Psychoanalysis – mags neg General 1NC

—AT: Austin

Austin’s theory of privacy fails --- can’t explain the yearning for privacy

Lisa Austin’s work also engages with critiques of autonomy, but raises similar questions. Austin seeks to reconceptualise privacy without autonomy at its core: suppose instead of the idea of an individual with an inner core transparent to itself upon solitary introspection, we posited a self that is in fact formed through social interaction. The point of privacy would not be to protect the conditions of social withdrawal in order to maintain the integrity of such a self – it would be to protect the conditions of social interaction in order to provide the basis for identity formation in the first place. 34 Like Nissenbaum, Austin is therefore critical of the dominance of consent in data protection laws,35 and her work has a well-developed theoretical foundation. 36 Austin takes seriously both the pervasiveness of power relationships and their consequences for the ideal of autonomy – including that the very practising of autonomy is a social act, meaningless in isolation. 37 Like Nissenbaum, however, Austin’s work does not address the desire individuals have to protect their privacy. For example, Austin does not explain what it is about a particular set of social conditions, a particular set of privacy principles, that enables identity-formation. The suggestion seems to be that individuals have an inherent need for their privacy to be protected – a single set of acceptable social conditions – as a prerequisite to identity formation. Again, one is left with an individual who desires a certain set of privacy rights prior to identity formation – even though the identity that desires these rights is already formed by them.

Link – Race

Racism operates through a paradox of double logic operationalized by the economy of pleasure – those subjected to racism are too similar and successful, like the Jews, or too different, like blackness – psychoanalysis provides a unique breaking point because it provides both accurate diagnosis of the problem and a potentials for rethinking the relations between ourselves, the other, and the other other

Young 2007 --- Silver Professor; Dean of Arts and Humanities (Robert J.C., “Torn Halves: Political Conflict in Literary and Cultural Theory”, http://robertjcyoung.com/THChapter6.pdf)//trepka

For all that, however, Reich's Work in this area is important because he was the first to isolate what he called the characteristic ambivalence of fascist ideology, and, crude as his analysis may in certain respects sound today, to stress the link between sexuality and racism, a link that is constantly repressed or subject to social amnesia. What is important about Reich's work is his demonstration that racism can't be separated from sexuality: positive or negative racist feelings share a structure of obsession with the loved or hated object. This suggests that if it were asked where psychoanalysis itself comes closest to a symptomatic discussion of racism, then it must be in the only concept that it takes from the racial arena, and that is fetishism. A term first used by travelers with reference to the religious icons of Africa-the Africa that Freud also identifies as the dark continent of female sexuality." The structure of fetishism, of simultaneous fixity and mobility, operating together at once in a dialectic of attraction and repulsion, seems at least to get at the constitutive ambivalence of racism, derived from what is in effect a surplus of signification in the other- which explains why its other constant feature is paranoia, the disease of overinterpretation. This recalls Freud's idea of the narcissism of minor differences. If the constitutive factor of racism is that it finds a constant surplus of signification in the other, it can, interestingly, work both by there being a difference, too much of a difference (in relation to black people) but equally well through there being a danger of their being no difference (as in anti- semitism, anti-Irish racism). There's no pleasing the racist: the bastards are either too different or too similar. Such a logic is a kind of perverted mirroring of the liberal position on cultural difference, that is, ethnic minorities are the same but different. This reversibility may suggest that either liberalism is simply the other side of racism, or that the structure of racism doesn't have to be dismantled but can rather be turned round. Either way, only psychoanalysis is placed to deal with this perverse kind of paradoxical double logic-because this is the logic of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is uniquely placed to understand the operation of such structures: psychoanalysis itself operates as a kind of illegitimate, unlegitimated form of thought that infiltrates the home territory of different disciplines, the other that has been brought in to the same but which far from being assimilated remains inalienable and other to it: here psychoanalysis itself reproduces the Very structure that is the object of racism-so that it appears as the apparently foreign body within that disturbs, producing the uncanny effect of disquiet which characteristically purists within the discipline seek to expel outside. Compare the insistent desire of psychologists and analytical philosophers to prove psychoanalysis wrong, to delegitimate yet again something that after all already has no legitimacy, with the insistently repeated attempts to refute racism and racialism on logical or scientific grounds. Psychoanalysis can locate, and even dislocate, the logics of racism precisely because, like racism, it is a discourse whose object is its own raveled fantasy. If racism involves a structure of sameness and difference, it also suggests a realignment of any simple model of 'the Other'. There is an immediate problem about using the term 'the Other' dualistically in relation to racism in a psychoanalytic context in so far as for psychoanalysis the Other is already a part of the psyche, the unconscious that remains unacceptable and uncanny because it is other to the ego and is not centred in a determinate self, amounting rather to the disturbing effect of the self dislocated, as it Were, into the third person. Now if the symbolic structure of the social is that of the other, then the social is already the other-whereas those who are the objects of racist antipathy are precisely those who remain other to the social, in psychoanalytic terms, therefore, other to the other. At this point the trauma becomes the inkling that the other's other could in fact be the same, the double of yourself. Forcing an uncanny recognition of what should have remained hidden, racism articulates desire and disavowal. Neither subject nor object, the structure of racism takes the form not of simple negation, but of 'denegation' (Verneinung), that is negation simultaneously accompanied by disavowal. This is the paradoxical form of What Kristeva calls the 'abject', a state of simultaneous revulsion and desire: There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. A certainty protects it from the shameful - a certainty of which it is proud holds on to it. But simultaneously, just the same, that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned. 31 These two incompatible but inescapable poles of attraction and repulsion enforce a blockage that produces its own narrative logic of repetition: the point about the racial stereotype is indeed that it is always a stereotype, the other is thus paradoxically always the same. The threatening heterogeneity is always reduced, while the desire that the other conjures up is displaced into the (dis)pleasure of repetition, a repetition that energizes and ensures the perpetuation and continuity of the cultural and ideological forms of racism through the ages-a parasite that lives on the exercise of power.

Power reappropriates affect, reinforcing racism in the process – conversely, psychoanalysis of the unconscious provides a break from the micro-economy of desire that structures race relations in the status quo

Hook 2007 (Derek, Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research in London, “Foucault, Psychology and the Analytics of Power”, http://sociology.sunimc.net/htmledit/uploadfile/system/20100915/20100915203936818.pdf)//trepka

The model of racism thatZizam speculatively advancing – that is, racism as affective technology of subjectivity and self would thus need to assume that there are kinds of routings, channellings of affect that take on regularized forms, and which are amenable to the exploitation of various political and discursive systems, which are themselves thus reinforced in the process. It seems to me that Foucauldian approaches to governmentality, and the associated scrutiny of human technologies have for too long neglected the question of affect.Zizam sympathetic, for reasons outlined in Chapter 4, with the argument that the ostensibly psychological notion of ‘affect’ appears incompatible with a Foucauldian frame;3 this certainly is the case if one takes this concept to bring with it the presumption of an essential interior that exists beyond the jurisdiction of power. Then again,Zizdo not subscribe to the view that affect should be located exclusively within the bounded parameters of individual interiority, nor doZizbelieve that this concept necessarily entails the trappings of the epistemology of humanism.Zizshare thus Rose’s (1996b) suspiciousness towards any theory that commits us to a reliance on the belief of a human nature.Zizappreciate also the pertinence of the Deleuzian concept of the fold as Rose employs it inasmuch as it ‘suggests a way in which we might think of human being without postulating [an] interiority’ (p. 142). The theme of fold, the idea that what is ‘inside’ is merely an infolding of an exterior, is a useful illustrative figure, one of considerable importance to the overall argument thatZizam advancing, certainly inasmuch as it helps us avoid ‘binding ourselves to a particular version of the law of this interiority whose history we are seeking to disturb’ (p. 142). Nevertheless, those utilizable elements of the human subject, those ‘instrumentalities’ of the human subject that might guardedly be referred to as ‘psychological’ or ‘psychic’, the very elements that Rose’s analysis would eschew – ‘Is it possible that one might write a genealogy of the subjectification without a metapsychology?Zizthink it is’ (p. 142) – remain, it seems to me, crucial dimensions in the conduction of power.4 It seems to me that if we are willing to accept that affect is indeed a human capacity – which, to press the point home, is neither simply localizable within the parameters of the individual psychological subject, nor the point from which a series of psychologistic or liberal– humanist presumptions necessarily flow – if we are willing to accept this, then we must accept that affect can be utilized, ‘resourced’ by types of power which generate and produce it, even as they conduct and extend and its forces. Perhaps in this respect we should follow the model set by Foucault in his genealogical prioritization of the body. The objective here, asZizhave already noted, is not to substantialize a transhistorical entity, but rather to examine the forces of the body as anchoring points of power’s corporeal implementation. The same may be true of affect – affect approached thus as a set of forces that act as anchoring points for power’s psychological implementation – an idea which brings with it two interesting suggestions. The first of which is that we need to treat psychoanalysis as an ally of Foucauldian analytics – albeit an uncomfortable or unexpected ally – one which provides a sophisticated vocabulary with which we may grasp the micro-functioning of a political instrumentation of affect. The second suggestion is that such an initiative is critically sustainable only on condition that, simultaneously, we concern ourselves with writing the genealogy of affect, a genealogy within which the conceptual language of psychoanalysis will presumably play a large although by no means singular role.

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