This place is haunted! We are haunted! This speech is haunted!

This years topic is an unique one. This years topic called for us to inspect the presidential war powers of
the first black president and decide which out of 5 should be taken away. This presupposition is haunted
by a lot of things. Derridas hauntology is not new to me, but it is new to a large number of people my
partner included. This years debate topic is haunted by the voices of people like Devon and Daveon
people like Ryan and the people like Northwestern from the final round of the NDT last year. The topic is
haunted because it is a compliation of what has come and what is yet to come.


Johnson 2007, URRICULUM VITA LEIGH M. JOHNSON Assistant Professor of Philosophy Rhodes
College 2000 North Parkway Memphis, TN 38104 johnsonl@rhodes.edu EDUCATION B.A., Philosophy,
University of Memphis, 2000 M.A., Philosophy, Villanova University, 2003 Ph.D., Philosophy, The
Pennsylvania State University, 2007 Doctoral Minor, African and African-American Studies , The
Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts HAUNTED DEMOCRACIES
AND THE POLITICS OF POSSIBILITY: A DECONSTRUCTIVE ANALYSIS OF TRUTH COMMISSIONS A Thesis in
Philosophy by Leigh M. Johnson 2007,

Derridas hauntology When Derrida asks, at the outset of Specters of Marx , what does it mean to
live finally? , he is asking not only what is the impact of ghosts , who have lasted beyond their
ownmost finality (in the Heideggerian sense), on our final understanding of the meaning of life?but also,
what does it means for the living to live with ghosts? This is, as will be demonstrated in later chapters, a
fundamentally political question: how does one negotiate both the inter-subjectivity of those present
and those who are neither wholly present nor absent? The dead leave a trace on our lives, and our
indistinct experiences of/with them appear to actively influence the varying configurations in which
we understand extant intersubjectivity. Ghosts, like Hamlets father, are remnants , remainders of a
past that has not passed and that, in its refusal to either properly present itself or to retreat into
oblivion, both haunts the present and influences the future. In so doing, ghosts gesture toward our inability to
master the past or the present, not to mention our inability to discern or decide finally between the two. Wendy Brown,
in her Politics Out of History, writes: [Hauntology]figure the necessity of grasping certain implications
of the past for the present only as traces or effects (rather than as structures, axioms, laws, or lines of
determination) and of grasping even these as protean. Learning to live finally means learning to live with this
unmasterable , uncategorizable, and irreducible character of the pasts bearing on the present, and
hence with the unmasterable and 125 irreducible character of the present as well. Learning to live
means learning to live without systematization , without conceits of coherence, without a
consistent and complete picture, and without a clear delineation between past and present.162 The
trouble with spirits is that they are never proactively encountered, that is, never really seen, though
the spectral other no doubt looks at us, we feel ourselves being looked at by it, outside of any
synchrony, even before and beyond any look on our part.163 We are haunted by their present-which-
is-not-present, that is to say, also by their absence-which- is-not-absent. Their guarded anonymity, their origin
and their status is never certain. They are fundamentally anachronistic (out of time)anachrony is the
law of the specter. Because, in the specter, we cannot clearly distinguish the difference between the thing itself and its
simulacrumthat opposition does not hold upDerrida suggests that the specter or ghost forces us to replace
metaphysics/ontology with what he calls a hauntology.164 Like the trace, it is in the nature of ghosts to
appear in those places which, according to Adorno , do not fit properly into the laws of historical
movement.165 That is to say, they haunt the present, that to which we so desperately attach
ourselves both existentially and intellectually, without ever wholly becoming a part of that present.
They are waste products and blind spots that have escaped the dialectic, and it is precisely Derridas project in Specters of Marx, in his
hauntology, to address what is left 162 Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 146. 163 Specters of
Marx, 7. 164 Specters of Marx, 10. 165 It is in the nature of the defeated to appear, in their impotence, irrelevant, exccentric, derisory.
What transcends the ruling society is not only the potentiality which it develops but also that which
did not fit properly into the laws of historical movement. Theory must deal with cross-grained, opaque, unassimilated
material, which has admittedly from the start an anachronistic quality, but is not obsolete since it has outwitted the historical dynamic.
Theodore Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life, trans. E.F. Jephcott (New York: Verso, 1996), 151 ( emphasis added).
126 unassimilated by metaphysics (and traditional philosophys) privileging of the present .166
Hauntology replaces ontology because, as Warren Montag writes, ontology speaks only of what is present or
what is absent; it cannot conceive of what is neither...The linear time of birth, life and death, of the
beginning and the end, has no place in the hauntic, which the latter alone allows to speak of what persists
beyond the end, beyond death.167 In the same way that the specter of communism reminded Marx
of the distance between 19th century Europes promises and its practices, so also does the specter of
the end of communism (which was being heralded by Fukuyama and his adherents at the time of Derridas Specters of Marx)
remind us of the distance between democracys promises and democracys practices .168 That is to say, the
specters that haunted Marx (and Marxs Europe)no doubt traces of the Hegelianism he was attempting to exorciseare of the same order
that haunt those attempting to turn Marxism on its head. Those who, at the end of the 1980s, triumphed the arrival of democracy just in
time (like Fukuyama) neglected to reckon with the ghosts of that which it claims to have overcome, the way in which it is constrained,
circumscribed and inscribed by the past; the way in which it is haunted before we make and enter it.169 To re-contextualize the
figure of the specter in concrete democratic practices, we should recall that the men and women of
history who have actually waited upon democracys deferral (like the Algerians Derrida so often cites,
or the South Africans to which I will soon turn, not to mention innumerable groups within the deceptively general category of
American ) often have done so without horizon of the wait, awaiting what 166 Ibid. 167 Warren Montag, Spirits Armed and Unarmed:
Derridas Specters of Marx in Ghostly Demarcations, 71. 168 Brendese, Remembering Democratic Temporality, 12. 169 Brown,
Politics Out of History, 151. 127 *one+ does not expect yet or any longer.170 That is to say, no one ever inherits democracy
without being haunted by the ghosts who have invested in its promise, even when that promise has
failed. Those that wait on democracy are haunted not only by its own spectrality (in the as-yet
unfulfilled promises of democracy) but also by the specters of those whom it has failed. The ghosts
of democracy are more than simply the ghosts of our forefatherspatriots and heroesbut also
the ghosts of murdered protesters, starving picketers, weary marchers, beaten and bruised
dissenters , democrats and voyous of all sorts. In Force of Law, Derrida argued that there is no state, no law,
which is not inaugurated in some violence. The political present is thus always an heir to some
bottomless wound, irreparable tragedy, the indefinite malediction that marks the history of the law
and history as law.171 The figure of the ghost, somewhere between presence and absence and
excessive of our capacities for metaphysical thinking, helps Derrida open up traces of new and
different political questions with stakes we could never calculate. Wendy Brown writes, What we
inherit is not what really happened to the dead but what lives on from that happening, what is
conjured form it, how past generations and events occupy the force fields of the present, how they
claim us, and how they haunt, plague and inspire our imaginations and visions for the future . 172 The
questions that the ghosts of democracy raise about the inadequacies of democratic practices, and
democracys failed promises, work to reinforce our vigilance in the present to closing the gap
between democracys hopes and achievements. If democracy is always 170 Specters of Marx, 65. 171 Specters of Marx, 21.
172 Brown, Politics Out of History, 150-151. 128 that which has not yet come to full presenceand, hence, is itself a
kind of specterthen our relationship with the ghosts of democracy keep alive in our memories
images of both what might have been and what still has yet to come. In the latter half of the
twentieth century, the world witnessed the emergence of a novel democratic practice designed to
reckon not only with the specter(s) of democracy, but with its autoimmunity and aporias as wellthe truth
commission. Although not all truth commissions took place in regimes that we would recognize as democratic, the practice of
commissioning the truth of a body politic per se, I contend, is democratic. Many of the deconstructive practices elaborated in this
chapter can be seen more concretely in the context of the work of truth commissions, especially the South
African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Here, we will see at work the collective labor of undoing political
failures and refiguring political possibilitieswhat Derrida would call the simultaneous and
irreducible processes of depoliticization and repoliticization . At stake in these processes are
simultaneously a politics of memory and a politics of possibility, both of which are but variations on a
political hauntology.












Every debate round is a haunted experience, every debate round truly has to recognize the spectre in
the Marxian sense or it is doomed to repeat itself. I make the previous assertion not as a debate scholar
by any means but ass a simple observer, what is worse than a team that sees an argument once and
cant learn to answer it correctly the next time.

That is the same situation current legal and specifically united states policy has fallen into. The
problem of current united states policy is that it attempts to repress the spectre. The United states has
attempted to erase the image of slavery, to erase the image of the torture being suffered in guatanomo
bay and and to erase the dissenters and only celebrate the heroes of the founding moments of this
nation. This repression embodies only a part of the full story for how this nation came to be one and
that is where we find our link into this years topic. We are an interrogation of the underpinnings of the
current United States war powers.

The united States has used its influence and war powers to justify humoungus atrocities. The only
reason the united states has gotten away with it so far is because of the way many people encounter the
atrocities.

The majority of the community looked at what was this years topic and said that it was about
restraining the president. The majority of the community then took to cutting their T blocks and their
restrain counterplans without ever truly questioning How, for who, and what exactly has been done to
get to this point.

With no conception of this key questions many of my ccolleagues have moved throughout this year
picking up ballots but leaving behind the spectre the one in this very room, the one underlying the very
pen that flows this speech. The spectre haunts the United states foreign policy in the form of the desert
Americana, in the form of the theater of torture. These terms seems abstract I know, but they are the
most poetic tools for revolution that we have been blessed with. It is the United States army man that
rapes, murders, and sexually abuses the Iraqi prisoner they were are talking about. It is the Man sitting
in the guantonomo bay detention cell for a crime that he received no trial and did not comitt. It is the
perception that the United states is doing this for a greater and more important good that we haunt that
we deconstruct. It is nessecary to take these things apart and examine them before ever starting a
discussion about whether one should have those powers at all. It is an ethical question not a political
one that this debate should have been about. Is it ever really fair for the united states to rape, and
mentally degrade another being when other options exist?

iek 2006, Slavoj iek, Philosopher and Psychoanalyst, is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for
Advanced Study in the Humanities, The Parallax View, pg 364

This is what happens with the proclamation of the Decalogue: its revolutionary novelty lies not in its content, but in the absence of the accompanying virtual texture of the Laws obscene
supplement. This is what acheronta movebo (moving the underground) as a practice of the critique of ideology means: not directly
changing the explicit text of the Law but, rather, intervening in its obscene virtual supplement.55 Think of
the relationship toward homosexuality in a soldiers community, which operates at two clearly distinct levels: explicit homosexuality is brutally attacked, those identied as gays are ostracized,
beaten up every night, and so on; this explicit homo- phobia, however, is accompanied by an excessive implicit web of homosexual innuendos, inside jokes, obscene practices, and so on. The
truly radical intervention in military homophobia should therefore not focus primarily on the explicit repression of homosexuality; rather, it should move the underground, disturb the
implicit homosexual practices which sustain the explicit homophobia. The real choice is not be- tween sticking to the universality of the symbolic Law, trying to purify it of its obscene
supplements (a vaguely Habermasian option) and dismissing this very universal dimension as a theater of shadows dominated by the Real of obscene fantasies. The true act is to intervene in
this obscene underground domain, transforming it. the obscene knot of ideology, and how to untie it Welcome to the Desert of the American
Subculture In his reaction to the photos showing Iraqi prisoners tortured and humiliated by US soldiers, made public at the end of April
what America stands and ghts for: the
values of democracy, freedom, and personal dignity. And, in eect, the very fact that the case turned into a public scandal which put the US
administration on the defensive was in itself a positive signin a really totalitarian regime, the case would
simply have been hushed up.56A number of disturbing features, however, complicate this simple picture. In the months before the outbreak of the Abu Ghraib scandal, the International Red
Cross was regularly bombarding the US Army authorities in Iraq with reports about abuses in military prisons there, and these re- ports were systematically ignored; so it was not that the US
authorities were getting no hint of what was going onthey simply admitted the crime only when (and be- cause) they were faced with its disclosure in the media. No wonder one of the
preventive measures was the prohibition for the US military guards to have digital cameras and cellular phones with video displayto prevent not the acts, but their public
circulation....Second, the immediate reaction of US Army command was surprising, to say the least: the explanation was
that the soldiers had not been properly taught the Geneva Convention rules about how to treat war prisonersas if one has
to be taught not to humiliate and torture prisoners! The main feature of the story, however, is the
contrast between the standard way prisoners were tortured under Saddams regime and the US
Army tortures: under Sad- dams regime the emphasis was on the direct brutal iniction of pain, while
the US soldiers focused on psychological humiliation. Furthermore, recording the humiliation with a camera, with the perpetrators included in
the picture, their faces stupidly smiling alongside the naked twisted bodies of the prisoners, is an integral part of the process, in stark contrast with the secrecy of Saddams tortures. When I
saw the well-known photo of a naked prisoner with a black hood over his head, electric cables attached to his limbs, standing on a chair in a ridiculous theatrical pose, my rst reaction was
that this was a shot of the latest performance art show in Lower Manhattan. The very positions and costumes of the prisoners suggest a
theatrical staging, a kind of tableau vivant, which cannot fail to bring to mind the whole scope of
American performance art and theater of crueltyRobert Mapplethorpes photographs, the weird scenes in David Lynchs lms.... And it is
this feature that brings us to the crux of the matter: to anyone acquainted with the reality of the US way of life, the photos immediately brought to mind
the obscene underside of US popular culturefor example, the initiatic rituals of torture and humiliation one
has to undergo in order to be accepted into a closed community . Do we not see similar photos in regular intervals in the US press,
when some scandal explodes in an army unit or on a high-school campus, where the initiatic ritual went too far and soldiers or students got hurt beyond a level considered tolerable, forced to
367 assume a humiliating pose, to perform debasing gestures (like penetrating their anus with a beer bottle in front of their peers), to be pierced by needles, and so on. (And, incidentally, since
Bush himself is a member of Skull and Bones, the most exclusive secret society of the Yale campus, it would be interesting to learn which rituals he had to undergo to be accepted....) Of
course, the obvious dierence is that, in the case of such initiate ritualsas their very name implies
one undergoes them of ones own free will, fully aware of what one has to expect, and with the clear
aim of ones ultimate reward (being accepted into the inner circle, andlast but not leastallowed to perform the same rituals on new members . . .), while in
Abu Ghraib, the rituals were not the price the prisoners had to pay in order to be accepted as one of us, but, on the contrary, the very mark of their exclusion. Is not the
free choice of those undergoing humiliating initiation rituals, however, an exemplary case of a false free choice, along the lines of the
workers freedom to sell his labor-power? E ven worse, we should recall here one of the most
disgusting rituals of anti-black violence in the old US South : a black guy is cornered by white thugs,
then compelled to perform an aggressive gesture (Spit into my face, boy!; Say I am a shit!. . .), which is supposed to
justify the ensuing beating or lynching . Furthermore, there is the ultimate cynical message in applying
to Arab prisoners the properly American initiatic ritual: you want to be one of us? OK, here you have a
taste of the very core of our way of life.... The Abu Ghraib tortures are thus to be located in the series
of obscene under- ground practices that sustain an ideological edice. Along the same lines, the true dark enigma of the behavior
of the Vatican toward the Nazis was not the one which gets the most media attention, the Popes silence on the subject of the Holocaustthis lack of response could
be understood, if not condoned, by the specic circumstances. Much more sinister was, in the years
after the Second World War, the full engagement of the Catholic Church in co- organizing the escape
of the Nazi criminals to South America: the normal escape route led to Northern Italy, where they were hidden for some time in remote monasteries (or, in
some cases, even in Vatican City itself);from there, they were smuggled to Spain or to a ship (usually in Genoa) which took them to Argentina.57 Why this urge to savenot ex-functionaries of
soft Fascist regimes like the one in Italy itself, butNazis themselves, whose ideology was explicitly anti-Christian, pagan? What deeper solidarity motivated the Vatican to engage in such a
vast and well- derground network to save the Nazis, why did it not build a similar network in
for instance, in Rome, at least? And the same ambiguity persists today: it is true that Pope John Paul II apologized for all the injustices the Church has committed
against the Jews in its long historybut the same Pope canonized the founder of Opus Dei, well-known for his anti-Semitic statements and his pro-Fascist sympathies. More generally, todays
Catholic Church itself relies on (at least) two levels of obscene unwritten rules. First, there is, of course, the infamous Opus Dei, the Churchs the lunar parallax: toward a politics of subtraction
own white maa, the (half-)secret organization which somehow embodies the pure Law beyond any positive legality: its supreme rule is unconditional obedience to the Pope and a ruthless
determination to work for the Church, with all other rules being (potentially) suspended. As a rule, its members, whose task is to penetrate the top political and nancial circles, keep their
Opus Dei identity secret. As such, they are in eect opus deithe work of God; that is to say, they adopt the perverse
position of a direct instrument of the big Others will. Then there is the abundance of cases of sexual abuse of children by prieststhese cases are
so widespread, from Austria and Italy to Ireland and the USA, that we can in fact talk about a separate counterculture within the Church, with its own set of hidden rules. And there is an
interconnection between the two levels, since Opus Dei regularly intervenes to hush up sexual scandals involving priests. Incidentally, the Churchs reaction to sexual scandals also shows how
it actually perceives its role: the Church insists that these cases, deplorable as they are, are its own internal problem, and displays great reluctance to collaborate with the police in their
investigations. And indeed, in a way, it is right: child abuse is the Churchs internal problem, that is to say, an inherent product of its very institutional symbolic organization, not just a series of
particular criminal cases concerning individuals who happen to be priests. Consequently, the answer to this reluctance should be not
only that we are dealing with criminal cases and that, if the Church does not fully participate in their
investigation, it is an accessory after the fact; moreover, the Church as such, as an institution, should be investigated with regard to the way it
systematically creates the conditions for such crimes. This is also why we cannot explain the sexual scandals in which priests are involved as a strategy of the opponents of celibacy, who want
to make their point that, if priests sexual urges do not nd a legitimate outlet, they have to explode in a pathological way: allowing Catholic priests to marry would not solve anything; we
would not get priests doing their job without harassing young boys, since pedophilia is generated by the Catholic institution of priesthood as its inherent transgression, as its obscene secret
supplement. Remember Rob Reiners A Few Good Men ,a court-martial drama about two US marines accused of
murdering one of their fellow-soldiers; the military prosecutor claims that the act was a deliberate
murder, whereas the defense (Tom Cruise teamed with Demi Moorehow could they fail?) succeeds
in proving that the defendants followed the so- called Code Red, the unwritten rule of a military
community which authorizes the clandestine night-time beating of a fellow-soldier who has
betrayed the Marines ethical standards. Such a code condones an act of transgression, it is illegal, yet at the same time it rearms the cohesion of the
group. It has to remain under cover of night, unacknowledged, unutterablein public, everyone pretends to know nothing about it, or even actively denies its existence (and the
climax of the lm is, predictably, the outburst of rage from Jack Nicholson, the ocer who ordered
the night-time beating: his public explosion is, of course, the moment of his fall).While it violates the explicit rules of
community, such a code represents the spirit of community at its purest, exerting the strongest pressure on individuals to enact group identication . In Derridean terms,
in contrast to the written explicit Law, such a superego obscene code is essentially spoken. While
the explicit Law is sustained by the dead father qua symbolic authority (the Name of the Father),
the unwritten code is sustained by the spectral supplement of the Name-of-the-Father, the obscene
specter of the Freudian primordial father.58 That is the lesson of Coppolas Apocalypse Now: in the gure of Kurtz, the Freudian primordial father
the obscene father-enjoyment subordinated to no symbolic Law, the total Master who dares to confront the Real of terrifying
enjoyment face to face is presented not as a remainder of some barbaric past, but as the
necessary outcome of modern Western power itself . Kurtz was the perfect soldier as such, through his over
identication with the military power system, he turned into the excess which the system has to
eliminate. The ultimate horizon of Apocalypse Now is this insight into how Power generates its own excess, which it has to annihilate in an operation which has to imitate what it
ghts (Willards mission to kill Kurtz is nonexistent for the ocial recordIt never happened, as the general who briefs Willard points out.) We thereby enter the domain of secret
operations, of what the Power does without ever admitting it. This is where Christopher Hitchens missed the point when he wrote, apropos of Abu Ghraib: One of two things must
necessarily be true. Either these goons were acting on some- ones authority, in which case there is a layer of mid- to high-level people who think that
they are not bound by the laws and codes and standing orders. Or they were acting on their own authority, in which case they are the
equivalent of mutineers, deserters, or traitors in the eld. This is why one asks wistfully if there is no provision in the procedures of military
justice for them to be taken out and shot.59 The problem is that the Abu Ghraib tortures were neither of these two
options: while they cannot be reduced to simple evil acts by individual soldiers , they were of course also not directly
orderedthey were legitimized by a specic version of the obscene Code Red rules. This is why the assurance from US Army command that no direct orders were issued to humiliate and
torture the prisoners is ridiculous: of course they were not, since, as everyone who knows army life is aware, this is not how such things are done. There are no formal orders, nothing is
written, there is just unocial pres. sure, hints and directives are delivered in private, the way one shares a
dirty secret.... To claim that they were the acts of mutineers, deserters ,or traitors in the eld is the
same nonsense as the claim that the Ku Klux Klan lynchings were the acts of traitors to Western
Christian civilization , not the outburst of its own obscene underside; or that abuses of children by
Catholic priests are acts of traitors to Catholicism....Abu Ghraib was not simply a case of American
arrogance toward a Third World people: in being submitted to humiliating tortures, the Iraqi prisoners
were in eect initiated into American culture, they got the taste of its obscene underside which forms
the necessary supplement to the public values of personal dignity, democracy, and freedom. No wonder, then,
that it is gradually becoming clear how the ritualistic humiliation of Iraqi prisoners was not a limited case, but part of a widespr the obscene knot of
ideology, and how to untie it Rumsfeld had to admit that the published photos are only the
tip of the iceberg, and that there are much stronger things to come, including videos of rape and
murder. In a recent debate about the fate of Guantnamo prisoners on NBC, one of the arguments for the ethico-legal
acceptability of their status was that they are those who were missed by the bombs: since they
were the target of the US bombing, and accidentally survived it, and since this bombing was part of a
legitimate military operation, one cannot condemn their fate when they were taken prisoner after the combat whatever their situation, it is better, less terrible,
than being dead. . . .This reasoning says more than it intends to say: it puts the prisoners almost literally into the position of living dead ,
those who are in a way already dead (their right to live forfeited by being legitimate targets of
murderous bombings), so that they are now cases of Agambens Homo sacer , the one who can be
killed with impunity since, in the eyes of the law, his life no longer counts.60 If the Guantnamo
prisoners are located in the space be- tween the two deaths, occupying the position of Homo sacer,
legally dead (deprived of an ocial legal status) while biologically still alive, the US authorities which
treat them in this way are also in a kind of in-between legal status which forms the counter- part to
Homo sacer: as a legal power, their acts are no longer covered and restricted by the lawthey
operate in an empty space that is still within the domain of the law. And the recent disclosures about Abu Ghraib only display the
full consequences of locating prisoners in this place between the two deaths. The exemplary economic strategy of todays capitalism is outsourcing
giving over the dirty process of material production (but also publicity, design, accountancy . . .) to another company via subcontracting. In this
way, one can easily avoid ecological and health regulations: production is done in, say, Indonesia ,where the eco- logical and health regulations are much less stringent than they are in the
West, and the Western global company which owns the logo can claim that it is not responsible for the violations of another company. Are we not getting something
analogous with regard to torture? Is not torture also being outsourced, left to the Third World allies of the USA, which can do
it without worrying about legal problems or public protest? Was such outsourcing not explicitly advocated by Jonathan Alter i
legalize torture ;its contrary to American values, he nonetheless concludes: well have to think about transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies, even if thats hypocritical.
Nobody said this was going to be pretty.61This is how, today, First World democracy increasingly functions: by out- sourcing its dirty underside to other countries....We can see
how this debate about the need to apply torture was by no means academic: today , Americans do
not even trust their allies to do the job properly; the less squeamish partner is the disavowed part
of the US government itselfan eminently logical result, once we recall how the CIA taught Americas
Latin American and Third World military allies the practice of torture for decades. And, insofar as the
predominant skeptical liberal attitude can also be characterized as one of outsourced beliefs (we let
the primitive others, fundamentalists, 371 do their believing for us), does not the rise of new religious
fundamentalisms in our own societies indicate the same distrust toward Third World countries: not
only are they incapable of doing our torturin the USA was in
the grip of the Terri Schiavo case: she suered brain damag
brought on by an eating disorder; court appointed doctors claimed that she was in a persistent vegetative state with no hope of recovery. While her husband wanted her disconnected so that
she could die in peace, her parents argued that she could get better, and that she would never have wanted to be deprived of food and water. The case reached the
highest level of the US government and judicial bodies, with the Supreme Court and the President
involved, Congress passing fast-track resolutions, and so on. The absurdity of this situation, in the wider
context, is breathtaking: with tens of millions dying of AIDS and hunger all around the world, US
public opinion focused on a single case of prolonging the run of naked life, of a persistent vegetative state bereft of all
specically human characteristics. This is the truth of what the Catholic Church means when its representatives talk about the culture of life as opposed to the culture of
death of contemporary nihilistic hedonism. What we en- counter here is, in eect, a kind of Hegelian innite judgment which
asserts the speculative identity of the highest and the lowest: the Life of the Spirit, the divine spiritual dimension, and the life reduced to inert vegetation....These are the two
extremes we nd ourselves today with regard to human rights: on the one hand those missed by the bombs
(mentally and physically full human beings, but deprived of rights), on the other a human being
reduced to bare vegetative life, but this bare life being protected by the entire state apparatus. So Bush was
wrong: what we are getting when we see the photos of the humiliated Iraqi prisoners on our screens and front pages is
precisely a direct insight into American values, into the very core of the obscene enjoyment that
sustains the US way of life. These photos therefore put into an appropriate perspective Samuel Huntingtons well-known thesis on the ongoing clash of civilizations:
the clash between the Arab civilization and the American civilization is not a clash between barbarism and
respect for human dignity, but a clash between a nonymous brutal torture and torture as a mediatic
spectacle in which the victims bodies serve as the anonymous back- ground for the stupidly smiling
innocent American faces of the torturers themselves. At the same time, we have here a proof of howto paraphrase Walter
Benjamin every clash of civilizations is the clash of the underlying barbarisms. This obscene virtual
dimension is inscribed into an ideological text in the guise of the fantasmatic background that sustains
the emptiness of the Master-Signier. The Master-Signier is the signier of potentiality, of potential threat, of a threat which, in order to function as such, has
to remain potential (just as it is also the signier of potential meaning whose actuality is the void of meaning: our Nation, for instance, is the lunar parallax: toward a politics of subtraction
the thing itself, the supreme Cause worth dying for, the highest density of meaning and, as such, it means nothing in particular, it has no determinate meaning, it can be articulated only in
the guise a tautologyThe Nation is the Thing itself).63 This emptiness of the threat is clearly discernible in everyday phrases like Just
wait! Youll see what will happen to you!the very lack of the specication of what exactly will
befall you is what makes the threat so threatening, since it invites the power of my fantasy to ll it in
with imagined horrors.64 As such, the Master-Signier is the privileged site at which fantasy intervenes, since the function of fantasy is precisely to ll in the void of the
signier without-signied: that is to say, fantasy is ultimately, at its most elementary, the stu which lls in the void of the Master-Signier: again, in the case of a Nation, all the mythic obscure
narratives which tell us what the Nation is.65 In other words, sovereignty al- ways (in its very concept, as Hegel would have put it) involves the logic of the universal and its constitutive
exception: the universal and unconditional rule of Law can be sustained only by a sovereign power which reserves for itself the right to proclaim a state of exception, that
is, to suspend the rule of law(s) on behalf of the Law itself if we deprive the Law of its excess that
sustains it, we lose the (rule of) Law itself. In the twentieth and twenty-rst centuries, this link between power and invisible threat gets in a way redoubled
or reected-into-itself: it is no longer merely the existing power structure which, in order to maintain its eciency, its hold over its subjects, has to rely on
the fantasmatic dimension of the potential/invisible threat; the place of the threat is, rather,
externalized, displaced into the Outside, the Enemy of the Powerit is the invisible (and for that very reason all-
powerful and omnipresent) threat of the Enemy that legitimizes the permanent state of emergency of the existing Power
(Fascists invoked the threat of the Jewish conspiracy , Stalinists the threat of the class enemyright up to todays war on terror, of
course).This invisible threat of the Enemy legitimizes the logic of the preemptive strike: precisely because
the threat is virtual, it is too late to wait for its actualization, we have to strike in advance, before it is
too late....In other words, the omnipresent invisible threat of Terror legitimizes the all-too-visible
protective measures of defense (which pose the only true threat to democracy and human rights, of
course).If the classic Power functioned as the threat which was operative precisely by never
actualizing itself, by remaining a threatening gesture (and this functioning reached its climax in the Cold War, with the threat of mutual nuclear
destruction which had to remain a threat), with the war on terror, the invisible threat causes the incessant actualizationnot of itself, butof measures against itself. The nuclear
strike had to remain the threat of a strike, while the threat of the terrorist strike triggers the endless
series of strikes against potential terrorists. The power which presents itself as being under threat all
the time, living in mortal danger, and thus merely defending itself, is the most dangerous kind of
power, the very model of Nietzschean ressentiment and moralistic hypocrisyand, in fact, was it not
Nietzsche himself who, more than a century ago, provided the best analysis of the false moral
premises of todays war on terror ? 373 No government admits any longer that it keeps an army to
satisfy occasionally the desire for conquest .Rather, the army is supposed to serve for defense, and
one invokes the morality that approves of self-defense. But this implies ones own morality and the
neighbors immorality; for the neighbor must be thought of as eager to attack and conquer if our state
must think of means of self-defense. Moreover, the reasons we give for requiring an army imply that
our neighbor, who denies the desire for conquest just as much as our own state does, and who, for his
part, also keeps an army only for reasons of self-defense, is a hypocrite and a cunning criminal who
would like nothing better than to overpower a harmless and awkward victim without any ght. Thus
all states are now ranged against each other: they presuppose their neighbors bad disposition and
their own good disposition. This presupposition, however, is inhumane, as bad as war and worse.
Fundamentally, indeed, it is itself the challenge and the cause of wars, because, as I have said, it
attributes immorality to the neighbor, and thus provokes a hostile disposition and hostile acts . We must
abjure the doctrine of the army as a means of self-defense just as completely as the desire for
conquests.66 In Laclaus terms, then, is not the ongoing War on Terror a proof that Terror is the
constitutive outside of democracy, its antagonistic Other, the point at which the democratic
agonism of plural options turns into antagonism which relies on the logic of equivalence (in the face of the
terrorist threat, we are all together, forgetting our petty dierences . . .)? More pointedly even,is not the relationship between the
Empire and the threat of Terror analogous to the one between Enlightenment and its superstitious
religious Other as described by Hegel in the chapter on The Struggle of Enlightenment with
Superstition in Phenomenology of Spirit?That is to say: is not the in- herent notional structure of the
fundamentalist Terror the same as that of the enlight- ened Empire? Are they both not based on an insight with a claim to
universality? In other words, the dierence between the War on Terror and worldwide twentieth - century
struggles like the Cold War is that while, in the earlier cases, the enemy despite its spectrality
was clearly identied with the really existing Communist empire, the terrorist threat is inherently
spectral , without a visible center. It is a bit like the characterization of the gure of Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction: Most people have a dark side . . . she had nothing else.
Most regimes have a dark oppressive spectral side . . .the terrorist threat has nothing else.67The paradoxical
result of this spectralization of the enemy is an unexpected reexive reversal: in this world without a
clearly identied Enemy, it is the USA itself, the protector against the threat, which is emerging as the
main enemy . . .as in Agatha Christies Murder on the Orient Express, where, since the whole group of suspects committed the murder, the victim himself (an evil millionaire) should
turn out to be the criminal. What then, if Heidegger was right in his notorious doubt about democracy: How can any political system be coordinated
to the technological age, and which political sys- tem would that be? I know of no answer to this
question. I am not convinced that it is democracy.68 What Heidegger had in mind as a more adequate
political response to the technological age was probably a kind of totalitarian sociopolitical
mobilization in the Nazi or Soviet style; he could not see how liberal-democratic tolerance re the
obscene knot of ideology, and how to untie it mobilizes individuals much more eectively ,turning
them into workaholics Beistegui puts forward this obvious counterargument: One can wonder as to whether Heidegger was right to suggest, as he did in the Der Spiegel
interview, that democracy is perhaps not the most adequate response to technology. With the collapse of fascism and of soviet communism, the liberal model has
proven to be the most eective and powerful vehicle of the global spread of technology, which has
become increasingly indistinguishable from the forces of Capital .69 Does not the ongoing silent revolution, limitation of democracy,
however, make the self-evident character of this argument problematic? Does not the dynamic of todays global capitalism enable us to discern inherent limits to the liberal-democratic
model?


We are haunted not only by the question of whether or not it was ethical, but also we are haunted by
the large question of who? Who is the victim of these ubsine crimes? Is it me? Is it you? The correct
response to this is question is we all are victims of this con Americana. The Utilitarian thinking that has
allowed for the United states to legitimize the torture of the bad muslim is exactly the logic that has
demoted all inhabitants to nothing more than calculable objects. It is not the agency of the Muslim
other alone that has been lost but the agency of us all. The United states has the ability to arbritraly
decide who is good and who is bad and who is worth saving and who may die, this problem percipates
itself in the context of who will be the sacrifice. Sadly the bodies that are sacrificed generally look they
same, they are darker skinned, less well educated, and just not what the media told us good americans
looked like.

iek 2002, Slavoj iek, Philosopher and Psychoanalyst, Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian Philosopher,
Psychoanalyst and Social Theorist at the Birkbeck School of Law, University of London. Author .Are we in
a war? Do we have an enemy? London Review of Books, Vol 24. No 10. May-23-2002,
www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n10/slavoj-zizek/are-we-in-a-war-do-we-have-an-enemy

When Donald Rumsfeld designated the imprisoned Taliban fighters unlawful combatants (as opposed to
regular prisoners of war), he did not simply mean that their criminal terrorist activity placed them outside the law: when an
American citizen commits a crime, even one as serious as murder, he remains a lawful criminal. The distinction between
criminals and non-criminals has no relation to that between lawful citizens and the people referred to in
France as the Sans Papiers. Perhaps the category of homo sacer , brought back into use by Giorgio Agamben in Homo
Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), is more useful here. It designated, in ancient Roman law,
someone who could be killed with impunity and whose death had, for the same reason, no sacrificial
value. Today, as a term denoting exclusion, it can be seen to apply not only to terrorists, but also to those
who are on the receiving end of humanitarian aid (Rwandans, Bosnians, Afghans), as well as to the Sans Papiers in France
and the inhabitants of the favelas in Brazil or the African American ghettoes in the US. Concentration camps and
humanitarian refugee camps are, paradoxically, the two faces, inhuman and human, of one
sociological matrix. Asked about the German concentration camps in occupied Poland, Concentration Camp Erhardt (in LubitschsTo Be
or Not to Be) snaps back: We do the concentrating, and the Poles do the camping. A similar distinction applies to the Enron bankruptcy,
which can be seen as an ironic comment on the notion of a risk society . Thousands of employees who
lost their jobs and savings were certainly exposed to a risk, but without having any real choice: what
was risk to those in the know was blind fate to them. Those who did have a sense of the risks, the top
managers, also had a chance to intervene in the situation, but chose instead to minimise the risk to
themselves by cashing in their stocks and options before the bankruptcy actual risks and choices were thus nicely
distributed . In the risk society, in other words, some (the Enron managers) have the choices, while
others ( the employees) take the risks . The logic of homo sacer is clearly discernible in the way the
Western media report from the occupied West Bank: when the Israeli Army, in what Israel itself
describes as a war operation, attacks the Palestinian police and sets about systematically destroying the Palestinian infrastructure,
Palestinian resistance is cited as proof that we are dealing with terrorists. T his paradox is inscribed into the very notion of
a war on terror a strange war in which the enemy is criminalised if he defends himself and returns fire with fire.
Which brings me back to the unlawful combatant, who is neither enemy soldier nor common
criminal. The al-Qaida terrorists are not enemy soldiers, nor are they simple criminals the US
rejected out of hand any notion that the WTC attacks should be treated as apolitical criminal acts. In short, what is emerging in
the guise of the Terrorist on whom war is declared is the unlawful combatant, the political Enemy
excluded from the political arena. This is another aspect of the new global order: we no longer have
wars in the old sense of a conflict between sovereign states in which certain rules apply (to do with
the treatment of prisoners, the prohibition of certain weapons etc). Two types of conflict remain:
struggles between groups of homo sacer ethnic-religious conflicts which violate the rules of
universal human rights, do not count as wars proper , and call for a humanitarian pacifist intervention
on the part of the Western powers and direct attacks on the US or other representatives of the new
global order, in which case, again, we do not have wars proper, but merely unlawful combatants
resisting the forces of universal order. In this second case, one cannot even imagine a neutral humanitarian organisation like the
Red Cross mediating between the warring parties, organising an exchange of prisoners and so on, because one side in the conflict the US-
dominated global force has already assumed the role of the Red Cross, in that it does not perceive
itself as one of the warring sides, but as a mediating agent of peace and global order, crushing
rebellion and, simultaneously, providing humanitarian aid to the local population


Finally we realize that we are screwed right? Let us throw up our hands like the steps before us int eh
sand and say that we have no way to fight back. That is not the spirit of debate and is not the spirit of
hauntology. These debate rounds we have had and will continue to have are important. We all know
that we arent going to change any policy, but the spectre of debate leaves a trace on our lives. We will
change our perspective based ont eh arguments we hear and how they work. We think really hard
outside of these rounds about the underpinnings of each others arguments. I can see it in the neg teams
eyes right now that they are thinking about how hauntology may be wrong, that they are thining about
how they may attract the ballot. I do not blame them, I in fact invite this discourse because at the heart
of it all this same discourse is deconstruction. It is one party pulling at another part trying to get at all of
the inconsitentcies to get to the truth to the ballot.

Thus for this round of debate the ballot should reflect the best performative realization about the
presidents war powers.

Hauntology is not an action of old men in rocking chairs, or an action only taken by 20 something college
kids, hauntology is a mode of thinking, deconstruction is a reading stragey not unlike the critical reading
stratagies that educators tell their kids about, it is a powerful thing to be able to read critical, to see
what is unseen, to realize the misses between democracies promises and deomcracies pratices. It is in
those moments that we can reach the meta as my coach would say, Hauntology is our way of going
beyond:


Abbinett 2006, Ross, Journal for Cultural Research Volume 10 Number 1 (January 2006), Spectres of Class:
Marxism, Deconstruction and the Politics of Affiliation, ISSN 14797585 print/17401666 online/06/01000122
2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14797580500422109,
http://www3.amherst.edu/~pmachala/endnotelibs/Endnote%20Bibliography/MarxSeminar/Marx%20for%2007%2
0students/Marxcourse-general-archive.Data/PDF/Abbinnett,%20Specters%20of%20Class%20-
%20Marxism,%20Deconstrunction%20and%20-1351316992/ABBINN~1.PDF

This brings me to the second point of encounter between Marxism and deconstruction: the supposed complicity of Derridas critique of
metaphysics with the ideological and technological regimes of liberal capitalism.6 Let me give a brief summary of the arguments presented by
Ahmad and Lewis in Ghostly Demarcations. Lewiss article claims that deconstruction, conceived as a reading strategy
which seeks to disclose the logic of presence through which culture, identity and law are sustained,
looks suspiciously like the moment of ideology which Marx referred to in The Communist Manifesto
as true socialism (Lewis in Sprinker 1999, p. 146). Derridas pursuit of the truth of humanitys participation in the onto-theological
resources of philosophy, in other words, repeats the one-sided- ness of the French socialists whose ideas of Human Nature and Man in
general remained withdrawn from the realities of class struggle (Marx 1998, p. 31). And so the spectre of Marx which
Derrida evokes is a purely messianic presence which demands the revision of neo-liberal forms of
hegemony but SPECTRES OF CLASS 11 without ever engaging with their material structures (class,
superstructure, state). For Ahmad, this spectral Marxism is no more than a Third Way politics not fundamentally different from
more sophisticated, less cruel forms of liberalismwhose revolutionary power is dissipated in hopeless revisionism and infinite
mourning (Ahmad in Sprinker 1999, p. 103). These arguments misrecognize the questioning of ontology which
runs throughout Derridas thought. As we have seen his exposition of Bataille in Writing and Difference gestures
towards an ethics that is opened by a desire which both precedes and exceeds the recuperative movement
of the logos (Derrida 1990, p. 260). The possibility of this ethics is explored more fully in the essay Violence and
metaphysics, for it is here that Derrida attempts to disentangle Levinass account of hospitality from
the eschatological forms of revelation and epiphany. What Derrida insists upon is that the question of
ethical responsibility remains proximate to the Heideggarian question of Being ; for the possibility of
taking responsibility for the other has always already been determined through the ontological and
linguistic designation of Man. His argument is that if, as Levinas claims, the ethical demand springs immediately from the inscription
of infinity (God) in the face of the Other, then the pure desire which haunts the systemic organization of discrete subjects (ipseities) cannot
determine itself in any specific command. Levinass phenomenology, in other words, collapses into a kind of
empiricism that seeks a pure unmediated contact with divine alterity (Derrida 1990, pp. 15152). It is however
important to remember that Derridas insistence upon inscribing the possibility of ethics within the general economy of Being is not simply a
defence of Heidegger against Levinass notion of the infi- nite. Rather deconstruction opens up the
institutional/ontological forms in which the law of hospitality is inscribed to a general economy of
effects which includes technological prosthesis, genetic manipulation, and informatic transformation of public space
(Derrida 2000, p. 45).



Waiting on the world to change, we are waiting, waiting on the world to change, Hauntology is more
than just something we say to get at the ballot it is a type of freeing ourselves and what we hope may be
able to free the people that hear these debates. Deconstruction is a reading strategy but the interesting
thing is everything that is deconstructed is always deconstructing still. Our debate careers come and
they go. We have fun, we learn, we lose, we win, The thing that stays with us is what we have learned.
We will always be a part of the debate community and the activity. The spectre of Darrian and searles
one day will be in the back of the room just as much as the spectre of Deven and daveon sits their now.
It is not winning or losing that keeps this place haunted because it is always haunted our argument is
that we must realize things are haunted in order to ever truly move forward. So as the clock ticks ever so
close to 9, I leave you with this, this speech act is over in the present but was haunted by a similar
speech act in the past and will still be there to haunt you in the future.