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Agamben Answers Rights Good...................................................................................................................2 Agamben Answers Rights Good...................................................................................................................3 Agamben Answers Rights Good...................................................................................................................4 Agamben Answers Alternative Answers.......................................................................................................5 Agamben Answers Alternative Answers.......................................................................................................6 Agamben Answers Alternative Answers -- Singularity Fails........................................................................7 Agamben Answers Humitarianism Answers.................................................................................................8 Agamben Answers Humitarianism Answers.................................................................................................9 Agamben Answers State Action Good........................................................................................................10 Agamben Answers Doesnt Apply to Politics.............................................................................................11
SUFFERING MAY BE INEVITABLE, BUT WE MUST BE ABLE TO PRIORITZE VIOLENCE AS A UNIQUE FORM OF SUFERING THAT IS NOT INEVITABLE AND SHOULD BE STOPPED Weinhold 04 Author Jessica Weinhold is a second-year student at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. http://www.pcusa.org/ideas/2004fall/violence.htm This stark reality demands an unambiguous response on the part of all persons in the church community: clergy, educators, lay leadership, and the congregation. The response must be unambiguous because, as Desmond Tutu once said, If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.1 But just responsesfor victim and offender alikecan only occur when there is, at the very least, a basic understanding of the problem. It is important to note that different forms of suffering permeate our personal and corporate contexts. Thus, not all forms can be equated or responded to uniformly. In the case of domestic and sexual violence, this suffering is not inevitable (like natural disasters, for example); it is intentional and above all else unnatural. Therefore, this form of violence must be addressed on its own terms. It must be distinguished as a particular form of suffering that occasions a unique form of grief and demands a uniquely definitive response from clergy and congregation. While the word violence most often evokes words like brutality, cruelty, carnage, and force, the reality is that violence includes physical violence-both sexual and non-sexualverbal, emotional and economic abuse.2 The constitution of violence, therefore, resides not in the degree of physical harm inflicted but in whether the integrity of someones personhood (body, mind, and/or spirit) was maintained or betrayed. If betrayedwhether through the perpetration of explicit bodily harm or notviolence has occurred. This fundamental constitution is consistently overlooked because of the failure to recognize that violence is more about power and control and less about acting violently. This misunderstanding enables cycles of violence to continue without confrontation.
perhaps the rather overstated or one-dimensional nature of Agamben's understanding of alienation reveals one of the problems with his use of this critique. He refers to the "absolutely banal man" who is tempted to evil by the powers of right and law (Agamben, 1993; 32); we have the 'falsification of all
alienation of the very nature of what it means to be human. But
production' and the 'complete control of social memory and social communication'; or the "absolute systematic falsification of truth, of language and opinion [] without escape" (Agamben, 2002). Because it is precisely in such a critique that one would expect Agamben to not merely acknowledge the "complete triumph of the spectacle" but to explain the relation between the spectacle and what 'positive possibility' there remains within conditions of alienation that might be used to counter these conditions. There would seem to be an enormous gap between Agamben's critique of this society and the state of simply being that
This state of death that Agamben would argue now colonizes all structures of power and that eradicates any experience of democracy might well still possess some kind of antagonistic clash, as Toni Negri
continues to be a possibility. argues, but it is difficult for us to see just where resistance to this state might emerge (Negri, 2003: 1). Certainly, Agamben calls for making all residents of extraterritorial space (which would include both citizen and non-citizen) as existing within a position of exodus or refuge, and in this we can perhaps see some basis for resistance. A position of refuge, he argues, would be able to "act back onto" territories as states and 'perforate' and alter' them such that "the citizen would be able to recognize the refugee that he or she is" (Agamben, 2000: 26). In this Agamben directs our attention usefully to the importance of the refugee today both in terms of the plight of refugees and their presence in questioning any assumption about citizen rights, and also in placing the refugee, or "denizen" as he says using Tomas Hammar's term, as the central figure
But he also reduces the concepts of right and the values they involve to forms of State control, eliding all difference within right and thereby terminating an understanding of the reasons for a disjuncture between legality and morality and of an existing separation of rights from the ideal of ethicality, in which liberation and dignity exist to be realized beyond any form of contract. . It is always possible to
of a potential politics (Agamben, 2000: 23). suppose that a self-fashioned potentiality is simply available to us, and in some senses it is, but not because a type of theory merely posits the social and the historical as completely open to our manipulation or 'perforation'. Likewise, we cannot merely assume that changing 'forms of life' necessarily amount to types of refusal. Such a claim would only make sense if it were put forward on the basis of an appreciation of an impulse to freedom from particular types of constraint and oppression. It would also require a sense of how this impulse takes place within a variety of conditions, some of which might be easily altered and some of which might not. In the absence of an engaged sense of what this impulse means, and of the context in which elements of freedom and unfreedom do battle, it is impossible to speculate on the nature of the
Agamben merely presumes that a strategy by which we all identify as refugees will renew a politics and thereby end the current plight of the refugee, as if no other reality impinges on this identification. This is also assumed on the basis that the State in Agamben's theorizing, the abstraction of an all-encompassing, leviathan State is equally, readily and easily liable to perforation. This contradiction is indicative of a wider problem where what we encounter is a form of critique that is oddly inappropriate to the type of issue it addresses. . Much can be said in criticism of the doctrine of right, of the limited nature of the understanding of freedom and rights in documents on rights, of the assumption of the place of citizen rights as the locus of the fundamental rights of the human, and most significantly, the absence of any sense of the undetermined nature of what being might mean. But what must be stated, I
subjectivity or potentiality which might be emerging or which might be in stages of decomposition.
feel, is that it would be a serious impoverishment of the ethical problem that we currently face to deny any potential value of rights in carrying forth traces of an impetus towards human dignity, of the ideals of freedom and equality, and to thus reduce rights to what might be termed an absolute politics. Rights cannot be reduced to citizenship rights as if the ideas of rights and citizenship are coterminous. What most critically needs to be understood is, firstly, why values of freedom and equality have such a limited and fragile place within conditions of such inordinate legalism, and, secondly, what the absence of freedom, which the cause of human rights inevitably suggests, means for the installation of any such rights. Without such an understanding we are left with a gestural politics that contains a posture of radicalism but one which fails to connect the aspirations of those who are struggling to achieve elementary rights with a vision of a world that could accord them a degree of dignity.
the Current State of Affairs in Humanitarian Law and Human Rights Policy
According to this basic Principle of Distinction, modern humanitarian action is directed towards those who are caught up in violent conflicts without possessing any strategic value for the respective warring parties. Does this imply that classic humanitarianism and its legal expressions reduce the lives of noncombatants to the "bare life" of nameless individuals beyond the protection of any legal order? I would rather argue that humanitarianism is itself an order-making activity. Its goal is not the preservation of life reduced to a bare natural fact, but conversely the protection of civilians and thereby the protection of elementary standards of civilization which prevent the exclusion of individuals from any legal and moral order. The same holds true for human rights, of course. Agamben fails to appreciate the fact that human rights laws are not about some cadaveric "bare life", but about the protection of moral agency. His sweeping critique also lacks any sense for essential distinctions. It may be legitimate to see "bare life" as a juridical fiction nurtured by the modern state, which claims the right to derogate from otherwise binding norms in times of war and emergency, and to kill individuals, if necessary, outside the law in a mode of "effective factuality." Agamben asserts that sovereignty understood in this manner continues to function in the same way since the seventeenth century and regardless of the democratic or dictatorial structure of the state in question. This claim remains unilluminated by the wealth of evidence that shows how the humanitarian motive not only shapes the mandate of a host state and nonstate agencies, but also serves to restrict the operational freedom of military commanders in democracies, who cannot act with impunity and who do not wage war in a lawless state of nature. Furthermore, Agamben ignores the crisis of humanitarianism that emerged as a result of the totalitarian degeneration of modern states in the twentieth century. States cannot always be assumed to follow a rational self-interest which informs them that there is no point in killing others indiscriminately. The Nazi episode in European history has shown that sometimes leaders do not spare the weak and the sick, but take extra care not to let them escape, even if they are handicapped, very old or very young. Classic humanitarianism depends on the existence of an international society whose members feel bound by a basic set of rules regarding the use of violencerules which the ICRC itself helped to institutionalize. Conversely, classic humanitarianism becomes dysfunctional when states place no value at all on their international reputation and see harming the lives of defenseless individuals not as useless and cruel, but as part of their very mission.
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