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JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC K - INDEX


APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC K - INDEX.................................................................................................................1
SHELL 1/4..................................................................................................................................................................2
SHELL 2/4..................................................................................................................................................................3
SHELL 3/4..................................................................................................................................................................4
SHELL 4/4..................................................................................................................................................................5
LINK APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC 1/2.................................................................................................................7
LINK APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC 2/2.................................................................................................................8
LINK - BIOTERRORISM........................................................................................................................................11
LINK - IRANIAN PROLIF......................................................................................................................................12
INTERNAL LINK ETHICS..................................................................................................................................13
MOURNING DA......................................................................................................................................................15
RAINFOREST ABJECTION DA.............................................................................................................................16
IMPACT VIOLENT EXCLUSION.......................................................................................................................17
IMPACT NUCLEAR BIOPOLITICS DESTROYS VALUE TO LIFE................................................................18
ALT - QUEER APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC..........................................................................................................19
APOC. RHETORIC -> POLICY..............................................................................................................................20
AT: FRAMEWORK 1/3............................................................................................................................................21
AT: FRAMEWORK 2/3............................................................................................................................................22
AT: FRAMEWORK 3/3............................................................................................................................................23
AT: PERM CO-OPTION DA................................................................................................................................24
ALT SOLVE PROBLEMATIZATION..................................................................................................................25
AT: ACTION GOOD................................................................................................................................................26
AT: INDIVIDUATION DA/ GENERIC LINK........................................................................................................27
IMPACT TURN APOC. RHETORIC GOOD 1/2.................................................................................................29
IMPACT TURN APOC. RHETORIC GOOD 2/2.................................................................................................30
IMPACT TURN BIOPOWER GOOD 1/2............................................................................................................31
IMPACT TURN BIOPOWER GOOD 2/2............................................................................................................32
ALT NO SOLVE.......................................................................................................................................................33
INDIVIDUATION DA 1/2.......................................................................................................................................34
INDIVIDUATION DA 2/2.......................................................................................................................................35
AT: IRANIAN PROLIF LINK.................................................................................................................................36
AT: BIOTERRORISM LINK...................................................................................................................................37
PERM SOLVENCY..................................................................................................................................................38
AT: MOURNING/RAINFOREST DA.....................................................................................................................39

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

SHELL 1/4
THE AFFIRMATIVES APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC EXERTS BIOPOLITIAL
CONTROL OVER LIFE BY EXPOSING IT TO DEATH, USING THE IMAGE OF
APOCALYPSE TO JUSTIFY THE EXTERMINATION OF THOSE OBJECTS OF
POWER ISOLATED AS THREATS.
COVIELLO, assistant professor of English, 2000
[peter, Apocalypse From Now On, PG. 40-1, JC]

Perhaps. But to claim that American culture is at present decisively postnuclear is not to say that the
world we inhabit is in any way post-apocalyptic. Apocalypse, as I began by saying, changed - it did not
go away. And here I want to hazard my second assertion: if, in the nuclear mhm of yesteryear, apocalypse
signified an event threatening everyone and everything with (in Jacques Derrida's suitably menacing
phrase) "remainderless and a-symbolic destruction," then in the postnuclear world apocalypse is an affair
whose parameters are definitively local. In shape and in substance, apocalypse is defined now by the
affliction it brings somewhere else, always to an "other" people whose very presence might then be
written as a kind of dangerous contagion, threatening the safety and prosperity of a cherished "general
population." This fact seems to me to stand behind Susan Sontag's incisive observation, from 1989, that,
"Apocalypse is now a long running serial: not 'Apocalypse Now' but 'Apocalypse from Now On.'" The
decisive point here in the perpetuation of the threat of apocalypse (the point Sontag goes on, at
length, to miss) is that the apocalypse is ever present because, as an element in a vast economy of
power, it is ever useful. That is, though the perpetual threat of destruction - through the constant
reproduction of the figure of the apocalypse - the agencies of power ensure their authority to act on
and through the bodies of a particular population. No one turns this point more persuasively than
Michel Foucault, who in the final chapter of his first volume of The History of Sexuality addresses
himself to the problem of a power that is less repressive than productive, less life-threatening than ,
in his words, "life-administering." Power, he contends, "exerts a positive influence on life [and]
endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and
comprehensive regulations." In his brief comments on what he calls "the atomic situation,"
however, Foucault insists as well that the productiveness of modern power must not be mistaken for
a uniform repudiation of violent or even lethal means. For as "managers of life and survival, of
bodies and the race," agencies of modern power presume to act "on the behalf of the existence of
everyone." Whatsoever might be construed as a threat to life and survival in this way serves to
authorize any expression of force, no matter how invasive, or, indeed, potentially annihilating. "If
genocide is indeed the dream of modern power," Foucault writes, "this is not because of a recent return to
the ancient right to kill' it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the
race, and the large-scale phenomena of population." For a state that would arm itself not with the power
to kill its population, but with a more comprehensive power over the patters and functioning of its
collective life, the threat of an apocalyptic demise, nuclear or otherwise, seems a civic initiative that can
scarcely be done without.

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

SHELL 2/4
BIOPOLITICS NORMALIZES THE CREATION OF POPULATIONS AND THEIR
EXPOSURE TO DEATH. THIS ENSURES THE SOVERIEGN APPARTUSS RIGHT TO
KILL.
Stohler 95
[Anne, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Race and the Education of
Desire,
p. 81-82]
Biopower was defined as a power organized around the management of life, where wars were waged on
behalf of the existence of everyone, entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in
the name of the life necessity, massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and that so many regimes
have been able to wage so many wars, causing so may to be killed. at stake is the biological existence of a
population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modem powers, it is because power is situated and exercised at the
level of life, the species, the race, and the large scale phenomena of the population. The sovereign right to kill
appears as an "excess" of biopower that does away with life in the name of securing it. How does this power
over life permit the right to kill, if this is a power invested in augmenting life and the quality of it? How is it
possible for this political power to expose to death not only its enemies, but even its own citizens. This is the point
where racism intervenes. "What inscribes racism in the mechanisms of the state is the mergence of biopower.. . .
racism inscribes itself as a fundamental mechanism of power that exercises itself in modern states" racist discourse
it is a "means of introduction a fundamental division between those who must live and those who must die. It
fragments the biological field it establishes a break inside the biological field, it establishes a break inside the
biological continuum of human beings by defining a hierarchy of races, a set of subdivisions in which certain
races are classified as "good." fit, and superior.& establishes a positive relation between the right to kill and
the assurance of life. It posits that the more you kill and let die, the more you will live." It is neither racism nor
that state that invented this connection, but the permanency of war-like relations inside the social body.
Racism now activates this discourse in a novel way, establishing a biological confrontation between "my life and
the death of others" The enemies are those identified as external and internal threats to the population. "Racism is
the condition that makes it acceptable to put certain people to death in a society of normalization" The murderous
function of the biopolitical state can only be assured by racism. which is indispensable to it. Racism will develop in
modem societies where biopower is prevalent and with colonizing genocide." How else, could a biopolitical state
kill civilizations if not by activating the themes of evolutionism and racism. War ''regenerates" one's own race.
In conditions of war proper, the right to kill and the affirmation of life productively converge. Discourse has
concrete effects; its practices are prescribed and motivated by the biological taxonomies of the racist state.

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

SHELL 3/4
ALTERNATIVE: VOTE NEGATIVE TO REJECT THE 1ACS RHETORICAL CONSTRUCTION
LEGITIMATING NUCLEAR STRATEGIC THOUGHT IN THE NAME OF APOCALYPTIC DANGER.
Taylor 2k7
[byran, associate prof. communications@ Colorado-boulder, the means to match their hatred: nuclear weapons,
rhetorical democracy, and presidential discourse, University of ColoradoBoulder, presidential studies quarterly,
vol. 37, no. 4, 667-692, JC]
This interdependency between security and rhetoric is further clarified in arguments conceptualizing nuclear
weapons as a legitimation crisis for the liberal-democratic nation-state (Deudney 1995, 209). Rosow (1989)
argues that traditional conceptualization of nuclear deterrence as a strategic issue obscures its status as "a
system of social relations" (564). In adopting this alternate perspective, Rosow argues, we may reclaim nuclear
weapons from official discourses that have sheared off from their necessary grounding inand authorization
bythe discourses of the nuclear life world: "[Strategic] debate scarcely touches on the experience of nuclear
deterrence as a cultural and political-economic production. . . . The result is a serious discontinuity between
the claims on which the validity of nuclear policy rests . . . and the actual effects of nuclear deterrence on the
material well-being and consciousness in the advanced capitalist West" (564). Rosow's argument establishes the
democratic status of nuclear weapons as a rhetorical problem: he conceptualizes nuclear deterrence as a discourse
composed of "interpretive claims" and imperative expressions and theorizes its mediation of both institutional
structures and forms of identity. Viewed in this light, we can recognize how, as artifacts, nuclear weapons clarify
a fundamental contradiction between their destructive potential and their legitimating cultural discourses:
"The same forces that are to produce peace and prosperity, i.e., science, knowledge, rationality, also produce
the tools for destroying the very civilization they are designed to protect and whose values and future they
embody."Richard Falk (1982, 9) has suggested the implications of this condition for a nuclear-rhetorical democracy:
"Normative opposition to nuclear weapons or doctrines inevitably draws into question the legitimacy of state
power and is, therefore, more threatening to governmental process than a mere debate about the property of
nuclear weapons as instruments of statecraft." As a result, Rosow concludes, changes in nuclear policy may
exacerbate inherent conflict between "the [cultural] consciousness of democratic citizenship" and the
legitimacy of the state (1989, 581). As the state increasingly rests its security on weapons systems requiring
centralized control and automated decision making, it becomes increasingly difficult to assert that the
legitimacy of those weapons arises from authentic popular consent. Fault lines in this hegemony are opened
when public rhetoric informs Americans about the international consequences of nuclear imperialism and
encourages their identification with negatively affected groups. In the post-Cold War era, Rosow predicted, it
will become increasingly difficult for the state to normalize nuclear weapons as a familiar and legitimate icon.

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

SHELL 4/4
RHETORICAL CRITICISM EXPOSES ASSUMPTIONS AND DISCOURSES WHICH PRECLUDE COOPERATIVE AND DEMOCRATIC POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT.
TAYLOR 2K7
[byran, associate prof. communications@ Colorado-boulder, the means to match their hatred: nuclear weapons,
rhetorical democracy, and presidential discourse, University of ColoradoBoulder, presidential studies quarterly,
vol. 37, no. 4, 667-692, JC]
Rhetorical scholars thus view speech in democracy as "the medium within which the ethical self-government
of autonomous individuals can be articulated with the imperatives of democratic governance" (Hicks 2002,
224). They reconceptualize ideals of deliberative democracy such as inclusion, equality, and reason to
rigorously assess their associated discursive practices. They raise questions about how these practices hail
citizens to participate in the democratic process as particular kinds of acting subjects, endow them with a
sense of entitlement and agency, mediate their understanding of others' interests and the effects of their
actions upon those interests, and develop their ability to not only competently reason together means do not
subvert democratic ends (Cloud 2004, 79). Of particular concern here is the hegemony in democracy of
"reason" as a framing standard (i.e., of rationality) and a conventional practice of accountability that
constrains deliberation through normalized assumptions concerning the source and range of legitimate
support for expression and the ontological status of political interests in relation to language (Welsh 2002). In
challenging those assumptions, rhetorical scholars rigorously critique the ethics and politics of self-described
democratic discourse. They ensure that it does not prematurely foreclose the expression of relevant interests
and that it encourages their patient and ethical cultivation as a resource for innovative transformation of self
and other. Finally, rhetorical scholars of democracy oppose corrosive discourse which forecloses the
possibility of achieving mutual identification between opponents and thus cooperation.

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

LINK APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC 1/2


APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC CREATES A DOCILE PUBLIC AND ENABLES
MILITARY INTERVENTION AND GLOBAL WAR.
DR. GAY 2K6
[William c., PhD Philosophy @ Boston, prof of phil. @ university of north Carolina,
apocalyptic thinking versus nonviolent action, in spiritual dimensions of nonviolence and
peace edit by David Boersema,]
Even when fear is not suppressed, it can be misdirected. The political risk resulting from
apocalyptic thinking and exaggerated fears is that these con- cerns can get co-opted. How are we to fight
off apocalyptic or global terror- ism? Nuclear prophets like Jonathan Schell say we must rid the world
of nu- clear weapons. Current anti-terrorist politicians say we must rid the world of terrorists; we must
wage a war against terrorism. Ironically, political leaders argue that the possession of
nuclear weapons is the means for preventing the apocalyptic horrors of nuclear war. Just in
case deterrence fails, government officials now tell us a missile defense system should be in
place. Six months after the attacks of 11 September 2001, the George W. Bush
administration announced plans to use modified nuclear weapons to destroy terrorist
strong- hold stashes of weapons of mass destruction, or to respond to terrorist attacks that
make use of biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons. Officials have told us for quite some time
that governmental possession of chemical and biologi- cal weapons is one of the means of preventing evil
governments or terrorist organizations from using weapons of mass destruction. Now, the claim is also
made that the modified nuclear weapons being urged by the Bush administra- tion for
possible use in the war on terrorism will also function to deter ter- rorism. In the past, and
again currently, governmental leaders, by preying on public fears, achieve acquiesce to an ideology that
portrays international adver- saries as totally diabolical and completely untrustworthy. Under these conditions, and supposedly in order to save their citizens from the absolute evils, military and political leaders
present military preparedness and military actions as the only, or best, insurance against nuclear apocalypse
and terrorist attacks.

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

LINK APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC 2/2


APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC DEMOBILIZES DEMOCRATIC CONSTRAINTS ON
GOVERNMENTAL EXERCISE OF POWER AND PROMOTES GLOBAL WARFARE.
DR. GAY 2K6
[William c., PhD Philosophy @ Boston, prof of phil. @ university of north Carolina,
apocalyptic thinking versus nonviolent action, in spiritual dimensions of nonviolence and
peace edit by David Boersema,]
In the first part of this essay, I will argue against the utility of fear and apocalyptic thinking.
Apocalyptic prognosticators have a zero accudoom forecast record. By nature, only once could such
a forecast be correct. In reli- gious apocalyptic traditions, the rising of the sun on the proclaimed
doomsday typically sends the sheet-enshrouded devotees back from the appointed hilltop to their everyday
tasks. Instead of being taken up into the clouds, they find their feet firmly planted on the ground. The
prophet may re-calculate and issue yet another warning of the beginning of the end on a still later date, but
the ranks of the faithful tend to thin. In the nuclear doom tradition, the theoretical and experimental
data of careful scientific research has often dispelled similar forecasts. A temporarily frightened public
returns to business as usual. Will governmental assurances lull us into believing that, despite its great cost, a
missile defense system will protect us for ballistic missiles launched at us by diabolical (and hardly
comparably powerful) rogue states such as Iran, and North Korea or the axis of evil, as they are
now termed? Now, will the Office of Homeland Security protect us from the various forms of
attack that terrorists may employ? Or, could the Office of Homeland Security be
propagating yet another myth of protection? Instead of bringing us security, the Office of Homeland
Se- curity may be a threat to democracy by undercutting civil liberties and intensify- ing militaristic and
warist attitudes at home, not just abroad.

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL


LINK CONTAINMENT RHETORIC

CONTAINMENT RHETORIC EMPLOYS A METAPHOR OF GAURDIANSHIP OVER


WEAPONS WHICH POSES THE EXPERTS AND NUCLEAR POLICYMAKERS
AGAINST DEMOCRATIC CONSTRAINTS AND PREVENTS MOBILIZATION
AGAINST NUCLEAR WEAPONS.
Taylor 2k7
[byran, associate prof. communications@ Colorado-boulder, the means to match their hatred: nuclear weapons,
rhetorical democracy, and presidential discourse, University of ColoradoBoulder, presidential studies quarterly,
vol. 37, no. 4, 667-692, JC]
In this way, rhetorical repression may be better conceptualized as containment of the nuclear public sphere.
Here, scholars such as Alan Nadel (1995) and William Kinsella (2001) have argued that nuclear weapons created a
traumatic exigency requiring the development of cultural narratives to control the associated public
experience of fear and responsibility. The central motif of that narrative, Nadel argues, was "containment," a
term which captures the conflation of declared foreign policy, informal domestic policy, and official rhetoric "that
functioned to foreclose dissent, preempt dialogue, and preclude contradiction" (1995, 14). It is impossible
here to miss the reflexive nuclear metaphor in this demophobic image: "containment" is also the technical
process by which energetic "reactions" in fissile nuclear materials are stimulated to yield desired results, while
minimizing operator exposure to dangerous "contamination," avoiding inconvenient "leaks," and preventing
fatal and "explosive" breaches of control. This metaphor richly evokes, then, technocratic disregard for
nuclear democracy (i.e., as a raw material for official manipulation) and suggests how "engineered"
deliberation can reproduce the premises of nuclear guardianship (Farrell and Goodnight 1981, 298).

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

LINK - BIOTERRORISM
BIOTERRORISM SCENARIOS CREATE A DOCILE FORM OF POLITICAL
SUBJECTIVITY, EXPOSING LIFE TO POWER INCLUDING EXTERMINATION AND
LETTING DIE AND PRECLUDES POSITIVE POLITICAL SOLUTIONS TO ACTUAL
THREATS.
Spana 2k4
[monica sochoh, asst. professor of medicine at uPittsburgh, bioterrorism: us public health and a secular apocalypse, anthropology today, vol 20,
issue 5, p.8-13, oct 21, jc]

Bioterrorism scenarios permit explorations into governmentality the institutions, processes and practices
through which a population comprised of individuals is imagined, their conduct and well-being made meaningful,
their sense of self nurtured in specific ways, and their efforts directed to some purposes over others (Ferguson &
Gupta 2002; Foucault 1991[1978]). Bioterrorism scenarios are a symbolic structure through which a particular
kind of danger is construed, and particular social identifications and relationships are made, with manifest
political consequences (Campbell 1992, Weldes et al. 1999). As represented in official response scenarios,
bioterrorism is an amalgam of dangers against which the US population must be made secure the foreign
terrorist, the replicating pathogen, and the panicky public. Around this definition, new networks of
authorities in and out of government are coming together to protect the common good (cf. Trouillot 2001);
their interests some- times converge, at other times conflict. Bioterrorism scenarios through their authorship,
performance and dissemination help to generate new political subjectivities. Arange of authorities find
reinvigorated purpose in providing protection against bioterrorism. Political and military leaders reassert
the duty to safeguard America from foreign enemies. Law enforcement professionals find new purpose in the
goals of subverting terrorist attacks and containing disorderly publics. Medical and public health practitioners
fulfil oaths to provide protection against bodily harm for patients and populations the political boundaries of
which may shrink or expand, from the local to the national to the global. Present concern with bioter- rorism
may signal novel forms of biopower(Foucault 1980[1976]), where the task of governing becomes enhancing
the ability to fight off infection, i.e. building better emergency response systems at the institutional level
and better immune systemsat the individual level (cf. Martin 1994). While an evangelism of fear has been
cardinal for the constitution of many states identity, the apocalyptic mode[] has been conspicuous in the
catalog of American statecraft(Campbell 1992: 153). Bioterrorism imaginaries of professionals charged with
ensuring preparedness are apparently secular: bioscience, technology and medicine are among the forces invoked
to deliver the population from danger. Approaching counter-terrorism scenarios as non-religious, however,
risks obscuring the complexity of US culture and politics. Religious and secular apocalypticisms frequently
interpenetrate one another (Stewart & Harding 1999). Tens of millions of Americans, it is esti- mated, believe
that the endtime prophesied in the Book of Revelation is soon to be realized: biological weapons are singled out
by some as the means of final destruction.13The latest installment in the evangelical Left Behindseries the bestselling adult novels in the US presents a war-like Jesus in the Second Coming, an image that resonates with
President Bushs portrayals of military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq in terms of godly purpose.14 Whether and
why various publicsin the US (and else- where) embrace the vision of a bioterrorized future is an open question.
Prevalent in US popular culture, scenarios may constitute a modality of power through which current political
leaders produce consent for their counter-terrorist activities and professionals reproduce their expert status.
Mass culture effects, however, are uncertain, unstable and contradictory (Traube 1996). More ethnographic study is
thus needed to understand whether and under what condi- tions various publics internalize dominant images of
themselves as being at risk of bioattack, and as legiti- mately protected by current domestic and foreign policy and
professional practices (cf. Skidmore 2003). An additional ethnographic and political question is what role
bioterrorist narratives play in reinforcing apocalyptic sce- narios in the minds of individuals and groups
fantasizing about bringing them about. Bioterrorism scenarios embody ambitions of both antagonist and
protagonist. Thinking hopefully about a future notthreatened by bio- logical attacks is doubly difficult in the
current environ- ment: apocalyptic rhetoric of an incontrovertible, impending doom all too easily
overwhelm[s] the opti- mistic faith necessary for meaningful political action (OLeary 1998: 412).

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

LINK - IRANIAN PROLIF


THEIR ARGUMENT ABOUT IRANIAN PROLIFERATION DISABLES DEMOCRATIC
CHECKS ON U.S. POWER AND MASK THE INEQUITY OF NULEAR ARMS
REDUCTIONS.
Taylor 2k7
[byran, the means to match their hatred: muclear weapons, rhetorical democracy, and presidential discourse,
University of ColoradoBoulder, presidential studies quarterly, vol. 37, no. 4, 667-692]
Critical and cultural scholars are responding to this rapidly evolving nuclear landscape and in particular to the
Bush administration's rhetorical depiction of international nuclear proliferation as a pretext for military
intervention. Hecht (2003) characterizes this rigid and simplistic rhetoric as an instance of ahistorical and
hyperbolic "nuclear rupture-talk" that legitimates neo-imperialism. In their indictment of the administration's
pre-invasion allegations concerning Iraq's possession of WMD, Hartnett and Stengrim (2004) conclude that this
rhetoric not only constitutes a grievous fabrication of evidence but also "amounts to a pattern of lying that
poses a serious threat to the foundational principles of democracy" (152). And Rutledge (2007) has examined
the administration's related rhetoric in its ongoing conflict with Iran over its nuclear development program.
In her post-colonialist analysis, Rutledge (2007, 133) concludes that this rhetoric is suffused with irony,
ambivalence, denial, and paradox. It reflects, for example, "America's continued attempts to protect the
secret of nuclear power while acknowledging the impossibility of doing so." It allows U.S. rhetors to avoid
acknowledging that nuclear domination has been achieved "at the cost of continued economic and political
exploitation of nations like Iran." It suppresses the inconvenient truth that "America hypocritically builds
bigger and more destructive nuclear weapons while expecting other nations to resist the temptation to develop
those same weapons." And finally, it allows the nation to shift ambivalence about its own nuclear history onto
enemies, thus "directing attention away from its own role in creating the horrible potentiality of . . . nuclear
destruction."

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

INTERNAL LINK ETHICS


NUCLEAR APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC MAKES ETHICAL DECISIONMAKING
IMPOSSIBLE BY ENCOURAGING A FARSIGHTED SENSE OF POLITICAL
IMPORTANCE WHICH IGNORE SYSTEMIC AND UNETHICAL VIOLENCE.
DR. GAY 2K6
[William c., PhD Philosophy @ Boston, prof of phil. @ university of north Carolina,
apocalyptic thinking versus nonviolent action, in spiritual dimensions of nonviolence and
peace edit by David Boersema,]
The final risk facing apocalyptic thinking and exaggerated fears is moral. Apocalyptic thinking
and exaggerated fears are too farsighted. Farsightedness or hyperopia is the pathological condition in which
vision is better for distant than near objects. For example, nuclear prophets do bring into sharp focus a
hopefully distant objectthe prospect that somewhere down the road we will reach an omega point where
the destructiveness of war will in fact be apoca- lyptic. The judgment is surely correct that the
precipitation of global doom would be a profoundly immoral act. But people who are
farsighted fail to bring nearby objects into sharp focus. Even if nuclear apocalypse or further
terrorist attacks of the magnitude of 11 September might not be very far down the road, numerous
other war-like objects are much closer to us. In fact, they surround us. Since World War II, no year has
passed in which fewer than four wars were being waged somewhere on this planet. When we devote too much
of our attention to imagining the worst that could happen, we risk inflicting moral hyperopia on ourselves.
Just as we are being myopic when we focus primarily on crime in the streets when
confronting the problem of human violence, even so we are being hyperopic to focus predominantly
on the threats of nuclear apocalypse and global terrorism when confronting the problems of large-scale
violence. Apocalyptic thinking and exaggerated fears risk leaving us morally shortchanged when they lead us
to fail to fight against the horrors of violence that are not distant or possible threats but everyday realities. We
need to respond to on-going atrocities in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa that are on a scale quite
adequate for moral outrage, and we need to seek feasible protection from devastating harms such as AIDS,
hunger, and environ- mental degradation that actually are currently afflicting us.

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL


INTERNAL LINK - GENDERED VIOLENCE
THE APOCALYTPIC IMAGINATION ENTAILS GENDERED VIOLENCE BY REVEALING THE
SECRET OF LIFE IMAGINED AS CREATION THROUGH DESTRUCTION OF THE FEMINIZED
BODY.

WARREN 2K8
[becket, dawn of a newapocalypse: engagements with the apocalyptic
imagination in 2012 and primitvist discourse, http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd/send-pdf.cgi/warren%20beckett.pdf?
acc_num=bgsu1218993516.]
A recurring staring point to defining what apocalypse, and the concepts so derived, is to look at its etymology.
Jacques Derridas essay Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy, (which serves as a starting point
for much of the discussions of the apocalyptic character of post-modernity), begins with the assertion by Andr
Chouraqui that the Greek apokalupsis is a translation of the Hebrew gala. He expands upon the similarities thusly:
Apokalupt no doubt was a good word [bon mot] for gala. Apokalupt, I disclose, I uncover, I unveil, I reveal the
thing that can be a part of the body, the head or the eyes, a secret part, the sex or whatever might be hidden, a
secret thing, the thing to be dissembled, a thing that is neither shown nor said, signified perhaps but that cannot be or
must not first be delivered up to self-evidence (1984: 4). Keller finds the origins of the word apocalypse as
gendered in that the unveiling of Apo-Kalypso connotes the marital stripping of the veiled virgin The
moment of truth blinks with cosmic excitement (1996: 1). Taken together, these two explanations of the origin of
apocalypse reveal important aspects that are frequently overlooked in favor of spectacular destruction: the revelatory
aspect, that apocalypse is concerned with epistemological concerns to as great an extent as metaphysical or
ethical claims; and that construction, maintenance or subversion of gender roles are often, if not always at
stake within the apocalyptic imagination.

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

MOURNING DA
APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC FORCLOSES A POLITICS OF MOURNING AND TURNS
ENLIGHTENMENT IDEALS INTO THEIR HOLLOW DOUBLES, OFFERING ONLY
VIOLENCE, TURNING THE CASE.
WARREN 2K8
[becket, dawn of a newapocalypse: engagements with the apocalyptic
imagination in 2012 and primitvist discourse, http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd/send-pdf.cgi/warren%20beckett.pdf?
acc_num=bgsu1218993516.]
For Jay, what those engaged with the apocalyptic imagination are unable to mourn is Kristevan mother figure.
He contends It is thus tempting to interpret the apocalyptic moment in the critique of technological and
scientific hubris as a convoluted expression of distress at the matricidal underpinnings of the modernist
project, indeed of the entire human attempt to uproot itself from its origins in something we might call mother
nature (1994: 42). The inability to mourn is not just that of the mother or a matricidal impulse of modernity;
instead it is the inability to mourn the failure of the promises of the Enlightenment. We cannot mourn the
passing of Enlightenment ideals because its institutions, having largely failed to deliver its promises, continue
to move around like an animated corpse. To parallel Jays mourning of the loss of the mother, the
Enlightenment on its legs of liberal democracy and scientific knowing, prattles forth like a parent suffering
from severe dementia, offering abuse and little else. While some of the family knows that it is now in fact its
time, most are unwilling to let go of pleasant memories from the past.

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

RAINFOREST ABJECTION DA
APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC SUSTAINS A SENSE OF ABJECTION OR AN
INCLINATION TO EXPECT THE SYSTEMIC VIOLENCE AND ENVIRONMENTAL
DESTRUCTION.
WARREN 2K8
[becket, dawn of a newapocalypse: engagements with the apocalyptic
imagination in 2012 and primitvist discourse, http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd/send-pdf.cgi/warren%20beckett.pdf?
acc_num=bgsu1218993516.]
Jay finds this sullen disposition to be at the heart of the apocalyptic imaginary as a whole, and not merely its
postmodern variant (1994: 36). While Jay also finds the writings of Jean Baudrillard and Jean Francois Lyotard to
be indicative of this mode of thinking, the anglophone Anthony Giddens has written about this disposition in a way
that proves useful. Giddens finds the sense of foreboding which so many have noted as characteristic of the
current age (1990: 131) to be based upon the way in which risk has become globalized in the modern world.
He finds seven points that characterize the specific risk profile of modernity (ibid: 124): 1) risks intensity,
that there is a risk of nuclear war that could potentially end all human life on the planet; 2) contingent events
that can effect extremely large numbers of people; 3) the impact of human knowledge on the natural world,
particularly technologys impact on environmental conditions; 4) institutionalization of risk in global market
exchanges, of which the current global food crisis is representative; 5) the awareness of risk being risky, that
is uncertain; 6) this awareness is held by many people; 7) and that no expert can be completely proficient in
managing risk. Similar to this overwhelming position of risk, Keller identifies a feeling of pending apocalypse
existing within society as a cryptoapocalypse, a sort of Kristevan abjection within the subliminal margins of
human psyche. It makes people inclined to expect the burning of the rainforests by naturalizing feelings of
foreboding and inevitability, enabling their own numbed complicity in the economic system that is causing
the end of the world for so many Amazonian species (1996: 8). Taken together these factors help to explain the
sense of pending cataclysm that is identified with adopting the apocalyptic imagination, but it is only one
component.

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

IMPACT VIOLENT EXCLUSION


SECURITY, JUSTIFIED BY THE IMAGE OF APOCALYPSE, IS USED TO UNDERMINE CONTRAINTS
ON ELITE POWER AND THE EXECUTION OF THOSE DEEMED A THREAT TO THAT POWER.
Taylor 2k7
[byran, associate prof. communications@ Colorado-boulder, the means to match their hatred: nuclear weapons,
rhetorical democracy, and presidential discourse, University of ColoradoBoulder, presidential studies quarterly,
vol. 37, no. 4, 667-692, JC]
The implications of this condition for nuclear democracy generallyand constitutional constraints on
presidential war powers, specificallyare quite serious. The president is believed to be the only one who can
authorize the launch of nuclear weapons and is commonly viewed as having the right to do so under conditions of
attack. Although he is required to discuss options with advisors before transmitting his decision (and launch
command codes) to military commanders, the president also has the right to predelegate launch authority to those
commanders (Born 2006, 26-27). This right has been exercised throughout the Cold War in periods of crisis, and
historians have demonstrated that those commanders have subsequently exercised their operational autonomy in
ways that undermine declared policies (Nolan 1989; Rosenberg 1983). Additionally, Falk notes (1982, 3), "Political
leaders in the United States have failed throughout the nuclear age to consult with, or disclose to, the public
the occasions on which the use of nuclear weapons was seriously contemplated." This situation has created a
frightening and largely unacknowledged gap between official policies of nuclear control and actual military
practices that has heightened nuclear risk and created an ongoing mystery regarding whether and how the
ideals of democratic rule are preserved in moments of crisis. Throughout the Cold War, this problem plagued
demophobic Realists who feared on the one hand that "excessive [nuclear] power in the hands of an aroused or
angry citizenry could lead to more than political upheaval and revolution; it could lead to annihilation" (Rosenthal
1991, 123) and, on the other, that near-disasters such as the 1962 Cuban missile crisis demonstrated an unacceptable
level of risk created by nuclear elites. For philosopher Elaine Scarry (1990), the problem of centralization is
fundamentally moral: the semi-automated status of nuclear weapons subverts a requirement of democratic
rule that bodies which may be destroyed in war must have the opportunity to consent to their conscription
and deployment. Third, Hudson (2004, 320) argues that the postwar national security state practices antidemocratic repression as officials invoke its imperatives to justify their subversion and suspension of domestic
civil liberties. Telescoping this claim to focus on nuclear weapons and rhetoric, we may concede the historical
impact of anti-Communist rhetoric on mainstream public regard of anti-nuclear dissent. Additionally, we may
consider howin the 1953 resolution of the U.S. government's case against the Rosenbergsrepression has
included the ultimate act of executing nuclear spies (Carmichael 1993; Garber and Walkowitz 1995). This
outcome is achieved through rhetorical practices such as courtroom cross-examination, and it also functions
in the public sphere as a "message" confirming the nuclear state's level of commitment to disciplining threats
posed to its order by political difference.

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

IMPACT NUCLEAR BIOPOLITICS DESTROYS VALUE TO


LIFE
BIOPOLITICAL EXPOSURE TO DEATH IN THE NUCLEAR REALM PERPETUATES
GENOCIDE AGAINST POPULATIONS AND EXPROPRIATES THE VALUE OF THOSE
LIVES IT SACRIFICES.
Bianco 2k4
[Jamie sky, zones of morbidity, rhizomes #08.spring, jc]
If disciplinary bio-politics are constituted in the governmentality, management and instrumentality of human
life, such as the doctrines of Human Rights, then the bio-politics of control and abandonment are constituted as
"necropolitics," the profitable designation of bodies, races, gender, nations, and sub-populations selected for
access, left to death, and/or made to die. The mutual positioning taken up in Silko's "novel" [10] and in Mbemb's
"political science" and Sandoval's "Chicana, feminist theory" [11] are the deadly and catastrophic stakes of
bodies, complexity, control, bio-power, and bio-political technologies not simply designed to subdue the mass
proletariat and exploit labor power, but to expropriate the value of living flesh itself.
Articulating the necropolitical and indigenous politics of land, Silko writes, "North was the direction of Death"
(Almanac 590). Within the continental "Americas" and by virtue of catastrophically under-acknowledged and
profitable exclusion and genocide across these lands, indigenous and non-white im(migrant) bodies occupy what I
term "zones of morbidity." For Silko, born in the Laguna Pueblo, this genocide continues through geo-economic
ecocide in the form of the largest un-reclaimed uranium mine in the United States, the Jackpile-Paguate mine, sitting
in the middle of the village. Given the vast complex of irradiation sicknesses, cancer clusters, and death
through uranium mining, nuclear weapons testing and radioactive waste disposal facilities found across and
adjacent to the traditional territories and current reservation lands of most Western states tribes, a case for
contemporary environmental racism as genocide could be made on behalf of indigenous peoples without any
historical considerations. The continuation of extermination practices and policies of the federal and state
governmental bodies, nuclear and genetic laboratories, military and police agencies, working directly with
corporate energy interests under the political and economic support and racist social oppression by the U.S.
middle class and international corporate elite makes for a tale of necropolitical technologies. This is precisely
what is found in Silko's rendering of contemporary storytelling and prophecy through the Almanac. The prophecies
of death or necropolitical design and political affect travel within and among the dead, the dying, the living and the
morbid. And as her Almanac demonstrates a prophetic and differential future must be mapped in consultation
with the remains of history, tradition, and culture because under these necropolitics of control, direct
opposition to power is not only futile; it is deadly.

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

ALT - QUEER APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC


THE ALTERNATIVE IS TO VOTE NEGATIVE AS AN ACT OF QUEERING THEIR
APOCALYPTIC NARRATIVE THIS ALLOWS US TO PROBLEMATIZE DANGER
AND OPPRESSION WHILE PRECLUDING THE IMPULSE FOR RETALIATORY
VIOLENCE
WARREN 2K8
[becket, dawn of a newapocalypse: engagements with the apocalyptic
imagination in 2012 and primitvist discourse, http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd/send-pdf.cgi/warren%20beckett.pdf?
acc_num=bgsu1218993516.]
Is the apocalyptic imagination, like fascism intrinsically violent? Carpenter wonders, If Revelation puts sex into
discourse as gynephobia and homophobia, then sexual and gendered violence may be integral to apocalypseas we
know it: the sexual politics of apocalypsemay be unable to dispense with violence because that violence a
gendered violence may be what is at stake in the vision of apocalyptic power (1995: 111). Carpenter suggests
that a gay apocalyptic is a potential way to somewhat work around this violence, an approach to the
apocalyptic imagination first developed in the 1960s. The revolution of the imagination seems to be a strong
component, Carpenter explains : But the events of the revolutionary sixties also gave rise to an oppositional
apocalyptic: readings of Revelation that valorize a line of prophets linked in a common opposition to culture, and
that celebrate apocalyptic vision as a rapturous opening of the seals of prophesy or the doors of perception, a
longed for coming out. In this gay apocalyptic, representations of Revelation take on the structure of a
visionary coming-out narrative, a prophecy of something to be revealed at the end of History but not in
history (1995: 120). This gay apocalyptic bears similarity to Kellers counter-apocalypse, and also reflects
Collinss characterization of the apocalyptic imagination being a revolution of the imagination. Opening the doors
of perception is one approach to changing the ways in which truths often taken as givens are challenged.
Rather than ignoring the gendered violence of Revelation, it must be acknowledged and be part of that which
is to be done away with. Rather than the Whore of Babylon being defeated, the apocalyptic imagination could
be employed to defeat such dichotomies of whore and mother. Richard Dellamora finds William S. Burroughs to
be a figure representative of such an engagement with the apocalyptic imagination, though he uses the term queer
apocalypse. (1995). This term may be somewhat more apt because it does not connote the diametric way of
thinking that is to be subverted; rather than gay as opposed to straight, queer has been used to describe the state of
flux in which sexuality exists. Kermode, does not find much to be found of use in the apocalyptic imagination,
including Burroughs. What is particularly problematic for Kermode is The most terrible element in apocalyptic
thinking is its certainty that there must be universal bloodshed (2000: 107). This is certainly true of many
manifestations of the apocalyptic imagination, particularly Christian Revelation as deployed by those who seek to
create or protect their authority. However it is overstatement to characterize it as a necessary element of the
apocalyptic imagination. While bloodshed and destruction are often present, it is not so in some of the Jewish
apocalypses examined by Collins, and seems to be mitigated or at least downplayed in some contemporary
manifestations. The conflation between judgment and punishment is what makes bloodshed seem necessary.
The revolution of imagination within queer or counter-apocalypse can call out domination and oppression
without demanding that an archangel line those responsible up against the wall.

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

APOC. RHETORIC -> POLICY


APOCALYPTIC NUCLEAR RHETORIC SHAPES POLICY
Taylor 2k7
[byran, associate prof. communications@ Colorado-boulder, the means to match their hatred: nuclear weapons,
rhetorical democracy, and presidential discourse, University of ColoradoBoulder, presidential studies quarterly,
vol. 37, no. 4, 667-692, JC]
First, although there is scholarly disagreement surrounding the utility of "the rhetorical presidency" as an analytic
concept (Ivie 2005; Medhurst 1996), it is largely uncontested that presidents use the full power of language at
their command to interpret the interests of the nation and to advocate policies that serve them. Here, politics,
poetry, and rhetoric may intersect as nuclear presidents draw on formal literary devices such as metaphor
and ideological narratives establishing what is true, beautiful, and good for the nation in order to justify
America's historical development of nuclear weapons. Here, Hall's poem reminds us that poetic language
dialogically shadows the rational deliberation of nuclear policy and potentially intervenes in its abstractions and
exclusions.

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

AT: FRAMEWORK 1/3


APOCALYPTIC NUCLEAR WEAPONS RHETORIC DESTROYS DELIBERATIVE
DEMOCRACY INTERNAL LINK TURNS YOUR POLICYMAKING GOOD D.A.
Taylor 2k7
[byran, the means to match their hatred: muclear weapons, rhetorical democracy, and presidential discourse,
University of ColoradoBoulder, presidential studies quarterly, vol. 37, no. 4, 667-692]
Finally, nuclear weapons contribute to the anti-democratic condition of distortion. Hudson (2004) depicts this
condition as an illegitimate stranglehold exerted by agents of the military-industrial complex on public
deliberation of national security policy. He lists associated practices such as persistent threat exaggeration and
incongruous promotion of anachronistic weapons systems and attributes these to the ongoing need of institutional
actors to preserve their authority, legitimacy, and profitability. This political-economic determinism, however,
does not explain the cultural dependency and productivity of such rhetoric. Additionally, the trope of
"distortion" invites us to prematurely judge nuclear rhetoric as either converging with or diverging from a
preexisting, objective truth condition. Alternately, we may consider that the critical significance of this rhetoric lies
not in its referentiality, but in its capacity to shape the conditions of deliberation by advancing particular
discourses and frames over their competitors.
Central to this discussion is the famous conceptualization by Robert Jay Lifton and Richard Falk (1991) of
"nuclearism" as a potent mixture of ideologies including bureaucracy, nationalism, religious fundamentalism,
militarism, technological determinism, and instrumental rationality. This hegemonic condition, argue Lifton and
Falk, fuels the promotion of nuclear weapons as a "solution" to perceived problems of national security. It
inhibits democratic discourse by inducing primitive and inappropriate defenses in the public mind as a
response to the terrifying threat of nuclear annihilation. These mechanisms include a quasi-religious faith in
nuclear weapons as a source of "salvation" in national security and "psychic numbing" that mediates dread
and guilt arising from repressed understanding of the actual consequences of nuclear weapons development
and use.

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

AT: FRAMEWORK 2/3


EXCLUSION OF THE ALTERNATIVE REPLICATES THE EXCEPTIONALIST
VIOLENCE OF APOCALYPTIC NUCLEAR RHETORIC, DESTROYS CULTURE,
LEADS TO CYLCICAL WARFARE, AND PREVENTS PUBLIC DELIBERATION.
Taylor 2k7
[byran, associate prof. communications@ Colorado-boulder, the means to match their hatred: nuclear weapons,
rhetorical democracy, and presidential discourse, University of ColoradoBoulder, presidential studies quarterly,
vol. 37, no. 4, 667-692, JC]
In his related critique of rhetoric surrounding the global war on terror, Robert Ivie (2005) establishes that the
continued degradation of American political culture stems from long-standing "demophobia." In this condition,
democracy is an ideal that must be enforced on international others to preserve essential American interests.
Simultaneously, however, it is viewed as a threatening source of domestic dissent and change that offends the
republican and federalist sense of political order. Ivie unflinchingly probes this throbbing paradox in the history of
U.S. war making: even as they claim to serve democracy through military adventurism abroad, U.S. officials
consistently distort the interests of their opponents and cripple citizen deliberation. They do so through use of
a "decivilizing" rhetoric that blends irrational, aggressive, rigid, paranoid, and exceptionalist discourses to
demonize Other-ness and delegitimate domestic dissent. The consequences of this practice, Ivie argues, are
grave indeed. It degrades cultural diversity required for successful adaptation to changing political
conditions; it suppresses the contradiction between the ideal of deliberation and the coercive use of armed
force; it exacerbates tensions that lead to war's irrevocable destruction; and it marginalizes alternate formats
(such as poetry) that may serve political deliberation. Ivie's solution to these problems is neither direct nor
simple: he calls for nothing less than a radical reorientation to the possibilities of political discourse. Here,
political speakers would privilege the comic pole of Burkean discourse and reject short-sighted, cynical, desperate,
and self-indulgent discourses. Instead, political actors resign themselves to continuous and "adventurous"
struggle (Peterson 2007) and cultivate the civil possibilities of rhetoric and performance for achieving
tolerance, coexistence, and dialogue. As a result, militarist and imperialist discourses of national security that
have attained unwarranted authority and autonomy may be rejoined with a full range of democratic voices.

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

AT: FRAMEWORK 3/3


DOMINANT NUCLEAR DISCOURSE MAKES INFORMED DELIBERATION
IMPOSSIBLE BY MATAINING A REGIME OF POWER OVER NUCLEAR
INFORMATION.
Taylor 2k7
[byran, associate prof. communications@ Colorado-boulder, the means to match their hatred: nuclear weapons,
rhetorical democracy, and presidential discourse, University of ColoradoBoulder, presidential studies quarterly,
vol. 37, no. 4, 667-692, JC]
Liberal scholars and other commentators who assess the relationship between nuclear weapons and democracy
balance cynicism and optimism (see, for example, Falk 1982; Mitchell 2000; Peterson 2007). Their tone frequently
evokes the morbid genres of diagnosis, autopsy, and obituary, but their grieving, condemnation, and pleading also
seek a healingif not outright resurrectionof the nuclear-democratic body. This activity typically grows more
active during periods of nuclear instability, in which possibilities for reconfiguring the relationship between nuclear
officials and citizens are at least temporarily opened. During the late Cold War and post-Cold War periods, then,
several speakers addressed this relationship in the context of extraordinary changes in international politics
(Deudney 1995; Falk 1982; Rosen 1989; Rosow 1989; Stegenga 1988). Collectively, these speakers considered how
institutions sediment around the artifact of nuclear weapons and how that process yields rhetoric that
undermines the possibility of robust democratic speech. To varying degrees, these critiques all assert a
fundamental incompatibility between nuclear weapons and the ideals of the democratic state. They argue that
oppressive conditions surrounding the development of nuclear weapons subvert the capabilities of citizens to
acquire, deliberate, and act on information concerning nuclear policy. As a result, the nuclear public is
characterized as fragmented, alienated, uninformed, and unable to participate in deliberation with forceful
and reasoned discourse. Commonly listed elements in this indictment include: an official regime of secrecy
which suppresses and distorts nuclear information; official cultivation of a climate of permanent emergency
that promotes public inertia and acquiescence to authoritarian rule; undue deference by nominal agents of
congressional oversight to the interests of military elites and corporate defense contractors; a timid and amnesiac
news media; and official demonization of anti-nuclear dissent as extreme, irrelevant, and unpatriotic (Rosen 1989).
"This long train of official lies," argues James Stegenga (1988, 89), "has made truly informed consent an
impossibility" (emphasis in original).

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

AT: PERM CO-OPTION DA


CO-OPTION OF THE ETHICAL CRITICISM OF THE 1NC INTO A REALM OF
STRATEGIC ARMS REDUCTION ALIENATES NUCLEAR POLICY FROM PUBLIC
CONTRAINTS, DECREASES NATIONAL CREDIBILITY, AND TURNS THE CASE.
Taylor 2k7
[byran, the means to match their hatred: muclear weapons, rhetorical democracy, and presidential discourse,
University of ColoradoBoulder, presidential studies quarterly, vol. 37, no. 4, 667-692]
Other studies of this pivotal moment in nuclear-rhetorical history have focused on the success of the Reagan
administration in depriving the Freeze movementand anti-nuclear opponents generallyof viability and
legitimacy. Bjork (1992), Goodnight (1986), Holloway (2000), and Rushing (1986) have all focused on how
Reagan's depiction of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) skillfully invoked mythic national narratives, and
joined these images with a proposed redemption of tainted nuclear techno-science. This rhetoric legitimated a
preferred strategic vision and continued the seemingly endless presidential quest to resolve nuclear weapons
within the fiendishly conflicting demands of national security and international peace. Sadly, these scholars
conclude, this rhetoric was either unable or unwilling to acknowledge how the SDI proposal merely deferred
inconvenient ambiguity and paradox, such as the utility of strategic "defenses" for supporting a U.S. nuclear first
strike against a nuclear-armed opponent. Nonetheless, this rhetoric effectively neutralized Freeze rhetoric
because it appropriated the movement's concern with the morality of the arms race and appeared to share its
commitment to ending that frustrating and frightening condition.
Mitchell (2000) has critiqued the implications for democracy of ongoing institutional and presidential BMD rhetoric.
Because this rhetoric is shot through with distortion, deception, and self-interest, he concludes, it constitutes a
wasteful, fraudulent, and technically compromised enterprise that should be either reorganized or canceled. It
has undermined the integrity of scientific research and eroded the international credibility of U.S. military
and political officials. It has increased the cynicism and alienation of U.S. citizens and their withdrawal from
the nuclear-political process. Finally, Mitchell concludes, it has inhibited the progress of significant nuclear
arms control and reduction.

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

ALT SOLVE PROBLEMATIZATION


PROBLEMATIZING APOCALYPTIC NUCLEAR RHETORIC IS ESSENTIAL TO
CONTEST ITS VIOLENT POLICY IMPLICATIONS.
Taylor 2k7
[byran, the means to match their hatred: Nuclear weapons, rhetorical democracy, and presidential discourse,
University of ColoradoBoulder, presidential studies quarterly, vol. 37, no. 4, 667-692]
The first involves reappreciating the significance of presidential rhetoric in shaping the story of the nuclear state. In
the introduction to this essay, I considered a provocative allegory linking presidential rhetoric to the voice of world
destroyer. That image is potentially useful as a spur to consider what seethes and languishes beneath the
discourse of nuclear policy deliberation. It obscures, however, the historical process by which nuclear
presidents have talked themselves and the nation into a seemingly rationalalbeit life-threateningaccommodation
of potential global destruction. Here, critics should continue to follow the rhetorical career of "good reasons"
justifying nuclear "solutions" to the "problems" of national security. Specifically, they should challenge the
continued use of irrational, religious imagery that conflates presidential authority with nuclear potency and
thus sustains imperial rule at the expense of a democratic republic.

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

AT: ACTION GOOD


TURN APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC DEMOBILIZES ANTI-NUCLEAR EFFORTS.
DR. GAY 2K6
[William c., PhD Philosophy @ Boston, prof of phil. @ university of north Carolina,
apocalyptic thinking versus nonviolent action, in spiritual dimensions of nonviolence and
peace edit by David Boersema,]
Beyond the prospect for factual rebuttal, apocalyptic thinking and exaggerated fears run a
psychological risk. Compare the responses to the nuclear threat and the terrorist threat.
Regardless of whether the big boom will bring on global doom, does belief in nuclear war as
apocalyptic motivate people to eliminate this threat? Much of the public protest against
governmental plans relied on the myth of the motivating power of fear to spur otherwise
apathetic citizens to rally around the anti-nuclear cause. But as we well know, the antinuclear bandwagon is not exactly overflowing these days. Initially after the events of 11
September 2001, many people were motivated to act. Unfortunately, already many people are
beginning to suppress their fear. Suppressing negative emotions or entering a state of denial represents the
psychological risk that faces apocalyptic thinking and exaggerated fears. The saying that the main responses
to fear are fight or flight is instructive. We have no way to guarantee that people frightened by accounts of
the horrors of nuclear war or terrorist attacks will fight back. Many people take flight, especially when they
feel disempowered in the political arena and see how limited the success of past efforts has been. These
persons may suffer from psychic numbing. When fear is suppressed, the call to action is avoided.

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

AT: INDIVIDUATION DA/ GENERIC LINK


INDIVIDUATION IS NOT A PLOY OF POWER BUT ENABLES A WORKABLE
STRATEGY TO COMBAT DEBILITATING APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC.
DR. GAY 2K6
[William c., PhD Philosophy @ Boston, prof of phil. @ university of north Carolina,
apocalyptic thinking versus nonviolent action, in spiritual dimensions of nonviolence and
peace edit by David Boersema,]
One of the messages of the nonviolent movements of the twentieth cen- tury that we should appropriate is that
hope serves us better than fear. A telling inadequacy of fear, whether proportionate or excessive, is that fear is
only negative. Nuclear prophets frightened many people with the negative images that they presented
repeatedly. Anti-terrorist politicians do the same. Their negative images give many people nightmares when
they are asleep and anxi- ety when they are awake. This negativity can get out of hand, unless we couple it with
a positive vision. In order to attain hope, we need to know about the feasibility of nonvio- lent struggle. In this
regard, Ackerman and Duvall note: We also believe that nonviolent resistance deserves more attention than it has
generally received. In our time violence generates more news be- cause, for many, history is perceived as a
spectacle. But if it were under- stood more commonly as a process, then the dynamic effect of nonvio- lent
sanctions would be more easily appreciated. This form of power is not arcane; it operates on the same level of
reality that most people live their lives, and it is comprehensible for that reason. Contrary to cynical belief,
the history of nonviolent action is not a succession of desperate idealists, occasional martyrs, and a few
charismatic emancipators. The real story is about common citizens who are drawn into great causes, which
are built from the ground up.10

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL


***AFF ANSWERS***

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

IMPACT TURN APOC. RHETORIC GOOD 1/2


APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC IS KEY TO PREVENT NUCLEAR WAR EVEN IF IT IS
FICTIONAL.
Weaver 2k7
[Roslyn, university of Wollongong, the four horsemen of the greenhouse apocalypse. forum.llc.ed.ac.uk/issue5/weaver.pd, jc]

For I.F. Clarke, the new apocalyptic fictions were not only nihilistic but also didactic because the discovery of the
new-found human capacity for creating the most genocidal instruments conceivable ... transformed the tale of the
Last Days into a most admonitory form of fiction that centres on the dangerous pursuit of super-weapons (21).
Apocalypse can therefore be an appropriate mode for writers keen to protest against complacent political
systems, harmful environmental policies, and reckless technological and scientific experimentation; the form
allows authors to extrapolate from current events and imagine a terrible future should certain actions be
taken. Even if social criticism is not the intention of the author, a disaster scenario that is the result of human
action (or, frequently, inaction) functions as a warning to readers. In this way, politics, technologies, ecological
issues and science may be construed as significant causative factors in either the end of the world or a world
very much worse than it is now.

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

IMPACT TURN APOC. RHETORIC GOOD 2/2


REJECTION IGNORES POSITIVE CHANGES CAUSED BY APOCALYPTIC
RHETORICS MOTIVATING DIMENSION. THIS TURNS THEIR NUCLEAR
PASSIVITY ARGUMENTS.
WARREN 2K8
[becket, dawn of a newapocalypse: engagements with the apocalyptic
imagination in 2012 and primitvist discourse, http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd/send-pdf.cgi/warren%20beckett.pdf?
acc_num=bgsu1218993516
Jay, drawing on Sigmund Freud, contends that the apocalyptic imagination rests on vacillations between
melancholia and mania stemming from an inability to mourn a lost object. He explains: For there can be little
doubt that the symptoms of melancholy, as Freud describes them, approximate very closely those of apocalyptic
thinking: deep and painful dejection, withdrawal of interest in the everyday world, diminished capacity to love,
paralysis of the will, and most important of all, radical lowering of self- esteem accompanied by fantasies of
punishment for assumed moral transgressions (1994: 37). Jays characterization of the apocalyptic imagination
only describes some of its manifestations, completely ignoring its possible constructive uses. While a
resignation to waiting for retribution, whether divine or natural is a possible course of action, so too is taking
predictions of a worst case scenario as a motivation to action. Jay also seems to be overly dismissive of the
anti- redemptive postmodernist voices in the apocalyptic chorus, characterizing Derridas valorization of
infinite, unconstrained linguistic play (ibid: 38) as an example of the accompanying manic impulse that also leads
to inaction. This argument seems to be based on a misreading of Derrida, or an overlooking of his work, such as
Force of Law in which he calls specifically for a socially engaged project of deconstruction.

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

IMPACT TURN BIOPOWER GOOD 1/2


Biopowers method of normalization is key to maximizing healthcare
Dickinson, Professor at Victoria University, 2004
(Edward, Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About
Modernity, Central European History, Vol. 37, No. 1, p.4, JC)
In this account, then, the history of modern Germany is above all the history of a particular national variant
of biopolitics. I will use the term here in the broad sense in which I believe it to be widely understood among
historians today as an extensive complex of ideas, practices, and institutions focused on the care, regulation,
disciplining, improvement, and shaping of individual bodies and the collective "body" of national
populations the " Volkskorper" as it was sometimes called in Germany.5 Biopolitics in this sense includes
medical practices from individual therapy and regimes of personal hygiene to the great public health
campaigns and institutions; social welfare programs, again from individualized care for particular
populations to larger-scale and quasi-universal programs such as social insurance and tax policies
intended to encourage particular demographic outcomes; the whole complex of racial science, from
physical anthropology to the various racial theories; eugenics and the science of human heredity;
demography; scientific management and occupational health; and at least potentially the full range of related
disciplines and practices such as psychiatry and psychology, discourses of self-improvement (nudism,
vegetarianism, fitness and nutrition fads, temperance), regimes of beauty, and the like. The overarching aim
of all these disciplines was to create a more powerful and prosperous society by maximizing health and
efficiency. All of them operated through the creation of expert knowledge centered around the project
of the "normalization" of the individual and his or her physical characteristics and (social and private)
behaviors, and the corresponding "pathologization of difference" the definition of some characteristics and
behaviors as healthy and natural, and of others as diseased, unhealthy, unnatural, and in need of containment,
stigmatization, treatment, or ehmination.6 This dual process is central to the functioning of biopolitics as
a conceptual framework and as a set of social practices. It serves as the critical legitimating discourse for
policy, and defines its targets and ends.

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

IMPACT TURN BIOPOWER GOOD 2/2


TURN - BIOPOLITICS IS THE NECESSARY CONDITION FOR A DEMOCRATIC
POLITICS THAT CONSTRAINS THE VIOLENT POTENTIAL OF BIOPOLITICAL
CONTROL.
Ross, Berkeley history professor, 2004
(Edward, Central European History, AD:7-8-9March, p. 35-36) PMK
In short, the continuities between early twentieth-century biopolitical discourse and the practices of the
welfare state in our own time are unmistakable. Both are instances of the disciplinary society and of
biopolitical, regulatory, social-engineering modernity, and they share that genealogy with more authoritarian
states, including the National Socialist state, but also fascist Italy, for example. And it is certainly fruitful to view
them from this very broad perspective. But that analysis can easily become superficial and misleading, because
it obfuscates the profoundly different strategic and local dynamics of power in the two kinds of regimes.
Clearly the democratic welfare state is not only formally but also substantively quite different from
totalitarianism. Above all, again, it has nowhere developed the fateful, radicalizing dynamic that
characterized National Socialism (or for that matter Stalinism), the psychotic logic that leads from
economistic population management to mass murder. Again, there is always the potential for such a
discursive regime to generate coercive policies. In those cases in which the regime of rights does not
successfully produce health, such a system can and historically does create compulsory programs to
enforce it. But again, there are political and policy potentials and constraints in such a structuring of
biopolitics that are very different from those of National Socialist Germany. Democratic biopolitical regimes
require, enable, and incite a degree of self-direction and participation that is functionally incompatible with
authoritarian or totalitarian structures. And this pursuit of biopolitical ends through a regime of democratic
citizenship does appear, historically, to have imposed increasingly narrow limits on coercive policies, and to
have generated a logic or imperative of increasing liberalization. Despite limitations imposed by political
context and the slow pace of discursive change, I think this is the unmistakable message of the really very
impressive waves of legislative and welfare reforms in the 1920s or the 1970s in Germany. Of course it is not yet
clear whether this is an irreversible dynamic of such systems. Nevertheless, such regimes are characterized by
sufficient degrees of autonomy (and of the potential for its expansion) for sufficient numbers of people that I think it
becomes useful to conceive of them as productive of a strategic configuration of power relations that might fruitfully
be analyzed as a condition of liberty, just as much as they are productive of constraint, oppression, or
manipulation. At the very least, totalitarianism cannot be the sole orientation point for our understanding of
biopolitics, the only end point of the logic of social engineering. This notion is not at all at odds with the core of
Foucauldian (and Peukertian) theory. Democratic welfare states are regimes of power/knowledge no less than
early twentieth-century totalitarian states; these systems are not opposites, in the sense that they are two
alternative ways of organizing the same thing. But they are two very different ways of organizing it. The
concept power should not be read as a universal staring night of oppression, manipulation, and
entrapment, in which all political and social orders are grey, are essentially or effectively the same. Power is
a set of social relations, in which individuals and groups have varying degrees of autonomy and effective
subjectivity. And discourse is, as Foucault argued, tactically polyvalent. Discursive elements (like the
various elements of biopolitics) can be combined in different ways to form parts of quite different strategies
(like totalitarianism or the democratic welfare state); they cannot be assigned to one place in a structure, but
rather circulate.

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

ALT NO SOLVE
THE ALTERNATIVE CANNOT CHANGE DOMINANT NUCLEAR DISCOURSE ESPECIALLY IN
DEBATE.
SANDLIN 2K4
[Micahel, review of "people of the bomb: portraits of america's nuclear complex by hugh gusterson",
http://www.popmatters.com/books/reviews/p/people-of-the-bomb.shtml]
And today, more than ever, Livermore nuclear scientists are flush with taxpayer dollars. The Bush administration is
still pining for the warped Reagan dream of militarizing space, while "mini-nukes" are being developed to smoke
out state-less, spiderhole-dwelling warlords. Gusterson leaves us with the idea that US nuclear dominance-asdefense has become the reconstructed "natural" order of the day. The utopian dreams of anti-nuclear critics
like Gusterson, Jonathan Schell and many others, advocate worldwide abolition of nuclear weapons as the only
truly fail-safe policy. Although realistically, unless there's an unexpected Green Party putsch in Washington, this
country's dominant discourse on nukes and militarism will probably be, at best, limited to whether nuclear
weapons should function as deterrents or as pre-emptive instruments of global restructuring. Any heretical
dovish discourse calling for peacetime economic conversion of military industries, or faith-based multi-lateral
nuclear abolition, will likely be relegated to chicken-wired "free speech zones" and academic echo chambers.

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

INDIVIDUATION DA 1/2
THEIR INDIVIDUIZED RESPONSE TO THE 1AC IGNORES THAT THE INDIVIDUAL
IS ITSELF A PRODUCT OF THE POWER THEY CRITICIZE. THE ALT PRODUCES
QUALITATIVELY MORE VIOLENT CONSTRAINTS.
Shapiro 2007
[Steve, Gather, Foucault and Constraints on Individualism, 4-22-07 http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?
articleId=281474976965588, Accessed 7-8-09, JC]
Think of the amount of suffering that binds us within small deviations of relative constraints. Any biopolitical
means is already a constraint of individualism in itself, therefore any attempt other than the attempt of the
individual to end that constraint is already deviating that biopolitical limitation the individual. Attempting
to change a constraint will only lead to a greater biopolitical constraint over the individual. Any attempt to
end the suffering of the individual will only lead to more suffering. Essentially, this action is the
destruction of that constraint altogether, but a destruction of a constraint can be as devastating, if not
more devastating, than the status quo itself. The constraint cannot be destroyed by any means, it can only be
limited through use of power over the initiation of that constraint. What can seem like agonizing to one outside
the constraint can be a simple form of life for another within it. Changing that form of life tremendously
increases the power structures over the individuals within the constraint, further leading to power over that
individual's mind. Interference can devastate the mind of the individual, making the lifting of the constraint even
more difficult. In particular instances, it takes more exertion of power to deviate a system than to control
it. Breaking free in essence, is the only possible change that can be enacted by the individual as a means
of deviating the constraint. Examining the contextuality of the historical abstract can lead us to a possible nonbiopolitical deviation of the status quo. Instead of attempting the impossible, destroying the constraint altogether,
the individual can lift that constraint through the visualization of its context. Only when the individual discovers
the source of his suffering can he truly be free from that constraint.

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

INDIVIDUATION DA 2/2
THE ALTERNATIVE, BY RELYING ON YOUR INDIVIDUAL BALLOT TO EXPRESS
CRITICISM OF THE 1AC, SUSTAINS POWERS INDIVIDUATING FUNCTION TO
CREATE DOCILE INTELLECTUALS. NO ALT. SOLVENCY.
Pickett, Associate professor of Political Science at Chaldron State College, 2005
(Brent, On the Use and Abuse of Foucault For Politics pp. 24-25, 2005, AD:7-10-9, JC)
Foucault also describes the growth of an individualizing political rationality "whose role is to constantly ensure,
sustain, and improve the lives of each and every one."71 This rationality develops into a system that he calls
'pastoral power.' The issue in this system is the relationship between the leader and the led and how it is to
be conceptualized. Foucault traces the origins of pastoral power back to Hebraic and early Christian
writings, where the leader is the shepherd and the led are the sheep. According to these writings,
obedience is a virtue, and the knowledge about each individual sheep by the shepherd is essential. The
shepherd, who should be ever-watchful, must know what goes on in the soul of each one . This account is
contrasted with the Greek view that focused upon the relation between the city and the citizen. Instead of
the leader involving himself with individuals, he is to seek the unity and flourishing of the state as a whole.
It is not that the Greek view has been superseded by the Judeo-Christian one; instead the two have grown
together: "Our societies proved to be really demonic since they happened to combine those two gamesthe
city-citizen game and the shepherd-flock gamein what we call the modern states."72 Two elements are
pivotal to this combination. First, individuals must be governed by their own truth. We hold a certain
conception of ourselves and attempt to live in accordance with it. We think of our identities as something
deep and natural and hence relate to ourselves as the bearers of a truth. One principal mechanism through
which this is expressed is our sexuality. Again, this is seen as something natural and therefore as something
to which we ought to be true. If a man is not sure about the truth of his sex, he may go to a psychiatrist
who interprets what he says and explains his truth back to him. The conceptual preconditions of such a
relationship are, first, that there is a truth about one's sex, and second, that one may be incapable of
understanding that truth but that another, through one's confession, can. Self-awareness, selfdiscipline, and self-correction are at the heart of this conceptualization. It is simply a later instance of
Christian techniques of self-mortification, techniques which introduced this linkage between obedience,
knowledge of oneself, and confession.73 The second central element of this modern political rationality is the
fostering of individual lives in a way that adds to the strength of the state.74 Healthy, productive, docile
citizens are essential to that strength. This is, in one sense, the pinnacle of disciplinary power. The forces of
individuals must be maximized in a manner that adds to the outcome of the disciplinary institution itself .
The same is true with the state, supported by all of these various disciplinary practices within society, but in turn
supporting them. It is a network of power, beginning with the lowly but ubiquitous practices of discipline, the
techniques and strategies of bio-power, all producing the sort of individual who can live within the modern state
and who in turn maintains that state as it supports those disciplinary and bio-power practices and institutions.
Since modern power produces individuals, it is useless to attempt to subvert that power through an appeal
to individualism or an assertion of the rights of the individual. Through a historical analysis of the rationality
specific to the art of governing modern states, it is clear that those states have been both individualizing and
totalitarian from the very beginning.75 Hence Foucault's claim: "Opposing the individual and his
interests to it is just as hazardous as opposing it with the community and its requirement s."76 The liberal
individual, his normative intuitions, and the rights that he bears are the effects of power, and therefore the
liberal individual cannot be the basis for an attack on the modern power regime .

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

AT: IRANIAN PROLIF LINK


CHANGE SOLVES! U.S. DIPLOMACY WITH IRAN IS NO LONGER INFLUENCED BY
APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC.
GAHRIB 2K9
[ali, interpress service writer, As Obama Engages, Hawks Soften Rhetoric, http://www.rightweb.irconline.org/articles/display/as_obama_engages_hawks_soften_rhetoric, a:jul 30 09, jwc]
Even the issue of an Iran with nuclear weapons is no longer discussed with the same apocalyptic language that
has been used in the past, with most panelists now saying the biggest threat is an Iran emboldened to "act
out" with what Lieberman called its "terrorist proxies."

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

AT: BIOTERRORISM LINK


APOCALYPTIC BIOTERROR SCENARIOS COMPELL POLICYMAKERS TO
ADDRESS CROSS-DISCIPLINARY ISSUES AND TO HELP INDIVIDUALS IN CASE
OF ATTACK.
Spana 2k4
[monica sochoh, asst. professor of medicine at uPittsburgh, bioterrorism: us public health and a secular apocalypse, anthropology today, vol 20,
issue 5, p.8-13, oct 21, jc]

Instructive in terms of the capacity of biological weapons to inflict human suffering on an immense
scale, bioterrorism scenarios nonetheless invite elaborate fantasies as to the cataclysm that could
ensue. Playing one- dimensional roles in bioterrorism scenarios, members of the public usually
surface as mass casualties or hysteria- driven mobs who self-evacuate affected areas or resort to
violence to gain access to scarce, potentially life-saving antibiotics and vaccines. These images,
around which offi- cial response systems are being built the public as a problem to be managed
during a crisis preclude careful consideration of, and planning for, ways to solicit the cooperation of
an affected population. The emphasis is on crowd control rather than enhancing the peoples ability to
cope with a public health emergency. In addition, such images help skirt the difficult issue of how to
ensure a fair distribution of resources during an epidemic emergency, by perpetuating a more
simplistic notion of the natural volatility of people in grave peril. The apocalyptic mode of scenarios
comes at the cost of fatalism and questionable substantive claims such as those involving mass
responses to disaster. Scenarios also have positive, generative effects as well. They are a compelling
medium through which policy-makers and public health and safety professionals come to comprehend the
complex dangers posed by biological weapons. As deliberately staged interactions among disparate
communities, sce- narios temporarily embody a larger response system, one typically outside of individual
experience. The mayor sees the dilemmas of the hospital administrator who sees the dilemmas of the
emergency room physician who sees the dilemmas of the health department, and so on. Bioterrorism
scenarios foster acquaintances, social connections and understandings across disciplinary bound- aries . In
this respect, bioterrorism scenarios have been revelatory experiences for officials unaware of how public

health actually operates or what limited ability it has to deal with unforeseen events, given its historically low
pri- ority in government, or how a dysfunctional health care system bears directly upon security matters.

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

PERM SOLVENCY
ABSTRACT CRITICISM OF THE NUCLEAR PARADIGM IS MEANINGLESS
WITHOUT THE ASPIRATION TOWARDS CONSEQUENTIAL POLITICAL CHANGE.
PERM SOLVES BEST.
WARREN 2K8
[becket, dawn of a newapocalypse: engagements with the apocalyptic
imagination in 2012 and primitvist discourse, http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd/send-pdf.cgi/warren%20beckett.pdf?
acc_num=bgsu1218993516.]
When Derrida asks wouldnt the apocalyptic be a transcendental condition of all discourse, of all experience even,
of every mark or every trace (Derrida, Apocalyptic Tone, 1984: 27), and claims that the genre of written apocalypse
is an exemplary revelation of such a structure, Derrida is suggesting that all works that are concerned with
truth claims are in fact apocalyptic, in that their purpose is to reveal certain truths. To illustrate this central
point, he repeatedly distinguishes between end and closure. The apocalyptic imagination is concerned with
ends rather than closures, and one must be clear as to what is meant by end. Eschatology is the detailing of
the enactment of a teleology. The end concerning Derrida is the end meaning purpose, not the end of
purposes. Apocalypse forever ought not be conceived as destructive, but rather, deconstructive, or calling for
deconstruction to come. Derrida conceives deconstruction as problematizing, destabilizing, complicating and
bringing out the inherent paradoxes of that which it turns its attention to. Though it may sometimes be
characterized as apolitical or merely anesthetizing politics, Derrida at least sees the project of deconstruction
as much more consequential, and critical legal studies to be an exemplary enactment: in order to be
consistent with itself, not to remain enclosed in purely speculative, theoretical, academic discourses but rather
(with all due respect to Stanley Fish) to aspire to something more consequential, to change things (1992: 8). The
dig at Fish is particularly telling, in that while Fish acknowledges the constructed nature of law, he distances himself
from critical judgments against existing political- juridical systems because they at least work. This distancing
from criticism of meaningful things in favor of mere criticism of meaning is not a full enactment of
deconstruction for Derrida. Deconstruction attempts to end established interpretive ends, reveal those
meanings that have been obscured, and enact change.

JULIAN SWITALALALALAL OLOLOLOLLOOLOOL

AT: MOURNING/RAINFOREST DA
THE KRISTEVAN NOTION OF ABJECTION MYSTIFIES THE BODY AND SUBUMES
HOMOSEXUAL DESIRE AND THE PRIMITIVE OR ORIENTAL. THIS PROVES
THEIR IMPACT ANALYSIS NORMALIZES SYSTEMIC FORMS OF VIOLENCE
AGAINST SELECTED POPULATIONS. INTERNAL LINK TURNS THE DA.
CHRISTIAN 2K4
[laura, of housewives and saints: abjections, transgression, and impossible mourning in Poison and Safe, camera
obscura, 19.3]
In situating the concept of abjection, Kristeva summons [End Page 96] the image of an infant who, gagging on
a surfeit of milk, choking on the enigmatic signifiers of its mother's desire, vomits itself out, expelling itself,
abjecting itself with the same convulsive motion through which it establishes itself as provisionally and
tenuously separate from the mother's body. This process, coincident with what is known in classical Freudian
discourse as the primal repression, lays the psychic foundations for the separation between self and other, subject
and object, concomitantly establishing the conditions for the infant's entry into language. The return of the abject
is thus associated with various borderline phenomenathe collapse of bodily boundaries, as well as the
breakdown of structures of signification.
In a sense, one encounters the limits of Kristeva's concept of abjection precisely at the point where it promises
to be the most generative. As soon as Kristeva attempts to position this psychical mechanism of foreclosure
(forclusion) within a broader sociosymbolic system, her analysis succumbs to a mystification of the maternal
body as the universal locus of a presymbolic multiplicity of drives (the semiotic). Butler and others have
observed how Kristeva subsumes not only homosexual desire but that which is marked as "primitive" or
"Oriental" under the ultimately metaphysical category of the "maternal-feminine."6 Haynes's films trouble
this category, suggesting that the abject assumes different codings and is identified with different marginal
zones of social life in different sociohistorical contexts. When the abject erupts in Haynes's films, virtually
rending the fabric of the text, it is not simply equivalent to the return of the "demoniacal potential of the
feminine."7 It is always situated in a specific sociosymbolic economy.

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