Three important notes about this file

Rejection alt

Rejection of their plan creates a different mode of politics

Mitropoulos ‘6 (Culture Machine, Vol 8 (2006) Home About Log In Register Search Current Archives Reviews InterZone CSeARCH Cutting Democracy's Knot Angela Mitropoulos

The possibility of, as we would put it, a non-sovereign decision--of a distributed or diffuse decision that does not rely on the mystical and auto-representative identity of the people--is the question around which the critique of democracy turns. And while one might frame such a decision around, say, the way in which languages or forms of life might change, the attempt to reign it back to some new political subject, figured either as the many or the one, reinstates the endless oscillation between citizen and subject on the terrifyingly familiar and empty grounds of democracy as we know it. Democracy, we argue, binds us, and what 'us' might mean, in certain ligatures. It leaves us bound in an indissoluble knot, where divergent tendencies--the many and the one, citizen and subject, law and sovereignty, society and community--tighten against each other in ways that are at once mutually reinforcing and mutually antagonistic. To cut this knot involves a kind of total risk. It means breaking the swing between abstract formalism and substantive identity that democracy, as a political form, 'manages' but also is. And, thus, far from amounting to a radical gesture, cutting this knot is the uninsurable action that restores politics as a question of relation, of the tie and the decision to tie or not, of who it is that might enter into relation, and so on. These are the questions through which politics as a praxis might be reopened. It is, in short, a break for freedom that cannot be integrated to the tendencies of the day but which slices through the present with an incision that scrambles all tenses and leaves the political up for grabs.

Perm Answer

It obviously links – the 1AC was riddled with notions of community and inclusion; you can’t undue a speech act.
The permutation fails- it reinforces notions of community and agreement that erase difference

Secomb ‘2K (Fractured Community Linnell Secomb Special Issue: Going Australian: Reconfiguring Feminism and Philosophy Volume 15, Issue 2, pages 133–150, May 2000

Despite these deficiencies within liberal Enlightenment universalism, Benhabib argues that a post-Enlightenment universalism is still viable. This, she suggests, would be "interactive not legislative, cognizant of gender difference not gender blind, contextually sensitive and not situation indifferent" (1992, 3). Benhabib proposes a universalist theory of community which attempts to overcome the problems of Enlightenment thinking. This vision of community involves a "a discursive, communicative concept of rationality"; "the recognition that the subjects of reason are finite, embodied and fragile creatures, and not disembodied cogitos or abstract unities of transcendental apperception"; and "a shift … from legislative to interactive rationality" (1992, 5–6). This reformulated universalist model of community would be founded on "a moral conversation in which the capacity to reverse perspectives, that is, the willingness to reason from the others' point of view, and the sensitivity to hear their voice is paramount" (1992, 8). Benhabib argues that this model does not assume that consensus can be reached but that a "reasonable agreement" can be achieved. This formulation of community on the basis of a conversation in which perspectives can be reversed, also implies a new understanding of identity and alterity. Instead of the generalized other, Benhabib argues that ethics, politics, and community must engage with the concrete or particular other. A theory that only engages with the generalized other sees the other as a replica of the self. In order to overcome this reductive assimilation of alterity, Benhabib formulates a univetsalist community which recognizes the concrete other and which allows us to view others as unique individuals (1992, 10). Benhabib's critique of universalist liberal theory and her formulation of an alternative conversational model of community are useful and illuminating. However, I suggest that her vision still assumes the desirability of commonality and agreement, which, I argue, ultimately destroy difference. Her vision of a community of conversing alterities assumes sufficient similarity between alterities so that each can adopt the point of view of the other and, through this means, reach a "reasonable agreement." She assumes the necessity of a common goal for the community that would be the outcome of the "reasonable agreement." Benhabib's community, then, while attempting to enable difference and diversity, continues to assume a commonality of purpose within community and implies a subjectivity that would ultimately collapse back into sameness. Moreover, Benhabib's formulation of community, while rejecting the fantasy of consensus, nevertheless privileges communication, conversation, and agreement. This privileging of communication assumes that all can participate in the rational conversation irrespective of difference. Yet this assumes rational interlocutors, and rationality has tended, both in theory and practice, to exclude many groups and individuals, including: women, who are deemed emotional and corporeal rather than rational; non-liberal cultures and individuals who are seen as intolerant and irrational; and minoritarian groups who do not adopt the authoritative discourses necessary for rational exchanges. In addition, this ideal of communication fails to acknowledge the indeterminacy and multiplicity of meaning in all speech and writing. It assumes a singular, coherent, and transparent content. Yet, as Gayatri Spivak writes: "the verbal text is constituted by concealment as much as revelation. … [T]he concealment is itself a revelation and visa versa" (Spivak 1976, xlvi). For Spivak, Jacques Derrida, and other deconstructionists, all communication involves conttadiction, inconsistency, and heterogeneity. Derrida's concept of différance indicates the inevitable deferral and displacement of any final coherent meaning. The apparently rigorous and irreducible oppositions that structure language, Derrida contends, are a fiction. These mutually exclusive dichotomies turn out to be interrelated and interdependent: their meanings and associations, multiple and ambiguous (Derrida 1973, 1976). While Benhabib's objective is clearly to allow all groups within a community to participate in this rational conversation, her formulation fails to recognize either that language is as much structured by miscommunication as by communication, or that many groups are silenced or speak in different discourses that are unintelligible to the majority. Minority groups and discourses are frequently ignored or excluded from political discussion and decisionmaking because they do not adopt the dominant modes of authoritative and rational conversation that assume homogeneity and transparency. The feminist critiques of community have usefully revealed the exclusion of difference and the abstraction from the specificity of corporeal existence which characterize the dominant philosophical models of community. Many feminist theorists, however, continue to endorse the apparent necessity of a final agreement or a unifying solidarity within community. While some, like Young, propose an alternative politics "conceived as a relationship of Strangers" (Young 1992, 234), there continues, even in this endorsement of heterogeneity, to be an assumption that these diverse strangers would share a common goal and that this would be the basis for the polity. The goal for Young is a radical, egalitarian democratic politics (248–56) which enables the differentiation, variety, eroticism, and publicity of city life (236–41). While Young overcomes the liberal and communitarian imperative of unity and fusion of identity she continues to endorse a commonality in the goal and purpose of community. I suggest, however, that this risks the re-creation of an affinity between the strangers of the city which would once again undermine their difference through a fusion of common political projects and goals which would create a merging of alterity into an identity founded on common purpose. In order to overcome the unifying and totalizing tendency of community it is necessary both to emphasize the specificity of citizens, as Benhabib has done, and the radical differences of strangers within the polity which is the basis of Young's formulation of city life. However, in order to avoid a final conflation into sameness through the creation of a common goal it is also necessary to envisage a community without common ends and projects. Jean-Luc Nancy's work on community develops this possibility by describing community as an "unworking" without common purpose. UNWORKING COMMUNITY Nancy's thinking on community marks a radical departure from the universalist conceptions of both community and subjectivity. Nancy's vision of community and singularity, formulated in the light of Heidegger's Dasein and Mitsein, puts in question accepted ideas about human existence and society (Heidegger 1992). For Nancy, as for Heidegger, the human existence is not an individual, subject, or citizen, but, in Heidegger's terms, a "being-there," or in Nancy's, a "singularity." For Nancy, the human existence is a singularity that is from the outset an inclining towards others and a sharing with and exposure to others.
The holocaust was not an aberration- the western conception of community ensures totalitarianism and genocide will break out

Norris ‘2K (Jean-Luc Nancy and the Myth of the Common Andrew Norris Constellations Volume 7, No 2, 2000.

When it is not simply the blind pursuit of power or the expression of base passions, politics for such people is a matter of discovering the immanent or implicit identity of a group and setting it to work, drawing it out and allowing it to express itself in functional activity. The conception of politics as work thus relies upon and follows from the conception of community as immanent identity: “Community understood as work or through its works would presuppose that the common being, as such, be objectifiable and producible.”12 If this is taken to suggest that Hegel or Sandel are indistinguishable from Nazis and racist Serbian nationalists, one would surely be right to reject the argument out of hand. But Nancy is hardly this simplistic. What the holocausts of our century have revealed is not that Hegel is really Milosevic; nor have they revealed that totalitarianism is “immanent” to the West. Given Nancy’s rejection of the logic of immanent identity, that would only land him in an obvious contradiction. As he and Lacoue-Labarthe argue, Nazism does not sum up the West, nor represent its necessary finality. But neither is it possible to push it aside as an aberration, still less as a past aberration. A comfortable security in the certitudes of morality and of democracy not only guarantees nothing, but exposes one to the risk of not seeing the arrival, or the return, of that whose possibility is not due to any simple accident of history.13 Here a comparison with Hannah Arendt – who greatly influences Nancy – might be helpful. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt attacks those political theories that center around the defense of human rights. She does so not because she is eager to see such rights violated, but because, ironically, their direct defense can undermine them. On her account, what is needed is rather a recognition of the ultimate basis of civil rights – what she terms the “right to have rights.”14 This basis Arendt finds in political action. Properly understood, human rights are civil rights: they are based on forms of human action, not a set of moral truths about the laws of God or nature.15 It is as political, not legal, actors that we are granted rights; and it is through political action that we defend those rights. But to do so successfully, we must defend them at their foundations: we must defend the right and the preconditions necessary to engage in political action. To neglect this, and to concentrate solely on the rights that are attached to politically passive and invisible legal subjects leads us to misdirect our resistance to totalitarianism – a misdirection that may prove fatal. In a similar vein, Nancy argues that our victories against totalitarianism and “ethnic cleansing” will remain intermittent at best if we resist them only by supporting a rival community, one committed to norms and values that are, if nothing else, at least better than those of racists and Nazis. What is required is an understanding of how totalitarianism can erupt in the midst of what seems to be a civilized community or nation-state – an understanding that will allow us to resist totalitarianism in its genesis. To do that we need to ask what the relationship is between our civilization and totalitarianism. There is a temptation to avoid this question, and to assume that totalitarian and racist movements such as Nazism are solely or essentially the result of evil, or pathology. But Nazism was not wholly devoid of sense. To all too many people it made all too much sense. To assume that all of those people were mad or evil or benighted will not allow us to understand what attracted them to totalitarianism. If our history is one of arbitrary eruptions of insanity, we would seem to be helpless in the face of an equally arbitrary future. If fascism and genocide are truly insane, they will lack all internal logic – which will make them all but impossible to resist in their genesis. Contesting this, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe write: “There is a logic of fascism. This also means that a certain logic is fascist, and that this logic is not wholly foreign to the general logic of rationality inherent in the metaphysics of the Subject.”16 Put more plainly, this means that what we today count as politically rational has something in common with what counted for rational politics in Nazi Germany.