Michigan Aff K Toolbox 2011 Part 3 Michigan 7 Week Seniors HAMP

Michigan Aff K Toolbox 2011 Part 3 Michigan 7 Week Seniors HAMP

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Aff K Toolbox Part 3 O - Z

ONTOLOGY

Cede the Political/Policy Paralysis

THEIR ALTERNATIVE IS POLITICALLY DISABLING AND RESULTS IN POLITICAL PARALYSIS, permutation to do the plan and investigate ontology solves best

Yar 2000(Majid – tutor in the Department of Sociology @ Lancaster University and recently completed PhD exploring the relation between ethical inter-subjectivity) “ARENDT'S HEIDEGGERIANISM: CONTOURS OF A `POSTMETAPHYSICAL' POLITICAL THEORY?) in Cultural Values Vol 4 Issue 1 (Jan)

If the presently available menu of political engagements and projects (be they market or social liberalism, social democracy, communitarianism, Marxism, etc.) are only so many moments of the techno-social completion of an underlying metaphysics, then the fear of 'metaphysical contamination' inhibits any return to recognisable political practices and sincere engagement with the political exigencies of the day. This is what Nancy Fraser has called the problem of 'dirty hands', the suspension of engagement with theexisting content of political agendas because of their identification as being in thrall to the violence of metaphysics. Unable to engage in politics as it is, one either [a] sublimates the desire for politics by retreating to an interrogation of the political with respect to its essence (Fraser, 1984, p. 144), or [b] on this basis, seeks 'to breach the inscription of a wholly other politics'. The former suspends politics indefinitely, while the latter implies a new politics, which, on the basis of its reconceived understanding of the political, apparently excludes much of what recognizably belongs to politics today. This latter difficulty is well known from Arendt's case, whose barring of issues of social and economic justice and welfare from the political domain are well known. To offer two examples: [1] in her commentary on the U.S. civil rights movement in the 1950s, she argued that the politically salient factor which needed challenging was only racial legislation and the formal exclusion of African-Americans from the political sphere, not discrimination, social deprivation and disadvantage, etc.(Arendt, 1959, pp. 45-56); [2] Arendt's pronounceraent at a conference in 1972 (put under question by Albrecht Wellmer regarding her distinction of the 'political' and the 'social'), that housing and homelessness were not political issues, that they were external to the political as the sphere of the actualisation of freedom as disclosure; the political is about human self-disclosure in speech and deed, not about the distribution of goods, which belongs to the social realm as an extension of the oikos.[20] The point here is not that Arendt and others are in any sense unconcerned or indifferent about such sufferings, deprivations and inequalities. Rather,It is that such disputes and agendas are identified as belonging to the socio-technical sphere of administration, calculation, instrumentality, the logic of means and ends, subject-object manipulation by a will which turns the world to its purposes, the conceptual rendering of beings in terms of abstract and levelling categories and classes, and so on; they are thereby part and parcel of the metaphysical-technological understanding of Being, which effaces the unique and singular appearance and disclosure of beings, and thereby illegitimate candidates for consideration under the renewed, ontological-existential formulation of the political. To reconceive the political in terms of a departure from its former incarnation as metaphysical politics, means that the revised terms of a properly political discourse cannot accommodate the prosaic yet urgent questions we might typically identify under the rubric of 'policy'. Questions of social and economic justice are made homeless, exiled from the political sphere of disputation and demand in which they were formerly voiced. Indeed, it might be observed that the postmetaphysical formulation of the political is devoid of any content other than the freedom which defines it; it is freedom to appear, to disclose, but not the freedom to do something in particular, in that utilising freedom for achieving some end or other implies a collapse back into will, instrumentality, teleocracy, poeisis, etc. By defining freedom qua disclosedness as the essence of freedom and the sole end of the political, this position skirts dangerously close to advocating politique pour la politique, divesting politics of any other practical and normative ends in the process. Conclusion: Ways Forward for the 'Postmetaphysical' Political In summary, on the basis of the criticisms I've outlined, I think thatthe postmetaphysical rethinking of the political must address itself to a number of difficulties: [1] It must open itself to the investigations of socio-historical sciences in formulating its characterisations of the political in late modernity, rather than relying upon a 'mapping' of philosophical understandings onto society, culture and polity as a whole; [2] It must reconsider its assumptions about the importance or potency of philosophy, using those aforementioned social, historical and politological investigations to reassess the heretofore unchallenged assumption that politics, society and culture are in some sense lived and practised as actualisations of philosophical figurations.This in turn will at least set in question the assumption that a post-philosophically led turn to an 'other thinking' of Being is the most appropriate response to a pathologisation of the political, a pathologisation which the philosophical tradition itself is presumed to have instigated; [3] on the basis of such explorations and reassessments, it must break with synoptic, over-generalising and undifferentiated assessments of the present political, enabling an identification of those aspects of political thinking and practice most in need of challenge; and [4] it must find a way to admit those social and economic problematics which stand under suspicion because of their contamination with metaphysical assumptions (instrumentality, rational calculability, planning, control, willful manipulation, etc.), but which nonetheless constitute the large part of the most urgent political concerns, for most people, in most of the world today. This last challenge appears the most difficult, striking as it does at the heart of the distinctions upon which the postmetaphysical critique relies. These distinctions are both its strength and its weakness. Strengths because they permit a critique of political modernity at a depth its rivals find hard to match, in the course of which it uncovers underlying continuities and compromises that prevalent discourses on emancipation share with the ideology and practices they endeavor to supplant. But weakness in that the ‘extremity’ or uncompromising character of its distinctions prevent it from doing what its rivals can do – that is, differentiate between ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ uses of rationality in its different forms, distinguish between technological alternatives according to their sensitivity to human and environmental needs, and so on. The only way forward, I would suggest, would be to open up to both the explorations of these disciplines in the human and social sciences it has thus far shunned, and equally to engage in a heterodox dialogue with other accounts which ‘work’ the same socio-political terrain. (I’m thinking here especially of critical theory and the possibility of a philosophically informed social theory and analysis). I think that such an engagement can only be to the benefit of all parties concerned.

2AC: Ethics Precedes Ontology

An ethical obligation to prevent specific atrocities precedes ontology—the death of the "other" calls our very being into question

Bulley 04 (Dan, PhD Candidate @ Department of Politics and International Studies--University of Warwick, "Ethics and Negotiation,"

Crucially an openness to justice cannot be an a priori good thing. Indeed, like the future, one can say it can only be “anticipated in the form of an absolute danger.” As incalculable and unknowable, an unconditional openness to the future-to-come of justice risks the coming of what he calls the “worst.” The most obvious figures of this “worst,” or, “perverse calculation,” areatrocities such asgenocide, Nazism, xenophobia, so-called ‘ethnic cleansing.’ These we can and must oppose or prevent. But why? Why only these? Derrida states thatwhat we can oppose is only those “events that we think obstruct the future or bring death,” those that close the future to the coming of the other. We can oppose this future-present (a future that will be present) coming then on the basis of the future-to-come (a future with no expectation of presence). Or to put it in terms of the other,we can oppose those others who prevent our openness to other others. Such was the ideology of National Socialism in its desire to entirely negate the Jews. We have a duty to guard against the coming of such a theory or idea. Why? Because such an other closes us to the other; a future that closes the future.

However, if, as Derrida says there is no ultimate way of judging between our responsibility for others, as “Every other (one) is every (bit) other,” whose calculation can we say is perverse, or the ‘worst’? Why are we responsible to victims rather than the perpetrators of atrocities if both are equally ‘other’? Who makes this decision and how can it be justified? Levinas suggests thatour “being-in-the-world” our being-as-we-are, is only conceivable in relation to, and because of, the other. Thus the death of the other calls our very being into question. Ethics in this sense precedes ontology as our responsibility to the other precedes our own being. We may say then that our commitment is to those that accept the other as other, that allow the other to be. There is a danger though that this becomes foundational, treated as a grounding principle outside traditional modernist ethics on which we can build a new ‘theory of ethics’. This is not the value of Derridean and Levinasian thinking however. What makes their different ways of thinking the other interesting is not that they are absolutely right or ‘true,’ but rather that they take traditional ethical thinking to its limit. Whether or not a Jewish tradition is privileged over Greek, they remain within the bounds of Western metaphysics. Derrida’s “responsibility [to the Other] without limits,” does not escape this, establishing itself unproblematically as a ‘ground’ outside traditional thinking. Rather, his thinking of the ethical shows thatwe can think these things differently, while still accepting the exigency to prevent the ‘worst’. There can be no ultimate foundation for what we think is the worst. And such a foundation cannot come from outside Western metaphysics. Limit thinking is not an immovable basis for judgement of the worst, and this is why it is so dangerous and troubling. The non-basis of judgement is rather the desire to stay as open as possible, while recognising that a judgement necessarily closes. The goal is for our closure to have the character of an opening (closing the future-present to allow the future-to-come), but it nevertheless remains a closure. And every closure is problematic.

XT: Ethics Precede Ontology

Ethics precedes ontology—the criticism is an excuse to avoid action to combat suffering

Edkins 99 (Jenny, lecturer in the Department of International Politics at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Poststructuralism and International Relations: Bringing the Political Back In, p. 141)

To enact a repoliticization requires an acceptance of the impossibility of ontological fullness. 7 This ontological paradox appears in theoretical physics, where two complementary properties of a subatomic particle are mutually exclusive-it is only possible to know one or the other to the necessary degree of accuracy. This notion of complementarity is reflected in the way "the subject is forced to choose and accept a certain fundamental loss or impossibility" in a Lacanian act. As Zizek puts it, "My reflective awareness of all the circumstances which condition my act can never lead me to act: it cannot explain the fact of the act itself. By endlessly weighing the reasons for and against, I never manage to act-at a certain point I must decide to `strike out blindly.-''9 The act has to take place without justification, without foundation in knowledge, without guarantee or legitimacy. It cannot be grounded in ontology; it is this "crack" that gives rise to ethics: "There is ethics-that is to say, an injunction which cannot be grounded in ontology in so far as there is a crack in the ontological edifice of the universe: at its most elementary, ethics designates fidelity to this crack."90

Our ethical obligation to the other precedes ontology

Berg-Sørensen 00 (Anders, Univ. of Copenhagen, "“Democratie-à-venir” - the tragic political philosophy of Jacques Derrida,"

In "Force of Law", Specters of Marx and Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas Derrida defines justice as the ethical relation to "the other".14 The ethical relation is a face-to-face-relation, where you experience "the other" through his face. The face is what you can perceive of "the other". It means that the face is the trace of "the other", and that in the face-to-face-relation you also experience the infinity of "the other" who transcends yourself.15 "The other" is what you cannot comprehend, the specter, the infinity, death, or God. Therefore the face-to-face-relation is an experience of your own finitude. Even though the ethical relation is a relation, it is an experience of radical separation too. The radical separation between you and "the other" who transcends your horizon of knowledge.

In the relation to "the other" the ethical is the welcome of "the other" directed to the face of "the other".16The welcome is an affirmative act towards "the other" or a saying yes to "the other". The welcome of "the other" denotes an objective as well as a subjective genitive. The welcome is directed to "the other" but it is "the other" that makes the welcome possible. Without "the other" whom to welcome there would not be any welcome. "The other" makes the possibility of subjectivity and receptivity into a capacity of reason. Subjectivity, intentionality and receptivity comes from "the other", not from oneself as in a cartesian cogito. The ethical self is not a just being in its essence, but in its capacity to do justice to "the other", a capacity given by "the other" in the face-to-face-relation.

In the light of this conception of ethics as being constitutive of subjectivity, intentionality and receptivity, Derrida refers to Levinas' thoughts on ethics as first philosophy. Ethics is constitutive of ontological thinking. Without the ethical relation to "the other" that interrupts our unreflected daily practices ontological thinking would be impossibleeven though an ontological closure is impossible too because of "the other". Derrida indicates this conception of ethics as first philosophy in his concepts of hauntology as constitutive of ontology. The specter that haunts us is "the other", and it haunts us because of our bad conscience that it makes possible.

Ethics precede ontology—only through our responsibility to the Other can a radical autonomy emerge

Cochran 99 (Molly, Asst Prof @ Sam Nunn School of International Affairs—Georgia Institute of Technology, Normative Theory in International Relations, p. 140)

Campbell, on the other hand, puts a different spin on beginning from our day to day practice, which potentially distances him from the 'radical autonomy' position that can result from Foucauldian poststructuralism. According to Campbell, what follows from a Levinasian position, with the help of Derrida, is a notion of 'radicalized interdependence': ethical conduct is a matter of 'how the interdependencies of our relations with Others are appreciated', such that 'what is transcendent is our embeddedness in a radically interdependent condition, where we are inescapably responsible to the Other' (Campbell 1996: 131 and 138). Such an ethics is generated from the philosophical implications of one overriding fact about our everyday experience: it is shaped by interdependence (Campbell 1996: 131). For Campbell,this interdependence is the most compelling aspect of a Levinasian-inspired ethics of responsibility because, in regard to conflicts such as the Balkan crisis, 'it maintains that there is no circumstance under which we could declare that it was not our concern' (1994: 462). Thus, the universal moment of this ethics has an absolute, sovereign quality as well, that we cannot escape this responsibility, no matter what the circumstances are; and, as a consequence, engagement with the other is ethically secured. The interdependence which connects our everyday experience is the ground for Campbell's ethics. While Campbell does not self-consciously acknowledge his own weak foundation, what his ground aims to establish are links or points of connection between persons - the many - which the radical autonomy position fails to do. 13 However, this ethics may still reflect an aspect of radical autonomy, since it is not located in normative structuresthat we share in local practices and regard as mutually constituting, but in the fact of our coexistence.

Ethics precede ontology—only through an ethical responsibility to the Other can current notions of ontology be questioned

Manning 93 (Robert, professor of theology and philosophy at Quincy University, Intepreting Otherwise than Heidegger, p. 118)

But what does Levinas mean by this statement? This is certainly an argument against Heidegger, an interpretation of first philosophy otherwise than Heidegger's establishment of ontology as first philosophy. For Levinas, ethics as first philosophy means that the social relation is that event in being that is not only irreducible to knowledge of being, but is something other than, more than, and better than comprehension of being. Ethics thus overthrows the supremacy of knowledge of being; it puts an end to the "domination of knowledge.""Ethics has nothing to do with epistemological power or weakness, but refers to the responsibility that is prior to and the condition of knowing."7 Ethics is not divorced from knowledge but cannot be reduced to knowledge, and it interrupts the project of knowledge both from within and from above, from the transcendence of the Other, "with a higher call, a more severe condition: responsibility.""' "It is not that the Other escapes knowing," Levinas asserts, "but that there is no meaning in speaking of knowledge or ignorance, for justice, the transcendence and condition for knowing, is nowise a noesis correlative of a noema."I I" Thus, it is ethics, which interrupts and conditions the adventure of knowledge, and not the adventure of knowledge itself, which is first philosophy.