Psychoanalysis – mags neg General 1NC
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- Fantasy provides the frame
- “utter ambiguity that surrounds the notion of fantasy” makes it accountable
- How does a given
- Counterterrorists’ views of the feared terrorists they are hunting day and night
- than actually knowing the pathetic reality of cave-dwelling people riding on mules such was bin Laden at the height of his influence – a fantasy that will sustain their desire to fight them to death
- American politics provides much evidence of the flight from the traumatic real into the realm of fantasy.
- Bush to go to Iraq
- Traversing the fantasy surrounding the terrorist does not mean confronting
- from the pursuit of the hunted terrorists
Alt Solves TerrorismDisrupting Americans’ constructed fear of terrorists and desire to pursue them is the only way to stop committing paranoid violence – the alternative is a prerequisite to solving terrorismZulaika, 13 – Professor and Director, Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, Reno (Joseba, “Drones and fantasy in US counterterrorism,” Journal for Cultural Research, 14-15)//SY But fantasy not only cements reality; in its semantic excess, and as illustrated by Dylan’s bitter song (after the biblical allegory and following trenchant commentaries such as Sø’sren Kierkegaard), creative fantasy at the service of art and thought has also the potential to interrogate and contest the claims of the real. “Man, you must be puttin’ me on.” Fantasy provides the frame and the setting for the individual who is caught in the narrative of images. This implies that the very identity of the subject of fantasy is put into question by the multiple identifications available in a fantasy setting; the mastery the subject claims over the fantasy is already undone by the fantasy’s own power of fragmentation. The “utter ambiguity that surrounds the notion of fantasy” makes it accountable, on the one hand, for “its beatific side, in its stabilizing dimension, the dream of a state without disturbances”, whereas, on the other hand, “in its destabilizing dimension … [in] all that ‘irritates’ me about the Other” (Zizek, 2012, p. 685) creates hell. Totalitarianism’s lesson is “the co-dependence of these two aspects of the notion of fantasy”: the Nazi’s dream of harmonious community producing the ghost of the paranoid Jewish plot; Stalin’s “new Socialist man” compulsively producing new enemies. At the closing of the cold war, the symbolic fiction of a “new world order” under American hegemony gave rise to the spectral apparition of “the terrorist” as the ever-present apocalyptic threat in a nuclear era. Fantasy 1 requires fantasy 2. We are abiding here by the Lacanian thesis about fantasy, namely, that in the opposition between dream and reality, fantasy is on the side of reality – fantasy is the support that gives consistency to we call reality (Zizek, 1989, p. 44). This does not translate into assumptions such as that reality is an illusion or life a dream. In the fantasy-scene the desire is not simply “satisfied” but constituted – “through fantasy, we learn ‘how to desire’” (Zizek, 1989, p. 118). How does a given object or person become the object of our desire, How does it begin to contain some X, some unknown quality, something which is ‘in it more than it’ and makes it worthy of our desire? by entering the framework of fantasy, by being included in a fantasy-scene which gives consistency to the subject’s desire. (Zizek, 1989, p. 119) And what is the tabooed figure of “the terrorist” but an individual possessing such “unknown quality” that is “in it more than it”, an X that provokes intense fear and desire? It begins to contain such unknown apocalyptic power by accessing the framework of fantasy. The terrorist followers are themselves the first ones to enter the fantasy framework by which their heroes become superhuman beings. I have heard from former ETA activists who, upon being released from prison, women would approach them and be surprised as to how “small” and “normal” they were – their actual presence did not correspond to their fantasies. Counterterrorists’ views of the feared terrorists they are hunting day and night, but whom they are unlikely to ever meet, seem no less immersed in fantasy; one might even guess that they are likely to prefer not to interact with the terrorists in part because they are more comfortable with the fantasy of the almost omnipotent enemies than actually knowing the pathetic reality of cave-dwelling people riding on mules such was bin Laden at the height of his influence – a fantasy that will sustain their desire to fight them to death as well as keep their budgets. For Lacanians “the fantasy is conceived as a construction allowing the subject to come to terms with [the] traumatic kernel” (Zizek, 1989, p. 133). Current American politics provides much evidence of the flight from the traumatic real into the realm of fantasy. It was the Defense Secretary Robert Gates who, smarted by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, made the comment that any future defense secretary who would advise the president to send the American army into the Middle East “should have his head examined.” Those who advised George W. Bush to go to Iraq had followed the thinking by which, as a presidential aide put it, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” while scorning journalists for being mere commentators of an already fabricated “reality-based community” (Rich, 2006, p. 4). At the core of this “reality” is the war on terror – which allows for an alternate reality sustained by the unknown yet intensely fantasized figure of the Terrorist. The ultimate goal of the Lacanian psychoanalyst is to awaken the subject from the spell of fantasy. The final moment of the analysis is defined as “going through the fantasy”: not its symbolic interpretation but the experience of the fact that the fantasy-object, by its fascinating presence, is merely filling out a lack, a void in the Other. There is nothing “behind” the fantasy; the fantasy is a construction whose function is to hide this void, this “nothing” – that is, the lack in the Other. (Zizek, 1989, p. 133) The question is therefore how to traverse the fantasy. Traversing the fantasy surrounding the terrorist does not mean confronting the reality as it is; what it implies is rather accepting the inconsistencies inherent to the figure itself. Thus, how to gain a minimal distance from this fantasmatic frame, how to unhook desire and enjoyment from the pursuit of the hunted terrorists, becomes a critical political problem. 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