Tournament: Clarion | Round: 2 | Opponent: Liberty BM | Judge: Jake Weiner
1AC
Chapter 1 The Figure of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
Democracy is made out of impossibilities rather than out of realities—democracy is riven with undecidable questions whose universal aspect insists that they be read in the particular rather than the universal—the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed operates as a key paradigmatic case of the exercise of power in the context of modern sovereignty—Mohammed is both at once the enemy of a democratic America and yet his body is also a friend to democracy, in that it bears the marks of undemocratic torture, a torture that speaks the name of the arbitrary and unprincipled exercise of sovereign force.
Torture is present within our democracy – the enigma that’s not supposed to be but almost always is.
Rejali 2009. Rejali, Darius. Torture and Democracy. Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton University Press, 2009. p 45-46. Professor of political science at Reed College.
As a matter of historical ….. demands for torture.
Mohammed’s body is suspended in a grey zone of legal illegality—his body receives violent treatment at the hand of the sovereign even as his inhuman status denies Mohammed the right to signify, to exist, and to request redress under the law—his torture and detention performatively produces his status as a subject unsuited to stand before the law even as his is manipulated, objectified, and punished by the “real” law of the sovereign’s exercise of force
Zizek 2007. Zizek, Slavoj. "Knight of the Living Dead." The New York Times 24 Mar. 2007 London , opinion ed. Web. 22 Oct. 2013.
SINCE the release …..spontaneous moral sensitivity.
Mohammed’s body is banned from the public even as it is subjected to the force of the law. The effective force of sovereignty produces its own internal rational through the exercise of force and the withdrawal of the law. This is the structure of the state of exception.
Agamben 1998. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Print.
1.7. If the exception …. eventually call it into question.
All life is now politicized—the human and non-human are defined implicitly through the exercise of the law in the name of political life and the suspension of the law in the administration of violence against bare life—the objective truths of human permanence that warrant our claims for political decisionmaking treat bodies as natural expressions of capacities in ways that define some lives as capable of signifying and others as capable only of dying meaninglessly—the smooth contours of politics as betray flowing biopolitical power that warps a vision of democratic peace into permanent totalitarianism cloaked in empty promises of freedom and liberty
Agamben 1998 Giorgio: Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at the University of Verona Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. P. 120-123.
1.2 Karl Lowith was …. learn to recognize.
Mohammed’s body does not signify—his management by the sovereign reproduces the paradigmatic totalitarianism which collapses politics and life itself
Agamben 1998. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Print.
The protagonist of …. body of humanity.
Chapter 2 State of Exceptionalism
Democracy manifests itself via exceptionalism. Awareness of this aspect is key.
Agamben 1998. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Print.
If anything ….spectacle condemns it.
Exceptionalism of the American is especially sovereign and is at the root of the global imperial order.
Hardt and Negri 2004. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004. Print. Page 7-9
The "state of exception" ….., politics, and global order.
The impact is unlimited war.
Hard and Negri 2004. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004. Print. Page 14-15
One consequence of this …..necessary and rational functions.
This causes a permanent and ontological war which exercise direct violence over life.
Hard and Negri 2004. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004. Print. Page 18-19
At this point we need ….. their¶ ultimate foundation.
This causes a reinvigoration of permanent colonial violence both internally and externally.
Gordon 2006. Gordon, Avery F. "Abu Ghraib: imprisonment and the war on terror." Race and Class 48.42 (2010): 42-59. Web. 23 Aug. 2013.
In the early history …..r in the world.36
The impact is the invisible genocidal of America’s enemies..
Spanos 2011. Spanos, William V. The Exceptionalist State and the State of Exception: Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor (Rethinking Theory). Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2011. 148-50. Print. Spanos is a Distinguished Professor of English and comparative literature at Binghamton University, Binghamton, New York
In calling his reluctant …. black "visionary" possibility.
This state of invisible genocide is permanent as long as the sovereign is the exception.
Spanos 2011. Spanos, William V. The Exceptionalist State and the State of Exception: Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor (Rethinking Theory). Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2011. 148-50. Print. Spanos is a Distinguished Professor of English and comparative literature at Binghamton University, Binghamton, New York
In recalling the ….. of war activates – permanent.
Advocacy Statement
We ask that you affirm the decidable in face of undecidability—the debate space is structured as a space between potentiality and impotentiality, twixt and tween sovereign and divine violence—the judge’s role in the debate is to act as a member of a civilian jury who restricts the sovereign power to detain by exercising their judgment of action to declare Khalid Sheikh Mohammed innocent.
Chapter 3: The Divine Troublemaker
The interruption of the law that is the affirmative’s action of divine violence is a form of constituent power; such interruptions of sovereignty are the only way out.
Frank 2K Jason A. Frank "The Abyss of Democracy": Antonio Negri's Democratic Theory¶ Theory and Event Volume 4, Issue 1, 2000 | 10.1353/tae.2000.0007
When Negri emphasizes these moments of ….. the radically democratic limits of democratic theory.
The law is not a dusty and distant archive—the judge performs the law by voting affirmative, generating a social practice that does not conserve the sovereign violence of the state of exception but instead produces a politics distinct from the vampiric public sphere of the status quo
Hariman 1990. Hariman, Robert. Popular Trials. Tuscaloosa And London: The Univerrsity of Alabama Press, 1990. 17-18. Print.
In the seventh book of the …..Thomas¶ Wentworth, Martin Luther, Socrates ....
The point at which the law is made is not the point of law’s strength but instead its point of greatest weakness—voting affirmative overturns the rampaging conservative violence of the law in this space—negative objections are merely attempts to reproduce the law for its own sake rather than for the intrinsic sake of justice
Benjamin 1921. Benjamin, Walter. Critique of Violence. New York: Shocken Books, 1921. Print.
In a far more ….. degeneration of violence.
The judge performs as the troublemaker who affirms a restriction upon the authority of the law in terms of its capacity to actualize its power over bodies—the negative team, forced into action, unwittingly reproduces the law’s own failure in their attempt to domesticate and control the debate space in defense of sovereignty—you may glimpse in the tautology of the negative’s arguments about framework and the law the intuitive WEAKNESS, not strength, of sovereignty
Garrison 2009. Garrison, Alysia E. "Agamben’s Grammar of the Secret Under the Sign of the Law." Law Critique 20 (2009): 281-97. Print.
"The ‘secret’ of ….human reason shatters’ (1995, p. 78)."
