1ac myth 1ac -critical Introduction of us armed Forces Aff
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- Invoking the threat of apocalypse legitimates any use of force not short of annihilation
DisadsExtinctionThe obsession with survival is the root cause of war – it undermines the love of lifeOliver 2007 Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin [Kelly, Women as Weapons of War, p. 149] In Kristeva's discussion of the so-called amorous disasters of women suicide bombers and two versions of freedom, she returns again to the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, specifically to the two pillars of peace from his essay on "Perpetual Peace." Like she did with the two notions of freedom, Kristeva describes what she takes to be Kant's two pillars of peace: "first, that of universality-all men are equal and all must be saved. Second is the principle of protection of human life, sustained by the love of the life of each. "60 She insists that although we are far from achieving economic justice for all, it is the second pillar and not the first that is in the most danger today: "Yet whatever the weaknesses, the efforts for realizing social, economic, and political justice have never in the history of humanity been as considerable and widespread. But it is the second pillar of the imaginary of peace that seems to me today to suffer most gravely: The love of life eludes us; there is no longer a discourse for it."61 It is not just economic, racial, and religious inequalities that prevent peace-although these are immense-but also the lack of a discourse of the love of life. The culture of death fosters war over peace because we are losing the ability to imagine the meaning of life beyond mere survival or profit-margins and; therefore we can no longer imagine ways to embrace life. Economic justice and the distribution of wealth, however, cannot be separated from questions of meaning. Increasingly the resources and wealth of the earth are owned by fewer individuals while most of the world's population lives in poverty. While the majority of the citizens of the planet struggle to survive, privileged middle-class and rich individuals increasingly feel their lifestyles threatened by poor people. They guard their possessions with gated communities, security systems, and high-tech prisons. At the same time they complain of feeling depressed and exhausted from spending all of their time accumulating wealth, which ultimately leaves them with feelings of meaninglessness. They have sacrificed the quality of life-the good life-for goods and services. The distribution of resources is thus related to questions of meaning in complex ways that affect the "haves" differently from the "have-nots." As we have seen, within patriarchal cultures and institutions both the distribution of resources and the . djstribution of meaning affect women differently than men. Invoking the threat of apocalypse legitimates any use of force not short of annihilationCoviello 2000 [PhD in English From Cornell, Queer Frontiers, p. 40-41] 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 age of yesteryear, apocalypse signified an event threatening everyone and everything with (in Jacques Derrida's suitably menacing phrase) `remainderless and a-symbolic destruction,"6 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 apocalypse is ever present because, as an element in a vast economy of power, it is ever useful. That is, through the perpetual threat of destruction-through the constant reproduction of the figure of apocalypse-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 o f Sexuality addresses himself to the problem of a power that is less repressive than pro-ductive, 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 pre-cise 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:'8 For a state that would arm itself not with the power to kill its population, but with a more comprehensive power over the patterns 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 Directory: file -> fetch fetch -> 11 th Lit Semester 1 Final Study Guide!!! fetch -> Industrial Revolution Inventors fetch -> Analysis for Galveston Hurricane of 1900 fetch -> The Illuminators (Team 2) 1900 Galveston Hurricane Cycle a team Assignment fetch -> Team csi-utb ruth Reyes Jose Ferrer fetch -> Galveston Hurricane of 1900 Cycle a-teacher as a Problem Solver fetch -> Is Climate Change Starting a New Dust Bowl? Cycle A fetch -> What makes a storm a hurricane fetch -> The 1950s were the "Happy Days" because it was a time of economic prosperity, technology development, new entertainment, new fashion and family growth. The 1950s was a great time fetch -> Sputnik and The Dawn of the Space Age Download 0.74 Mb. Share with your friends:
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