Security OHS Debate 2010

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SECURITY
The aff frames the world and its people as objects and tools to be policed and used as
needed. This labels certain populations as expendable. Instead of making us safer it
naturalizes a mode of politics that ensures absolute war and extermination.

Burke, Senior Lecturer in the School of Politics and Int. Relations at the Univ. of New South Wales, Sydney, in ʻ7
[Anthony, Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence, 190-210]
Even though he could not predict it, and can hardly be blamed, Bacon's technological hubris emerges in the language and ontology of
the modern strategist in the form of Henry Kissinger's 1969 argument that postwar US foreign policy had been based 'on the
assumption that technology plus managerial skills gave us the ability to reshape the international system and to
bring about domestic transformations in emerging countries'. This ` scientific revolution' had 'for all practical purposes,
removed technical limits from the exercise of power in foreign policy' . At the same time, Kissinger clung to the view that the
West is 'deeply committed to the notion that the real world is external to the observer, that knowledge consists of recording and
classifying data – the more accurately the better' . This, he claimed, has since the Renaissance set the West apart from an `undeveloped'
world that contains 'cultures that have escaped the early impact of Newtonian thinking' and remain wedded to the 'essentially pre-Newtonian view that
the real world is almost entirely internal to the observer'.45 Two implications flow from this – first, that the instrumental policymaker seeks
to alter and shape the world to their will, but refuses to accept (ethical) responsibility for doing so; and, second, it
provides a licence for Western intervention into the developing world because, as James William Gibson writes, by doing so
the West believes itself to be `bring[ing] reality to the Third World' .46 Such convictions draw on Orientalist
discourses that justified colonial and imperial control by appeal to the West's civilising mission, technological
advancement and martial power. In Orientalism, Edward Said places Kissinger on an imperial continuum with Arthur Balfour and the former
British governor of Egypt, Lord Cromer: is not Kissinger's hunger for international order , he asks, 'similar to Cromer's vision of a
harmoniously working machine designed ultimately to benefit some central authority, which opposes the developing world'?
47 In this view, as Aaron Beers Sampson writes, rationality,civilisation and modernity are opposed to less developed societies
whose actions are seen as'products of passionate reflexes'. Early anthropology and social theory, strongly embedded in Orientalist
traditions, portrayed such societies as 'decentralised, disorganised and anarchic', which the West then naturally had
a role to organise and control . Sampson shows how such divisions were internalised by modern international relations
theory, especially Realism, which draws on British social anthropology and the functional sociology of Emile Durkheim to portray the
international system as a 'primitive' form of `tropical anarchy' . Influential American realist Kenneth Waltz identified this as a
justification for America's ordering mission during the Cold War: the dangers of international anarchy can
bemoderated by 'transforming an anarchic system into a hierarchic one '. He wrote that just as Imperial Britain claimed the 'white
man's burden' and Imperial France her mission civilisatrice, 'we, in like spirit . . . say that we act to make and maintain world order'. While
Waltz took the view that nakedly imperial `global burden bear[ing]' would be detrimental to American interests, his preferred solution, 'the
detached management of world affairs', nonetheless betrayed the same mechanistic confidence central to Kissinger's
vision of US power.48 This matrix of cultural and epistemological assumptions is central to both modernstrategy and
US foreign policy towards the Middle East, one played out as a ruthless Cartesian search for geopolitical certainty, order
and control. Immediately following his hubristic boast that 'technology plus managerial skills gave us the ability to reshape the international system'
Kissinger was to write: 'this direct "operational" concept of international order has proved too simple. Political multipolarity makes it impossible to
impose an American design. Our deepest challenge will be to evoke the creativity of a pluralistic world, to base order on political multipolarity even
though overwhelming military strength will remain with the two superpowers.'49 Kissinger's frustration was later visible when in 1975, using the
pseudonym 'Miles Ignotus', he published an article in Harper's entitled 'Seizing Arab Oil'. This argued that 'we could solve all our economic and political
problems by taking over the Arab oilfields [and] bringing in Texans and Oklahomans to operate them'. In the same year he told Business Week that the
United States could bring oil prices down though 'massive political warfare against countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran to make them risk their political
stability and maybe their security if they did not cooperate'.5° Now, it seems not accidentally, Americans are indeed running Iraqi oilfields.51 Kissinger's
article helped father the policy now pursued by the Bush administration and began the process of deepening US intervention in the Persian Gulf
throughthe creation of the Rapid Deployment Force and Central Command (CENTCOM) in Florida, and the forward deployment of troops to Saudi
Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar.52 In short, despite writing that a direct 'operational' concept of order was `too simple', Kissinger
could not let go of it. Visible here is a vicious, historic irony played out two decades later in Iraq: a desire to utilise
and control nature, technology, society and human beings that is continually frustrated, but never abandoned or
rethought. Martin Heidegger shows us both why it was so difficult for Kissinger to rethink his Cartesian investment in
technology and order, and why Oppenheimer's anguish about the imperviousness of calculation to ethics continues
to haunt us. In The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger' s startling argument is that in the modernising West technology is not
merely a tool, a 'means to an end' (that we assume humans might be easily able to control and subordinate to other values like 'ethics').
Instead technology has become a governing image of the modern universe, one that has come to order, limit and
define human existence as a 'calculable coherence of forces' and a 'standing reserve' of energy . 'Everywhere we
remain unfree and chained to technology ,' Heidegger writes, 'whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to
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it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral.'53 (How revealing then that the influential
strategist Colin Gray argues that 'strategy is, and can only be, a value-neutral tool' .)54 Technology is not a neutral
instrument subordinate to humans, but has become the very definition of humanity. This derives not merely from
scientific discovery and invention, but from a larger structure of thinking which defines humanity's relation to itself
and to the world in a new and instrumental way, and for which the work of Newton, Bacon and Descartes formed a prophetic template.
This is a sobering realisation: as Heidegger writes, 'the threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially
lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already affected man in his essence. '55 Heidegger
describes the modern technological existence as only possible within a form of 'revealing' which is now also 'challenging' – one that `puts to nature the
unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored [for use] as such'. He contrasts the modern 'challenging' of nature with an
older form of revealing which resulted in a `bringing-forth' or 'unconcealment of things – of the kind achieved by the craftsman, the artist or the peasant
tilling a field in order to 'take care of and maintain' the soil and nurture its possibilities for growth. He argues that in this earlier form of revealing, the
craftsman or farmer was simultaneously 'responsible and indebted' to and for what they had brought forth, and that this is how we must think about
causality: as not merely a 'result' or 'effect'. We should not think of technology as simply a tool or a means to an end, without thinking morally and
responsibly about the entire creative process (scientific, social, political, ecological) that brought it about and into which it enters. Heidegger laments
that 'today we are too easily inclined to understand being responsible or indebted moralistically as a lapse'.56 Yet under the technological understanding
of being humankind has become obsessed with the causa efficiens – the end result – and no longer `takes care' of the earth but 'has come under the grip
of a different kind of setting-inorder which sets upon nature . . . in the sense of challenging it': Agriculture is now the mechanised food industry. Air is
now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium; uranium is set up to yield atomic energy, which can be released either for
destruction or atomic use.57 Heidegger argues that this in turn becomes paradigmatic for modern science, whose 'way of representing pursues and
entraps nature . . . as the chief storehouse of the standing energy reserve'. This process Heidegger calls 'enframing' and through it the scientific mind
demands that 'nature reports itself in some way or other that is identifiable through calculation and remains orderable as a system of information'. This
is Oppenheimer's problem: an 'ethical', questioning relation to technology and strategy cannot challenge prudence and calculation because the enframing
technological mode of being 'has already claimed man and has done so so decisively that he can only be man at any given time as the one so claimed'.58
Man is not a being who makes and uses machines as means, choosing and limiting their impact on the world for his ends; rather, man has imagined the
world as a machine and humanity everywhere becomes trapped within its logic. This is what is at stake when strategy is assumed, when
debate takes place only within its frame. Man becomes not only unable to think outside enframing and calculation,
as a user and controller ofnature, but becomes an orderable resource itself : [Man] comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall . . .
where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile Man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to theposture of lord of the
earth. In this way the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only in so far as it is his construct.59 Technological man
not only becomes the name for a project of lordship andmastery over the earth, but incorporates humanity within
this project as a calculable resource: matter to be mined, ordered, enhanced, driven, destroyed. In strategy and
geopolitics humanbodies, actions and aspirations are caught, transformed and perverted by such
calculating,enframing reason: humans are made 'citizens', patriots and soldiers; desires for freedom orself-
determination become weapons to be directed at enemies, or 'threats' to be managed or eliminated; resistance and
protest become 'instability' to be stabilised; human lives become tools, obstacles, useful or obstinate matter . Michel
Foucault's and Giorgio Agamben's analyses of `biopower' have analogies to Heidegger's insights here. In an incisive analysis Julian Reid shows that
Foucault saw biopower as a 'lifeadministering power' that developed at the same time as a 'strategic' formation of
tactical and productive power began to spread through Western societies. Biopower, argued Foucault, sought to 'incite,
reinforce, control, monitor, optimise and organise the forces under it . . . distributing theliving in the domain of
value and utility'.60 Agamben, while he did not specifically refer to strategy and war, identified in the emergence of `biopolitics' a
disturbing convergence between democratic and totalitarian power. Biopolitics simultaneously makes all life
'political' and reduces some to 'bare life' that `may be killed and yet not sacrificed' . While Agamben argued that the 'camp'61
was the paradigmatic space of this transformation, I would also argue that such a form of power in which 'human life is included in the
juridical order solely in the form of its exclusion (that is, of its capacity to be killed)' is operating in any space where the
'exception' is put into play (the border, the war zone, the geopolitical zone of `containment'), where the rule of law
and prohibitions on suffering and murder are suspended or qualified .62 (In this sense the US prisons at Abu Ghraib and
Guantanamo Bay are not only disturbing evidence of a new extra-legal norm in US security policy; they form a natural continuity with the callous
attitude to 'life' typical of modern war.) Reid also refers to a humanistic protest against such power visible in Paul Virilio's view
that the rationalising war–politics relation disrupts the `essential values of the human disposition,turning all human
beings into nodes within the logistic networks of war preparation '. 63 This certainly evokes the experience of Iraq, as do Foucault's
bitter remarks in his essay `The Right to Death and Power over Life': 'wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must
be defended; they are wagedon behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilised for the purpose
of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital'.64 It is only inthe wake of these
insights that we can begin to think about the experience of Iraq withinWestern strategic policy and collective
security since 1979, when the Iranian revolution turned American eyes towards Saddam's regime as a strategic counterweight to the newly militant
Islamic state. By this time theenframing, instrumentalising grasp of US foreign policy was well developed, having been
put to use with disastrous results in Indo-China, Indonesia, South and Central America, and in the Middle East with the Pentagon and CIA's support of the Shah of Iran and the decisive tilt towards Israel after the 1967 Six-Day
War.65 These policies were disastrous both in human and in political terms, causing the destruction of millions of human lives and providing shocking examples of hubris and policy failure. In the 1960s and early 1970s the overarching strategic framework in the Persian
Gulf was containment of communism; after the fall of the Shah and the oil price shocks, however, anxiety about Western control of Gulf oil and its price became dominant. In spite of the earlier disasters – 'Miles Ignotus' published his plan to seize Arab oil the same year
Saigon and Phnom Penh fell to communism – the enframing pursuit of strategic reason as a geopolitical panacea would continue. The `Kissinger Plan' and its animating ontological machinery was grinding into operation. As unbelievable as it now seems, the first tool in
this strategy was Saddam Hussein himself – who, it must be said, shared the Western powers' disastrous investment in strategic reason, as he developed an oppressive system of intelligence services, invaded Iran, slaughtered Kurds with chemical weapons, invaded Kuwait
and played chicken with the UN as he sought to protect his WMD capabilities, all the while incurring tens of billions in debt that would hang like a noose around the necks of his own people. Indeed, until 1990 he did so with the active support of the West, becoming the
secret recipient of arms, intelligence, technology, loan guarantees and diplomatic support from 1981 until just prior to the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait.66 Central to the concerns of the United States, its NATO allies Italy and the United Kingdom, and Arab states like
Egypt and Jordan, were the military setbacks Iraq was experiencing after its invasion of Iran. Then Secretary of State George W. Schultz set out the rationale for US support in the harsh language of diplomacy: 'under present circumstances in which Iraq is clearly on the
defensive and Iran is in little danger of defeat .. . our i1nterest is in maintaining a strategic balance between the belligerents in the interest of regional stability'.67 They wanted to keep Iran from victory, and for both sides to bleed. The United States provided Iraq with
satellite photos showing Iran's order of battle and US air force pilots were tasked to work with the Iraqi air force.68 Strategic advice from Vice-President Bush (via Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak) led Iraq to escalate its bombing of Iranian oilfields and shipping facilities
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in the Gulf and, according to Alan Friedman, 'triggered an Iranian response that led both sides to target civilian centres over the next two years, contributing mightily to the resulting blood bath'.69 Iraq also used a fearsome cocktail of chemical weapons against Iranian
troops and towns, killing as many as 50,000, and later against Kurdish civilians. The most notorious attack, the killing of over 5,000 Kurds in half an hour on 16 March 1988 in the city of Halabja, was only one of hundreds – part of a massive 1987-8 offensive that took the
lives of more than 100,000 Kurds, included systematic depopulation and ethnic cleansing, and eventually took on genocidal dimensions.7° Despite the US Senate passing a bill to impose sanctions on Iraq for the atrocities, the Reagan administration pressured the House of
Representatives to block the bill and in 1989, a year after the attacks, doubled its annual Commodity Credit Corporation aid to more than US$1 billion.71 The meaning of Kurdish suffering in theenframing strategic paradigm that governed US policy was coldly visible in the
report of a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer who saw the Iraqi campaign up close in 1987, writing that the Kurdishproblem 'might prove the Achilles heel of Iraq's defense [against Iran]' . In Samantha Power's paraphrase, 'the pressing concern was that Iraq's
Kurdish nuisance was then drawing some 150,000 Iraqi troops away from the Iranian front. Iraq was facing a war of attrition from both the south (Iran) and the north (Iran plus Iranian-backed Kurds). This was deemed bad for the United States.'72 The US government
also knew of Iraqi efforts to build nuclear weapons and turned a blind eye to the export of sophisticated machine tools by US-based corporations and an invitation by the Department of Energy to Iraqi nuclear scientists to attend a US symposium run by the Los Alamos and
Lawrence Livermore nuclear laboratories. They knew that US-guaranteed loans were being used to purchase nuclear and chemical weapons and missile technology, and approved some 771 exports to Iraq of dual-use items (including botulism, anthrax, salmonella, E. coli
and praloxidine) that could be used to create biological weapons and nerve gases.73 When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, US policy towards Saddam's regime was to do an abrupt about-face – over an utterly unchanged bedrock of enframing strategic reason.
American strategic interests in oil meant that Iraq's potential control of two-thirds of global reserves was a threat, along with the vast military forces Saddam had built up over the past few years with the help of the West. A desireto destroy much of this military power may
have motivated the Bush administration's desire to rush to war, despite indications that diplomacy might work and despite significant misgivings on Capitol Hill.74 Iraqi deaths during the Gulf War are estimated at about 60,000 (including approximately 32,000 from the
bombing campaign and 25,000 as US air force, army and marines slaughtered retreating Iraqis on the road from Kuwait), but the most devastating impact was to come later. In the course of over 110,000 sorties, allied air forces used between 100,000 and 140,000 tons of
explosives, killing thousands of civilians and striking crucial infrastructure such as power stations, with flow-on effects such as breakdowns in hospital services, health care and sewage treatment. Combined with the effects of the draconian sanctions imposed by the UN
Security Council in August 1990, the war had, in the words of Andrew and Patrick Cockburn, `thrust Baghdad and its 3.5 million inhabitants abruptly back into the third world'. Dilip Hiro described the impact as 'reducing Iraq to a pre-industrial state'.75 The Cockburns
relate how, just six months after the end of the war, a US Catholic Relief Services worker 'cast a professional eye over the breakdown in the health system, food supplies, and the overall effect of sanctions on the economy and soberly forecast to us that, as a result, no less
than 175,000 Iraqi children would inevitably die'.76 UN Security Council Resolution 687 specified that the sanctions should remain in force until Iraq had dismantled its weapons of mass destruction and was co-operating with ongoing monitoring and verification (as set
out in paragraphs 8-13 of the resolution).77 However, the United States and its allies had other ideas: three months after the war ended President Bush signed a secret 'finding' authorising the CIA to mount a covert operation to 'create the conditions for the removal of
Saddam Hussein from power'.78 Speaking after the vote that authorised Resolution 687, the UK permanent representative David Hannay calmly stated that 'my government believes that it will in fact prove impossible for Iraq to rejoin the community of civilised nations
while Saddam Hussein remains in power'. The US Deputy National Security Advisor Robert Gates put the US position most clearly in May 1991, when he said that Saddam's 'leadership will never be accepted by the world community and, therefore, Iraqis will pay the price
while he remains in power. All possible sanctions will be maintained while he is gone. Any easing of sanctions will be considered only when there is a new Government'.79 This policy was later restated by President Clinton's Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, and
National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger (in March and November 1997), and by George W. Bush's Secretary of State, Colin Powell (in February 2002).80 US Gulf policy after the end of the Gulf War took the form of 'dual containment' of Iraq and Iran, which Clinton's
National Security Advisor, Anthony Lake, described as being based on the 'strategic principle . . . to establish a favorable balance of power, one that will protect critical American interests in the security of our friends and in the free flow of oil at stable prices'. In this 1994
Foreign Affairs article, Lake criticised as 'disastrous' the previous US policies of supporting the Iranian Shah and building up Iraq's military capability, only to then replay the same cruel and unthinking hubris. He described Iran and Iraq as 'a complex strategic puzzle that
has confounded the policies of three previous American administrations', and wrote that, 'as the sole superpower, the United States has a special responsibility for developing a strategy to neutralize, contain and, through selective pressure, perhaps eventually transform
these backlash states into constructive members of the international community'.81 United States foreign policy in this way hijacked both the UN Security Council and the people of Iraq, grossly distorting international law enforcement and causing enormous human
suffering. The people of Iraq were not seen as people, but as pieces in a 'strategic puzzle', and they were to realise that, as Lake wrote, 'there is a price to pay for their [regime's] recalcitrant commitment to remain on the wrong side of history'.82 All elements of US policy,
even humanitarian elements, were to be subordinated to the goal of removing Saddam. The Kurdish 'safe haven' established in Iraq's north (after a global outcry at the refugee crisis following the 1991 uprising) was used as a base for Iraqi exile groups and CIA covert
operations, while the 'no fly zone' in the south did nothing to prevent Iraqi ground forces repressing Shia Muslims but was, as Hiro suggests: 'strategically valuable to Washington. The Pentagon perceived it as a means of denying Baghdad the opportunity to train its pilots
in the Southern Iraqi airspace and as a source of intelligence input in its early warning system.' The zones also gave the United States and UK an excuse to strike Iraqi targets without reference to the UN: in just eight months in 1999 the United States fired 1,100 missiles at
359 targets, more than three times the number during 1998's Operation Desert Fox.83 United States coup-making efforts were also a dismal failure: in 1994-5 the CIA-backed Iraqi National Accord (INA) killed as many as 100 civilians in a series of terrorist bombings in
Baghdad (with little political effect), and coup attempts in March 1995 and June 1996 were decisively crushed by the regime. The 1996 attempt – thwarted after Iraqi intelligence secretly seized CIA-supplied communications equipment from Iraqi exiles and proceeded to
eavesdrop on the planning of the coup – saw the arrest and execution of over 800 people from the army, Republican Guard and security services, and was described by the Cockburns as 'one of the most colossal failures in the history of the CIA, deserving comparison with
the far more famous Bay of Pigs Operation in 1961'.84 Not only did the US–UK regime-change policy fly directly in the face of Resolution 687, but the United States sabotaged the operations of the UN Special Commission in Iraq (UNSCOM) by placing its own agents in the
organisation, who led inspections of highly sensitive sites such as Republican Guard headquarters, security services offices and military academies.85 While Iraq had certainly been attempting to conceal the extent of its programs from UNSCOM, the US regime-change
policy gravely muddied the waters and gave Iraq every motive not to comply. This was a key element in both Iraq's demand for US inspectors to leave Iraq in 1997 and the total breakdown in co-operation with UNSCOM by 1998, which precipitated Operation Desert Fox
and ensured that sanctions would remain in force for years to come.86 Meanwhile the sanctions continued, reducing Iraq to appalling levels of poverty and undermining its economy and its education, health and cultural systems – at the same time as they strengthened the
regime. The rationing system established by the regime made Iraqis more rather than less dependent on the regime, and the undiscriminating harshness of the sanctions led Iraqis to blamethe West more than the folly and venality of President Saddam Hussein. This
underlines both the immorality and stupidity of US strategy. The blockade slashed Iraqi oil exports by US$13 billion, forced a 2,000per cent increase in food prices in a single year, caused enormous unemployment and slashed real incomes (by 90 per cent in the first year of
sanctions and a further 40 per cent over the next five years). Wardamage to infrastructure and bans on 'dual-use' imports such as chlorine meant that water and sewage treatment plants could not be repaired. The end result was malnutrition and disease – especially
gastroenteritis and cholera – which saw infant mortality rates rise from one-inthirty to one-in-eight in 1997. With a lack of clean water, reduced power supplies and an inability to import medicines and equipment, Iraq's hospital system crumbled at a time of its greatest
ever need." US policymakers sometimes cite the 'oil-for-food' programme (which Saddam rejected until 1996) as evidence that Iraq's suffering was the regime's fault. In the context of the United States use of the UN as a vehicle for regime change, this is a serious
misrepresentation – not only did the UN sanctions committee refuse approval for the import of items such as tyres, spare parts for ambulances and lead pencils, but the amount offered to Iraq (US$4 billion a year, minus 28 per cent for UN costs and reparations to Kuwait)
failed to cover its annual food import needs and did nothing to assist Iraq to rebuild its shattered health, power, water and education systems.88 Even when the Security Council further raised the ceiling to US$10 billion a year in 1998, the run-down state of the Iraqi oil
infrastructure meant that it could not pump enough oil to generate that much income (which was still miniscule compared with the import levels of comparably sized countries). These policies were in turn worsened by the appalling corruption of Iraqi and UN officials and
international businesses dealing with the regime under the programme.89 By 1995, the human impact of the sanctions regime had taken on the proportions of a major international crime: the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that as many as 576,000
children had died as a direct result, and the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that 90,000 Iraqis annually were dying in Iraq's public hospitals 'above and beyond the number who would have expired in a "normal" situation'. In August 1999 the Executive
Director of UNICEF said that had the reduced child mortality rates recorded before 1990 continued into the sanctions period, 'there would have been half a million fewer deaths of children under five in the country as a whole during the period 1991 to 1998'. The sanctions
continued until 2003, and the Cockburns argue that 'the number of Iraqis of all ages who have died because of sanctions is probably closer to one million'. More conservative estimates by the Joan B. Kroc Institute of International Peace Studies (for child mortality only)
estimated that between 106,000 and 227,000 children under five had died by 1999, still an appalling total." What was the purpose of all this suffering? How does it have meaning within the enframing deployment of strategic reason that governs Iraq's fate? A former CIA
official associated with the Iraq operation has said that senior US policymakers 'really believed that the sanctions policy might encourage a coup', and in 2002 Colin Powell was still saying that `sanctions and the pressure of sanctions are part of a strategy of regime change,
support for the opposition, and reviewing additional options that might be available of a unilateral or multilateral nature'.91 The function, the utility of the Iraqi people in this strategy was of course crystal clear back in 1991, when Robert Gates warned that 'Iraqis will pay
the price while Saddam Hussein remains in power'. So many people who might have lived, but now do not; mass, slow-motion slaughter in the service of `life'; in Heidegger's terms, the people of Iraq were made into 'standing reserve', their suffering was a resource. The
sanctions were finally lifted by the United Nations on 22 May 2003, following the illegal US-led invasion of Iraq with its toll of more than 7,000 Iraqi civilian (and 14,000 thousand military) dead, and more than 19,000 civilian wounded. By the time of writing, in November
2005, more than 2,000 American soldiers had been killed and over 18,000 wounded in a complex drawn-out guerrilla war that the United States appeared to be losing. Estimates of overall Iraqi dead ranged up to 100,000, with more conservative estimates of civilian
deaths ranging from 26,000 to 30,000.92 The first phase of the war cost the United States and Iraq some US$45 billion, further damaged crucial infrastructure such as oil and electricity, saw the widespread looting of schools, universities, museums, government buildings
and hospitals, and general lawlessness and insecurity. It created enormous anger and bitterness across the Arab world, leading Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to warn that 'if there is one bin Laden now, there will be one hundred bin Ladens afterward'.93 The war has
weakened the cause of moderation in the Muslim world and hastened the convergence of (formerly hostile) secular and fundamentalist radicals, potentially providing them with new sanctuaries, new operational linkages and strengthened capabilities. Beyond Iraq, the war
is likely to provoke global increases in military spending, lower the threshold for the use of force, damage the credibility of international arms control and verification efforts, encourage the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and undermine global security.94 Two
years of occupation have cost the United States upwards of US$150 billion and deeply polarised the US electorate. US occupation policy (characterised by a chaotic mix of goodwill, viciousness and ham-fisted efforts to quickly impose US favourites, enrich US corporations,
secure long-term strategic objectives and restructure the economy along neoliberal lines) is deeply resented by Iraqis.95 Much of it also now lies in ruins. The Bush administration's failure to plan for the occupation and reconstruction is by now well known, but its
management of the occupation has also been disastrous. Decisions to deliberately exclude the United Nations, to detain thousands of people in prisons such as Abu Ghraib, to disband the Iraqi armed forces and sack thousands of bureaucrats and teachers, and to privatise
Iraqi state corporations and give the bulk of the reconstruction work to American companies are all blamed for the alienation of Sunni sheikhs and poor Shia, who have supported (or become involved in) armed resistance against the United States and its allies.96 Counter -
insurgency operations, such as those in Fallujah, Baghdad and Najaf, have been ineffective, caused enormous civilian death and displacement (some 200,000 people left Falluja during the November 2004 offensive) and further alienated Iraqis.92 The war has given al
Qaeda a new theatre in which to fight the United States and a powerful series of propaganda images – not the least of which are those from the prison at Abu Ghraib. The brutal hostage-taking and executions of officials, journalists and aid workers by anti-coalition militants
have also evoked images of the chaos in Lebanon following Israel's 1982 invasion, and further hampered reconstruction. Even the welcome image of Iraqis voting in free elections was marred by widespread violence, which rapidly resumed its intensity once extra security
measures were relaxed.98 Furthermore, even if US planning and occupation policy had been better, it is likely that substantial armed resistance and the damage to infrastructure would still have hampered the restoration of stability, given what is now known of the Hussein
regime's elaborate plans for a guerrilla struggle prior to the war.99 In the wake of this failure, it is intriguing to observe how US analysts are seeking to grapple with the situation and salvage some kind of strategic benefit from it. In a 2004 study an influential strategist at
Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies, Anthony Cordesman, hoped that 'the United States may still be able to achieve some sort of victory in Iraq if it persists, commits the necessary resources, and accepts the real-world limits on what it can do'. While
he recommended that the United States should 'stay the military course' and 'develop Iraqi security forces as quickly as possible', with 'at least a five year period of continued US engagement after full Iraqi sovereignty' – approaches broadly in line with administration policy
– his analysis concluded that central US strategic goals have either been mistaken or would not be achievable. In particular, future Iraqi governments may not besympathetic to the United States and plans to reconstruct the economy along neoliberal lines and control its oil
industry should cease.100 Yet however radical, Cordesman's analysis was silent on scandals such as Abu Ghraib and the impact of counter-insurgency operations on civilians (along with their perverse political results), and underestimated the enormous challenge of
involving the international community and bringing genuine stability to Iraq. In contrast, progressive think-tanks like the Institute for Policy Studies were advocating a total withdrawal of all American troops as a crucial step in restoring Iraq's sovereignty, bringing greater
legitimacy to an elected Iraqi government and removing a major focus for attacks.'°1 While credibly suggesting that this will see a reduction in insurgent violence, their analysis may likewise have underestimated the dangers of civil war, human rights abuses by Iraqi
security forces, or more general state breakdown after a withdrawal. Journalist Paul McGeough gloomily suggested in a 2004 study that 'the prospect is that Iraq will become Beirut writ large'. 102 Two years into the occupation, Iraq's future appeared to be little more than a
long series of Sophie's choices. After the 11 September attacks, George W. Bush told Americans that even though 'this conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others' it 'will end in a way, and at an hour, of our choosing'. He told them that `the course of this conflict is
not known, yet its outcome is certain'. Like a latter-day Francis Bacon, Bush voiced his conviction that the use of force against terror would provide America with 'fitting certainty' .1°3 Thus, while the US strategy in Iraq has been unravelling on its own terms, the enframing
machinery of strategic reason grinds on in all its unreflective, calculating arrogance, endlessly demanding that powerhave no limits, that everything be made useful, that no ethical framework be permitted to slow its progress. The endlessness of it is what is most

Calculation, hegemony, utility: this, for

strategic man, is meaning. Yet Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition, had already sounded a warning – pointing to the
emptiness of a utilitarianism that gets caught in an 'unending chain of means and ends' in which 'all ends are bound
to be of short duration and to be transformed into means for some further ends' .104 This perfectly describes the rolling disaster of the United States' policy
towards Iraq, from the time the Reagan administration decided to make of Saddam a 'strategic asset', then sought his removal through a decade of failed and ever more destructive policy, until only the invasion and occupation of the country
could seemingly achieve US goals. It perfectly describes the geopolitical panic and ambition of the Bush neoconservatives, who have sought to build one illusory strategic 'victory' on another (Afghanistan, Iraq, then . . .) without consideration of
what counts as victory, its manifest failures and its unbearable human, economic and political costs. Strategy, seeking one proliferating end after another, becomes an end in itself and the ultimate, narcissistic source of meaning. To use Arendt's

words, it 'defies questioning about its own use . . . utility established as meaning generates meaninglessness' .105 When will it
stop? When will Oppenheimer's ethical plea – made only a year before John F. Kennedy warned that the 'fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth' – ever be heard and acted upon?106 Heidegger
warned that within modern instrumental reason lay a double tragedy: that as man turned himself into a resource, into 'standing reserve', he would simultaneously 'exalt himself to the posture of lord of the
earth'. This, he warned, 'in turn gives rise to one final delusion : It seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself .'107 Bacon
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did say that scientific man would recover 'his empire over creation' that was lost at the Fall, affirming his 'power over nature' with 'new creations and imitations of divine works' until 'man may be said to be
a god unto man'.108 So what of Iraq, the land where, with the words of Isaiah, George W. Bush triumphantly informed the world on 1 May 2003 that 'theUnited States and its allies have prevailed'?109
Man the vengeful god: Iraq is this god's plaything, strategic man's burnt offering to himself, this ever useful death, ashes in the President's mouth.

The aff is constructing threats in order to coerce order and control. They are treating human
life as an animal existence, a living that just happens to be. The aff’s strategical debate is a
world of calculations where ethics are nonexistent.

Burke, Senior Lecturer in the School of Politics and Int. Relations at the Univ. of New South Wales, Sydney, in ʻ7
[Anthony, Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence, 196-7]
The arguments of liberals and realists against the 2003 war on Iraq have been weakened by the fact that, at important political and
epistemological levels, they share the assumptions of the preventative warriors. They accept that the United States and
the West have important strategic interests in thePersian Gulf, that strategy often works, and they generally condone
(or in many cases have been the makers of) previous UN and US policies towards Iraq. They accept strategy as a paradigm , and
accept that it has been moral and legitimate to apply it to the population of Iraq. In the remainder of this chapter, I will explore what this 'strategy' is and
does; I will argue that strategy
is embedded in a larger system of reason that combines invention, knowledge, organisation
and technology into a drive for geopolitical certainty (`security'), one that has its roots in the thought of Hobbes, Machiavelli, Bacon and
Descartes.3 By the time Clausewitz had written his philosophy of war, and Hegel his philosophies of being and history, three crucial social-
political 'regimes of truth' that define and limit strategic reason had been set in place. The first is based on
theconviction that war is rational ; it is a means to an end based on estimates of 'costs and gains'. The second, is that
war is not merely an 'instrument of national policy' but may be an existential necessity.36 (As Michael Shapiro argues,
Clausewitz is at one with Hegel in seeing war 'as an ontological investment in both individual and national completion . . . war is a major aspect of
being'.)37The third, which I particularly wish to explore here, remains concealed beneath the positivist ideology that asserts
strategy is merely a 'neutral tool'.38 However strategy is not merely a tool of policy, but takes it over; and
strategy does not merely employ technology, but constitutes a powerful political technology in its
own right – pushing beyond the utilisation of technology as a tool to makethe technological into a governing image
of social and political existence. As a modernist machinery of coercive order and control , strategy is not merely an
'instrument' of policy butengenders an image of the world in which everything it touches becomes an
instrument,including humans. In the 'strategic' vision of the earth, human beings are less living things than things
that happen to be living, and are therefore useful; like animals and nature before them, humans are so many tools, so
much mass or substance that must be controlled, evaded, utilised or destroyed . This is the story of contemporary Iraq. We are
back with Oppenheimer, agonising about why the debate over (thermonuclear) strategy could only be conducted in the terms of
'calculation' and 'prudence' – except that now we worry that the debate over Iraq is reduced to one about the existence of a
'compelling strategic rationale'. Yet Oppenheimer could not understand why ethics had been banished in
favour of calculation, and how science and policy had been reduced to something soinstrumental, so
morally indifferent. We, however, face an obligation to understand how deeply planted the values of calculation are
in our culture – how, in many important areas, they have in fact come to define it in terms of machinic systems of
mathematical, political, technological andstrategic reason.
Security OHS Debate 2010
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Extinction is inevitable due to environmental damage, climate change, and depletion of
resources.
Wiener 5 (Jonathan B., Perkins Professor of Law, Environmental Policy, and Public Policy at Duke University, and a
University Fellow of Resources for the Future, “Book Review: Catastrophe: Risk and Response; Collapse: How societies
choose to fail or succeed”, Journal of Public Analysis and Management, Autumn, Volume 24, Issue 4, pp. 885-9)GZ

One might think that we live in the safest epoch in human history: Life expectancies are the longest they have ever been,
childhood diseases are in decline, nutrition is mproving, the Cold War is over, and even the eradication of poverty is
within sight. But in spite of these successes —or perhaps because of them—our worries now turn to other threats. Every
culture has a mythology of the end of the world, usually triggered by some extrinsic force. But serious thinking people are
supposed to dismiss such prophe- cies. The bearded man on the corner holding up the sign announcing “The End is Near”
is a cartoon icon of lunacy. Now in meticulously researched and yet highly accessible books, Richard Posner and Jared
Diamond, two very serious thinkers, are warning that we should worry a good deal more about catastrophe and collapse
triggered by human choices. Posner is a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, a law professor at the
University of Chicago, and perhaps the most prolific legal scholar in history. He is also one of the founders of the law-and-
economics movement, which has often cautioned against government regulation to solve problems that markets could
han- dle on their own. Diamond is an eminent biologist at UCLA, whose last book, Guns, Germs and Steel, won the
Pulitzer Prize. This pairing is reminiscent of earlier combinations of biologists and economists who, writing
independently, proved influential in the theory of environmental pro- tection in the 1960s: Rachel Carson (whose Silent
Spring warned of toxic contami- nation) and Ronald Coase (whose “The Problem of Social Cost” showed how exter-
nalities are the product of transaction costs and how transferable entitlements could solve such inefficiencies); and Garrett
Hardin (whose “The Tragedy of the Commons” called for restrictions on depletion of shared resources) and Mancur Olson
(whose The Logic of Collective Action showed why cooperation to protect shared interests is so difficult). Diamond’s
concern in Collapse is similar to Hardin’s: the depletion of valuable resources, such as forests, because of the lack of
institutional constraints on resource use. Hardin warned that individual rationality could lead to mutual ruin. Diamond
amplifies that theme with detailed case studies of Easter Island, the Anasazi, the Mayans, the Viking settlements, and
other societies in which resource depletion apparently destroyed the economic and political system. He identifies five key
factors—environmental damage, climate change, increasingly hostile neigh- bors, decreasingly friendly trade partners, and
failure to respond to environmental problems—of which he argues the last is most pivotal (while he recognizes that it does
not explain every societal failure—he notes the Soviet Union as a counterex- ample). In the final chapter, Diamond
enumerates 12 problems of resource deple- tion, pollution, and population growth facing modern societies. These
problems are gradual and cumulative: extended overuse eventually triggers decline or even a crash. The question is why
institutions do not respond earlier to head off this cri- sis, which Diamond attempts to diagnose in Chapter 14. He laments
that societies often forget past shortages or overlook gradual trends, and overconsume water, forests, and energy as if good
times will last. Like Hardin and Olson, he worries that individually rational behavior will thwart collective action. But as
Douglass North, Elinor Ostrom, Harold Demsetz, Gary Libecap, Robert Ellickson, Carol Rose, and others have shown, in
many cases these dire results do not occur, because institutions do develop to manage and prevent overuse. Dia- mond,
too, recognizes some success stories; yet his selective sample of cases of col- lapse, rather than a diverse array of both
failures and successes, prevents him from testing which variables influence the outcomes. Via signals of scarcity (such as
ris- ing prices), reciprocity, monitoring, and sanctions, markets and societies can suc- cessfully rein in overuse. The limits-
to-growth alarmists of the 1970s overstated fears of “overshoot and collapse” because they neglected the roles of price
signals, market responses, and institutional change. Even in large societies lacking close- knit reciprocity, and even in
cases of externalities not reflected in market prices, col- lective action to protect the national or global environment can
succeed, as in the Clean Air Act and the Montreal Protocol to phase out CFCs (despite Mancur Olson’s prediction that
collective goods will go unprovided, thus implying that either his theory is wrong or that these ostensibly public-interest
policies are actually cases of special-interest rent-seeking). The tragedy of the commons is mainly a serious threat where
markets and institutions fail to respond to signals of scarcity with incentives that redirect behavior appropriately.
Resources priced in markets, or governed by effective democratic institutions with secure tenure, externality taxes, or
tradeable quotas, are better shielded from depletion than are resources not priced in markets, such as clean air or
biodiversity, or governed by myopic, unre- sponsive or corrupt institutions, such as many forests and fisheries.
Security OHS Debate 2010
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The impetus toward security is premised on an ontological framework that commits itself to
order and control not only of conflict, but of life itself. This drive to order anything and
everything guarantees that the mass graves and nuclear holocausts of the 20th century will be
repeated.

Burke, senior lecturer at University of New South Whales, 07 [Anthony, “Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and
Reason”, theory & Event, 10, 2]
such an account of the nationalist ontology of war and security provides only a general insight into the
By itself,
perseverance of military violence as a core element of politics. It does not explain why so many policymakers think
military violence works. As I argued earlier, such an ontologyis married to a more rationalistic form of strategic thought
that claims to link violent means topolitical ends predictably and controllably , and which, by doing so, combines military
action and national purposes into a common --and thoroughly modern --horizon of certainty. Given Hegelil 's desre to decisively distiand control the dynamic potentials
of modernity in thought, it is helpful to focus on the modernity of this ontology --one that is modern in its adherence to modern scientific models of truth, reality and technological progress, and in its insistence on imposing images of scientific truth from the physical

one of the reasons Clausewitz was so

influential was that his 'ideas seemed to have chimed in with the rationalistic, scientific, and technological outlook
54
associated with the industrial revolution'. Set into this epistemological matrix, modern politics and government
engages in a sweeping project of mastery and control in which all of the world's resources - mineral, animal, physical,
human --are made part of a machinic process of which war andviolence are viewed as normal features . These are the
deeper claims and implications of Clausewitzian strategic reason. One of the most revealing contemporary examples
comes from the writings (and actions) of Henry Kissinger, a Harvard professor and later U.S. National Security Adviser and Secretary of State. He wrote during
the Vietnam war that after 1945 U.S. foreign policy was based 'on the assumption that technology plus managerial skills gave us the ability to reshape the international system
and to bring about domestic transformations in emerging countries'. This 'scientific revolution' had 'for all practical purposes, removed
technical limits from the exercise of power in foreign policy'. Kissinger's conviction was based not merely in his pride in the
55

vast military and bureaucratic apparatus of the United States, but in a particular epistemology (theory of knowledge). Kissinger asserted that the
West is 'deeply committed to the notion that the real world is external to the observer, that knowledge consists of
recording and classifying data --the more accurately the better'. This, he claimed, has since the Renaissance set the West apart from an
'undeveloped' world that contains 'cultures that have escaped the early impact of Newtonian thinking' and remain wedded to the 'essentially pre-Newtonian view that the real
56
world is almost entirely internal to the observer'. · At the same time, Kissinger's hubris and hunger for control was beset by a corrosive
anxiety: that, in an era of nuclear weapons proliferation and constant military modernisation, of
geopoliticalstalemate in Vietnam, and the emergence and militancy of new post-colonial states, order and mastery
were harder to define and impose. He worried over the way 'military bipolarity' between the superpowers had
'encouraged political multipolarity', which 'does not guarantee stability . Rigidity is diminished, but so is manageability...equilibrium is
difficult to achieve among states widely divergent in values, goals, expectations and previous experience' (emphasis added). He mourned that 'the greatest
57
need of the contemporary international system is an agreed concept of order'. Here were the driving obsessions of
themodern rational statesman based around a hunger for stasis and certainty that would entrench U.S. hegemony:
For the two decades after 1945, our international activities were based on theassumption that technology plus
managerial skills gave us the ability to reshape the international system and to bring about domestic
transformations in "emerging countries". This direct "operational" concept of international order has proved too simple. Political multipolarity makes it
impossible to impose an American design. Our deepest challenge will be to evoke the creativity of a pluralistic world, to base order on political multipolarity even though
58
overwhelming military strength will remain with the two superpowers. Kissinger's statement revealed that such cravings for orderand
certainty continually confront chaos, resistance and uncertainty: clay that won't be worked, flesh that will not yield,
enemies that refuse to surrender . This is one of the most powerfullessons of the Indochina wars, which were to
continue in a phenomenally destructive fashionfor six years after Kissinger wrote these words. Yet as his sinister, Orwellian
exhortation to 'evoke the creativity of a pluralistic world' demonstrated, Kissinger's hubris was undiminished. This is a vicious, historic
irony: adesire to control nature, technology, society and human beings that is continually frustrated, but
neverabandoned or rethought. By 1968 U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the rationalist policymaker parexcellence,
had already decided that U.S. power and technology could not prevail in Vietnam; Nixon and Kissinger's refusal to
accept this conclusion, to abandon their Cartesian illusions, was to condemn hundreds of thousands more to die in Indochina and the
59
people of Cambodia to two more decades of horror and misery. In 2003 there would be a powerful sense of déja vu as another Republican
Administration crowned more than decade of failed and destructive policy on Iraq with a deeply controversial and divisive war to
remove Saddam Hussein from power. In this struggle with thelessons of Vietnam, revolutionary resistance, and rapid geopolitical
transformation, we are witness toan enduring political and cultural theme: of a craving for order, control and
Security OHS Debate 2010
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certainty in the face ofcontinual uncertainty. Closely related to this anxiety was the way that Kissinger's thinking -- and that of
McNamara and earlier imperialists like the British Governor of Egypt Cromer -- was embedded in instrumental images of technology and the
machine: the machine as both a tool of power and an image of social and political order . In his essay 'The Government of Subject
Races' Cromer envisaged effective imperial rule --over numerous societies and billions of human beings --as best achieved by a central authority working 'to ensure the
60
harmonious working of the different parts of the machine'. Kissinger analogously invoked the virtues of 'equilibrium', 'manageability'
and 'stability' yet, writing some six decades later, was anxious thattechnological progress no longer brought
untroubled control: the Westernising 'spread of technologyand its associated rationality...does not inevitably
61
produce a similar concept of reality'. We sense the rational policymaker's frustrated desire : the world is supposed
to work like a machine, ordered by aform of power and governmental reason which deploys machines and whose
desires and processesare meant to run along ordered, rational lines like a machine. Kissinger's desire was little different from that of
Cromer who, wrote Edward Said: ...envisions a seat of power in the West and radiating out from it towards the East a
greatembracing machine, sustaining the central authority yet commanded by it. What the machine's branches feed into it from the
East --human material, material wealth, knowledge, what have you --is processed by the machine, then converted into more power...the immediate translation of mere
62
Oriental matter into useful substance. This desire for order in the shadow of chaos and uncertainty --theconstant war with an
intractable and volatile matter --has deep roots in modern thought, and was a major impetus to the development of
technological reason and its supporting theories of knowledge. As Kissinger's claims about the West's Newtonian
desire for the 'accurate' gathering and classification of 'data' suggest, modern strategy, foreign policy and Realpolitik
have been thrust deep into theapparently stable soil of natural science, in the hope of finding immovable and
unchallengeable roots there. While this process has origins in ancient Judaic and Greek thought, it crystallised in philosophical terms most powerfully during
and after the Renaissance. The key figures in this process were Francis Bacon, Galileo, Isaac Newton, and René Descartes, who all combined a hunger for political and
Bacon sought to create certainty and order, and with
ontological certainty, a positivist epistemology and a naïve faith in the goodness of invention.
it a new human power over the world, through a new empirical methodology based on a harmonious combination of
experiment, the senses and the understanding . With this method, he argued, we can 'derive hope from a purer alliance of the faculties (the experimental
63
and rational) than has yet been attempted'. In a similar move, Descartes sought to conjure certainty from uncertainty through the application of a new method that moved
progressively out from a few basic certainties (the existence of God, the certitude of individual consciousness and a divinely granted faculty of judgement) in a search for pure
fixed truths. Mathematics formed the ideal image of this method, with its strict logical reasoning, its quantifiable results and its uncanny insights into the hidden structure of
64
the cosmos. Earlier, Galileo had argued that scientists should privilege 'objective', quantifiable qualities over 'merely perceptible' ones; that 'only by means of an exclusively
65
quantitative analysis could science attain certain knowledge of the world'. Such doctrines of mathematically verifiable truth were to have powerful echoes in the 20th
Century, in the ascendancy of systemsanalysis, game theory, cybernetics and computing in defense policy and strategic decisions, and in the awesome scientific breakthroughs
of nuclear physics,which unlocked the innermost secrets of matter and energy and applied the most advanced applications of mathematics and computing to create the atomic
bomb. Yet this new scientific power was marked by a terrible irony: as even Morgenthau understood, the control over matter afforded by the science could never be translated
66
into the control of the weapons themselves, into political utility and rational strategy. Bacon thought of the new scientific method not merely as way of achieving a purer
access to truth and epistemological certainty, but as liberating a new power that would enable the creation of a new kind of Man. He opened the Novum Organum with the
statement that 'knowledge and human power are synonymous', and later wrote of his 'determination...to lay a firmer foundation, and extend to a greater distance the
67
boundaries of human power and dignity'. In a revealing and highly negative comparison between 'men's lives in the most polished countries of Europe and in any wild and
barbarous region of the new Indies' --one that echoes in advance Kissinger's distinction between post-and preNewtonian cultures -- Bacon
set out what was at
stake in the advancement of empirical science: anyonemaking this comparison, he remarked, 'will think it so great,
that man may be said to be a god unto 68 man'.We may be forgiven for blinking, but in Bacon's thought 'man' was indeed in the process of stealing a new
fire from the heavens and seizing God's power over the world for itself. Not only would the new empirical science lead to 'an improvement of mankind's estate, and an increase
in their power over nature', but would reverse the primordial humiliation of the Fall of Adam: For man, by the fall, lost at once his state of innocence, and his empire over
creation, both of which can be partially recovered even in this life, the first by religion and faith, the second by the arts and sciences. For creation did not become entirely and
utterly rebellious by the curse, but in consequence of the Divine decree, 'in the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread'; she is now compelled by our labours (not assuredly by
There is a breathtaking, world creating hubris in this statement
69
our disputes or magical ceremonies) at length to afford mankind in some degree his bread...
--one that, in many ways, came to characterise western modernity itself, and which is easily recognisable in a
generation of modern technocrats like Kissinger. The Fall of Adam was the Judeo-Christian West's primal creation
myth, one that marked humankind as flawed andhumbled before God, condemned to hardship and ambivalence.
Bacon forecast here a return to Eden,but one of man's own making. This truly was the death of God, of putting man
into God's place, and nopious appeals to the continuity or guidance of faith could disguise the awesome
epistemologicalviolence which now subordinated creation to man . Bacon indeed argued that inventions are 'new creations and imitations of
divine works'. As such, there is nothing but good in science: 'the introduction of great inventions is the most distinguished of human actions...inventions are a blessing and a
70
benefit without injuring or afflicting any'. And what would be mankind's 'bread', the rewards of its new 'empire over creation'? If
Security OHS Debate 2010
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the new method and invention brought modern medicine, social welfare, sanitation,communications, education and
comfort, it also enabled the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust and two world wars; napalm, the B52, the hydrogen
bomb, the Kalashnikov rifle and military strategy. Indeedsome of the 20th Century's most far-reaching inventions
--radar, television, rocketry, computing, communications, jet aircraft, the Internet -- would be the product of drives for national security and
militarisation. Even the inventions Baconthought so marvellous and transformative -- printing, gunpowder and the compass
--brought in their wake upheavaland tragedy: printing, dogma and bureaucracy; gunpowder, the rifle and the
artillery battery; navigation,slavery and the genocide of indigenous peoples . In short, the legacy of the new empirical
science would beambivalence as much as certainty; degradation as much as enlightenment; the destruction of nature
asmuch as its utilisation. Doubts and Fears: Technology as Ontology If Bacon could not reasonably be expected toforesee many of
these developments, the idea that scientific and technological progress could bedestructive did occur to him.
However it was an anxiety he summarily dismissed: . ..let none be alarmed at the objection of the arts and sciences becoming depraved to malevolent
or luxurious purposes and the like, for the same can be said of every worldly good; talent, courage, strength, beauty, riches, light itself...Only let mankind regain their rights
over nature, assigned to them by the gift of God, and obtain that power, whose 71 exercise will be governed by right reason and true [Link] the mid-Twentieth Century,
after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, such fears could no longer be so easily wished away, as the physicist and

scientific director of the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer recognised. He said in a 1947 lecture: We felt a particularly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for
supporting and in the end in large measure achieving the realization of atomic weapons...In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no over-statement can
72
quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge they cannot lose. Adam had fallen once more, but into a world which refused to
acknowledge its renewed intimacy with contingency and evil. Man's empire over creation --his discovery of the innermost secrets
of matter and energy, of the fires that fuelled the stars -- had not 'enhanced human power and dignity' as Bacon claimed, but instead brought
destruction and horror. Scientific powers that had been consciously applied in the defence of life and in the hope of its betterment now threatened
its total and absolute destruction. This would not preventa legion of scientists, soldiers and national security
policymakers later attempting to apply Bacon's faith in invention and Descartes' faith in mathematics to make of the
Bomb a rational weapon. Oppenheimer--who resolutely opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb
--understood what the strategistscould not: that the weapons resisted control, resisted utility, that 'with the release
73
of atomic energy quite revolutionary changes had occurred in the techniques of warfare' . Yet Bacon's legacy, one deeply
74
imprinted on the strategists, was his view that truth and utility are 'perfectly identical'. In 1947 Oppenheimer had clung to the hope that 'knowledge is good...it seems hard to
live any other way than thinking it was better to know something than not to know it; and the more you know, the better'; by 1960 he felt that 'terror attaches to new 75
knowledge. It has an unmooring quality; it finds men unprepared to deal with it.'Martin Heidegger questioned this mapping of
naturalscience onto the social world in his essays on technology --which, as 'machine', has been so
crucial to modern strategic and geopolitical thought as an image of perfect function and order and a
powerful toolof intervention. He commented that, given that modern technology 'employs exact
76
physical science...the deceptive illusion arises that modern technology is applied physical science'.
Yet as the essays and speeches of Oppenheimer attest, technology and its relation to science, society and war cannot be reduced to a
noiseless series oftranslations of science for politics, knowledge for force, or force for good. Instead,
Oppenheimer saw aprocess frustrated by roadblocks and ruptured by irony; in his view there was no
smooth, unproblematictranslation of scientific truth into social truth, and technology was not its
vehicle. Rather his comments raise profound and painful ethical questions that resonate with terror
and uncertainty. Yet this has not prevented technology becoming a potent object of desire, not merely as an instrument of power but as a promise and conduit of
certainty itself. In the minds of too many rational soldiers, strategists and policymakers, technology brings with it the
truth of its enablingscience and spreads it over the world. It turns epistemological certainty into political certainty; it
turnscontrol over 'facts' into control over the earth. Heidegger's insights into this phenomena I find especially telling and disturbing --because they
underline the ontological force of the instrumental view of politics. In The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger's striking argument was that in
the modernising West technology is not merely a tool, a 'means to an end'. Rather technology has become a
governing image of the modern universe, one that has come to order, limit and define human existence as a
'calculable coherence of forces' and a 'standing reserve' of energy . Heidegger wrote: 'the threat to man does not come in
the first instance from the potentially lethal machinesand apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already
77
affected man in his essence.' This process Heidegger calls 'Enframing' and through it the scientific mind demands that 'nature reports itself in some
way or other that is identifiable through calculation and remains orderable as a system ofinformation'. Man is not a
being who makes and uses machines as means , choosing and limiting their impact on the world for his ends; rather man has imagined
the world as a machine and humanity everywhere becomestrapped within its logic. Man, he writes, 'comes to the very
Security OHS Debate 2010
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brink of a precipitous fall...where he himself willhave to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile Man, precisely as
78
the one so threatened, exaltshimself to the posture of lord of the earth.' Technological man not only becomes the name for a projectof
lordship and mastery over the earth, but incorporates humanity within this project as a calculableresource. In strategy, warfare and geopolitics human bodies, actions and
aspirations are caught,transformed and perverted by such calculating, enframing reason: human lives are reduced to tools,obstacles, useful or obstinate matter
Security OHS Debate 2010
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Were they to succeed, the measures of security championed by the affirmative would manage to
protect life only by suppressing some profoundly valuable part of it. Difference, Uncertainty,
and Change are important parts of what makes life beautiful. Security is a hostile effort to
eradicate these paradoxes in favor of knowledge and predictability. This results in resentment
toward a domesticated life hardly worth living.
Der-Derian 93 (James, Professor of IR and political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst,
“The Value of Security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche and Baudrillard”, The Political Subject of Violence, ed. David
Campbell and Michael Dillon, Page 101-105)
One must begin with Nietzsche's idea of the will to power, which he clearly believed to be prior to and generative of all considerations of security. In Beyond Good and Evil ,
"Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-
he emphatically establishes the primacy of the will to power:
preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its
strength--life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the most frequent results ." 34 The will to
power, then, should not be confused with a Hobbesian perpetual desire for power. It can, in its negative form,
produce a reactive and resentful longing for only power, leading, in Nietzsche's view, to a triumph of nihilism.
But Nietzsche refers to a positive will to power, an active and affective force of becoming, from which values
and meanings--including self-preservation--are produced which affirm life. Conventions of security act to
suppress rather than confront the fears endemic to life, for ". . . life itself is essentially appropriation, injury,
overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one's own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation--but why should one
is a
always use those words in which slanderous intent has been imprinted for ages." 35 Elsewhere Nietzsche establishes the pervasiveness of agonism in life: "life
consequence of war, society itself a means to war." 36 But the denial of this permanent condition , the effort to
disguise it with a consensual rationality or to hide from it with a fictional sovereignty, are all effects of this
suppression of fear. The desire for security is manifested as a collective resentment of difference --that which is
not us, not certain, not predictable. Complicit with a negative will to power is the fear-driven desire for
protection from the unknown. Unlike the positive will to power, which produces an aesthetic affirmation of
difference, the search for truth produces a truncated life which conforms to the rationally knowable, to the
causally sustainable. In The Gay Science , Nietzsche asks of the reader: "Look, isn't our need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover
everything strange, unusual, and questionable, something that no longer disturbs us? Is it not the instinct of fear that bids us to know? And is the jubilation of those who obtain
The fear of the unknown and the desire for certainty combine
knowledge not the jubilation over the restoration of a sense of security?" 37
to produce a domesticated life, in which causality and rationality become the highest sign of a sovereign self,
the surest protection against contingent forces. The fear of fate assures a belief that everything reasonable is
true, and everything true, reasonable. In short, the security imperative produces, and is sustained by, the
strategies of knowledge which seek to explain it. Nietzsche elucidates the nature of this generative relationship in The Twilight of the Idols : The
causal instinct is thus conditional upon, and excited by, the feeling of fear. The "why?" shall, if at all possible, not give the cause for its own sake so much as for a particular
kind of cause --a cause that is comforting, liberating and relieving. . . .That which is new and strange and has not been experienced
before, is excluded as a cause. Thus one not only searches for some kind of explanation, to serve as a cause, but
for a particularly selected and preferred kind of explanation--that which most quickly and frequently abolished
the feeling of the strange, new and hitherto unexperienced: the most habitual explanations. 38 A safe life
requires safe truths. The strange and the alien remain unexamined, the unknown becomes identified as evil,
and evil provokes hostility--recycling the desire for security. The "influence of timidity," as Nietzsche puts it,
creates a people who are willing to subordinate affirmative values to the "necessities" of security: "they fear change,
transitoriness: this expresses a straitened soul, full of mistrust and evil experiences." 39 The unknowable which cannot be contained by force
or explained by reason is relegated to the off-world. "Trust," the "good," and other common values come to rely
upon an "artificial strength": "the feeling of security such as the Christian possesses; he feels strong in being
able to trust, to be patient and composed: he owes this artificial strength to the illusion of being protected by a
god." 40 For Nietzsche, of course, only a false sense of security can come from false gods: "Morality and
religion belong altogether to the psychology of error : in every single case, cause and effect are confused; or
truth is confused with the effects of believing something to be true; or a state of consciousness is confused with
its causes." 41 Nietzsche's interpretation of the origins of religion can shed some light on this paradoxical origin and transvaluation of security. In The Genealogy of
Morals , Nietzsche sees religion arising from a sense of fear and indebtedness to one's ancestors: The conviction reigns that it is only through the sacrifices and
accomplishments of the ancestors that the tribe exists --and that one has to pay them back with sacrifices and accomplishments: one thus recognizes a debt that constantly
Sacrifices,
grows greater, since these forebears never cease, in their continued existence as powerful spirits, to accord the tribe new advantages and new strength. 42
honors, obedience are given but it is never enough, for The ancestors of the most powerful tribes are bound
eventually to grow to monstrous dimensions through the imagination of growing fear and to recede into the
darkness of the divinely uncanny and unimaginable : in the end the ancestor must necessarily be transfigured into a god . 43 As the ancestor's
debt becomes embedded in institutions, the community takes on the role of creditor. Nietzsche mocks this originary, Hobbesian moment: to rely upon an "artificial strength":
"the feeling One lives in a community, one enjoys the advantages of communality (oh what advantages! we sometimes underrate them today), one dwells protected, cared for,
in peace and trustfulness, without fear of certain injuries and hostile acts to which the man outside , the "man without peace," is exposed . . . since one has bound and pledged
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oneself to the community precisely with a view to injury and hostile acts. 44 The establishment of the community is dependent upon ,
indeed it feeds upon, this fear of being left outside. As the castle wall is replaced by written treaty, however, and
distant gods by temporal sovereigns, the martial skills and spiritual virtues of the noble warrior are slowly
debased and dissimulated. The subject of the individual will to power becomes the object of a collective
resentment. The result? The fear of the external other is transvalued into the "love of the neighbor" quoted in
the opening of this section, and the perpetuation of community is assured through the internalization and
legitimation of a fear that lost its original source long ago. This powerful nexus of fear, of external and internal otherness, generates the
values which uphold the security imperative. Indeed, Nietzsche locates the genealogy of even individual rights, such as freedom, in the calculus of maintaining security: - My
rights - are that part of my power which others not merely conceded me, but which they wish me to preserve. How do these others arrive at that? First: through their prudence
and fear and caution: whether in that they expect something similar from us in return (protection of their rights); or in that they consider that a struggle with us would be
perilous or to no purpose; or in that they see in any diminution of our force a disadvantage to themselves, since we would then be unsuited to forming an alliance with them in
The point of Nietzsche's critical genealogy is to show that the
opposition to a hostile third power. Then : by donation and cession. 45
perilous conditions that created the security imperative--and the western metaphysics that perpetuate it--have
diminished if not disappeared; yet, the fear of life persists: "Our century denies this perilousness, and does so
with a good conscience: and yet it continues to drag along with it the old habits of Christian security, Christian
enjoyment, recreation and evaluation." 46 Nietzsche's worry is that the collective reaction against older, more
primal fears has created an even worse danger: the tyranny of the herd, the lowering of man, the apathy of the
last man which controls through conformity and rules through passivity. The security of the sovereign, rational
self and state comes at the cost of ambiguity, uncertainty, paradox--all that makes a free life worthwhile.
Nietzsche's lament for this lost life is captured at the end of Daybreak in a series of rhetorical questions: Of future virtues--How comes it that the more comprehensible the
world has grown the more solemnities of every kind have decreased? Is it that fear was so much the basic element of that reverence which overcame us in the presence of
everything unknown and mysterious and taught us to fall down before the incomprehensible and plead for mercy? And has the world not lost some of its charm for us because
we have grown less fearful? With the diminution of our fearfulness has our own dignity and solemnity, our own fearsomeness , not also diminished? 47 It is of course in
Nietzsche's lament, in his deepest pessimism for the last man, that one finds the celebration of the overman as both symptom and harbinger of a more free-spirited yet
fearsome age. Dismissive of utopian engineering, Nietzsche
never suggests how he would restructure society; he looks forward
only so far as to sight the emergence of "new philosophers" (such as himself?) who would restore a reverence
for fear and reevaluate the security imperative. Nietzsche does, however, go back to a pre-Christian, pre-
Socratic era to find the exemplars for a new kind of security. In The Genealogy of Morals , he holds up Pericles
as an example, for lauding the Athenians for their "rhathymia "--a term that incorporates the notion of
"indifference to and contempt for security." 48 It is perhaps too much to expect Nietzsche's message to
resonate in late modern times, to expect, at the very time when conditions seem most uncertain and
unpredictable, that people would treat fear as a stimulus for improvement rather than cause for retrenchment.
Yet Nietzsche would clearly see these as opportune times, when fear could be willfully asserted as a force for the
affirmation of difference, rather than canalized into a cautious identity constructed from the calculation of risks
and benefits
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Our alternative is to renounce the affirmative’s violent and futile search for security in favor of
affirming an insecure life. Precisely the defining characteristic of human being is its
vulnerability to Otherness. Rather than responding to this with a fear that calcifies into a
defensive disposition against difference, we should celebrate our condition in order to seek out
an ethical politics of work on the Self. This model of responsibility is the only ontologically
appropriate response to the dangers that we inevitably face, whereas the administrative politics
of the affirmative damn us to race from one threatening scenario to another, militarizing all of
being in a fruitless search for sovereignty and certainty.

Dillon 96 (Michael, professor of politics and international relations at University of Lancaster “The Politics of
Security: Toward a Political Science of Continental Philosophy,” pg. 137-143)
This, too, was the world of the polis—as it was part constituted, portrayed and explored, through tragedy—where life was lived in truth as aletheia. If we, therefore, ask
The
what political difference the ontological difference makes, which many commentators, like Richard Rorty for example, effectively do, the answer is the tragic.31
tragic is the ontological difference first experienced —not thought as such—as the possibility and practice of a
mortal politics. ‘For there to be tragic action’ , a recent classic study of tragedy concluded, ‘ it is necessary that a concept of
human nature with its own characteristics should have already emerged and that the human and divine
spheres should have become sufficiently distinct from each other for them to stand in opposition; yet at the
same time they must continue to appear as inseparable .’32 In consequence, the tragic sense of responsibility makes its appearance at the
point when, in human action, a place is given to internal debate on the part of the subject [sic], to intention and premeditation, but when this human action has still not
The true domain of tragedy lies in that border zone where
acquired enough consistency and autonomy to be entirely self-sufficient.
human actions are hinged together with the divine powers, where—unknown to the agent— they derive
their true meaning by becoming an integral part of an order that is beyond man and that eludes him .33 138
The political and the tragic (Human action never, of course, attains that consistency and autonomy which would make it self-sufficient, its very freedom to act and the
character of its actions—which always, more or less unpredictably, set things in train—deny it this. The realm of the gods was also the Greek way of pointing towards,
All this is directly related in addition, of course,
and expressing the divinity of, the beyond of mortality to which limited mortality is nonetheless linked.)
to the question of security and insecurity, and to the radical ambiguity of (in)security as well. For within tragedy it becomes
clear that it is not simply a question of insecure human being seeking security . Merely to see a recoil back
and forth between security and insecurity is to miss the point altogether, because it misses something
fundamental about human being itself which tragedy seeks to depict and celebrate . It is, therefore, to miss something
which Martha Nussbaum explored so brilliantly that it is worth quoting her conclusion at length. ‘ There is a certain valuable quality in social
virtue that is lost when social virtue is removed from the domain of uncontrolled happenings’ , she writes: There
is no courage without the risk of death or of serious damage ; no true love of city that does not say (with Alcibiades), ‘Love of city is
what I do not feel when I am wronged’; no true commitment to justice that exempts its own privileges from scrutiny. In sum: This willingness to
embrace something that is in the world and subject to its risks is, in fact, the virtue of the Euripidean child,
whose love is directed at the world itself, including its dangers. The generous looks of such a child go
straight to the world with love and openness; they do not focus upon the safe and the eternal, or demand
these as conditions of their love…any life that devoted itself entirely to safe activities would be, for a
human being, impoverished. The Hecuba [for example] does not conceal from us the seductive dangers of romanticising risk itself…. [But] there
are certain risks—including, here, the risk of becoming unable to risk—that we cannot close off without a
loss in human value, suspended as we are between beast and god, with a kind of beauty available to
neither.34 Being human being is tragic, and so we are (in)secure. That anxiety which is experienced in the
duality of security and insecurity is the freedom —the very capacity to respond and so be responsible—of
the human condition. In the tragic we not only find that we have been here before, but also that, in a sense,
we have never truly been elsewhere because there is no escape from where we are at . This juncture of the
duality of human-ness that gives rise to the political and the democratic is what tragedy sought to speak
about and provide an education in; for ‘tragedy was born when myth began to be assessed from the citizen
point of view’.35 That is why the recovery of the political is not only something which must always already
take place in the context of the specific, historical circumstances of human being—currently labelled ‘Modernity’—it is
also why that recovery must take place with, in and through the movement of democratic thought. Hence, while
‘[f]rom a political point of view, the questioning of modernity means the questioning of democracy’.36 Democracy must also always remain a
form of questioning which constantly recalls the political to mind and seeks to make space for it in the
obligatory freedom of human being. From within the polis the tragic, therefore, called into question the very demarcations that constituted it. The
drama was a showing whose effect was to educate and individuate ‘everyman’ precisely because it derived its source material from the social thought peculiar to the
fifth-century city, with all the tensions and contradictions that appear in it when the advent of law and the constitution of political life place in question the old religious
and moral traditional values.37 When
the ‘hero’ and the polis are thus publicly brought into question in Greek tragedy
‘it is the individual Greek in the audience who discovers himself to be a problem in and through the
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presentation of the tragic drama’.38 Nothing less than human being’s civilising capacity and power is at issue in the tragic. 39 But because
the tragic recognises Otherness to be immanent, as well as radical, it is compelled to find ways of
responding to it with agonistic respect. This sets the question of the political aside from all those ,
conventionally studied in terms of the (inter)national politics of security, of the structures, institutions,
rationalities and technologies of our contemporary regimes of power and practices of rule .40 In particular, it sets
the question aside from the intense and pervasive cult of the subject which constitutes the (inter)national
politics of Modernity, as such. While the cult of the subject seems to have arisen as a liberatory move within the dissolution of the Christian
imaginary, it necessarily called into effect, and thereby entered into an intimate alliance with, the rationalising
and reifying practices of rule of which ‘we’ are the inheritors . This was no mere accident . Neither was it a coincidence,
nor the unfortunate pathology of an otherwise admirable development. It was integral and essential to what was a radical mutation
in the symbolic order, and intensification of the logic of ontotheology, by which the very staging and sense of the political
was fundamentally re-ordered. (Inter)national political Modernity, as the legatee of that mutation, is, itself, already mutating—through the
rationalising, technologising, globalising velocity of its very own representational practices and dynamics—just as radically as the times which engendered it. That
bequest from the dissolution of the Christian world is, in consequence of the very logics at work within it, rapidly fashioning a radically different political bequest to ‘us’.
The (inter)national politics of Modernity must, therefore, become concerned not with living-out but with
out-living the modern. Out-living it through recalling and affirming, for example, the continuous disclosure of
the excess of human (and other) being over appearance as this arises within and against the foreclosures
threatened by the web of Modernity’s technologising determinations . Such is a routine and mundane as
well as a 140 The political and the tragic monumental task; though the mundane, for many in it, is often itself a monumental achievement. The need
to engage in a contest for the political does not, therefore, arise somewhere else. Nor does it operate in
some other time or place yet to come from out of the past or out of the future. It always already exists;
here, now, for the future. Tragedy, therefore, does not have to invent its characters or plots. It finds them
already there in the human condition. Within the space, framework and interpretive dynamics of the tragic
consciousness, human being is not represented as a model — however defined and determined— nor even as a problem,
but as an excessive, abundant, temporal way of being. It is , therefore, a mortal riddle, never fully to be
decoded, precisely because it is temporal; because being temporal it knows not from whence it came, and because being temporal it projects, that is to say, takesup its freedom. Tragedy, therefore, always has history as its
material. But history here is not history in the historiographical sense of a series of facts and events more or less statically present in a once-present. It is history in the fundamental sense in which human being is temporal. ‘Dasein does
not first become historical in repetition’, Heidegger notes in Being and Time, ‘but because it is historical as temporal, it can take itself over in its history by repeating’.41 This historical sensibility, which is less ‘historical’ in the traditional
sense and more radically temporal, recognises that what has taken place always already shapes and limits what comes to meet us, and how we are disposed to meet it; including also how we meet the ‘past’. It thus recognises more than
that we have a past and that that past is of antiquarian or independent interest to us. Rather, it recalls that, because of time, we are always already historical, shaped by the way the past unfolds through us as we project forward; and that
the past is, therefore, always an issue for us in the present as we practise that projecting forward there in realising our potentiality-for-being. In sum, history is human being taking-up what it undergoes—the process, as Heidegger puts
it, of its ‘having its being to be’—and therefore always arising anew in the process. Herein lies a fundamental problem, however, one that further illustrates the bind that we are in. Because tragedy is Greek, and we are not, strictly
speaking we need a new name and new practices for that to which I have been using the tragic to draw attention. This lack is the gap that contemporary political thought has yet to bridge. That I have both to affirm and yet reject the
tragic illustrates how ‘we’ are still suspended in the web of the political economy of the tradition of the ‘West’; still ensnared in that historical, and historically specific, manifold problematic of identity which results in recurring cults of
the subject (nation, people, state, class). ‘We’ shall not discover and elaborate for ourselves a sense of the political and of the tragic, therefore, as if we could, by seeking simply to readopt the Greek polis and Greek tragedy. Instead we
can only do so by interrogating them for what they say about the very questions of origination and derivation themselves. The tragic may take history as its material, but Greek history is not (or not simply) our history, and Greek tragedy
is not our tragedy. For one thing, metaphysics—and for another the fate of the Judeo-Christian God—intervene The political and the tragic 141 between then and now. In short, we lack a political genre to give single voice to the
ineradicable duality of the mortal life—simultaneously necessitous and free— of human being as we encounter it in our present.42 That lack is itself something which distinguishes us from the Greeks and is integral to our tragedy; part
of which is the loss of the tragic sensibility itself. Whereas in classical tragedy ‘[t]he nature of tragic action seems…to be defined by the simultaneous presence of a “self” and something greater that is divine at work at the core of the
decision and creating a constant tension between the two opposed poles’,43 in a way that seems powerfully to recall the ontological difference, it also forcefully reminds us that the ontological difference is a contemporary philosophical
expression. The Greek understanding of reverence and of the divine is sufficient to indicate that the ontological difference was not experienced and thought by the Greeks in such terms. With the end of philosophy, therefore, arises not

Tragedy nonetheless
simply the death of God, but the depiction and exploration of the tragic—the mortal life of human being which exists in virtue of the very difference it bears within itself—without gods.44

constitutes the only powerful voice we currently possess for recalling the political difference which the
ontological difference makes; as the mounting storm of technologising normalisation and representative-
calculative thought threatens to efface any re-collection of it, thereby operating always to foreclose the
opening of the political. While the tragic invokes ‘a transformed relation to the essence of the old’45 which asserts itself with such new vigour in our times,
however, tragedy promises neither a new language, nor a novel set of assertive or prescriptive device s. Instead,
through its very sensibility to human being, tragedy operates provocatively and evocatively to recall the
tragic character of our mortal being to us despite and against the inroads which technology is making into
it. Hence it remains an indispensable resource . Mortal being, the condition of the condition known as tragic, is tragic not because we die or
because we are fated and miserable, therefore, but because being temporal we live by virtue of death and are consequently always already differentiated, open and
excessive creatures indebted to an excess that we can never master: Beings that know themselves to be and yet also to be had by, and so differ from, Being which they
[Link] to be some-thing, by the gratuitous gift of life itself, but not determined to be one thing or
another, we are not just alive and not just dead (even, in a sense, when dead). We are always something more than
either of them because we are always already both—living and dying —at the same time. The tragic,
therefore, discloses an insight into existence as the mortality which is just this, a continuous adventure of
freedom in an ethical frontier constituted by the opening of the ontological difference which constantly
challenges us to decide how we should find the time and place to dwell freely in the freedom of our being ,
which is a being we share in common; with ourselves, each other, and the earth itself .46 There, too, in the opaque
borderlands of this difference, knowledge and power constantly collide in a way that tragedy recognises: because there is no secure 142 The political and the
tragic place in the tragic consciousnes s for a stable hierarchy of types of knowledge; for the architectonics of power; or for the
contract they seek to conclude. Equally foreign to it is the enframing of the ineradicable duality of human being in terms of the endless either/ors of metaphysical
thought. More even than this, because there is nothing which guarantees that the gift of life is benign, the tragic entertains the possibility of a fundamental indifference,
the freedom of being human is the challenge,
or even antagonism, between truth and humanity and explores that very condition;
regularly evaded in ways too numerous to catalogue, of course, to discover ways of resolving the freedom of
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its (in)security. Hence the ‘truth’ of tragedy directly conflicts with that of philosophical truth; logic is confounded in the tragic precisely because it affirms the a-
logicality of the duality of the human condition. The tragic effects what Krell would call a frontal ontology on the political,47 exploring being as it experiences the
experiencing of the ontological difference in its very own experience; out-facing, through its tropes and topologies, the vaunted ontic realism of our (inter)national
politics of security. Tragedy thereby shifts the political into a different dimension of space, time and truth; where time has many cadences and the disclosive quality of
truth retains a fundamentally obscure, divided and errant quality which finds its expression in many voices and is a challenge to mortal being itself. This is a dimension
that specifically does not function according to the polarities of logic, the demands of adequation, and the policing impulse of a love that requires a why. Tragedy
abounds, instead, in the boundary or limit; where limit is, however, liminality, the very occasioning of something.48 Its world is a world of ambiguity and multiple
disclosure where the validity or invalidity of a thesis is ultimately not the point. It is one where double arguments and duality proliferate and where differences
encounter and counter, rather than simply negate, one another as they describe the struggle of being. Instead of being preoccupied with the formulation of rules that tell
us what we must do, tragedy is concerned with depicting the predicament of the Being of a being which lives life in appreciation of the agonal freedom of the ontological
[Link] the tragic consciousness the very formulas, norms and boundaries employed to establish order
are all themselves at issue. The very clarity of the world and the meaning of events is hidden behind a foreground which none of the characters can
penetrate with certainty. But the figure of the so-called tragic ‘hero’—breaking the laws that give order, unsecuring
what secures, lacking stability of place and identity—is not simply the exceptional figure. Rather it is the
figure that recalls the exceptional character of mortal being itself. Exhibiting a capacity for greatness,
prone to excess, the tragic ‘hero’ is a figuration of the way in which for all human beings, their very being-
ness, that is to say what it is to be human , has continuously to be recovered and reconstructed in ever
changing circumstances. Where, classically, the ‘hero’ confronts the extreme polarities of mortal life and is the very device ‘which springs the safe
fastenings which hold together our logical, ordered world’,49 a heightened sense of the political—as the very mobile relationality
of human being (capacity to respond to its being which is always and The political and the tragic 143 everywhere,
necessarily, a being-in-common with others in Otherness in virtue of the fact that Otherness inheres within
itself) in relation to the circumstances in which it finds itself—nonetheless arises . Precisely because the
action and the character are a-political (city-less, cut off from the city, inhabiting and disrupting its boundaries ) a sense of the
political, as a movement in which the critical liminality of boundaries is experienced and respected to
facilitate the disclosure of human being itself, is made available : a sensibility to precisely this arises—polis, not stasis. Thus
tragedy does not promise a release from the agonism integral to the freedom of human being, or from the
violence which it always threatens. How could anything? It explores the prospects, instead, for practising
life-affirming approaches to it. Danger, therefore, stalks the tragic consciousness as well; a special danger these days, in all sorts of ways, but especially
since the miasma of Fascism has threatened profoundly to compromise the truth of the tragic itself, fundamentally impairing our capacity to recover a sense of it
appropriate to our condition. Yet, the tragic ultimately indicts rather than invites Fascism. First, because for the tragic the
limit is liminality (creativeness) rather than terminality (the final solution). Second, however much it may have arisen in a
time when the Greeks differentiated themselves from Barbarians, because tragedy does notlocate the boundary between the civilised
and the savage on the frontiers of society—at the limits of the inhabited/civilised world so that the
immanent alterity of the human condition can then be dealt with by projecting it out and onto some
outside—‘but brings it within the polis itself, within the very hearts of its rulers and citizens’,50 it thereby
exposes how Fascism’s self-immolative rage against others and Otherness
is ultimately a self-loathing aimed at our very articulatedness. Possessing yet also being possessed by existence, creative and yet created, that much that I did not
make goes towards making me whatever I shall be praised or blamed for being; that I must constantly choose among competing and apparently incommensurable goods and that circumstances may force me to a position in which I
cannot help being false to something or doing some wrong; that an event that simply happens to me may, without my consent, alter my life; that it is equally problematic to entrust one’s good to friends, lovers, or country and to try to
have a good life without them—all these I take to be not just the material of tragedy, but everyday facts of lived practical reason. 51
The tragic is not, therefore, an excuse for evil, it is the setting in which evil arises as evil. The same goes
for the good as well. We do not know securely what either is in advance, we have always to re-cognise what they are in our present circumstances. Not an escape from judgement or responsibility, the tragic is the condition that calls it up
and apportions it while also acknowledging the creation of injustice and irresponsibility which judgement inevitably also entails. Rather than displaying the dilemmas of human beings as ‘pre-articulated’, 144 The political and the tragic
tragedy shows them ‘searching for the morally [ethically] salient’. 52
Mortal life— free life—which is tragic life, forces each of us to be active in this way. That is to say, as an ‘undecided being’, to exit from the realm of undecided
possibility into the contest over good and evil—neither of which we can escape because there is also, of course, a belonging together of good and evil (how else would we distinguish either?) which capacity is what constitutes freedom—
and take-up that which we undergo, freedom itself, through the challenge of decision and judgement; which, because they are always concerned with the freedom of the human condition, are neither decisionistic nor arbitrary. 53
‘Interpreting a tragedy’, Nussbaum continues, is, therefore, ‘a messier, less determinate, more mysterious matter than assessing a philosophical example’. And truer. With both the mortal and the tragic ‘even when the work has been
interpreted it remains unexhausted, subject to reassessment in a way that example does not’. 54 However much it addresses the general condition of mortality, the tragic has always to be set in the specific world in which mortals come
to appearance. Tragedy, then, seeks to explore the meanings which constitute that world through the dynamics of what is meaningful in it, how and why they are meaningful, and how the condition of mortality works its way out there.
Tragedy therefore historicises, contextualises and particularises as it seeks to address the condition of mortality. As it does so, it traces the history of a complex pattern of deliberation, exposes the roots of that conduct in a specific way of
life, and seeks to work through or anticipate the consequences it will have for that way of life, and for the human beings who inhabit it. While involving us in that life, therefore, tragedy nonetheless also has a way of distancing us from its
setting. Thus spacing things out, it thereby provides a space in which our experience is extended in ways that relate to our immediate concerns and partisan commitments, without allowing us merely to remain embroiled within them so
that we get no other purchase on them than that provided by our immediate preoccupations with them. 55
Given its basic modus operandi, including of course the fundamental requirement to engage and communicate, how would the
dramatist, then, pursuade an audience to engage with a drama that has no perspective? Of what interest could a view from nowhere be to people who are, however problematically, always already somewhere? There is no human point in
operating from an Archimedean point. Hence the tragic implicitly disdains the argument that we cannot know how to proceed or judge unless we do have an Archimedean point from which to take our bearings and resolve our
dilemmas. It knows that we do act, and have to act. It knows that, however inadequately, we always have reasons for acting. It knows, too, that we can never be fully in control of our actions, because much remains mysterious to us and
there are always unintended, and often dreadful, consequences attached to what we do. And it knows, finally, that we have to take public responsibility for what we are and do, even though we are not fully in control of our actions and
their outcomes, by virtue of the fact that as mortal beings we are open to Being and beings through our own being; and cannot, therefore, escape taking-up the burden of that which we undergo, namely, existence itself. The political and
the tragic 145 It appreciates also that because our actions are public and that the very publicness of them is what always already installs the critical distance within them which calls us forth from them so that we cannot remain
solipsistically trapped by them. Here responsibility ‘has nothing whatsoever to do with moral imperatives’ arising out of a command ethic, but arises instead from human being’s resolute openness which manifests itself in the desire to
make manifest and answer ‘before mankind for every thought’, by affirming the life that is lived in ‘that luminosity in which oneself and everything one thinks is tested’. 56 Once more, that responsibility is, then, the holding open of
that openness which is the ability to respond. That indeed, precisely because we lack total control, we are destined to embrace such a world-creating responsibility; to hold open a time and place, a disposition, posture and stance, which
insists on remaining open to all that we are. This, literally, from the perspective of tragedy, is the place and the function of the polis. In the process of doing so, tragedy claims, life is restored by a selfrecognition through which humans
can attain a certain greatness in that openness, for practical political questions emphatically do not admit of truth in the sense of simple correspondence or coherence. Tragedy is, therefore, concerned precisely with the condition in
which we do not and cannot know what is correct in advance, and with how, nonetheless, we creatively work-out and work with our disclosure in the truth of that condition in order to live the free manifold of life itself. And it can be this
because correctness is ultimately not the point for it. Its truth, the truth of this occulting dis-closure, is a truth which antecedes correctness. For these very reasons, the tragic is not ‘a form of playful imitation, nor does it resemble
daemonic impersonation, it is a transmutation of life’. 57
It shows the transformative, restorative capacity operating within an existence that is free, not by writing a rule book but by offering, instead, the enacting of action, or the
terrible movements, demands and responsibilities of that free life itself. Above all, tragedy is an exploration of the adventure in the freedom of repetition. Of course, there is imitation in that performance, but the mimesis of tragedy is
58 It is not a mere process of ‘repetition’. No repetition is ever in fact, of course, mere repetition: ‘variation is not added to repetition in order to hide it, but is
not passive reflection; neither is that entailed in the living of a political life.
59 Hence, the mimesis or repetition referred to is a process of active composition in which displacement and disruption also—and necessarily—
rather its condition or constitutive element, the interiority of repetition par excellence’.
take place. (As Deleuze noted: ‘the power of difference and repetition…[can] be reached only by putting into question the traditional range of thought’. 60) That mimesis is one in which the ambiguities and strains of coping with the
interactions of the inherent freedom and plurality of human being, and of the city (of the being capable of life in a polis), are explored. Tragedy, then, offered a unique mode of learning which was itself a model of politeia because it
literally called citizens forth into the specific situation—always a situation with others—in which they had to act. That is to say, through its moment 146 The political and the tragic of on-site in-sight, tragedy called the citizen forward into
the situation where the political is itself always arising; the factical, contingent, temporal, spatial mise en scene and mise en sens of one of those moments of all of the moments in which human being continuously takes up that which it
is undergoing in the politics of the polis. Such a moment—the undecidedness of freedom—is literally the moment where human being bears repeating; picks-up where it has been left-off and takesover its temporal possibilities again, in
that very situation and by virtue of that very situation. It is a moment which of necessity cannot be determined in advance for it only ever arises in virtue of the specific way in which it has been entered into. It is not, therefore, the
abstracted kind of decision situation in which the options have been worked out beforehand, and are now present at hand ready for choice. It is the moment in which what is possible is resolutely worked out in the turn of the moment.
There is, then, no application or mere repetition of models going on here, and neither is the outcome fully calculable in advance. This moment, enacted in tragedy, is the very moment of the political. Politics has its turn in the tragic. As
Franz Rosenzweig wrote, All criticism follows upon performance. The drama critic will have little to say before it, no matter how clever he may be, for his criticism is not supposed to testify to what cleverness he had prior to the
performance but to that which the performance evokes in him. Similarly, a theory of knowledge that precedes knowledge has no meaning. For all knowing—whenever anything is really known—is a unique act, and has its own
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method. 61 Showing, therefore, teaches us to look for the sake of seeing.62 It gets us to think from somewhere rather than nowhere—namely the standpoint of someone else, thus allowing us not only to appreciate that other position,
but also to recognise that it may legitimately be different and remain so—and so focuses our attention and judgement as spectators (which means we are integral and indispensable to the public-ness of the performance, bear witness to
63 For showing also creates an audience which represents the world ‘or rather the worldly space which has come into being’, by virtue of the play. 64 Thus not only do people
it) on the publicly available aspects and import of the play.
learn to speak and enact a politics through the tragic, a (political) people may be constituted this way. 65 In this moment a world is created anew. It is a moment which, however, is neither making nor acting, in their metaphysical
senses, neither creation ex nihilo, techne, nor the supposed mere repetition of tradition. It is something else which seems to combine aspects of all of these elements without being able to be reduced to any one, or any combination, of
them. It seems to me to be, then, what Heidegger has tried to describe both in terms of resolute openness and in terms of those moments which found a ‘people’ or a ‘State’. And yet, it is not as simple as either of these thoughts of his
have been made out to be either; nor even as dangerously simple as he himself seemed to be inclined to make them sometimes when talking about the ‘German’ ‘State’ and ‘people’. Take Oedipus, for example; both because The political
and the tragic 147 I want to come on to him next but also because—which is why I want to come on to him next—he seems to exemplify precisely this condition. Oedipus appears to be a radical, a State-founder. He arrives as a stranger,
and saves Thebes. But Thebes was there before he arrived—and it continues anew after his departure. Indeed, he was once a part of it, and there is some evidence for thinking that Sophocles creates a deliberate ambiguity in the play to
intimate that Oedipus and the rest are covertly aware of this. Oedipus, remember also, is both a native and a stranger born. The problematic which the play addresses is, therefore, neither simply that of how to found a polity (pure
creation), nor is it simply that of how to ensure the continuation of a polity (supposed ‘tradition’). Rather, it is the problematic of political renewal, the renewal of freedom and judgement posed by the aporia of freedom and judgement,
and of the costs entailed in that process. Politics is not a simple matter of new foundation in Oedipus. Rather, Oedipus’ guilt is a turn-up which precipitates a turn-around and a turn-over that recalls the liminality of limits which frees
the polis to its freedom again. This does not mean, however, that because Oedipus wins a certain restoration and transformation, with his public assumption of responsibility for remaining open to limits and difference, that he wins it
for everyone; or that he wins it for Thebes forever. Neither does it mean that because he has won it once he might not have to win it again, and take the lesson to heart himself. Indeed, Creon is forced to remind him, at the very end of the
play, that he no longer commands even though his instinct to hold-on to things seems as powerful as ever it was (in Greek the word to rule—kratein—means to grasp or hold-on to). It insists only that at a cost, and because—somehow
both all alike and yet all different— human being is a possibility continuously open to a future, there is a real prospect of winning that renewal: ‘In distinction from its goal, the principle of action can be repeated [and re-learnt] time and

66 Manifest in the world only through action, it lasts ‘as long as action lasts but no longer’. 67 Oedipus’ Dionysian affirmation of life, and freeing of the
again, it is inexhaustible’.

polis, is not won without cost—the cost of his own blood. Neither is it won once and for all for everyone.
That yes to life, which is finally wrung from Oedipus—‘ I am Oedipus’—has to be endlessly uttered. It has
to be continuously recovered and repeated, in all the mundane, as well as the monumental, circumstances
of life, through the resolute openness of which human being is capable precisely because it is mortal .68
Gods do not need it, only mortals do. Gods, indeed, are not capable of it, only mortals are.