Agambens alternative re-inscribes the very humanist assumptions he seeks to displace.

His obligation toward the refugee is based on the precariousness of lifewhich is the ethical grounding of the rights that he critiques. Meister, 05 (Postmodern Culture, "Never Again": The Ethics of the Neighbor and the Logic of Genocide 15.2, Robert, Department of Politics, UC Santa Cruz). Proximity thus functions for Lvinas as a special case of distance--the case in which we must address our lack of any relationship to another human except the ethical one, which is exposure and nothing more .41 Not only is the neighbor someone whom we cannot really know: Lvinas believes (here following Frantz Rosensweig) that the neighbor comes before us as a stranger to himself in just the same sense that, in his presence, we too can no longer presume to know ourselves. Some Lacanians use the term "extimacy" to describe this non-relationship of humanitarian ethics, and distinguish the demands of pure proximity from the relations of closeness we call intimate .42 In this respect, Lvinas anticipates the recent thought of Giorgio Agamben, who asks us to "imagine two political communities insisting on the same region and in a condition of mutual exodus from each other." In such an "aterritorial . . . space," "the being-in-exodus of the citizen" would oppose itself to the limitations of the nation-state (Agamben, "Beyond Human Rights" 24-5). "The political survival of humankind is today thinkable," Agamben goes on to say, "only in a world in which the spaces of states have been thus perforated and topologically deformed and in which the citizen has been able to recognize the refugee that he or she is" (26). If Agamben now directly seizes on the ethical figure of the neighbor as refugee, it is still Lvinas who insists that in responding to each other as beings-in-exodus, our respective "stories" must not matter. The ethical point--for Lvinas the whole point--is that the neighbor is someone to whom we must respond merely because he is there. Our response, therefore, must not be to reproduce an historical narrative of our interaction: Which of us arrived first? Who must leave first? Which of us is "allergic," and which is the allergen? We must, rather, respond to the neighbor's need outside of history--we must, unavoidably, answer to his presence itself, even before deciding what to do. The face of the other in its precariousness and defenselessness is for me at once the temptation to kill and the call to peace, the "You shall not kill." The face which already accuses me makes me suspicious but already claims me and demands me. (167) Precariousness and defenselessness are, of course, typical of the plight of refugees, but even more fundamentally they are the source of the dogma of the "sacredness" of human life on which human rights interventionism rests. As Agamben demonstrates, homo sacer in Roman Law refers originally to an exception from the prohibition on murder, the life that may be taken with impunity by either ruler or neighbor without having the religious significance of a sacrifice or a sacrilege: Subtracting itself from the sanctioned form of both human and divine law . . . homo sacer . . . preserves the memory of the originary exclusion through which the political dimension was first constituted. . . .The sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without committing homicide and sacred life . . . is the life that has been captured in this sphere . . . . [T]he production of bare life is the originary activity of sovereignty. The sacredness of life, which is invoked today as an absolutely fundamental right in opposition to sovereign power, in fact originally expresses precisely both life's subjection to a power over death and life's irreparable exposure in the relation of abandonment. . . . [T]he sovereign and homo sacer present two symmetrical figures that have the same structure and are correlative: the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as

sovereigns. . . . Life is sacred only insofar as it is taken into the . . . originary exception in which human life is included in the political order in being exposed to an unconditional capacity to be killed. (Homo Sacer 82-85) Agamben here suggests that the asserted priority of ethics over politics, which is the kernel of the fin-de- sicle ideology of human rights interventionism, is itself symptomatic of a political condition in which precariousness and defenselessness are presupposed--and which humanitarian interventions themselves both mitigate and reproduce.43

Humanitarian intervention must be rejected because it: a)drains situations of their potentially radical political content, b)divides the world into heroic saviors and barbaric victims, and c) defines good only in opposition to evil, which is a conservative notion that resists positive projections of alternative futures. Brown, 04 (Nicholas, University of Illinois at Chicago, Or, Alain Badiou and Slavoj iek, Waiting for Something to Happen, CR: The New Centennial Review 4.3 (2004) 289-319). Ethicscogently translated by Peter Hallward, who also provides a pertinent introduction and appends a probing interview with the authoris, if anything, even more exhilarating than Saint Paul. Badiou begins from a critique of the discourse of human rights. This ethics has the virtue of being simple and self-evident: the ethical imperative is to prevent suffering. But Badiou exposes its hollowness by staging it. While the ethic of human rights obviously presupposes a human subject posited as universal, in practice this subject is radically split between victim and benefactor. And at this point it might raise our suspicions that the location of this split is remarkably consistent: the benefactor is always "us"the armed Western democracies or our allies, who have suddenly acquired the right to intervene. (Badiou does not address the hypocrisy of using the language of human rights to justify intervention in situations where the "Western democracies" are in fact responsible for the situation in the first place, or of the reluctance to intervene where there is little strategic benefit. If the ethics itself were justifiable, then the hypocrisy would have to be addressed as a separate issue.) This "humanitarian" intervention, moreover, can only conceive humanityor at least the victimas an animal: "the status of victim, of suffering beast, of emaciated, dying body, equates man with his animal substructure" (Ethics, 11). What is foreclosed at the outset is any possibility of conceiving the situation of "abuse" as political. (Think of the current situation in Haiti.) Since what is taken into account is only animal suffering and never the political situation that determines it, the attitude of humanitarian intervention is, despite initial appearances, one of profound contempt: violations of human rights require not political analysis, but only the identification of barbarism. The ethical orientation of human rights is purely negative: it has no conception of the good other than the absence of evil, of suffering. Lacking any imperative to inquire into the good, it discourages any substantial consideration of alternatives to the status quo. The exclusive concern of human rights with the question of evilits practical identification of the human being with "that which can

suffer evil"means that any attempt to base a political project on a conception of the good (which might, it is true, involve a share of suffering, not least on the part of those who uphold it) is deemed "utopian," doomed to transform itself into its opposite, a totalitarian nightmare. To begin from the good, therefore, leads directly to evil. Fo Badiou, this is "sophistry at its most devastating" (Ethics, 13), and the second half of the book is an attempt to think through an ethics that would begin from the good