T Version of Aff Cards

Creative ways of working within the law create space for new ideas and liberatory action. NoubeSe Philip and Saunders ‘8M. NoubeSe Philip in an interview done with Patricia Saunders. Prof. Saunders is an associate professor of English at the University of Miami. Her research and scholarship focus largely on the relationship between sexual identity and national identity in Caribbean literature and popular culture. NoubeSe Philip studied law and economics before becoming a Canadian poet, novelist, and essayist. Defending the Dead, Confronting ¶ the Archive: A Conversation with ¶ M. NourbeSe Philip. small axe 26 • June 2008 • p 63–79

NP: I think we’ve been using the master’s tools (to use Audre Lorde’s powerful metaphor) to ¶ dismantle the structures that hold us fast and that what is happening, as I said yesterday, is ¶ that we are beginning to fashion new tools to do the work, because the work cannot be done ¶ successfully using the master’s tools. The master’s tools were developed for us out of the master’s ¶ relationship with us. And, as a result, they always hold within their very form and function ¶ the content of our denial, so when I take the legal text and say, alright let’s play with this now, ¶ let’s really play with

this, let’s see what this text gives up and gives us, it seems to me that that ¶ process makes room for something—anything—else to happen. It seems to me that what that ¶ approach suggests is that I don’t trust the

archive, that the archive is much more unstable than we originally thought. It’s complex because we need language, we need grammar, we need all of ¶ those things, but we also need to use them in a different way—to make them ours in a different ¶ way. There’s something I think that, as you say, is shared by Saidiya’s work and mine. It’s as if ¶ we’re moving towards an understanding that there’s a built-in limit to how much those tools, ¶ including the archive, have helped us to this point. And this limit requires new approaches to ¶ engage the task at hand, to tell the stories of our time. While I believe that this project—these ¶ projects—are particular to this time, I feel that we are coming back to the same

story—that is ¶ trying to tell itself—by “untelling”; the same questions, but with different resources, different ¶ understandings, building on those who have posed these questions before.

There is no outside the law for black subjects – exploding the law from the position of dispossession inside the law can be liberating. NoubeSe Philip and Saunders ‘8M. NoubeSe Philip in an interview done with Patricia Saunders. Prof. Saunders is an associate professor of English at the University of Miami. Her research and scholarship focus largely on the relationship between sexual identity and national identity in Caribbean literature and popular culture. NoubeSe Philip studied law and economics before becoming a Canadian poet, novelist, and essayist. Defending the Dead, Confronting ¶ the Archive: A Conversation with ¶ M. NourbeSe Philip. small axe 26 • June 2008 • p 63–79

PS: What is striking about the project is your insistence that you stay within the law and the legal document because so much of the dispossession for black people is precisely within this framework, this present and past history. Black subjects have always had to view the Law suspiciously because they were always already situated outside of the law (as property, nonhuman, chattel). But the paradox is that there is no “outside of the law,” since it frames the social and political structures in which we exist in order to make sense of [the fact] that you have to explode it from inside, and connect it to its origins, its buried pasts. NP: that is true. And it is within that dispossession within the law that we find our liberation, our freedom, our energy, by exploding it—from the inside. It’s paradoxical. It really is profoundly paradoxical.

Heidegger Ans

Calculative thought is inevitable – it is the only way to truly understand the full horror of a situation since it is impossible to access anything but the symptoms.Santilli ‘3 [Paul Professor of Philosophy at Sienna College, Radical Evil, Subjection, and Alain Badiou’s Ethic of the Truth Event, World Congress of The International Society for Universal Dialogue, May 18-22, p. 20-21, http://www.isud.org/papers/pdfs/Santilli.pdf]From the standpoint of an ethics of subjection there is even something unnecessary or superfluous about the void of suffering in the subject bearers of evil. For Levinas, the return to being from the ethical encounter with the face and its infinite depths is fraught with the danger the subject will reduce the other to a "like-me," totalizing and violating the space of absolute alterity. As Chalier puts it, "Levinas conceives of the moral subject's awakening, or the emergence of the human in being, as a response to that pre-originary subjection which is not a happenstance of being."28 But if there really is something inaccessible about suffering itself, about the 'other' side of what is manifestly finite, subjected, and damaged, then to a certain extent it is irrelevant to ethics, as irrelevant as the judgment of moral progress in the subject-agent. Let me take the parent-child relation again as an example. Suppose the child to exhibit the symptoms of an illness. Are not the proper "ethical" questions for the parent to ask questions of measure and mathematical multiples: How high is the fever? How long has it lasted? How far is the hospital? Can she get out of bed? Has this happened before? These are the questions of the doctor, the rescue squads and the police. They are questions about being, about detail, causes and effects. Ethically our response to the needs of must be reduced to a positivity simply because we have access to nothing but the symptoms, which are like mine. Our primary moral responsibility is to treat the symptoms that show up in being, not the radically other with whom I cannot identify. Say we observe someone whose hands have been chopped off with a machete. How would we characterize this? Would it not be slightly absurd to say, "He had his limbs severed and he suffered," as though the cruel amputation were not horror enough. Think of the idiocy in the common platitude: "She died of cancer, but thank God, she did not suffer", as though the devastating annihilation of the human by a tumor were not evil itself. For ethics, then, the only suffering that matters are the visible effects of the onslaught of the world. All other suffering is excessive and inaccessible. Therefore, it is in being, indeed in the midst of the most elemental facts about ourselves and other people, that we ethically encounter others by responding to their needs and helping them as best we can. It is precisely by identifying being and not pretending that we know any thing about suffering, other than it is a hollow in the midst of being, that we can act responsibly. What worries me about Levinas is that by going beyond being to what he regards as the ethics of absolute alterity, he risks allowing the sheer, almost banal facticity of suffering to be swallowed in the infinite depths of transcendence. Indeed, it seems to me that Levinas too often over emphasizes the importance of the emergence of the subject and the inner good in the ethical encounter, as though the point of meeting the suffering human being was to come to an awareness of the good within oneself and not to heal and repair. I agree with Chalier's observation that Levinas's "analyses adopt the point of view of the moral subject, not that of a person who might be the object of its solicitude."29 Ethics has limits; there are situations like the Holocaust where to speak of a moral responsibility to heal and repair seems pathetic. But an ethics that would be oriented to the vulnerabilities of the subjected (which are others, of course, but also myself) needs to address the mutilation, dismemberment, the chronology of torture, the numbers incarcerated, the look of the bodies, the narratives, the blood counts, the mines knives, machetes, and poisons. Evil really is all that. When the mind does its work, it plunges into being, into mathematical multiples and starts counting the cells, the graveyards, and bullet wounds. Rational practical deliberation is always about the facts that encircle the void inaccessible to deliberation and practical reason.30

Ontology doesn’t come first – the alt is nihilism – internal link turns value to life Fain 11 [Lecturer in the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies at Harvard University, Ph.D. in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (Lucas, March 2011, The Review of Metaphysics, “Heidegger's Cartesian nihilism,” Academic OneFile)

That Heidegger transforms happiness, classically understood as the completion of human nature, into the anxiety of being-towards-death may be deduced from the fact that it is death which signifies Dasein's "authentic potentiality-for-being-a-whole," (45) with the consequence that ethical virtue is replaced by Dasein's pure resolve in the face of nothing. That Heidegger's conception of care may likewise be construed as an impoverished version of the Platonic doctrine of eros is plainly evident by its purely formal structure,

which renders it devoid of any capacity to rank-order objects of desire. (46) By way of contrast, Platonic eros moves hierarchically between the human and the divine (that is to say, between the base and the noble), whereas Heideggerian care moves horizontally, we should even say "horizonally," in the sense that "the ontological meaning of care is temporality," and "the existential-temporal condition of the possibility of the world lies in the fact that temporality, as an ecstatical unity [of future, past, and, present], has something like a horizon." (47) That horizon is circumscribed by Dasein's thrownness into the future, and Dasein's ownmost future is, of course, its death. Hence we read, "The primary phenomenon of primordial and authentic temporality is the future," and "The ecstatical

character of the primordial future lies precisely in the fact that the future closes one's potentiality-for-being." (48) It is therefore through Dasein's resolute anticipation of its death that the meaning of being reveals itself as the "temporalizing of temporality." (49) But temporality reduced to itself is stripped of all love, beauty, and value. It means simply the opening up of one's future possibilities, which is to say that the authentic meaning of being is without value, and being without value is meaningless, which is finally to say that the meaning of being terminates in nihilism . (50)

Heideggerian fundamental ontology does not therefore escape from Nietzschean chaos. Rather, it returns us to it, only without the noble illusion that life requires us to make it lovable. (51) And this remains the case no matter whether we prefer the early language of "resoluteness" or Heidegger's later "turn" into Gelassenheit or "releasement." For insofar as Heidegger's turn (Kehre) is meant to free the meaning of being from its attachment to any notion of active or passive willing, for

example, of the kind indicated by the language of resolution, it releases us ever deeper into the nullity within which the world comes to presence. (52) So much for the meaning of being. Despite his revolutionary proclamations, Heidegger holds us in a double bind. On the one hand, the history of metaphysics (and its completion in the era of modern

technology) (53) grips us in a nihilistic forgetting of the question of being. On the other hand, fundamental ontology empties the meaning of being of value, and this too is nihilism. (54) What matters in the last analysis,

however, is not whether Heidegger is a nihilist, but whether his teaching is the true teaching. And

if, as Leo Strauss once said, our capacity to evaluate Heidegger's teaching comes down to a question of competence, our measure of competence depends on our capacity for valuation, or more

accurately, for prudential judgment or a capacity to discern what makes it right. (55) Yet, on the basis of Heidegger's existential analysis, there can be no such ground of legitimation apart from the pure instance of resolution (Entschluss). And this is because fundamental ontology cannot tell us on the basis of its questioning into being why such questioning should be desirable, or why we should want to invoke a spiritual revolution that founds itself on the abstract question of being. Instead, there must be some more primordial notion of the good that first directs us to the question of being--as Nietzsche would say, to the question of being as a value. In saying this, however, I do hot wish to suggest that there must be some objective or quasi-objective standard of the good that is somehow "out there" waiting to be discovered, as if it were a vein of gold embedded in the rock. Yet it is plainly evident that a more primordial access to the good must underlie any capacity for rank-ordering values or existential possibilities, and it is precisely this feature of human experience that fundamental ontology abandons or occludes by abstracting the question of being from the so-called ontic or inauthentic dimension of ordinary experience.

Stated simply, there is no reason why the question of being should be foundational for the future of philosophy. Yet it must be said that Heidegger never relinquished his revolutionary aspirations for bringing metaphysics to its end. For as clearly as the text of 1927 stated the need to put the future of philosophy on "new foundations" (neue Fundamente), (56) Heidegger persisted up to and through 1959 in the hope that the turn to the question of being would promise a "new ground and foundation" (neuen Grand und Boden) upon which it might be possible to confront the epoch of metaphysical nihilism. (57) Of

course, it may be entirely true that our releasement into the mystery of being grants us "the possibility of dwelling in the world in a totally different way." (58) The question is why this should be at all desirable, especially if the thinking of being expires in nihilism. And it is here that we find Heidegger without argument. As we read in a relevant passage from the "Letter on Humanism" of 1949: Whether the realm of the truth of being is a blind alley or whether it is the free space in which freedom conserves its essence is something each one may

judge after he himself has tried to go the designated way, or even better, after he has gone a better way, that is, a way befitting the question. (59) I note in passing that we shall also have to judge whether the essence of freedom is itself a blind alley. But this just affirms my larger point. Heidegger returns us to the question of competence. But since fundamental ontology cannot stand the

question of competence, we are left simply with a decision that leaves the future of philosophy hanging on the angst-ridden resolve that affirms itself in the face of death. (60) And this is Cartesianism all over again, in the sense that Heidegger's subordination of ethics to ontology--the decisive severing of the human relation to the good from the foundations of philosophy--amounts to the most radical late modern expression of the Cartesian legacy. Rather than saving us from our fall into modern decadence, Heidegger's thought results finally in a deepening of the modern crisis.

AT: Econ Feminism

Coalescing politics around the identity of “women” assimilates differences and erases the other. Sandlands 97 Catriona Sandilands, Professor of Environmental Studies @ York, Mother Earth, The Cyborg, and The Queer: Ecofeminism and (More) Questions of Identity, NWSA Journal, 1997

These questions are neither flippant nor academic For feminism, the reliance on the category "women" signals a problematic support for a gendered solidity that is the product of power-laden discursive "Othering" and often smacks of a blindness to the process of social construction." The solidity of the identity "women"—even, or perhaps especially, if pluralized—

functions politically by concealing the mode of its construction. Given that in patriarchal discourse the construction is the site of the problem, then that solidity must be rejected.

Essentialism (even when used strategically or for empowering ends) leads to oppressive representations of identity and classism, sexism and homophobiaGosine, ‘2 Kevin Gosine, Brock University Sociologist, Essentialism Versus Complexity: Conceptions of Racial Identity Construction in Educational Scholarship, CANADIAN JOURNAL OF EDUCATION 27, 1 (2002): 81–100, http://www.csse.ca/CJE/Articles/FullText/CJE27-1/CJE27-1-06Gosine.pdf.Researchers might consider employing postmodern perspectives to highlight the various ways individuals negotiate, engage, and resist such collective identifications from the multiplicity of subject positions that comprise a given racial community. Put

differently, it is important to account for the unique ways different social statuses continually intersect to complicate collective strivings for coherent racial identities. Although collective or intersubjective forms of racial identity can frequently work to protect and empower racialized youth living within a

hostile, Eurocentric environment (Miller, 1999), the imposition of defensively situated (counter-hegemonic) essentialisms can be, as Yon’s (2000) interviews with Trevor and Margaret illustrate, just as confining or oppressive as the negatively valued representations that circulate within the dominant society. In both cases, human subjects are objectified through the imposition of confining, static labels — a situation that provides fertile ground for intra-communal classism, sexism, and homophobia . For this reason, it is worthwhile to explore the diverse effects of these racialized communal forms of consciousness along with the multiplicity of ways in which individuals negotiate and make sense of them. Accounting for intra-group division, ambivalence, and rupture exposes the unstable and fluid nature of collective identities.

Ecofeminism won’t solve- it devalues women and will not be accepted by a larger public Bretherton 1 Charlotte Bretherton is an MA in Latin American Studies “ECOCENTRIC IDENTITY AND TRANSFORMATORY POLITICS,” The International Journal of Peace Studies, Volume 6, Number 2, Autumn/Winter 2001The implications of ecofeminist ideas for human identity are numerous. For women, particularly those (primarily Western) women who have become alienated from the natural world, there is a need to rediscover their "natural" ecocentric/ecofeminine

identification. Ecofeminism thus posits, for women, an essentialist ecocentric identity. This would involve not a loss or negation of the self but an opportunity to experience the fulfilment of recovering one's true maternal nature and to embrace the responsibilities associated with identification as a saviour of the planet. To some extent women have appeared to take up these responsibilities. In many parts of the world they have undoubtedly contributed significantly to environmental activism. Moreover, a number of women's environmental organisations have espoused overtly ecofeminist principles (Bretherton 1996). Indeed, Mies and Shiva (1993, p.3) claim, from their conversations with women's groups in many parts of the world, "women, worldwide, felt the same anger and anxiety, and the same sense of responsibility to preserve the bases of life, and to end

its destruction." However, this raises the danger that women, who are everywhere the least powerful members of society, might be expected to assume disproportionate responsibility for cleaning up men's messes. Rather, an ecocentric identification demands that the "feminine"

qualities of cooperation and nurturance be valued and embraced by all members of societies. It demands, too, that the

"masculine" qualities of competition and dominance be devalued and rejected. Consequently, it must be concluded that, in many societies, the adoption of an ecocentric identity would involve, for men, a change of consciousness very much more fundamental than that required of women. While the major focus of an ecofeminine identity is

positive identification with the natural world, there are implicitly elements of an identity defined negatively against the alien other of unreconstructed "masculine" man. Because of its implied

exclusivity, which reflects a tendency towards maternalist essentialism, ecofeminism is unlikely to provide the basis for a universal ecocentric identity. Ecofeminism is important, nevertheless. It provides a trenchant critique of those cultural norms and values which support the power structures of contemporary societies and which have facilitated the development of a dangerously dysfunctional relationship between human collectivities and the ecosystems of which they are a part. In focusing very specifically upon this latter issue, bioregionalists would be well advised to incorporate feminist insights concerning the origin, and persistence, of gendered structures of power (Plumwood 1994; Bretherton 1998).

Ecofeminist identity politics leads to error replication and exclusionSandlands 97 Catriona Sandilands, Professor of Environmental Studies @ York, Mother Earth, The Cyborg, and The Queer: Ecofeminism and (More) Questions of Identity, NWSA Journal, 1997

In ecofeminism, the fact of being a women is understood to lie at the base of one’s experience of ecological degradation of one’s interests in ecological protection, and reconstruction, an of one’s “special” ecological consciousness. Whether the important elements of that “being” are seen to reside in biological, social, ascribed, or imposed factors is immaterial to my argument, the crucial thing is that identity, similarity, and belonging to a specific group are the primary foci of political

speech and the basis of political legitimacy, and that the achievement of the freedom to express identity without oppression is a key political goal (as opposed to, say, a focus on individuality and a desire to put specific identity aside to achieve a common good, an equally problematic but nonetheless different political logic). While an obvious result of identity politics is an exclusionary logic—“you can’t speak about this because you do not belong to the group”—there are other deeper problems with the model. For example, Identities are inevitably partial, and the relevant social categories on which identity politics are based can go only so far to describe a person, the reduction of any self to a list of categories replicates many of the problems that identity politics set out to address, including the socially experienced limits of the identity categories themselves. I will outline what I consider the logic and limits of identity politics later, what

said at the outset is that ecofeminists in basing their political specificity on an identitarian women’s experience of nature or environmental degradation or on a specifically women’s set of issues or principles or metaphors, assume a correspondence among ontology, epistemology , and politics—an identity politics—that reduces the relations between feminism and ecology to a highly problematic group experience for women and nature.