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link – aversion to sovereignty
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link – aversion to sovereigntyAversion to sovereignty cedes argumentative turf to war-mongerersPassavant 12 - Associate Professor of Political Science Habart and William Smith College (Paul, “Democracy’s ruins, democracy’s archive” in Reading Modern Law: Critical Methodologies and Sovereign Formations eds. Buchanan et al p. 49) Giorgio Agamben's work condemns sovereignty and aspires to found a new politics, or a 'coming community', beyond sovereignty and law. He describes sovereign power as determining, unitary, and absolute. This sovereign must be overcome by its equally absolute or all-encompassing other. This other to sovereignty has been conceptualized as pure potentiality, pure singularity, belonging itself, contingency, creativity, excess, or absolute democracy (Agamben 1993: 2, 67; Hardt and Negri 2000). I argue that Peter Fitzpatrick's work on sovereignty and law shows that absolute sovereignty is not capable of existing as such. Nor, for that matter, is absolute democracy capable of existing as such. 'Sovereignty' and 'democracy' are not absolutely opposed to each other. Instead, politics takes place in the torsion or these impossibilities. Many postmodernists today are allergic to anything with a whiff of sovereignty (Hardt and Negri 2000). Unfortunately, this has the consequence of asking those with democratic sensibilities to give up on the project of popular sovereignty at the exact moment that the right in the United States is seeking to ruin democracy by asserting sovereign prerogatives under various theories of absolute and uncheckable presidential powers.' .We are faced, presently, with the ruins of a law opposed to unchecked presidentialism, torture, and camps.2 Fitzpatrick's attention to sovereignty's paradoxical requirements, and to its near-mythic reliance upon law for temporary resolution of these contradictory demands, teaches us that law, and hence democracy, is always vulnerable to ruin of this sort. Instead of sharing the hopes of messianic postmodernists for a final resolution to these challenges, Fitzpatrick indicates where we must begin our political labours: among democracy's ruins. These ruins are legal remainders of past struggles against tyrannies and, as such, material for an archive of democratic remains. I contend that our political work should be mindful of law as democracy's archive. These reminders can help us to recollect the persistence necessary to take down or overcome tyrannies, to recall the fidelity necessary to keep a commitment to popular sovereignty. If we fail to labour on behalf of the future this archive anticipates, then the scriveners of George W. Bush's administration will continue to consign us to a dwelling among democracy's ruins. link – indeterminacySemantic indeterminacy collapses legal ethics---provides zero grounds for distinguishing between legal and extra-legal actionMarkovic 11 – Abraham L. Freedman Teaching Fellow, Temple University Beasley School of Law. J.D., Georgetown University Law Center (2006); M.A., New York University (2003) (Milan, “ADVISING CLIENTS AFTER CRITICAL LEGAL STUDIES AND THE TORTURE,” 114 W. Va. L. Rev. 109, Lexis) B. Indeterminacy and the Challenge to Legal Ethics
link – whatever being‘Whatever being’ linkPassavant 10 - Associate Professor of Political Science Habart and William Smith College (Paul, “Yoo's Law, Sovereignty, and Whatever,” Constellations, 17: 549–571. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8675.2010.00614.x) Yoo's project, however, is not the same thing as whatever. It is part of a highly motivated and disciplined conservative attempt to install a new law and a new state formation.106 Nevertheless, it is advanced by the emergence of what Agamben refers to as whatever being. Whatever being, freed from discipline, is a condition that scholarship from a variety of perspectives seeks to address, whether from the celebratory perspective of Hardt's discussion of the decline of civil society where civil society was sustained by the disciplines, or from Fein's outrage at contemporary society's constitutional illiteracy, or Dean's consideration, indebted to Slavoj Zizek, of the implications regarding a decline in symbolic efficiency.107∂ While Yoo himself is not well-described as whatever being, his work taps into our awareness of language's communicative possibilities. Perhaps Agamben has captured something by characterizing our present as becoming whatever, a growing ease with pure mediality where language is experienced simply as pure communicability itself, and therefore in a relation of exteriority to any given purpose or true or false proposition. If he has, though, then John Yoo and his production of “legality” indicate that, contrary to Agamben's arguments, whatever is not a great threat to the state. Rather, we must be more specific. Whatever is not a threat to the way that Agamben has figured the state as a unitary sovereign in his Homo Sacer project. Whatever is a threat to a liberal democratic state formation that governs through dispersed yet articulated institutions, or assemblages and assemblies through which the state seeks extension. Whatever eases the growth of a counter-state within the spaces of a liberal democratic state, a state dedicated to camps, unchecked presidential decisionism, and torture within the formal institutions of a state founded on the opposition to tyranny.∂ In sum, the growth of whatever being, and a growing fantasy of unitary presidentialist sovereignty, are mutually facilitating. On the one hand, to move towards unitary presidentialist sovereignty requires unmaking liberal democratic subjects, and whatever registers this desubjectification. On the other hand, whatever being is at ease with the strange “legality” where words have been manipulated like code, displaced from the discursive formation of a constitutional democracy, and are no longer ordered by a nomos constituted negatively against tyranny. Whatever being experiences “law” independent of content, and dislodged from any purposes or a distinctive practice – law as language or communicability itself.108 Whatever being is captured by Yoo's wordplay that toys with our law, deactivating it from liberal democratic uses, rendering these inoperative so it can be used for the tyrannical purposes of camps, presidentialism, and torture.109 Whatever being facilitates the empowerment of aspirations of a “sovereign” president, while the success of those very aspirations is productive of whatever being – at least momentarily – in the context of a liberal democratic legal formation. Thus, while we might note a philosophical contradiction in Agamben's work between the determined treatment Coming Community gives the state and the determining treatment Homo Sacer gives the state, the conjunction of these two projects might be symptomatic of a change being produced in contemporary liberal democracies, or at least in the United States, to the extent that we see whatever being and unchecked presidentialism in a mutually supporting relation.110 Download 426.35 Kb. Share with your friends:
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