The 1AC posits performance and agency as articulated through only through the vehicle of a common human language- if you are in anyway convinced that you can engage in their politics without being a speaking subject then vote negativePuar 2011 (THE COST OF GETTING BETTER: SUICIDE, SENSATION, SWITCHPOINTS http://www.jasbirpuar.com/assets/The-Cost-of-Getting-Better.pdf 156-157) DR 15

In an effort to open up capacity as a source of generative affective politics rather than only a closure around neoliberal demands, I briefly return to Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” perhaps unfashionably so.18 In the context of disability studies, this question becomes not only a mandate for epistemological correctives but a query about ontological and bodily capacity, as granting “voice” to the subaltern comes into tension with the need, in the case of the human/animal distinction, to destabilize the privileging of communication/representation/ language altogether. The ability to understand language is also where human/ nonhuman animal distinctions, as well as human/technology distinctions, have long been drawn, and here disability studies, posthumanism, and animal studies may perhaps articulate a common interest in a nonanthropomorphic, interspecies vision of affective politics. Posthumanism questions the boundaries between human and nonhuman, matter and discourse, technology and body, and interro- gates the practices through which these boundaries are constituted, stabilized, and destabilized. (The burgeoning field of animal studies is thus also a part of the endeavor to situate human capacities within a range of capacities of species as opposed to reifying their singularity.) If, according to posthumanist thinkers such as Manual DeLanda and Karen Barad, language has been granted too much power, a nonanthropomorphic conception of the human is necessary to resituate language as one of many captures of the intensities of bodily capacities, an event of bodily assemblages rather than a performative act of signification.19 Our current politics are continually reproducing the exceptionalism of human bodies and the aggrieved agential subject, politics typically enacted through “wounded attachments.”20 Without minimizing the tragedy of Clementi’s and other recent deaths, dialogue about ecologies of sensation and slow death might open us up to a range of connections. For instance, how do queer girls commit suicide? What of the slow deaths of teenage girls through anorexia, bulimia, and numerous sexual assaults they endure as punishment for the transgressing of proper femininity and alas, even for conforming to it? What is the political and cultural fallout of recentering the white gay male as ur-queer subject? How would our political landscape transform if it actively decentered the sustained reproduction and proliferation of the grieving subject, opening instead toward an affective politics, attentive to ecologies of sensation and switchpoints of bodily capacities, to habituations and unhabituations, to tendencies, multiple temporalities, and becomings?

The refusal of the affirmative opens up the possibility of silence- the halting of the anthropological machine and embracing of unintelligibility- this is the hijacking of speech through silence Negri was talking about Jackson 13 (Zakiyyah Iman , Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism https://www.academia.edu/6169668/Animal_New_Directions_in_the_Theorization_of_Race_and_Posthumanism) DR 14

Kalpana Rahita Seshadri’s HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language is a careful and generative study of the intersections and divergences subtending Jacques Derrida’s, Giorgio Agamben’s, and Foucault’s philosophies of language and power with respect to ethics and politics. Drawing on varied sources such as J. M. Coetzee’s Foe, Charles Chesnutt’s

“The Dumb Witness,” and aerialist Philippe Petit’s Man on Wire, it takes as its central task the disruption of the hierarchical binary that purports to distinguish speech from silence . Seshadri argues that the figuration of silence as privation has been central to the law’s biopolitical expression with respect to race and

nonhuman animals. Namely, power conflates law’s peculiar speech with the capacity for speech ,

and this conflation is then equated with being human. Law , in turn, denies those it deems “inhuman” access to speech and law, thereby producing the inhumanity it excludes. Thus, the “inhuman’s” putative privation of speech, the very figure of inhumanity, is in fact an effect of law. Seshadri questions the presumption that “speech” distinguishes human from inhuman by reminding the reader that “language” encompasses speech and silence. Silence, according to Seshadri, is “not identical with not speaking;” rather, it is an “empty space” where the regulatory power of discourse is inoperable (34). For Seshadri, what Derrida termed “trace” possesses the transformative possibilities of this “empty space ”: trace is not the underlying logic or historical origin of a particular discourse , but rather the “self-canceling and instituted origin,” “ the condition of all conditions of possibility” for speech and its play of différance (xiv).

Thus, “silence” is a space of possibility for something other than the law . Rejecting the authority of law, Seshadri maintains that the figure of silence —the space and movement between law and language — possesses alternative ethical and political possibilities that lie beyond the purview of law. Seshadri suggests that “silence” is a political realm , a site of contestation. While silence can function as an alibi for power, it also holds the converse potential for the neutralization of power’s characterization of silence as privation and therefore inhuman . Thus, silence is both an

instrument and disruption of what Agamben has referred to as the “anthropological machine ,” or the

recursive attempt to adjudicate, dichotomize, hierarchize, and stage a conflict between “the human” and “the animal” based on the putative presence or absence of language.¹⁷ If it is possible for language to be liberated

from law, to some extent, then perhaps silence holds open the possibility for power’s neutralization.