything like signification, communication or experience, so this sovereign justice is

the unconditional condition of possibility for any act or event that might in any sense of the word be

considered ‘just’. As Derrida writes, ‘what is at issue is precisely another thought of the possible (of power, of the masterly and sovereign “I can”, of ipscity itself)’ (Derrida 2005, 143) and therefore:What must be thought... is this inconceivable and unknowable thing , a freedom that would no longer be the power of a subject , a freedom without autonomy , a heteronomy without servitude , in short,

something like a passive decision . (Derrida 2005, 152)In the violent hierarchy of sovereignty and law, as I conceded above, it appears at first that an ‘ipsocentric’ sovereignty plays the role of speech as the originally privileged term. Therefore, it is

precisely the necessity of also restaging this structure in reverse-so that even ‘the classical

emancipatory ideal’ may open to deconstruction - that indicates how the emergent figure of an

unconditionality without power always remains in a certain sense a figure of ‘sovereignty’, although only the sovereignty that , as Derrida puts it in his reading of Bataille, ‘ is always in question’ , a sovereignty that ‘has no identity , is not self, for itself, toward itself, near itself (Derrida 1978, 265).This almost unnamable, imiptive and inaugural openness must be grasped as the result, or more precisely the remainder, of the deconstructive play of calculation and incalculability that seems to be at work in all of Derrida’s signature arguments, both early and late. In the famous final paragraphs of ‘Structure, Sign and Play’, Derrida opposes, as ‘two interpretations of interpretation’:the saddened, negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauistic side of the thinking of play whose other side would be the Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joyous affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation__The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign, and which lives the necessity of interpretation as an exile. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms play, and tries to pass beyond man and humanism. (Derrida 1978, 292)

2AC

The cleansing of spectrality erases the past - this is how statecraft marches forward without being accountable for its bloody history – our starting point is a prerequisite to the NEGs Auchter ‘14 Jessica, Assistant Professor, Political Science, Public Administration, & Nonprofit Management, University of Tennessee, “The Politics of Haunting and Memory in International Relations,” Routledge, Google Books It bears mentioning that this is not a treatise on which memorialisation is appropriate or not. I make a concerted effort not to impose this. I

merely try to track the fragments of ghosts. Neither is looking for haunting about looking for death. Death is everywhere, particularly as a result of the processes of conflict and war that so often form the basis of a focus on international politics. And it is not about ghosts as the individual spirits of those who have died. The ghost of the state also lingers in the exercise of power to construct identity, narrative, and order. ’•Hauntings arc rather

about specific kinds of social and political and even economic practices that are themselves imbued with tension and contestation. They are about an alternative way of viewing that takes into account the ghostly , which exists and operates on the margins of what is generally considered traditional politics. Traditional politics is the state apparatus, the rational , the visible. The spectre disrupts this notion of visibility, because it is by nature invisible through traditional means. Indeed it further disrupts this schema because we cannot see it, while it looks at us and sees us not see it even as it is there. This spectral asymmetry disrupts all specularity. As Derrida describes it: ‘We do not see who looks at

us’.14 Similarly, as Avery Gordon characterises, ghosts represent ‘a kind of visible invisibility: I see you are not there’.15 So the spectre also represents that which is often invisible to us about how the state functions: the mechanisms of statecraft, of ordering and limiting and of identity construction. It represents that which is invisible to us about the power relations involved in performances of statecraft in identity construction through the way narratives are constructed about past events. 16 Indeed, Fredric Jameson says that

a world cleansed of spectrality is ontology itself, a world of pure present , of things without a past.

What this reminds us is that as the state tries to enforce pure ontology, it must forget its origins, forget the

very performativity by which it sustains itself . In order for statecraft to work, the ‘ crafting’ of the

state must be forgotten , and an alternative story of origins told. We need not view ghosts either as simply traces.

They are as wholly existential as you or I, and as wholly material, and indeed remind us that our own existence and our own identities are precarious, constructed, and at the margins of political life as much as those of ghosts. Indeed, this is where the Derridean spectre is very different from other uses of the ghostly. As Jo Labanyi notes, Derrida docs not view ghosts as a psychological projection, but rather as ‘really there’.17

Ghosts remind us that life and death are often arbitrarily assigned in an expression of power, and that

certain lives and deaths are often privileged over others. As Avery Gordon writes, to be haunted is ‘to contend with the very tangled way people sense, intuit, and experience the complexities of modem power and personhood’.*8 In this sense, it is personhood , or subjectivity, that lies at the heart of haunting

and statecraft. To explore this further, it is worth delving into Derrida's discussion of spectrality and visibility. Spectrality describes those ghosts, those beings which straddle the boundaries between life and death. Derrida describes the spectre in Specters of Marx as a paradoxical incorporation.19 It is some ‘thing’ which is difficult to name, neither soul nor body, but at the same time both one and the other. The spectre appears to present itself, but one rather represents it to

oneself: it is not itself present in flesh and blood. Because it disrupts the traditional framework of specularity and

because it is unintelligible, invisible, and uncontrollable, the spectre can be portrayed as a deathly threat that is subject to interventions or mediations . This results in a hostility towards ghosts or a making ridiculous of ghosts, laughing about it to allay fear of the threat.Derrida argues that the proper feature of spectres is that they are deprived of a specular image. How you recognise a ghost is that the ghost doesn't recognise itself in a mirror.20 So let's explore this mirror function further.21 The construction of a mirror to reflect one’s own self by creating a visible self is the construction of ontology through reflection. Construction of the mirror requires a collaborative, intersubjective endeavour because it must work properly in the sense that others have to sec you the way you see yourself in the mirror. Ontology is not a given: it is a mutual recognition of being. As Rodolphc Gaschc has demonstrated with regards to a philosophy of reflection, the mirror can only be a mirror if the pane of glass is backed by a tain, which serves the purpose of reflecting rather than simply the transparency of glass.22 But

the ontologisation of the self by the creation of the mirror in which we see ourselves, make ourselves visible, is not final, because we are still haunted by the fact that reflection is not simply given truth. If ghosts spring out, we are no longer simply visible, we are rather somewhat visible, the visibility of reflection is not a fixed truth, and this means we are dead or dying, because the human being as self/subject is defined as that which is visible, the mirrorable, visible being of life, that which can see itself in a mirror, because, as Derrida says, ghosts cannot see themselves in a mirror. This repetitive construction of the mirror maintains the division between self and other perpetrated by the mirror function. The mirror makes the ultimate distinction: between living and dead, to decide what is worthy of life and what counts as nearly invisible or invisible (deathly, spectral). But this distinction is itself made using human instrumentality: the mirror is itself a human instrument. What the spectre demonstrates to us is that this ultimate

distinction between living and dead is not ultimate after all. What counts as worthy of life, as grievable life in Butler's terms, is a socially constructed decision. The ungrievable lives continue to haunt as spectres , to disrupt frameworks of specularity, that which distinguishes a life of value from one without, one which may as well be dead, and as a result to disrupt frameworks of statecraft . Marilyn Ivy refers to ghosts as indicators that the structure of remembering through memorialisation is not completely effective. What this means is that the line between life and death that

remembering the dead institutes is not secure.2Indeed. Derrida's project of deconstruction, according to Antonio Negri, is precisely

about ‘a radical questioning of the problem of life and death’.24This mirror function, derived from Lacanian psychoanalysis, reveals the basis of the politics of recognition, how we recognize ourselves and indeed how we recognize (or do not recognize) others. It allows for exploration of how the line between life and death is socially constructed.

Bringing in ghosts, then, or that which is perceived as invisible in the mirror, allows for exploration of marginalised or ungrievable lives, and indeed how power is implicated in the construction of the line between life and death. It reveals the logic of haunting underlying contemporary statecraft, which relies on the construction of subjectivity through decisions about life and death itself. Statecraft , then,

must decide on which lives are lives precisely in order to function , in order to craft the state. To

paraphrase Tom Lewis, the ghost, the spectre, ‘surfaces as the figure of undecidcability that must be exorcised as the Other if a being is to be acquired’.25 Derrida’s spectre, then, is radical precisely because

it puts out a call: see man in his precarious life, at the edge of the grave. Yet this visibility is also problematised even as the injunction is

issued because the spectre is itself not visible, as described above.

Hanafin evidence – PAS is the best way to unfold this binary, ultimate control of life and death through the law denies alternative understandings of life and death, PAS is based on a western definition of biological life which doesn’t account for how death is also political and social.

Our AFF deconstructs this reading of death, the argument for prohibition is based on a false understanding of life being a sacred apriro, that’s an attempt at simplifying an impossible decision which masks how late modernity has effaced alternative ways of knowing

Politics that perform resistance CAN ONLY WORK when we recognize spectrality, ontologizing identity brackings being into a zone of autonomization which prevents difference from revealing itself

Powell and Shaffer 9 Benjamin D. Powell, PhD is an instructor of performance studies in the Department of Theatre and Film at Bowling Green State University. Tracy Stephenson Shaffer is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Louisiana State University, where she directs in the HopKins Black Box and teaches courses in performance and film. “On the Haunting of Performance Studies,” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp 1-19. Haunting is a complicated theoretical approach hard to describe, let alone operate within. Complications arise in any proposal for an epistemology because it makes various assumptions which call into question notions of value, content, form, knowledge, and truth. For people working with haunting, these issues become even more intensely contested because haunting calls these values into question before they

arrive as questions. Put simply, if one adopts haunting one will be forced into a radical rethinking of how scholars and performers articulate experience(s). Haunting requires that concepts such as presence, ontology, performativity, and identity be rethought in a way that allows for difference to emerge . The idea of difference must be rethought as well to avoid conceiving of difference in terms of subjectivity or identity. Haunting is an epistemology concerned with the treatment of the other as an ethics of difference. It is precisely because we cannot account for difference from a subjective perspective

without risking alienation or (re)instating norms, that we must change the manner in which we

conceive of difference, using concepts like presence or performativity in a different way . We argue that such an ethics of radical difference can also be extended to performance studies practice and scholarship.5 Some areas of performance studies that might be reinvestigated using haunting as an epistemology are the relationship between performer and audience, temporality, performativity, presence and absence, and the representation of history in/as performance.

Haunting calls accepted notions underlying each of these areas into question and opens them up for different forms of critique to emerge. In order to understand what haunting is(not), we need to examine more closely how Derrida employs haunting in Specters of Marx. Derrida himself recognizes the importance of performance in his reading of Marx via haunting which operates as a performative interpretation, that is, of an interpretation that transforms the very thing it interprets . . . [this is] a definition of the performative as unorthodox with regard to speech act theory . . . (‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it’). (Derrida, Specters 51) From the beginning of his text on ghosts and Marx, Derrida constantly operates within such an unorthodox understanding of performativity, which continually transforms the texts and theories that he engages. We argue that such a continual transformation, or increase in productive capacity, of performance theory is necessary to expand how we conceive and practice

performance.6 We might use established concepts within performance theory against themselves in order to better highlight the contested nature of performance. That is, an understanding of performativity similar to Butler and Derrida’s: through repeated usage, transformation occurs in the usage itself. This theory of performativity depends upon repetition and not reproduction. Similar to Butler’s theory of performativity and agency, Derrida’s shows the transformative potential of repetition via iterability and the trace through the performative interpretation at work within Specters. The trace is not a presence but the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates itself, displaces itself, refers itself, it properly has no site—erasure belongs to its structure . . . The paradox of such a structure, in the language of metaphysics, is an inversion of metaphysical concepts, which produces the following effect: the present becomes the sign of the sign, the trace of the trace. It is no longer what every reference refers to in the last analysis. It becomes a function in a structure of generalized reference. It is a trace, and a trace of the erasure of the trace. (Derrida, Margins, 24) The trace emerges in a process of iterability via repetition. Where presence is commonly misinterpreted as the result of reproduction, the trace functions as a (non)presence of repetition because it always already has erasure(s) contained within it. For example, during the run of a performance, the performance transforms itself through its repetition night to night. The performance has traces of previous iterations of itself from previous nights. As a performer, one may remember a certain bodily sensation on a certain night, a look from an audience member that moved the performance in a new direction, or even the way it felt as the lights went down. Traces can extend even further into the rehearsal period, historical research, and even certain selections of music that might have been playing while learning lines. Performativity and, more specifically, the trace, destabilize the moment of

performance and force scholars and practitioners to (re)orient themselves to their work. For Derrida, justice comes in the form of

responsibility to the other as difference. The others who Derrida writes of are both living others and others who have passed. He uses the ghost as a figure that calls attention to both. Individuals have a responsibility to live with the other and treat the other justly . In order to live responsibly then, one must be acutely aware of the socius, the with of the being-with Derrida writes about. The fact that we are among others calls us to be mindful of how we treat each other. This is the first order of responsibility for an

individual concerned with an ethics of difference. The with prevents Cartesian subjectivity, and all of its ontological

traps from forming, because this more Derridian subject has at her foundation a concern for the

other in the form of the with . Therefore subjectivity must be rethought not in terms of an individual,

but as a community of different individuals. We argue that such an ethics of difference extends also to performance. In the

now of performance there are individuals experiencing performance with each other. According to Derridian logic, the audience and performers call each other into an ethical relationship that transforms the notion of “responsibility to the audience” from understanding to experience. Instead of grounding ethical responsibility for the audience in the role of facilitator of understanding, we argue for a Derridian ethics which grounds itself in the with of co-experiencing each other as a multiplicity of difference . T his is similar to what Susan Sontag argues in Against Interpretation. Responsibility for the critic shifts from meaning through interpretation, toward experiencing art through an erotics or eroticization of art. In the moment of co-experiencing, the performer and audience engage each other not just in terms of what the other means, but how they excite each other’s senses. They redefine their roles according to flows of desire or sensoral engagements that they co-experience. Within Specters, Derrida focuses primarily on Marx. Derrida wants to maintain the “specters of Marx” without conjuring them away into vulgar (i.e., traditional) readings; he recoups Marx and Marxism through the lens of deconstruction. One of the major tasks that Derrida continually attempts is to describe the ghost and how it operates. This task ultimately fails because of the need for the ghost to be constantly reinvestigated and questioned. The ghost “is something that one does not know, precisely, and one does not know if precisely it is, if it exists . . . One does not know: not out of ignorance, but because this non-object, this non-present present, this being-there of an absent or departed one no longer belongs to knowledge. At least no longer to that which one thinks one knows by the name of knowledge”

(Derrida, Specters 6). The ghost, by its very nature, confounds what is accepted as knowledge. The ghost is not a static identity, rather it haunts as a “non-sensuous sensuous . . . the tangible intangibility of a proper body without flesh, but still the body of someone as someone other. And of someone other that we will not hasten

to determine as self, subject, person, consciousness, spirit, and so forth” (7). The ghost is a figure that defies traditional definitions of being. We cannot sense the ghost as a subject or an identity that resides in understanding as knowledge. According to Derrida, the ghost is the closest figure to that of the other because it is a body without

flesh. We perceive the body of the ghost, but its flesh exceeds our senses and our understanding. Similarly, we perceive the other but cannot locate the other in stable identity for fear of eliminating possible forms for the other to take. This alterity is the injunction from which we inherit the law, the absolute law of hospitality as

justice to the other . The ghost exists although we often do not see it. Invisible between its apparitions, it enacts a kind of invisible

visibility. This asymmetry, or visor effect, interrupts, de-synchronizes, and recalls us to anachrony (6-7). First and foremost the “the spirit comes by coming back [revenant], it figures both a dead man who comes back and a ghost whose expected return repeats itself, again and again” (10). The question of the ghost is a question of repetition because the specter is always a revenant and begins by coming back. We cannot control the ghost’s comings and goings (11). According to Derrida, the ghost is always other and sets out the task for the living to constantly (re)orient themselves to experiencing the figure of the ghost as other. In performance, the ghost could take the form of a figure from history such as Orson Welles. If we were creating a performance about Orson Welles in which a performer on stage represents him, the ghost of Orson Welles could repeatedly take on different forms in the body of the performer. At their simplest manifestation, these forms could be verbal or physical actions that evoke Orson Welles in some manner. In between possessions of the body of the performer by “Orson,” the ghost would remain hidden, but always looking out at both the performers and audience from the past, waiting to (re)materialize as a trace of history. The ghost works, it produces, and therefore must be allowed to work. It works in the “mode of production of the phantom, itself a phantomatic mode of production” (97). This mode of production shows the work of mourning to be rethought as never-ending work. Mourning then, is “work itself, work in general, the trait by means of which one ought perhaps to reconsider the very concept of production” (97). According to this logic, mourning is not a process that ends after a set period of time. Performance can be mourned in such a way. Experiencing a performance does not end once the lights come up and the audience leaves; the performance has not disappeared. We necessarily wrestle with our experience

and allow it to produce new places to engage, create, and critique future performances. We argue for a mourning of

performance in its spectrality, rather than an interpretation of performance in its finality like Phelan

suggests . Through the figure of the ghost, then, Derrida rethinks possibilities for our experience of time. Temporality, he says, can be thought “only in a dis-located time of the present, at the joining of a radically dis-jointed time . . . Not a time whose joinings are negated, broken, mistreated, dysfunctional, disadjusted . . . a time without certain joining or determinable conjunction” (17-18). In other words, temporality is not the progression of the “now” moving from the past to the future sequentially, otherwise the “now” would be granted with a presence that Derrida says is impossible. Derrida explains this “disjointure in the very presence of the present, this sort of non-contemporaeinity of present time with itself (this radical untimeliness or this anachrony on the basis of which we are trying here to think the ghost)” (25) as the conditions for the impossibility of presence as such. He goes further to describe the presence of the present as a fallacy because the present is what passes, the present comes to pass, it lingers in this transitory passage, in the coming-and-going, between what goes and what comes, in the middle of what leaves and what arrives, at the articulation between what absents itself and what presents itself . . . Presence is enjoined, ordered, distributed in the two directions of absence, at the articulation of what is no longer and what is not yet. To join and enjoin. (25) The present, or, here-now, must be reconsidered in light of such an articulation of presence as singularities of

experience. Singularity is a concept that comes out of deconstruction and différance specifically. From différance, “the here-now

unfurls. Without lateness, without delay, but without presence, it is the precipitation of an absolute singularity, singular because differing, precisely, and always other, binding itself necessarily to the form of the instant, in imminence and in urgency: even if it moves toward what remains to come” (31). A singularity is a collection of difference(s) held together by the here-now. However one must rethink the concept of “held together” not as a solid or stable unit, but a loose collection of differences held in sway, (dis)united in its “identity,” or presence. Derrida uses the here-now to talk about singular moments of experience without resorting to the language of the present as presence. The differences of a singularity are held together in the moment of the experience of the here-now and labeled as a “singularity.” A singularity could contain a host of traces “inside” itself. There could be a community of people that makes up a singularity, all differing, watching a performance. Let’s call them the audience. The moment that all eyes witness the first movement of a body onstage would be a singular moment of the here-now that Derrida and Nancy write about. The singularity is made up of different people, different histories, and different perspectives all experiencing the performance in the here-now. Even “together” in this way, no two subjects in the audience experience the show in precisely the same way, thereby ensuring

that multiple flows of difference(s) emerge. For example, the term “audience” is often analyzed in performance studies discourse as an ontological category rather than as a singularity as described here. Rather than understanding the audience as a united whole to whom we bear a responsibility for their “getting” the performance, we argue for the creation of performances that formally experiment and play with their structure(s) or composition so that multiple paths into the performance are provided—an ethics of composition. For Jean-Luc Nancy it is the (non)togetherness of different singulars that makes up singularity “itself.” Singularities are

assembled insofar as they produce space between them; they are linked only as far as they are not unified (33). Derrida uses the here-now as an example of a singularity of experience which illustrates the spacing as “the passage of this time of the present [which] comes from the future to go toward the past, toward the going of the gone” (Derrida, Specters 24). In a singularity of the here-now there is only difference that draws from traces of the past and future. The here-now draws from the past because it contains traces (marks and erasures) in its iterations. It also draws from the future, according to Derrida, because it is in the future that the behavior of individuals living in the here-now will come to be judged. In order to ethically treat the other, subjects must live for future generations. For Derrida, the heterogeneous nature of the “now” constantly opens things up and lets itself be

opened by the very disjunction of that which remains to come, from the past and future, singularly from the other (33). Put another way, the temporal disjunction of the ghost becomes both repetition and inauguration, since the ghost always begins by coming back. As the ghost reappears, it appears to us for the first time but has already engaged in a repetition by coming (back) one more time. The repetition of the ghost is the repetition

of performativity. Derrida goes further to describe the performativity of the ghost saying that “the experience, the apprehension of the ghost is tuned into frequency: number (more than one), insistence, rhythm (wave, cycles, and periods)” (107). For Derrida, the process of repetition and iteration are important when engaging the ghost. The importance lies in how the ghost is asking us to experience life, not in

what it is saying itself. Because the ghost always begins by coming back, the haunted subject has the responsibility to wait for the ghost . As stated before, the ghost is the closest manifestation to a figure of the other. Because we cannot control its comings and goings, we must not seek to appropriate the ghost, or the other, by conjuring it into existence. By trying to control the coming of the ghost, one assumes dominion over the ghost, and consequently the form that the ghost might take. According to Derrida, ethical treatment of others depends on allowing them to take whatever form they please in order to permit the possibility of difference(s) to manifest . The ethical thing to do is to allow the

other, or ghost, to manifest by waiting for its arrival, openly and without expectation. In practical terms,

then, we might stage multiple iterations of the other rather than offering a unified representation. In

addition, we should be open to the myriad unanticipated others who might make themselves manifest. Derrida positions this absolute law of hospitality as the law of justice and responsibility to the other. One must always remain open to “what is coming, that is, to the event that cannot be awaited as such, or recognized in advance therefore, to the event as the foreigner itself, to her or him for whom one must leave an empty place, always, in memory of the hope—and this is the very

place of spectrality” (65). Of course, true hospitality is impossible. However, an individual concerned with living hospitably will nonetheless attempt to provide it. Ghosts are always out there waiting to (re)appear. The task then is to remain “open, waiting for the event as justice, this hospitality is absolute only if it keeps watch over its own universality” (168).

Deconstruction challenges its own transgressions – their link arguments haunt our affirmative, yet our affirmative is still the best response to this exclusion – winning a flaw is not enough, they need to win the flaw makes progress impossible and the 1AC irremediable – their direct opposition is set up to keep hierarchy intact Hirst 11 – Aggie, PhD, Lecturer in International Politics, City University London, “Ordeals of Resistance: Derrida, Deconstruction, Aporia ,” BISA Annual Conference 27th – 29th April 2011, online pdf In addition to charges of conservatism, it has also been claimed that the deconstructive temperament leads to political quietism or ethico-political immobilisation . Eagleton has argued that deconstruction’s “abyssal spiral of

ironies... is commonly coupled with a political quietism or reformism,”49 which leaves its adherents too “drearily enamoured of “closure‟ to do the committee work, photocopy the leaflets and organize the food supplies.”50 Similarly, Derrida’s thought has, as Catherine Zuckert demonstrates, been charged with depriving his readers “of the capacity to think, much less act on their own behalf.” This means, she continues, that we “may be freed from complete domination, but we are not free to do much.”51 Part of the reason for this immobilisation is, it has been suggested, that Derrida privileges the realm of philosophy, and reads the “real” world solely in its terms. According to Michel Foucault, Derrida’s thought exhibits a “profound philosophical interiority,”52 in which the latter presides over “a reduction of discursive practices to textual traces...”.53 Such textual interiority suggests a transgression insofar as the external world becomes subsumed beneath it, and textual play takes precedence over engagements and encounters of “real” world politics. Such a challenge cannot simply be dismissed; it is, perhaps, not inaccurate to suggest that deconstruction’s restless destabilisation of foundations and points of reference from where the good, ethical or emancipatory may be inferred renders highly problematic an engagement with “emancipatory‟ counter practices because such practices, like all practices, cannot be defensible, are limitlessly violent and

deconstructible . The deconstructive position emphasises the limitless and irredeemable violence of any and all politics and intervention s . Indeed, this is its mode of resistance : it resists the foreclosure of any

and all ontological categories which are the condition of knowledge about the good. It also highlights

the indefensibility of claims to lesser violence , both because this is unknowable and because it

legitimates actions which bypass the irreducible undecidability of the decision and thereby default

on the endless and unrealisable task of attempt to take responsibility . It thus makes “active” or “direct‟ political intervention acutely painful; in undertaking action of this kind, one has to do so in the knowledge

of its violence and indefensibility, rather than within the any reassurance of its emancipatory

implications. This may, I would suggest, lead to a reticence to engage in certain explicit interventions. In the absence of any confidence that one acts for good, and in full awareness of the unbearable violences, both predicable and unpredictable, that one not only risks but ensures, in short, acting solely on the basis of one’s own decision, it is no surprise that a life spent engaging with the absent and the dead appears more appealing.

Engaging with the concept of resistance, indeed resistances, from this space may thus characterised as an experience of ordeal. Because all acts are indefensibly and unbearably violent, meaning that identifying and pursuing emancipatory

goals is highly problematic , enacting resistance is a traumatic and painful proce ss . This means that one has to struggle against both the temptation allowing oneself to sidestep this by effacing the violence by assuring oneself that one is doing the “right” thing, and against the simultaneous and

consequent temptation to evade the encounter. Given the unbearable violence of any and all (counter)

practices, challenging the ontological structures upon which totalising politics depend appears

preferable, but risks leaving prevailing practices intact as the subject refuses to engage outside the

sphere of academic engagement, leaving such practices unchallenged . The danger associated with this is that

“active” or “direct” political interventions, whether writing to an MP, participating in a demonstration, occupying a building, or

linking arms in front of a police line, are almost impossible to face without some sense that one is justified. As Terry

Eagleton has claimed, if political practice takes place only within a context of interpretation, and if that context is notoriously ambiguous and unstable, then action itself is likely to be problematic and unpredictable. This case is the used, implicitly or explicitly, to rule out the possibility of radical political programmes of an ambitious kind. This, he continues, “plays right into the hands of Whitehall or the White House.”54 At the risk of oversimplification, such an account of resistance as an ordeal may

be contrasted with accounts of which emphasise possibilities for emancipation. Jenny Edkins and Veronique Pin-Fat suggest as much in their description of multi-layered resistances that “are the fabric of political life,” and that can and do change things

for the better. They claim: Pessimism is not justified , for just as relations of power can form a dense web that

seems to solidify into institutions like the state and sediment into forms of domination, so points of

resistance can come together to lead to revolution .55 Part of this possibility lies, for Edkins and Pin-Fat, in advocating a

resistance to the “drawing of lines‟, understood as a “refusal to play sovereign power’s language-game and follow the rules of the ‘counting’

and as such, vitally, it defies and refuses its grammar."** Here, resistance is possible in the form of finding modes of interaction which are somehow less violent than those enacted by sovereign power; thinking and acting otherwise can offer emancipatory outcomes that can “resist the danger of foreclosure,” for instance by engaging in modes of interaction which are “non-conventional, non-statist, non-sovereign, and nonbiopolitical."*7 This logic may be characterised by three features: firstly, emancipatory goals, whether revolution or more local, limited changes, are can be aimed towards through intervention; secondly, resistance is always already happening as it is bound up in the constitution of the subject and power relations; and finally, resistance occurs in enacting alternative and less violent counter practices which aim at emancipator)' outcomes. It thus may be termed ‘emancipatory resistance’.In contrast to such a resistance that preserves an emancipator)' agenda, the experience of ordeal that accompanies ‘active’ or ‘direct’ political

intervention in the first formulation is concerned with the endless task of taking responsibility for the indefensibility of be(com)ing. Far from being able to posit a lesser violence or refuse to play the games of sovereign power, it recognises the irredeemable imbeddedness of the subject in the grammar of violence, and restlessly destabilises both the subject and its interactions to try to take account of this. From a deconstructive perspective, positing a lesser violence, claiming to have created or discovered counter-practices that ‘resist the danger of foreclosure’ is to efface the violence of any and all games. By disrupting any and all such

games, a deconstructive intervention begins from acknowledging its own transgression and

complicities, perhaps the greatest of which is to claim innocence .

BUT – you’re ballot is not a knife, when the sovereign inevitably makes decisions in the world of the alternative they will reinforce the state of exception – only a deconstructive strategy can both reveal the violence in the law while creating justice for the other through strategic readings of it Shershow 11 Scott, Professor of English at the University of California Davis, “‘A Triangle Open on its Fourth Side’: On the Strategy, Protocol, and ‘Justice’ of Deconstruction,” Derrida Today 4.1: 59–85It appears that our second deconstruction (in which force interrupts law) now plays the part of the less-privileged term that, as one might put it, somehow announces the irruptive new ‘concept’ of justice that interrupts and displaces this new oppositional system. This would therefore seem to be a ‘justice’ conceived, this time, as a mode of incalculability that always and absolutely exceeds the law, and that therefore encompasses a kind of force or sovereignty just as the ‘arche-trace’ encompasses the disseminative and supplementary qualities ascribed to writing in a logocentric model of signification. Indeed, when we read further in the pages from ‘Force of Law’ from which this invocation of twin temptations is taken: doesn’t Derrida seem to be, if I can put it this way, especially tempted by the second one, by the possibility of a deconstruction that wholly destroys the conceptual system from which it comes? He asks, putting our two original terms of method into play again:

Can what we are doing here resemble a general strike or a revolution , with regard to models and structures, but also modes of readability of political action? Is that what deconstruction is? Is it a general

strike, or a strategy of rupture? Yes and no. Yes, to the extent that it assumes the right to contest, and not only

theoretically, constitutional protocols, the very charter that governs reading in our culture and especially in the academy. No, at least to the extent that it is in the academy that it has been developed (and let us not forget, if we do not wish to sink into ridicule or indecency, that we are comfortably installed here on Fifth Avenue – only a few blocks away from the inferno of injustice). (Derrida 2002, 272)

The radicality of deconstruction – and even perhaps the ‘deconstructive affirmation’ itself (Derrida 2002, 298) – is only partial (‘yes and no’). Indeed, when Derrida says that deconstruction could claim only partially to be a ‘strategy of rupture’, this curious phrase enfolds

one more level of mediation by yoking together both of deconstruction’s temptations. The general political strike (for example, a

union striking for better wages) would seem to be strategic , at least in the conventional sense of the word: one asks for so much and no more, and the calculation of this ‘so much’ is centrally important. By contrast, the general proletarian strike – which rejects ‘every kind of program, of utopia – in a word, of lawmaking’ (Derrida 2002,

292) – must in some crucial sense abandon all calculation , to break with all preexisting protocols and strategie s , since it cannot in principle be specified in advance what will follow its radical break with law and the order of the state . In passing, one might also ask: is the very idea of rupture tied inextricably to the singular event, or can one pursue or continue what Derrida calls above a ‘strategy of rupture’ over time? Derrida seems to give an example of the latter by using the phrase to refer to the legal strategies pursued by Jacques Vergès, the French lawyer famed for representing accused terrorists, in which the accused ‘appears only to testify (without testifying) of his opposition to the law’ (Derrida 2002, 267).

But in any case, as Derrida also concedes, deconstruction has only a mediated relationship to even such already-mediated forms of revolutionary political and legal practice. For one thing, deconstruction largely remains, as the saying goes, merely academic, always vulnerable to the belittling reduction of the ‘ivory tower’. But Derrida’s point obviously overflows such

observations, however necessary they always remain. He implicitly suggests that a deconstructive protocol might ‘kick-off’ either a specific reading of laws within a constitutional order that otherwise remains in place, or a more fundamental interruption and break with the ‘inaugural pretensions’ on which a whole order has been founded. But deconstruction, as Derrida writes, is also finally the demand to think the ‘differential contamination between

these two’, which are at once dissociable and irreducible (Derrida 2002, 272). To contest constitutional protocols is, so to speak,

both more and less than to contest the constitution. The law, however conceived, must always be pursued to its limit via the methods or strategies that are called ‘practical’. But a radical contestation of the

founding assumptions of the law (the state, the citizen), remains all the more necessary, in order to preserve

an opening not only to all those originally excluded from the constitutional order , but also to

whoever and whatever may someday arrive to strain its limits once again. Correspondingly, Derrida’s reading of Benjamin finally becomes what might be called a cautionary tale or object lesson. Benjamin, in effect, wholly succumbs to the temptation of interruption and rupture by envisioning a messianic, law-destroying violence as ‘the only secure

foundation’ for a critique of violence. He envisions a situation in which a ‘rotten’ law had somehow infected the whole field of the political, monopolising a force that served it on both sides, by making or by preserving law, or even both at once, as happens with the modern police force. Suggesting that ‘all violence as a means is either lawmaking or law-preserving’ (Derrida 2002, 287), Benjamin finally denounces both of these as ‘pernicious’ in order to envision a violence of ends: a divine, law-destroying, ‘violent manifestation of violence that . . . would not be a means toward an end’ (Derrida 2002, 287). Benjamin’s strategy is thus precisely not a deconstructive one : it cuts through and effaces ( instead of

deconstructing ) the opposition whose play has been at issue, envisioning the emergence at every point of the system of what Benjamin calls, in his final sentence, ‘sovereign force’. This is where Benjamin’s text, closing the triangle , shows itself potentially complicit with ‘the very thing against which one must

act and think, do and speak’ (Derrida 2002, 298).

All this indicates that the formulation briefly outlined above, in which sovereignty or force is regarded as the less privileged term of the original opposition (and therefore the ghostly augur of the irruptive ‘concept’), can be entertained only with important qualifications. It might be objected that the irruptive quasi-concept cannot be associated, even in this partial or oblique way, with sovereignty or force, for Derrida in his late works seeks above all to ‘dissociate unconditionality and sovereignty’ (Derrida 2001b, 59). That is, more precisely, he submits for discussion ‘a certain inseparability between, on the one hand, the exigency of sovereignty in general (not only but including political sovereignty . . . ) and, on the other hand, the unconditional exigency of the unconditioned’ (Derrida 2005, 141). But this argument, I suggest, is related to but distinct from that of ‘Force of Law’. In this case, Derrida is in effect splitting the classical concept of sovereignty in two, and opposing (while insisting on their inseparability) an ‘ipsocentric’ or ‘ipsocratic’ sovereignty (Derrida 2005, 17), the sovereignty of a subject, that is hence essentially conditional and calculative, to the sovereignty that, ‘especially in its modern political forms, as understood by Bodin, Rousseau, or Schmitt, [is] precisely unconditional, absolute, and especially, as a

result, indivisible’ (Derrida 2005, 141). When law is opposed to and privileged against sovereignty, as in the second of

the two deconstructions outlined above, sovereignty there plays precisely the role of the unconditional as opposed

to law as ‘the element of calculation’ (Derrida 2002, 244). But because the opposition of law and sovereignty offers itself to deconstruction in two different ways, it puts into play two ‘deconstructions’ and thus demands that we think, yet again, their common ground and différance (Derrida 1978, 293). One might therefore understand this opposition of two ‘deconstructions’ as one between justice as law

(that is, justice as the law that interrupts force, justice as the exercise of calculation) and justice as sovereignty (that is, justice as the

force that interrupts law, justice as a kind of absolute incalculability that overflows the calculations of law). Deconstruction is tempted by both of these, just as it is tempted by the analogous opposition between the ‘political strike’, the strategy in which one remains on the ground of whatever one resists, fighting it with its own weapons and seeking only to replace its laws and orders with new ones (calculation); and the ‘general proletarian strike’, the strategy of interruption and rupture (which must exceed calculation). Without some possibility of law , code , or institution , the justice of ‘sovereign force’ risks what we witnessed

with Benjamin ; but without some opening to the unavoidable play of decision and force, the

emancipatory hopes invested in the law dwindle into a mere legalism that is unable to think (and

hence always vulnerable to) the sovereign ‘exception’.

Their strategy in particular relies on a hermeneutics of suspicion that totalizes whiteness, forces a confession of privilege, and insists that the game is being rigged – destroys ability to accurately conceptualize identity construction as well as ignoring other modes of oppression and causing backlashNiemonen, South Dakota anthropology and sociology professor, 2010(Jack, “Public Sociology or Partisan Sociology? The Curious Case of Whiteness Studies”, the American Sociologist, 41.1, project muse)

A hermeneutics of suspicion is predicated on revealing societal dynamics as a white plot by tying together seemingly unrelated events into a set of cause and effect relationships. This explanatory schema creates order out of chaos (Chubbuck 2004; Parker 2001; Pratt 2003; Waters 1997). By invoking whiteness, proponents explain what was not understood previously. They find purpose where others find coincidence, offer the clarity of simple explanations to the ambiguity of contradictory facts, and assign blame, responsibility, and agency (Hewitt and Hall 1973; Knight 1997; McArthur 1995). Histories, biographies , stories, anecdotes, recollections, and ruminations reveal other manifestations of whiteness , adding to the conviction that proponents have made a theoretical breakthrough (Hewitt and Hall 1973). The fact that whites don’t recognize whiteness is a function of its power, which secures itself by refusing to identify itself as the primary organizing principle of contemporary life (Asumah 2004; Blanchett 2006; Cashmore 1979; Donskis 1998; Howard 2004; Hyland 2005; Jay 2005; Jeffery 2005; Martin and Davis 2001;

McArthur 1995; Pratt 2003; Purnell 1982; Tate 2003). History is thus the “undisturbed realization of intentions,” largely white (Waters 1997).

“To disrupt the insidious power of white culture, then, [proponents of whiteness studies] most expose and define it” (Perry 2001:85). A hermeneutics of suspicion is a self-confirming belief system (Birchall 2001; Parker 2001). For example,

to deny that whiteness is omnipresent is proof that whiteness is omnipresent. To protest that sociological knowledge is not used to manipulate nonwhites is evidence that it is used for such a purpose (Aanerud 2007; Applebaum 2006; Catron and Harmon 1981; Haddad and Lieberman 2002; Hartigan 2000b; Hays and Chang 2003; Sleeter 1993). To claim “I just see people” is “color evasiveness” (Solomon et al. 2005), which circumvents the need to interrogate whiteness (Denevi 2001; Flagg 1993; Gallagher 2003;

Gillespie 2003; Gordon 2005; Jay 2005; Lewis 2001; Mahoney 1995). To observe that some whites are materially worse off than nonwhites is a rhetorical move that dissociates them as beneficiaries of a white privileged system (Aanerud 2007; Eichstedt 2001). A

hermeneutics of suspicion is skeptical of dominant discourse , which is characterized as a “totalizing narrative” (Birchall 2001) that is expressed in the phrase “well, minorities would say that, wouldn’t they?” The white elite manipulates discursive resources—that is, the language and rules of the game—to reframe the race relations problematic in such a way as to preserve the status quo (Marvasti and McKinney 2007; Spark 2001; cf. Abercrombie and

Turner 1978). For example, “master scripting” is employed in nonwhite schools to prevent “counter-voices” from challenging white supremacy and affirming an alternative humanity (Blanchett 2006). Master scripting requires that nonwhites dance the “performance of subjugation” (Gillman 2007), which is sustained through institutional practices such as tracking (Blanchett 2006; Chubbuck 2004; Hunter and Nettles 1999). When confronted with their complicity, whites make the classic moves, such as de-racializing events and accusing nonwhites of playing the race card. These moves are the means by which to sustain an illusory state of equality (Aanerud 2007; Denevi 2001; Gordon 2005; Hunter and Nettles 1999; Jay 2005; Lea 2006; Levine-Rasky 2000; Lewis 2001; Marvasti and McKinney 2007). Instructors versed in whiteness studies have both the authority and the responsibility

to “reclaim” social justice (Baez 2000). White students are to explain in ontological terms the oppressive basis of their being ,

which means that in practice they are to identify themselves as white and catalog the unearned benefits that they accrue because they are white. Then, they are to accept responsibility for the atrocities of the past, acknowledge their complicity in perpetuating injustice, and undergo “corrective socialization” such that they may love themselves and others more authentically (Thompson 2003b; Vasquez 2006). Developing “race cognizance” is a necessary tool in this process (O’Brien 2007). Race cognizance is a pedagogical device that enhances students’ ability to understand how history was racialized, identify the major distortions of Western epistemology, recognize the practices that normalize whiteness, and disown whiteness and its concomitant privileges. Students are expected to reject social scientific frameworks that focus on the alleged cultural deficiencies of nonwhites, embrace the epistemologies that challenge Eurocentrism, and become more effective anti-racist practitioners by developing, mastering, and implementing anti-racist strategies and practices (Hatchell 2004; Hytten and Warren 2003; Jeffery 2005; Kimmel 2002; LadsonBillings 1996; Lawrence 1998; Leonardo 2002; Levine-Rasky 2000; Manglitz 2003; Manglitz et al. 2005; Martin and Davis 2001; Marx 2004; Marx and Pennington 2003; McCarthy 2003; McIntyre 1997a, b; Niehuis 2005; Pearce 2003;

Samuels et al. 2003; Sanders 1999; Schacht 2001; Scheurich and Young 1997; Schick 2000; Sleeter 1993; cf. Srivastava 1996). Through the use of experiential approaches, such as autobiographies, storytelling, and parables, the pedagogy of whiteness studies critiques the accepted canon and prevailing order and presents an alternative view of reality. It “unpacks” white privilege (McIntosh 1988, 1990), brings to the forefront the impact of racism on the lives of nonwhites, “liberates students from the logic of the present system” (Sanders 1999:175), and creates a communal understanding that builds consensus and encourages social change (Cooper et al. 2006; Green 2003; Kanpol and Yeo 1995; Manglitz et al. 2005; Mueller et al. 2007; Tate 1997; Taylor 1998). The pedagogy of whiteness studies claims to be a model for education that recognizes the “multiplicity of situated knowers” (Kanpol and Yeo 1995) vis-a-vis imposing a Eurocentric worldview as the standard against which others

will be judged. Its operative assumption is that for some to have good lives, the others must have lives that are truncated and brutalized (Green 2003). Moral Vision, Democratic Dialogue, and Corrective Socialization Throughout the whiteness studies literature on pedagogy, moral vision and democratic

dialogue are mantras. White students understand neither because they are the dupes of colorblindness. Allegedly, white students resist teaching strategies that disrupt their sense of entitlement. Some students express embarrassment, shame, guilt, anxiety, discomfort, defensiveness, anger, denial, or resistance in order to avoid appearing racist.

They trivialize racism and exonerate themselves from culpability by citing parallels to nonwhites in an attempt to show that their experiences are comparable. They affirm their goodness by dissociating themselves from their racist families or friends. In the classroom, other students impede “authentic” discussions of whiteness and its associated privileges by refusing to recognize the right of nonwhites to speak (Denevi 2004; Diangelo 2006; Gillespie et al. 2002; Green 2003; Griffin 1998; Haddad and Lieberman 2002; Hays and Chang 2003; Hunter and Nettles 1999; Hytten and Warren 2003; Kiselica 1999; Leonardo 2004; Samuels et al. 2003). Through the use of counter-claims that devalue alternative epistemologies, they reassert the dominant discourse and reproduce the myths that sustain the status quo. Pedagogues who are versed in whiteness studies state categorically that students who do not admit that they are racist are in denial. Nonwhite students who adopt the Western epistemological standpoint do so because that is

easier than developing an oppositional standpoint in the face of white resistance. Courses that students view as less controversial or non-biased are the embodiment of whiteness—that is, they are “unmarked and unnamed” (Hunter and Nettles 1999; also Hytten and Warren 2003; Marx and Pennington 2003). Pedagogues who are versed in whiteness studies claim that nonwhite students bring richer perspectives and experiences to the classroom than do most white students, who have almost no “race literacy” (Aanerud 2007)—that is, the ability to understand, discuss, and challenge white privilege. They are trapped within a Western worldview, and they have not mastered the skills that most nonwhites have to negotiate their way through different epistemologies. Thus, white instructors and students alike must be racialized in order to enable them to see how whiteness in the classroom has impeded their ability to learn (Aanerud 2007; Blanchett 2006;

Diangelo 2006). The point is not to prove that students are racist—that is a given— but to bring to conscious awareness their “uncritical and limited ways of thinking” (Applebaum 2006), decenter whiteness as the favored epistemological standpoint, and undercut the authority with which they speak and act in the world, revealing this authority as a particular perspective that is imbued with the

unjustifiable claim to truth (Allen 2004; Fishman and McCarthy 2005; Henze et al. 1998; Perry 2001; Reitman 2006). Unlike victims, perpetrators are masters of self-deception and do not take responsibility for their actions; therefore, they must be held accountable (Doolin 2001; Johnson et al. 2000; Rodriguez 1999). White students are to move from a position of anger and denial toward an antiracist white identity, which requires self-examination—that is, learning how being white affects their values, attitudes, and behaviors (Martin and Davis 2001). Bafflement, shame, and guilt are expected and necessary stages in the process (Marx and Pennington 2003; Norton and Baker 2007). White students will “work through whiteness” by engaging in “memory work,” defined as am emerging outrage at the history of racial oppression and a growing desire for justice in the present (Giroux 1997). Instructors are not prepared to take on this mandate. Indeed, they describe themselves as ignorant, inept, and vulnerable when discussing whiteness and its associated privileges. To paraphrase a common question, how was I, as a white instructor, prepared to acknowledge the privileges that whiteness affords me? Pedagogues who are versed in whiteness studies claim that the answer is not found through intellectual inquiry; rather, the answer lies in a developmental leap sparked by a deep call to the soul (Blum 1998; Denevi 2004; Johnson et al. 2000; Ryan 2002; Smith

1998; Thompson and Disch 1992; Warren and Hytten 2004). For true racial reconciliation to occur, white students must admit that they are necessarily racist as a consequence of their epistemological standing. Then , along with their non-student counterparts,

they must confess (Allen 2004; Croteau 1999; D’Andrea 1999; Gustafson 2007): I believed that racist attitudes and behaviors were an aberration. I contributed to racial oppression even though I was not a blatant racist. I thought that the underprivileged simply needed to work harder to achieve success in life. I understand for the first time how I had benefited from the privileged position that I had been granted because I am white. I realize that I cannot escape from racism so long as we live in a racist society (Croteau 1999; Hays and Chang 2003; Kiselica 1999; Schacht 2001; Schick 2000). In short, this process requires that white students disavow white

supremacy and commit to the public good (D’Andrea 1999; Ferber et al. 2007; Hays and Chang 2003; Jay 2005; Levine-Rasky 2000; McDermott and Sampson 2005). White confessionals are helpful insofar as they bring to light the “insidiousness” of white privilege and result in a critique of selves rather than the others

(Leonardo 2004). However, confessing is not enough; c onfession merely releases white students from their complicity. It fails to make visible the negative consequences that the “power of whiteness” has had on the lives of nonwhites (McDonald 2005).18 The claim that “I am not a racist” is little more than an American liberal fantasy that maintains the belief that one is a good white who protects the underdog (Grimes 2002; Jeffery 2005; Schick 2000). The need to be known as a good white results from the recognition that whiteness is

problematic. Thus, cherished notions of rationality, objectivity, universality, fairness, and goodness must be relinquished, for they are the main obstacles to racial change (Thompson 2003a). Confessions may be painful and demoralizing, as a more realistic self emerges from the process of “piercing falsely inflated notions of the self” (Thompson 2003b:431; also Alcoff 1998; Leonardo 2004; Thompson

2003b). Although white students cannot be “cured” of racism in a short period, given their lifelong submersion in whiteness, they can develop healthy white identities that reflect on, and then take responsibility for, their roles in perpetuating racial inequality (Alcoff 1998; Masko 2005; McIntyre 1997a, 1997b; O’Brien 2007; Vasquez 2006). Until whiteness is a “felt experience,” it will be impossible to “bring Whites on board to fight racism” (Denevi and Pastan 2006:71). The Problematic Nature of Whiteness

Studies: Propounding Public Sociology Without Professional Sociology Whiteness studies are constructed on a foundation that consists of broad generalizations, ontologica l and epistemological claims , normative and evaluative statements ,

prescriptive advice, political goals, and critique—supported by histories, biographies, stories, anecdotes, recollections, and ruminations (Kolchin 2002; Scott 2000; cf. Zack 1999). If proponents prove that Western epistemology “incubated” whiteness and then predicated it on the racial ruling, cultural denigration, and physical decimation of nonwhites, then they could lay claim to both a new sociology of race relations and the moral high

ground (Featherstone 2001; Leonardo 2002; Rabaka 2007). However, their defense rests on a caricature of professional sociology . Allegedly, mired in assimilationist and multicultural concerns, its approach to the study of race relations today explains racism primarily as a problem of distorted personality dynamics. Professional sociology characterizes the United States as a meritocratic society that is “afflicted by the disease of racism,” and it invokes the culture of poverty to explain the plight of nonwhites, who typically are described as “natives with deficient cultures” (Bonilla-Silva and Baiocchi 2003, 2007, 2008). Professional sociology employs social surveys, dubious statistics, and “rhetorical writing” as means to support the thesis of the declining significance of race (Bonilla-Silva and Baiocchi 2003, 2007, 2008).19 It does not conceptualize racism as an institutional phenomenon because it is grounded on a weak theory that defines racial disparities as a problem of individual failings (Bonilla-Silva and Baiocchi 2008:139). Worse, professional sociology encourages nonwhites to adopt white—that is, Western European—values as a divide and conquer strategy (Baez 2000; Castagno 2006; Chubbuck 2004; Garcia 1999; Garner 2006; Goldberg et al. 2006; Guess 2006; Hendrix 2001; Moreton-Robinson 2006; Reitman 2006; Welcome 2004). For example, “... assimilation is a one-way adaptation to existing white hegemony, which inevitably means it’s symbolically violent and self-oppressive” (Feagin and Cobas 2008:52). Latinos, especially, formulate their views on racial matters from the perspective of the white racial frame . . . . By buying heavily into the racial-status continuum and its supportive framing, they pay a substantial price in self-oppression and in symbolic violence to themselves, their families, and their communities (Feagin and Cobas 2008:40, 52). Latinos’ willingness to work for the “wages of whiteness” vis-a-vis the political, economic, and moral advantages of allying with blacks has undermined the possibilities for inter-group cooperation among minorities (Feagin and Cobas 2008; Rochmes and Griffin 2006): . . . so long as Latinos think they are white, there is no hope for them. The search for a meaningful Latino identity and real political inclusion in the United States must be predicated on the dismantling of whiteness (Rochmes and Griffin 2006:89).20 The fact that these dynamics were not examined until recently reflects the power of paradigmatic thinking. Professional sociology promotes the theories and methods that keep whiteness invisible (Rochmes and Griffin 2006). It grounds race, not in exploitive relations, “but in the realm of visibility as apparently locatable in the body” (McDonald 2005:248; also Guess 2006; Hartigan 1997; McCarthy 2003). In other words, sociologists conclude that nonwhites have pathological tendencies. This conclusion finds its way into popular culture as fact, thus encouraging the policies and practices that force assimilation (Masko 2005; Scheurich and Young 1997; Solomon et al. 2005; Sue 2004; Tate 2003). Such

“deceitful narratives” (Welcome 2004) are nothing less than “epistemological racism” (Hendrix 2001). Reification, Reductionism, and Conceptual Inflation Despite recognition that racial classification systems are not constant, proponents of whiteness studies treat whites as if they were an immutable , bounded, and cohesive category (Bonnett 2003; Eichstedt 2001; Gabriel 2000; Giroux 1997; Hartigan 1997; Keating 1995; Kincheloe 1999; Kolchin 2002;

Levine-Rasky 2000; McCarthy 2003; Pugliese 2002; Sidorkin 1999; Yans 2006). They posit a generic white subject, both privileged and unaware of the extent of that privilege. However, even if whites coalesce at certain historical junctures, we cannot conclude that the category “white” is an entity that will continue indefinitely in the absence of antiracist initiatives (McDermott and Sampson 2005; Yans 2006; cf. Niemonen 2007). Reification has the unintended consequence of neglecting how the construction of racial identities is a negotiated , indeed manipulative, process (Bonnett

1998; Rockquemore 2002). In doing so, proponents of whiteness studies understate the contradictions , inconsistencies, and ambivalences within white and nonwhite identities. They assume before the fact that whites regard whiteness rather than nationality, ethnicity, religion, or class as the main factor that separates the civilized from the uncivilized. And, they oversimplify the challenges that nonwhites face by implying that their problems are largely race-related and hence attributable to racism (Croteau et al. 2002; Hartigan 2002; Kolchin 2002;

Mansfield and Kehoe 1994; Warren and Twine 1997). Emphasizing the unifying interest in, and reproduction of, dominance minimizes how the boundaries of racial categories are negotiated, reinforced, or challenged in daily life (Alcoff 1998; Bash 2006; Perera 1999). Largely ignored are the complicated interactions between race, class, and sex, and the struggles of many whites to acquire privileges in a class-stratified society , especially economic security and some degree

of self-autonomy (Bonnett 1997; Eichstedt 2001; Hartigan 1997, 2000b; Hubbard 2005; Kolchin 2002; Lee 1999; Winders 2003). Reifying the concept of race fails to capture the processes through which it acquires meaning, confers status, or exerts a “structuring effect” (Bash 2006;

Lewis 2004). By suppressing intra-group divisions and contradictions, whiteness studies ignore how multiple statuses work together in people’s lives (cf. Brekhus 1998; Merton 1972) and perpetuate an “us-them” view of difference —the binary perspective that is at the core of racist discourses. The reification of racial categories endows them with causal potential and predictive ability, implying that all persons classified as white will exhibit the undesirable traits associated with whiteness, since being white is a conditio n with distinct, identifiable, but largely negative attributes that are in need of corrective attention (Alcoff 1998; Bash 2006; Hartigan 2000b; Keating 1995; Santas 2000; Scott 2000). In a reversal of the historical equation, “white” has become reprehensible whereas “nonwhite” has become virtuous (Gillborn 1996; Keating 1995). Whiteness studies posit racism as a mono-causal explanation for almost everything. All other forces, including the class struggle, are relegated to the margins. William Julius Wilson’s work is dismissed out-of-hand as a defense of the culture of poverty thesis (e.g., Harrison 1998; Ladson-Billings 1996; Welcome 2004). Racism is the problem. Therefore,

whites either actively resist its reproduction or they perpetuate existing inequalities (Hartigan 2000b; Kolchin 2002; Moon

and Flores 2000; Troyna 1994). This premise allows for the subsequent argument that whiteness is the source of oppression. If it is eradicated, then social justice will emerge (Moon and Flores 2000; Trainor 2002). Once whiteness is demonized, whites have no choice but to view their selves —ironically— in the context of a deficit model that identifies their failings, after which they may redeem themselves by becoming race traitors. Whites are required to renounce their whiteness but at the same time celebrate the alternatives. Such arguments inevitably result in anger and bafflement (Gillborn 1996; Kolchin 2002).

1AR

Hudson

Anti-blackness is not an ontological antagonism---conflict is inevitable in politics, but does not have to be demarcated around whiteness and blackness---the alt’s ontological fatalism recreates colonial violence Hudson, Witwatersrand political studies department, 2013(Peter, “The state and the colonial unconscious”, Social Dynamics: A journal of African studies, 39.2, Taylor and Francis)

Thus the self-same/other distinction is necessary for the possibility of identity itself. There always has to exist an outside, which is also inside, to the extent it is

designated as the impossibility from which the possibility of the existence of the subject derives its rule (Badiou 2009, 220). But although the excluded place which isn’t excluded insofar as it is necessary for the very possibility of inclusion and identity may be universal (may be considered “ontological”), its content (what fills it) – as well as the mode of this filling and its reproduction – are contingent. In other words, the meaning of the signifier of exclusion is not

determined once and for all: the place of the place of exclusion, of death is itself over-determined, i.e. the

very framework for deciding the other and the same, exclusion and inclusion, is nowhere engraved in

ontological stone but is political and never terminally settled. Put differently, the “curvature of intersubjective space” (Critchley 2007, 61) and thus, the specific modes of the “othering” of “ otherness ” are nowhere decided in advance (as a certain ontological fatalism might have it ) (see Wilderson 2008). The social

does not have to be divided into white and black , and the meaning of these signifiers is never necessary – because they are signifiers . To be sure, In this sense, then, the white man doesn’t exist, the black man doesn’t exist (Fanon

1968, 165); and neither does the colonial symbolic itself, including its most intimate structuring relations – division is constitutive of the social, not the colonial division . “ Whiteness ” may well be very deeply sediment in modernity itself, but respect for the

“ontological difference” (see Heidegger 1962, 26; Watts 2011, 279) shows up its ontological status as ontic. It may be so deeply sedimented that it becomes difficult even to identify the very possibility of the separation of whiteness from the very

possibility of order, but from this it does not follow that the “void” of “black being” functions as the ultimate substance, the transcendental signified on which all possible forms of sociality are said to rest .

What gets lost here, then, is the specificity of colonialism , of its constitutive axis, its “ontological” differential . A

crucial feature of the colonial symbolic is that the real is not screened off by the imaginary in the way it is under capitalism. At the place of the colonised, the symbolic and the imaginary give way because non-identity (the real of the social) is immediately inscribed in the “lived experience” (vécu) of the colonised subject. The colonised is “traversing the fantasy” (Zizek 2006a, 40–60) all the time; the void of the verb “to be” is the very content of his interpellation. The colonised is, in other words, the subject of anxiety for whom the symbolic and the imaginary never work, who is left stranded by his very interpellation.4 “Fixed” into “non-fixity,” he is eternally suspended between “element” and “moment”5 – he is where the colonial symbolic falters in the production of meaning and is thus the point of entry of the real into the texture itself of colonialism. Be this as it may,

whiteness and blackness are (sustained by) determinate and contingent practices of signification; the “structuring relation” of colonialism thus itself comprises a knot of significations which , no matter how tight, can always be undone. Anti-colonial – i.e., anti-“white” – modes of struggle are not (just) “psychic” 6 but involve the “ reactivation ” (or “de-sedimentation”)7 of colonial objectivity itself . No matter how sedimented (or global), colonial objectivity is not ontologically immune to antagonism. Differentiality, as Zizek insists (see Zizek 2012, chapter 11, 771 n48), immanently entails antagonism in that differentiality both makes possible the existence of any identity whatsoever and at the same time – because it is the presence of one object in another – undermines any identity ever being (fully) itself. Each element in a differential relation is the condition of possibility and the condition of impossibility of each other. It is this dimension of antagonism that the Master Signifier covers over transforming its outside (Other) into an element of itself, reducing it to a condition of its possibility.8 All

symbolisation produces an ineradicable excess over itself, something it can’t totalise or make sense of, where its production of meaning falters. This is its internal limit point, its real:9 an errant “object” that has no place of its own, isn’t recognised in the categories of the system but is produced by it – its “part of no part” or “object small

a.”10 Correlative to this object “a” is the subject “stricto sensu” – i.e., as the empty subject of the signifier without an identity that pins it down.11 That is the subject of antagonism in confrontation with the real of the social, as distinct from “subject” position based on a determinate identity.

Walker

Social death is an incorrect homogenization of the past AND reifies colonial power relations by placing European whiteness at the center of symbolic examinationWalker, Birkbeck University Masters in Psychosocial Studies, 2012(Tracey, “The Future of Slavery: From Cultural Trauma to Ethical Remembrance”, Graduate Journal of Social Science, 9.2, July, JSTOR)

To argue that there is more to the popular conception of slaves as vic tims who experienced social death within the abusive regime of transat lantic slavery is not to say that these subjectivities did not exist. When considering the institution of slavery we can quite confidently rely on the assumption that it did indeed destroy the self-hood and the lives of millions of Africans.

Scholar Vincent Brown (2009) however, has criticised Orlando Patterson’s (1982) seminal book Slavery and Social Death for positioning the slave as a subject without agency and maintains that those who managed to dislocate from the nightmare of plantation life ‘were not in fact the living dead’, but ‘ the mothers of gasping new societ ies’ (Brown 2009, 1241). The Jamaican Maroons were one such disparate group of Africans who managed to band together and flee the Jamaican plantations in order to create a new mode of living under their own rule. These ‘runaways’ were in fact ‘ferocious fighters and master strategists’, building towns and military bases which enabled them to fight and successfully win the war against the British army after 200 years of battle (Gotlieb 2000,16). In addition, the story of the Windward Jamaican Maroons disrupts the phallocentricism inherent within the story of the slave ‘hero’ by the very revelation that their leader, ‘Queen Nanny’ was a woman (Gotlieb 2000). As a leader, she was often ignored by early white historians who dismissed her as an ‘old hagg’ or ‘obeah’ woman (possessor of evil magic powers) (Gotlieb 2000, xvi). Yet, despite these negative descriptors, Nanny presents an interesting image of an African woman in the time of slavery who cultivated an exceptional army and used psychological as well as military force against the English despite not owning sophisticated weapons (Gotlieb 2000). As an oral tale, her story speaks to post-slavery generations through its representation of a figure whose gender defying acts challenged the patriarchal fantasies of the Eurocentric imaginary and as such ‘the

study of her experiences might change the lives of people living under paternalistic, racist, classist and gender based oppression’ (Gotlieb 2000, 84). The label of ‘social death’ is re jected here on the grounds that it is a narrative which is positioned from the vantage point of a European hegemonic ideology. Against the social symbolic and its gaze, black slaves were indeed regarded

as non-humans since their lives were stunted, diminished and deemed less valuable in comparison to the Europeans. However, Fanon’s (1967) assertion that ‘not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man’ (Fanon 1967, 110)

helps us to un d erstand that this classification can only have meaning relative to the symbolic which represents the aliveness of whiteness against the back drop of the dead black slave (Dyer 1997). Butler (2005)

makes it clear that the ‘death’ one suffers relative to the social symbolic is imbued with the fantasy that having constructed the Other and interpellated her into ‘life’ , one now holds the sovereignty of determining the subject’s right to live or die: this death, if it is a death, is only the death of a certain kind of subject, one that was never possible to begin with, the death of the fantasy of impossible mastery, and so a loss of what one never had, in other words it is a necessary grief (Butler 2005, 65).

The point to make here is that although the concept of social death has proved useful for theorists to describe the metaphysical experience of those

who live antagonistically in relation to the social symbolic, it is nevertheless a colonial narrative within which the slaves are confined to a one dimensional story of ter ror . In keeping with Gilroy’s (1993b) argument that the memory of slavery must be

constructed from the slaves’ point of view, we might instead concentrate, not on the way in which the slaves are figured within the European social imaginary, but on how they negotiated their own ideas about self and identity. We might therefore find some value in studying a group like the Maroons who not only managed to create an autonomous world outside of the hegemonic discourse which ne gated them ,

but also , due to their unique circumstances, were forced to create new modes of communi cation which would include a myriad of African cultures, languages and creeds (Gottlieb 2000). This creative and resistive

energy of slave subjectivity not only disrupts the colonial paradigm of socially dead slaves, but also implies the ethical tropes of creation, renewal and mu tual recognition . In contrast, the passive slave proved to feature heavily in the 2007 bicentenary commemorations causing journalist Toyin Agbetu to interrupt the official speeches and exclaim that it

had turned into a discourse of freedom engineered mostly by whites with stories of black agency excluded 8 . Young’s argument that ‘one of the damaging side effects of the focus on white people’s role in abolition is that Africans are represented as being passive in the face of oppression’, appears to echo the behaviour in the UK today given that a recent research poll reveals that the black vote turnout is significantly lower than for the white majority electorate and that forty percent of second generation ‘immigrants’ believe that voting ‘doesn’t matter’.9 Yet, Gilroy (1993a) argues that this political passivity may not simply be a self fulfilling prophecy, but might allude to the ‘lived contradiction’ of being black and English which affects

one’s confidence about whether opinions will be validated in a society that, at its core, still holds on to the fantasy of European superiority (Gilroy 1993a).

Without con sidering the slaves’ capacity for sur vival and their fundamental role in overthrowing the European regime of slavery, we limit the use–value of the memory and risk becoming overly attached to singular slave subjectivities seeped in death and passivity. The Maroons story how ever , enables slave consciousness to rise above the mire of slavery’s abject victims and establishes an ethical relation with our ancestors who lived and survived in the time of slavery.