Tinsley negative at: Black Queerness

Affirmation Bad - Link

The politics of affirmation are in direct opposition to the ability for critique and negativity. The affirmatives strategy is ignorant to the effects that our neo-liberal economic regime has allowed fundamentalism to fill the gaps left by their attempt at affirmation.

White finds such affirmative gestures in the work of seemingly disparate thinkers—George Kateb, Charles Taylor, William Connolly, and Judith Butler. He reads these liberal, communitarian, feminist, and post-Nietzschean thinkers as responding to universalist, foundationalist, and essentialist claims. In so doing, he distills from them a common practice of tempering, easing, or defanging one’s own theoretical position, a practice characteristic of what White refers to as a weak ontology. White understands weak ontologies to involve a tentativeness or uncertainty in the face of the recognition of the contestability of one’s own fundaments, to account for human being in terms of constituent attributes of “language, finitude, natality, and sources” (9), to emphasize cultivation rather than argument, conversion, confrontation, or compulsion, and, to involve a kind of contextualized reflection, alteration, or folding of the theory’s ethical-political aims back into its ontological position. Weak ontologies are thus theories that embrace their own contestability and understand their theoretical task less in terms of presenting claims to truth or irrefutable arguments than of nudging, suggesting, offering, or affirming practices and ways of thinking as valuable, generous, and responsive to the multiplicities and contingencies of late-modern life.

In my view, critical, as opposed to affirmative, theory is necessary today. White’s position assumes a political-economic consensus that no longer exists. He repeats without revising Charles Taylor’s presumption that a felicitous ontological claim assumes the modern welfare state and market economy (70). This assumption is deadly—and deadly wrong. It mistakes the tenacious energy with which the Right in the US (and other countries) is transforming the state. The welfare state has been crumbling since the seventies. Neoliberal economics has replaced the welfare state’s generalized sense of social solidarity and the collective assumption of risk with the brutal extremes of economic inequality and the heightened violence and fear of the society of control. In the name of freedom and security, as if these concepts fit easily together, all three branches of the US government have acquiesced to the use of torture. Consequently, we now must fight anew for human equality and dignity. We have to find new arguments, arguments fitting for mobile populations in an integrated world, for just and sustained economies, for common approaches to living together.

The affirmative dulls the radical potential of their act by attempt to gloss over the stark and radical differences that are created by global economic oppression. Their strategy is ultimately one of avoidance  fundamentalism

The notion of a weak ontology could support engaged, oppositional politics. Given the prevalence of fundamentalism today, contesting the political imposition of the religious fundaments of the Christian right and widely cultivating generosity toward sexual minorities and the economically exploited and oppressed would be a dramatic, potentially revolutionary change. Similarly, the affirmation of contingency could, and I’ll add should, inspire a political drive to struggle for change—things can be different; we do not have to protect and defend the so-called free market at all costs. White avoids either of these political possibilities. He displaces potential radicalism—which would necessitate strong claims, less generosity, and division—with an interiorized cultivation of an ethos of generosity. Political and economic struggles against fundamentalisms are thereby reformatted as the struggles of a subject against itself.

Affirmation Bad - Vulnerability Link

Their ethic of vulnerability is apolitical because it avoids responsibility for decisions, which is ultimately unethical.

Dean 2005 Jodi A politics of avoidance: the limits of weak ontology http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/files/butler_and_ontology.doc

Despite her emphasis on the importance of critique, then, Butler’s ethics, like White’s weak ontology, avoids politics. Just as White’s emphasis on affirming the contestability of one’s own fundaments fail to engage those who like their fundaments, who embrace them, who live by them, who kill for them, so does Butler’s emphasis on the limits at the basis of our ability to give an account of ourselves format the lack constitutive of the subject as an opacity to be acknowledged ethically but avoided politically. Moreover, each approach, even as it asserts the limits of knowledge, the conditions of contingency and unknowingness in which we find ourselves, seems somehow to presume that such conditions call into question the possibility of politics. It’s as if what the politics of avoidance wants most to avoid is responsibility for actions, for decisions and condemnations, that will necessarily exceed the aims and intentions of those who find themselves acting. But politics necessarily entails risking actions whose results cannot be guaranteed, making decisions and exercising power under conditions where not every option can be pursued, where some needs will go unaddressed, and where not every value should be respected or even tolerated. Political decisions, indeed, the very decisions to politicize or to constitute a space or identity as political, involve determinations of which practices and principles one wants to further and which one wants to reject.

Affirmation Bad – Fascism Impact

The project of affirmation provides no mechanism to reject fascism. You should orient your decision away from their sugar coating of political decisions and towards a politics which necessitates responsibility for the dirty exclusionary work of politics

Dean 2005 Jodi A politics of avoidance: the limits of weak ontology http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/files/butler_and_ontology.doc

The first generation of the Frankfurt School developed critical theory in an effort to confront and explain fascism. For them, immanent critique was crucial to this project as it enabled them to work from within what was given to grasp what came to be. At its best, immanent critique was a practice of finding lost futures in enlightenment, loss possibilities for meaning and, perhaps, a freer, even reconciled, relation to the world. White’s weak ontology turns immanent critique into immanent affirmation as it finds in critical approaches to the present sources that affirm it. The ambiguity that haunts his account of weak ontology contrasts mightily with the political and ethical positions that gave the Frankfurt theorists their ethical bearings. Could we, should we, imagine a political theory that confronted fascism with nudges, suggestions, and generosity rather than with complete rejection and opposition?

Unknowingness conditions our politics as well as our ethics. Rather than an ontological condition somehow compelling us to embrace the contestability and uncertainty of convictions (as if any ethical or political position could follow directly from such an account) or an ethical acknowledgement that renders what is unknown to me the same as what is unknown to the other, in politics unknowingness involves responsibility for that which one cannot but do, for the exclusions and expulsions necessarily implicated in the exercise of power. Yes, one should be willing and able to give an account of these decisions, just as one should be willing and able to condemn and oppose what should be condemned and opposed. Such will, such ability, is crucial if we are to oppose the market and religious fundamentalism threatening the world today.

Radical negation is key to open the space for the alternative – only wiping the slate clean can solve

Zizek 1999 (Slavoj, The Ticklish Subject, page 91-92, gjm)

With regard to the opposition between abstract and concrete Universal­ity, this means that the only way towards a truly 'concrete' universality leads through the full assertion of the radical negativity by means of which the universal negates its entire particular content: despite misleading appearances, it is the 'mute universality’ of the neutral container of the particular content which is the predominant form of abstract universality. In other words, the only way for a Universality to become 'concrete' is to stop being a neutral-abstract medium of its particular content, and to include itself among its particular subspecies. What this means is that, paradox­ically, the first step towards 'concrete universality ' is the radical negation of the entire particular content: only through such a negation does the Universal gain existence, become visible 'as such'. Here let us recall Hegel's analysis of phrenology, which closes the chapter on 'Observing Reason' in his Phenomenology: Hegel resorts to an explicit phallic metaphor in order to explain the opposition of the two possible readings of the proposition 'the Spirit is a bone' (the vulgar-materialist 'reductionist' reading - the shape of our skull actually and directly determines the features of our mind - and the speculative reading - the spirit is strong enough to assert its identity with the most utterly inert stuff, and to 'sublate' it - that is to say, even the most utterly inert stuff cannot escape the Spirit's power of mediation). The vulgar-materialist reading is like the approach which sees in the phallus only the organ of urination, while the speculative reading is also able to discern in it the much higher function of insemination (i.e. precisely 'conception' as the biological anticipation of concept).

NEGATIVITY IS A PREREQUISITE – the alternative is a completely negative gesture which is essential to any progressive politics – extend the Johnston evidence – the alt is necessary to wipe the slate clean for ethical politics – more evidence on this question

Zizek, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies, Ljubljana 1999 Slavoj, The Ticklish Subject, page 153-154

It would therefore be tempting to risk a 'Badiouian-Pauline reading of the end of psychoanalysis, determining it as a New Beginning, a symbolic 'rebirth' - the radical restructuring of the analysand's subjectivity in such a way that the vicious cycle of the superego is suspended, left behind. Does not Lacan himself provide a number of hints that the end of analysis opens up the domain of Love beyond Law, using the very Pauline terms to which Badiou refers? Nevertheless, Lacan's way is not that of St Paul or Badiou: psychoanalysis is not 'psychosynthesis'; it does not already posit a 'new harmony', a new Truth-Event; it - as it were - merely wipes the slate clean for one. However, this 'merely' should be put in quotation marks, because it is Lacan's contention that, in this negative gesture of 'wiping the slate clean', something (a void) is confronted which is already 'sutured' with the arrival of a new Truth-Event. For Lacan negativity, a negative gesture of withdrawal precedes any positive gesture of enthusi­astic identification with a Cause: negativity functions as the condition of (im)possibility of the enthusiastic identification - that is to say, it lays the ground, opens up space for it but is simultaneously obfuscated by it and undermines it. For this reason, Lacan implicitly changes the balance between Death and Resurrection in favour of Death: what 'Death' stands for at its most radical is not merely the passing of earthly life, but the 'night of the world', the self-withdrawal, the absolute contraction of subjectivity, the severing of its links with 'reality' - this is the 'wiping the slate clean' that opens up the domain of the symbolic New Beginning, of the emergence of the 'New Harmony' sustained by a newly emerged Master-Signifier.

Millington Prof of Latin American Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK 2007 Mark “Transculturation: Contrapuntal Notes to Critical Orthodoxy” Bulletin of Latin American Research 26.2 EBSCOhost

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