Decolonize 1NC Shell

Shell
DECOLONIZE 1NC
The idea of producing a transcript of reality as from a
position of observation and reportage constitutes
knowledge on the basis of colonialitythe epistemology
begins from the presupposition of centered colonial power
its not about the content its about the location of the
speaker
Mignolo 2009 (Walter, Professor of Humanities at Duke, Theory, Culture,
& Society 26.7/8, Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and DeColonial Freedom)
The introduction of geo-historical and bio-graphical configurations in
processes of knowing and understanding allows for a radical reframing (e.g. de-colonization) of the original formal apparatus of
enunciation.2 I have been supporting in the past those who maintain that it
is not enough to change the content of the conversation, that it is of
the essence to change the terms of the conversation. Changing the
terms of the conversation implies going beyond disciplinary or
interdisciplinary controversies and the conflict of interpretations. As
far as controversies and interpretations remain within the same
rules of the game (terms of the conversation), the control of
knowledge is not called into question. And in order to call into
question the modern/colonial foundation of the control of
knowledge, it is necessary to focus on the knower rather than on the
known. It means to go to the very assumptions that sustain locus
enunciations. In what follows I revisit the formal apparatus of enunciation
from the perspective of geo- and bio-graphic politics of knowledge. My
revisiting is epistemic rather than linguistic, although focusing on the
enunciation is unavoidable if we aim at changing the terms and not
only the content of the conversation. The basic assumption is that
the knower is always implicated, geo- and body-politically, in the
known, although modern epistemology (e.g. the hubris of the zero
point) managed to conceal both and created the figure of the
detached observer, a neutral seeker of truth and objectivity who at
the same time controls the disciplinary rules and puts himself or
herself in a privileged position to evaluate and dictate.
LINK: <You should probably insert a good specific link.

This is a fine generic link to critical affs>
Even radical critics of Western reason and advocats for
progressives causes still operate within colonial time,
fixing a Euro-centric imaginaryeven the idea that their
performance or intervention somehow alleviates
conditions or improves current existence relies on a
conservative imagination of a world resembling coloniality
Alcoff 2007 (Linda, Professor at Syracuse University, Mignolos
Epistemology of Coloniality The New Centennial Review 7.3)
It allows us to understand the constitutive relationship between the
historical a priori of European thought and its off-shore adventures.
It also allows us to think through the Anglo- and Eurocentric
structure of thought and representation that continues to dominate
much of the world today, whether or not, in a given place and time, formal
national liberation has been won. From Dussel, Mignolo took up the idea of
transmodernity, which signifies the global networks within which
European modernity itself became possible. Transmodernity operates
to displace the teleological and linear progression of modernity and
postmodernity, rendering even the most anti-Western
postmodernists still complicit with the temporal concepts of
colonialism that erased the colonial difference. Whereas the
concepts of modernity and postmodernity maintain the Eurocentric
imaginary timeline of Greece Rome Renaissance Modern World,
relegating the colonized areas of the world as peripheral to the main
story, the concept of transmodernity is intended by Dussel to displace
that timeline with a spatialization in which the whole planet is
involved at every stage in history. If modernity is imagined to be
European, transmodernity is planetary, with principle players from all
parts of the globe.
Vote negative-- de-linking begins without generating

authority from European intellectual and subjective
positionsthis means rejecting their authority to speak
genocide results from anything short of total de-linking
Mignolo 2007 (Walter, semiologist and professor of Humanities at Duke
University, DELINKING: THE RHETORIC OF MODERNITY, THE LOGIC OF

COLONIALITY AND THE GRAMMAR OF DE-COLONIALITY
http://www.ceapedi.com.ar/imagenes/biblioteca/libros/20.pdf)
If modernity is understood essentially as a European phenomenon,
then the emancipation of people in the non-European world has
to be planned, dictated and executed from Europe or the U.S. itself
only. Spreading democracy in the Middle East, President Bushs repeated
dictum is a case in point and an illustration of what Habermass project on
the completion of the incomplete project of modernity. It is not sure that
Islamic or Indigenous progressive intellectuals, like Habermas himself, would
like to go along with German ideals. In such a scenario, there is no
possibility of another political economies and political theories.

Religions would be tolerated as long as they do not interfere with THE
political economy and THE political theory that rules the world. Everything
shall be dictated by and from that original point, in space and time, were
power concentrates. The rest of the world would have to wait and see,
to listen and follow the leaders like in the war in Iraq.22 Fortunately the
World Social Forum, the Social Forum of the Americas and countless delinking
social movements (not NGOs!). In an Habermasian type of scenario
liberation would be subservient to emancipation; and, decolonization,
likewise, would still be covered over and managed by the
emancipating rhetoric of modernity, either liberal or Marxist. In
other words, if emancipation is the image used by honest liberals
and honest Marxists from the internal and historical perspectives of
Europe or the U.S., then looking at the world history from outside
of those locations (either from a country geo-historically located
beyond both or from the perspective of immigrants from those
countries to Europe and the U.S.) means coming to terms with the
fact that there is a still further need for liberation/de-coloniality
from the people and institutions raising the flag of
emancipation.23 Thus, in this precise sense, emancipation cannot be
the guiding light for liberation/de-coloniality but the other way
round: liberation/de-coloniality includes and re-maps the rational
concept of emancipation. In this complexity, we need a relentless
critical exercise of awareness of the moments when the guiding
principle at work is liberation/de-coloniality and when, on the other
hand, the irrational myth directs social actors in their projects for
political, economic and spiritual (epistemic, philosophical, religious)
decolonization. Nobody has access to an ultimate truth, and, consequently,
no one person (or collective, church or government) from the right or from
left, can offer a solution for the entire population of the planet. That is why
abstract universals (Christianity, Liberalism, Marxism, and Islamism) run out
of fashion and become different content of the same fundamentalist and
imperial logic. For this reason, de-coloniality, as ethically oriented,
epistemically geared, politically motivated and economically
necessary processes, has the damns as its central philosophical
and political figure. As Fanon stated, decolonization is a double
operation that includes both colonized and colonizer,24 although
enacted from the perspective and interests of the damns.
Otherwise, the damns would be deprived of their right to
liberate and de-colonize and will have to wait for the generous gifts
of the colonizer given them freedom. In other words, if the
colonizer needs to be decolonized, the colonizer may not be the
proper agent of decolonization without the intellectual guidance of
the damns. There are two kinds of individuals at work in the colonizers
society: those that enact the irrational myth that justifies genocidal
violence and those that, within that society, oppose and denounce it. But
denunciation within the colonizers society, while important, is not
sufficient in itself. It is necessary for dissenting actors belonging
(e.g., having citizenship, not necessarily the right blood or skin color) to a
colonizing society (e.g., the U.S. today) to join projects of
decolonization (political and epistemic) that are, at once, articulated

by the colonized and yet not the project of a colonized elite, who
use decolonization as a tool for personal benefit while reproducing,
in the decolonized country, the same irrational myth that
justifies genocidal violence . There are several cases in Africa and South
America that followed this path after decolonization and likewise in the
United States vis--vis Native Americans and people from African descent.
The colonized do not have epistemic privileges, of course: The only
epistemic privilege is in the side of the colonizer, even when the
case in point are emancipating projects, liberal or Marxist.25
Colonizer side here means Eurocentric categories of thought which carries
both the seed of emancipation and the seed of regulation and oppression.
Still, now are the histories and memories of coloniality; the wounds
and histories of humiliation that offer the point of reference for decolonial epistemic and political projects and of de-colonial ethics.
De-coloniality, then, means working toward a vision of human life
that is not dependent upon or structured by the forced imposition of
one ideal of society over those that differ, which is what
modernity/coloniality does and, hence, where decolonization of the
mind should begin. The struggle is for changing the terms in addition to
the content of the conversation. De-linking means to change the terms and
not just the content of the conversation--the content has been changed, in
the modern/colonial world by Christianity (e.g. theology of liberation), by
liberalism (e.g., the U.S. support to de-colonization in Africa and Asia during
the Cold War) and by Marxism (also supporting de-colonization in Africa and
Asia during the Cold War). De-linking requires that economic, political,
philosophical, ethical, etc., conceptualization based on principles that makes
the Bible, Adam Smith and Karl Marx necessary (because Western categories
of thoughts have been globalized through the logic of coloniality and the
rhetoric of modernity) but highly insufficient. In this section, then, I would like
to explore further the different politics of knowledge organizing the darker
side of modernity, the irrational myth that justifies genocidal violence within
the layered historical frame established by processes of emancipation,
liberation and decolonization. I will proceed by following Dussels distinction
of the critique of modernity from the perspective of liberation and
decolonization. If de-linking means to change the terms of the
conversation, and above all, of the hegemonic ideas of what
knowledge and understanding are and, consequently, what
economy and politics, ethics and philosophy, technology and the
organization of society are and should be, it is necessary to
fracture the hegemony of knowledge and understanding that have
been ruled, since the fifteenth century and through the
modern/colonial world by what I conceive here as the theo-logical
and the ego-logical politics of knowledge and understanding.26 We
(I am referring to you and me, patient reader) are entering here in the
unavoidable terrain of terminological de-naturalization. That is, one
strategy of de-linking is to de-naturalize concepts and conceptual
fields that totalize A reality. I take Theo-logy as the historical and
dominant frame of knowledge in the modern/colonial world from the
sixteenth to the first have of the eighteenth century. Theo-logy was, as

people like to say, not homogeneous. There were Catholics and Protestants,
and also Eastern Orthodox. Catholics and Protestants were mainly linked to
Latin Christianity while Eastern Christian to Greek Orthodoxy and to Slavic
languages, etc. etc. The hegemony in the Western world (Western Europe and
the Americas) during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the
common ground on which Catholics and Protestants played out their
differences. The Theo-logical politics of knowledge and understanding was,
then, the platform for the control of knowledge and subjectivity in Europe
and the Americas, but not yet in China, India or the ArabicSlamic world. When
Western politics of knowledge began to be imposed in Asia and Africa, in the
nineteenth century, Europe has already gone through an internal
transformation. The sovereignty of the subject began to be felt at the
beginning of the seventeenth century (Cervantes, Bacon, Shakespeare,
Descartes) and the questioning of Theology open up the doors for a
displacement, within Europe, from the Theo-logical to the Ego-logical politics
of knowledge and understanding.
Links
Environment
Environmental use is a symptom of colonial thought
rather than a neutral expression of the truth of the
natural world
Adams and Mulligan 2003 (W.M. and Martin, Professors of Geography
at Cambridge, Decolonizing Nature : Strategies for Conservation in a
Postcolonial Era, p. 5)
Richard Grove (1995) and other environmental historians (see, for
example, Griffiths and Robbins, 1997) have made the point that
experiences of colonialism with regard to exploiting nature have
been far from uniform, and that an impetus to conserve nature
began when colonial authorities grew alarmed at the speed of
environmental degradation in colonized lands. Somewhat
paradoxically, while ideas about the exploitation of nature moved
with the colonizers from the centre to the periphery of old empires,
ideas about the conservation of nature circulating in the periphery
were brought back to the centre. However, it is important to
recognize that both the exploitation of nature in the colonies and
the impetus to conserve nature for longer-term human use were a
product of the colonial mindset, which was shaped by the interaction
between colonial experiences in the centre and periphery. The
colonial mindset can only be understood by looking at this
interaction; but it was fundamentally rooted in European values,
which constructed nature as nothing more than a resource for
human use and wildness as a challenge for the rational mind to
conquer. As Tom Griffiths (1996) has pointed out, even those settlers who
were most enamoured of the flora and fauna in their adopted
homelands saw themselves as either hunters or collectors, and
wanted to assert their mastery over the wildness that they
simultaneously admired and feared, or to collect specimens that
could be named and safely deposited in museums. Early colonial
ideas about the conservation of nature essentially grew out of a
broader desire to tame the wild.
Their managerial approach to the environment is part of a

sphere of normalization that is founded on a politics of
extermination
Swyngedouw 09 (Erik, PhD of philosophy at John Hopkins University,
former professor of geography at University of Oxford, The Antinomies of the
Postpolitical City: In Search of a Democratic Politics of Environmental
Production, pgs 609-610)
In post-politics, the conflict of global ideological visions embodied in
different parties which compete for power is replaced by the
collaboration of enlightened technocrats (economists, public opinion
specialists . . .) and liberal multiculturalists; via the process of negotiation of
interests, a compromise is reached in the guise of a more or less universal
consensus. Postpolitics thus emphasizes the need to leave old ideological
visions behind and confront new issues, armed with the necessary expert
knowledge and free deliberation that takes peoples concrete needs and
demands into account (iek, 1999b: 198). Postpolitics is thus about the
administration (policing) of environmental, social, economic or other
domains and they remain, of course, fully within the realm of the possible, of
existing social relations; they are the partition of the sensible. The
ultimate sign of postpolitics in all Western countries, iek (2002:
303) argues, is the growth of a managerial approach to government:
government is reconceived as a managerial function, deprived of its proper
political dimension. Postpolitics refuses politicization in the classical Greek
sense; that is, politics as the metaphorical universalization of particular
demands, which aims at more than the negotiation of interests. The
consensual times we are currently living in have thus eliminated a genuine
political space of disagreement. However, consensus does not equal peace or
absence of contestation (Rancire, 2005: 8). Under a postpolitical condition:
Everything is politicized, can be discussed, but only in a non-committal way
and as a non-conflict. Absolute and irreversible choices are kept away;
politics becomes something one can do without making decisions
that divide and separate. When pluralism becomes an end in itself, real]
politics is pushed to other arenas (Diken and Laustsen, 2004: 7). Difficulties
and problems, such as re-ordering the urban or re-shaping the
environment that are generally staged and accepted as problematic need
to be dealt with through compromise, managerial and technical
arrangement and the production of consensus: Consensus refers to that
which is censored . . . Consensus means that whatever your personal
commitments, interests and values may be, you perceive the same things,
you give them the same name. But there is no contest on what appears, on
what is given in a situation and as a situation. Consensus means that the only
point of contest lies on what has to be done as a response to a given
situation. Correspondingly, dissensus and disagreement dont only
mean conflict of interests, ideas and so on. They mean that there is
a debate on the sensible givens of a situation, a debate on that which
you see and feel, on how it can be told and discussed, who is able to name it
and argue about it . . . It is about the visibilities of the places and abilities of
the body in those places, about the partition of private and public spaces,
about the very configuration of the visible and the relation of the visible to
what can be said about it . . . Consensus is the dismissal of politics as a
polemical configuration of the common world (Rancire, 2003b: 46). The key
feature of consensus is the annulment of dissensus . . . the end of politics
(Rancire, 2001: 32). Of course, this postpolitical world eludes choice and
freedom (other than those tolerated by the consensus) and, in the absence of
real politicization of particulars, the only position of real dissent is that
of either the traditionalist (those stuck in the past and who refuse to
accept the inevitability of the new global neoliberal order) or the
fundamentalist. The only way to deal with them is by sheer violence,
by suspending their humanitarian and democratic rights. The
postpolitical relies on either including all in a consensual pluralist order and
on excluding radically those who posit themselves outside the consensus. For
them, as Agamben (2005) argues, the law is suspended; they are
literally put outside the law and treated as extremists and terrorists.
Link: Objectivity
Idea of objective disciplinary viewpoint attempts to
insulate itself from charges of racism and violence: this
self-anesthetization perpetuates this violence
Mignolo 2009 (Walter, Professor of Humanities at Duke University,
Dispensable and Bare Lives Coloniality and the Hidden Political/Economic
Agenda of Modernity in Human Architecture: The Journal of the Sociology of
Self-Knowledge 7.2)
Thus, it is as a South American from European descent cum Hispanic Latino
in the US (ethnic identification) and someone trained in semiotic, discourse
analysis and literary theory, that I approach racism in the modern/colonial
and imperial/colonial world.5 The equation is relevant since I am not
starting from the discipline to understand an imperial management
of human subjectivities (through racism) but, on the contrary, I start
from the subjective feelings of my own history and of those who are not
immigrants in South America, but dissenting creoles from Spanish descent
or Mestizos and Mestizas. That is, I joined forces with those who
instead of using their privileges, in South America, of being from
European descent (one way or another, that is, Creoles, Mestizas or
Immigrants), takeJJJ advantage of their privilege to join the
struggles carried on by progressive Indians and progressive AfroSouth and Caribbean Americans. I am not representing or
speaking for them (Indians and Afro-descendent). They have been
speaking for themselves for centuries. And of course, no one will
accuse me of representing or speaking for them when the them
in question are Jews or Islamic. I use semiotics, discourse analysis and
literary theory as a tool to deal with the problem I just outlined. I am not
using semiotics as a method to dissect racism as something
that is outside of myself and that I can study through my
disciplinary identification. I am not hiding myself under the
clothing of disciplinary objectivity, as if disciplinary formations
where not infected by the modern racial matrix or were epistemic
formations outside of it. I am here inverting the process and this
inversion is indeed my methodology: the problem at hand is
infected already by the racial matrix and there is no way to hide
from this infection in any discipline (semiotics, sociology, political
science, biology, bio-technology) and pretend that racism and
human being or humanity can be described and explained from
the uncontaminated eyes of God (theology) or eyes of Reason
(egology). Furthermore, disciplines are a surrogate for religious and ethnic
identities. Disciplinary identities are formed under the principle of
objectivity, neutrality, reason without passion, mind without
interference of affects, etc. Disciplinary identities are formed on the
basis of a set of beliefs posited as detached from individual
experiences and subjective configurations. However, disciplinary
identities are no less identities than religious or ethnic ones. From
the sixteenth century on, epistemic and ontological constructions of
racism had two major devastating consequences: the economic and

legal/political dispensability of human lives. DispensableJJJJJJJJJJ
lives were and are either assumed (naturalized feelings) or
established by decree (laws, public policies). Two human communities
that paid the price of economic and political devaluation of human
lives were enslaved Africans from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century
and German Jews in the twentieth century. Both histories are my own
history as a human being; disregarding whether I am Black, Jewish or
Argentine from European descent. However, as an Argentine from
European descent I cannot be oblivious to the fact that the two communities
in question where enslaved Africans and German Jews. Why so? When, by
who, and how was such cosmology put in place and why did the cosmology in
question constructed enslaved Africans and German Jews as undesirable,
dispensable or unvalued human lives?
Development
Idea of societal improvement, development, and
advancement attached to the epistemically invalid idea of
knowing what is better
If you engage in the de-colonial option and put anthropology at your
service like Smith does, then you engage in shifting the geography of
reason in unveiling and enacting geopolitics and body-politics of
knowledge. You can also say that there are non-Maori anthropologists of
Euro-American descent who are really for and concerned with the
mistreatment of Maoris and that they are really working to remedy the
situation. In that case, the anthropologists could follow two different paths.
One would be in line with Father Bartolome de las Casas and with Marxism
(Marxism being a European invention responding to European problems).
When Marxism encounters people of color, men or women, the
situation becomes parallel to anthropology: being Maori (or Aymara, or
Afro-Caribbean, like Aime Cesaire and Frantz Fanon) is not necessarily a
smooth relation because Marxism privileged class relations over
racial hierarchies and patriarchal and heterosexual normativity. The
other would be to submit to the guidance of Maori or Aymara
anthropologists and engage with them in the de-colonial option. A
politics of identity is different from identity politics the former is
open to whoever wants to join, while the latter tends to be bounded
by the definition of a given identity. I am not saying that a Maori
anthropologist has epistemic privileges over a New Zealand anthropologist of
Anglo-descent (or a British or US anthropologist). I am saying that a New
Zealand anthropologist of Anglo descent has no right to guide the
locals in what is good or bad for the Maori population. That is
precisely the problem that appears in the report of the Harvard
International Review, where a group of US experts believe they can
really decide what is good and what is bad for developing
countries. Granted, there are many locals in developing countries
who, because of imperial and capitalist cosmology, were led to
believe (or pretended they believed) that what is good for developed
countries is good for underdeveloped as well because the former
know how to get there and can lead the way for underdeveloped
countries to reach the same level. I am just saying, following Wiredus
dictum (African, know thyself), that there is a good chance that Maoris
would know what is good or bad for them better than an expert from
Harvard or a white anthropologist from New Zealand. And there is also
a good chance that an expert from Harvard may know what is good for him
or her and his or her people, even when he or she thinks that they are stating
what is good for them, the underdeveloped countries and people.
Link - Globalization/Securitization
Globalization is tied a defensive sovereignty which
creates methods of surveillance. This new regime makes
destruction of identity, racism and bare life inevitable
Turner 2007(Turner, Bryan, sociologist, former professor of Sociology at
the University of Cambridge, The Enclave Society: Towards a Sociology of
Immobility, http://home.iscteiul.pt/~apad/justica01/textos/12_Turner_0778071.pdf)
Urry is clearly correct to emphasize global flows and networks as key
features of the modern world. However, as the economy becomes
increasingly global, especially in terms of the flow of finance,
investment and commodities, states and their bureaucracies have in
many respects become more rigid in attempting to defend the
principle of sovereignty. There is, as a result, a profound contradiction
between the economic requirements of flexibility and fluidity and the states
objective of defending its territorial sovereignty. In particular with the
growth of a global war on terror after 9/11, states, rather than
becoming more porous, have defended their borders with increasing
determination. From a historical perspective, it is useful to remind ourselves
that the flow of people has become more rather than less restrictive.
John Torpey (2000) has argued that the invention of the passport as a
method of surveillance and regulation was a product of twentiethcentury statehood. In a similar fashion Saskia Sassen (1999) in Guests and
Aliens showed how the free flow of workers in Europe, that had been
traditional during harvest time, was changed by the transformation of such
guests into political aliens. My argument is that, while there may be an
increasing global flow of goods and services, there is emerging a parallel
immobility regime exercising surveillance and control over migrants,
refugees and other aliens. If sociology is to be criticized, it is not because it
has neglected globalization; it is because it has neglected the rise of global
security systems whose stated aim is to protect residential populations
against the perceived risk of mobile populations. The changing mood of the
social sciences against the argument that societies are becoming more
porous and borders are disappearing was perhaps sharply illustrated by the
special issue of the European Journal of Social Theory in 2006. This issue
noted in particular that in the wake of the events of 9/11 and the more
recent acts of terrorism in Bali, Madrid and London, governments have began
to reassess their border-opening policies (Newman, 2006: 181). Proponents
of globalization need to recognize the fact that territory and reterritorialization, at a variety of spatial scales, remain a major form
of societal organization and ordering (Newman, 2006: 183). The
principal causes of re-territorialization are said to be: the
development of policies of securitization, the terrorist threat to
urban centres and civil society, the growth in negative sentiments
towards immigration and foreign workers, and a social mood that is
hostile to cosmopolitanism. The empirical evidence concerning European
racism is ample (Semyonov et al. 2006). There is in any case a

widespread view that associates immigrants with poverty,
prostitution, disease, drug offences and violence. Where there is low
trust, there is a growing sense of the offensive nature of juvenile crime and
vandalism, and this incivility is increasingly associated with migrant
communities and especially with their dislodged and alienated young men. As
Abdelmalek Sayad (2004: 282) observes in his The Suffering of the
Immigrant, migration has produced a new state thought in which the
criminality of the migrant has become ontological, because, at the
deepest level of our mode of thought (i.e state thought) it is
synonymous with the very existence of the immigrant and with the
very fact of immigration. By 1987, one-third of prisoners in Belgium,
Switzerland and France came from foreign and ethnic minority communities.
The relationship between illegal or irregular migrant status and crime is
particularly problematic (Engbersen et al., 2006) and hence there is a
widespread sense of the need by governments for new policies to control
migration (Guiraudon and Joppke, 2001). Of course, migrants are not the only
pool of displaced youth ready to be recruited or forced into criminal roles. In
more general terms, young men find themselves confined to certain areas of
the city, that is, they experience back street territorialization a process that
can also give them some degree of control of this space. For example, South
African marginal youth occupy die agterbuurdesomewhat out of the direct
control or regulation by the state (Jensen, 2006). The argument against
the theory of global mobilities has been systematically captured by
Ronen Shamir (2005) in the concept of a mobility regime, which
describes the paradox that globalization also produces new systems
of closure. There is a paradigm of suspicion in which various
categories of persons are seen to be dangerous, and hence their
movements need to be contained and curtailed. Hence there is a need
to conceptualise globalisation as also involving closure, entrapment and
containment (Shamir, 2005: 199). The result is an emerging riskmanagement system that has a global reach. If we regard the freedom
to be mobile as a resource, it is clear that the capacities for mobility are
unequally shared by any population and hence there is what Shamir calls a
mobility gap that is somewhat parallel to the information gap and the
digital divide. Finally, Shamir detects an evolution of these systems from
elementary forms (walls and fences) to more complex systems (involving for
example, the use of forensic medicine and bioprofiling). While Shamirs
contribution to this debate is substantial, I have two minor comments on his
approach. First, his idea of a mobility regime should be re-titled the
immobility regime and, second, the notion of biological closure can
usefully be elaborated through a consideration of the work of Giorgio
Agamben (1998) on sovereignty and bare life.
Fluid Identity Link

Claims about the fluidity of identity have to be specificed
they are attached privilegeonly whites can inhabit
fluid identities with full choice
Bailey 2002 (Benjamin, Professor of Communication Studies at UMass
Amherst, Language, Race, and Negotiation of Identity: A Study of Dominican
Americans,
http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/scmsAdmin/media/users/xr1/Dominican_Republic/La
nguage_Race_and_Negotiation_of_Identity.pdf)
In face-to-face interaction, fluidity and choice of identity are
constrained by the historical social relations that are actualized in
present-day received categories. These received categories shape
the ways that individuals are seen and classified by others. Since
boundaries delineating social groups are double boundaries (Royce
1982), comprising a boundary that is enacted or identified from within and
another one from without, successful constitution of an identity involves
congruent self-ascription and other-ascription. Macro-social categories,
even if they represent folk-understandings as with phenotyperacial categories, organize the range of social groups to which
individuals are assigned by others. Alonso (1994) locates hegemonic
forms of inscription outside of discourse, but social history and
hierarchy are omnipresent as everyday common sense
understandings of the world in face-to-face interaction. These
understandings are situationally activated in discourse and serve as
guideposts for social ascription.
Claims about fluidity reimpose American imperialism

fluid choice needs to be politicized
Grande 2000 (Sandy, American Indian scholar and assistant professor at
Connecticut College, Harvard Educational Review 70:4, American Indian

geographies of identity and power)
To be fair, I believe that both American Indian intellectuals and critical
theorists share a similar visiona time, place, and space free of the
compulsions of Whitestream, global capitalism and the racism,
sexism, classism, and xenophobia it engenders. But where critical
scholars ground their vision in Western conceptions of democracy
and justice that presume a liberated self, American Indian
intellectuals ground their vision in conceptions of sovereignty that presume a
sacred connection to place and land. Thus, to a large degree, the seemingly
liberatory constructs of gluidity, mobility, and transgression are
perceived not only as the language of critical subjectivity but also as
part of the fundamental lexicon of Western imperialism. Deloria (1999)
writes: Although the loss of land must be seen as a political and economic
disaster of the first magnitude, the real exile of the tribes occurred with the
destruction of ceremonial life (associated with the loss of land) and the
failure or inability of white society to offer a sensible and cohesive
alternative to the traditions which Indians remembered. People became
disoriented with respect to the world in which they lived. They could not
practice their old ways, and the new ways which they were expected to
learn were in a constant ystate of change because they were not a
cohesive view of the world but simply adjustments which whites
were making to the technology they had invented.
Gender Link
Traditional critiques of conflating sex and gender lock the
linksex was primary in the colonial narrativefocus on
type of work locks the link
Lugones 2010 (Maria, Professor of Comparative Literature at Binghamton
University, Toward a Decolonial Feminism in Hypatia 25.4)
It is important to note that often, when social scientists investigate
colonized societies, the search for the sexual distinction and then
the construction of the gender distinction results from observations
of the tasks performed by each sex. In so doing they affirm the
inseparability of sex and gender characteristic mainly of earlier
feminist analysis. More contemporary analysis has introduced arguments
for the claim that gender constructs sex. But in the earlier version, sex
grounded gender. Often, they became conflated: where you see sex, you will
see gender and vice versa. But, if I am right about the coloniality of
gender, in the distinction between the human and the non-human,
sex had to stand alone. Gender and sex could not be both
inseparably tied and racialized. Sexual dimorphism became the
grounding for the dichotomous understanding of gender, the
human characteristic. One may well be interested in arguing that
the sex that stood alone in the bestialization of the colonized, was,
after all, gendered. What is important to me here is that sex was
made to stand alone in the characterization of the colonized. This
strikes me as a good entry point for research that takes coloniality seriously
and aims to study the historicity and meaning of the relation between sex
and gender.[[
Our critique solves genderfolds in under our terms of

analysis
Lugones 2010 (Maria, Professor of Comparative Literature at Binghamton
University, Toward a Decolonial Feminism in Hypatia 25.4)

I use the term coloniality following Anibal Quijanos analysis of the capitalist
world system of power in terms of coloniality of power and of modernity,
two inseparable axes in the workings of this system of power. Quijanos
analysis provides us with a historical understanding of the inseparability of
racialization and capitalist exploitation4 as constitutive of the capitalist
system of power as anchored in the colonization of the Americas. In
thinking of the coloniality of gender, I complicate his understanding
of the capitalist global system of power, but I also critique his own
understanding of gender as only in terms of sexual access to
women.5 In using the term coloniality I mean to name not just a
classification of people in terms of the coloniality of power and
gender, but also the process of active reduction of people, the
dehumanization that fits them for the classification, the process of
subjectification, the attempt to turn the colonized into less than
human beings. This is in stark contrast to the process of conversion that
constitutes the Christianizing mission.[
Utilizing category of women in the 1AC triggers

colonialism and recenters the West
Mohatney 88(Chandra, feminist theorist, Under Western Eyes;
Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses pgs 78-79)
This last section returns to an earlier point about the inherently political
nature of feminist scholarship, and attempts to clarify my point about the
possibility of detecting a colonialist move in the case of structurally
unequal first/third-world relation in scholarship. The nine texts in the
Zed Press Women in the Third World series that I have discussed focused on
the following common areas in discussing womens status within various
societies: religion, family/kinship structures, the legal system, the
sexual division of labor, education , and finally political resistance. A
large number of western feminist political writings on the third
world focus on these themes. Of course, the Zed texts have various
emphases. For example, two of the studies, Women of Palestine (1982) and
Indian Women in Struggle (1980), focus explicitly on female militance and
political involvement , while Women in Arab Societies (1980) deals with
womens legal, religious, and familial stats. In addition, each text references a
variety of methodologies and degrees of care in making generalizations.
Interestingly enough, however, almost all the texts assume women as a
category of analysis in the manner designated above. Clearly, this is an
analytical strategy which is neither limited to these Zed Press publications in
general. However, in the particular texts under question, each text assumes
women have a coherent group identity within the different cultures
discussed, prior to their entry into social relations. Thus, Omvedt can tlak
about Indian Women; while referring to a particular group of women in the
State of Maharashta, Cutrufellia bout Women of Africa and Minces about
Arab Women as if these groups of women have some sort of obvious cultural
coherence, distinct form men in these societies. The status or position of
women is assumed to be self evident because women as an already
constituted group are placed within religious, economic, familial and legal
structures. However, this focus on the position of women whereby
women are seen as coherent group across contexts, regardless of
class or ethnicity., structures the world in ultimately binary,
dichotomous terms, where women are always seen in opposition to
men, patriarchy is always necessarily male dominance, and the
religious, legal, economic, and familial systems are implicitly
assumed to be constructed by men. Thus, both men and women are
always seen as preconstituted whole populations, and relations of
dominance and exploitation are also posited in terms of whole
peoples wholes coming into exploitative relations. It is only when
men and women are seen as different categories or groups
possessing different already constituted categories of experience,
cognition and interests as grops that such a simplistic dichotomy is
possible. What does this imply about the structure and functioning of power
relations? The setting up of the commonality of third world womens
struggles across classes and cultures against a general notion of
oppression ( primarily the group in power - i.e, men) necessitates
the assumption of something like what Michel Foucault calls the
juridico-discursive model of power (1980: 134-135), the principal

features of which are: a negative relation (limit and lack); an insistence on
the rule (which forms a binary system0; a cycle of prohibition ; the logic of
censorship; and a uniformity of the apparatus functioning at different
levels. Feminist discourse on the this which assumes a homogenous category
or group called women necessarily operates through such a setting up of
originary power divisions. Power relations are structured in terms of a
unilateral and undifferentiated of power and cumulative reaction to power.
Opposition is a generalized phenomenon created as a response to power
which, in turn, is possessed by certain groups of people. The major problem
with such a definition of power is that it locks all revolutionary struggles into
binary structures possessing power versus being powerless. Women are
powerless, unified group. If the struggle for a just society is seen in terms of
the move from powerless to powerful for women as a group, and this is the
implication in feminist discourse which structures sexual difference in terms
of the differences between the sexes, then the new society would be
structurally identical to the existing organization of power relations,
constituting itself as a simple inversion of what exists. If relations of
domination and exploitation are defined in terms of binary divisions groups
which dominate and groups which are dominated surely the implication is
that the accession to power of women as a group is sufficient to dismantle
the existing organization of relations? But women as a group are not in the
same sense essentially superior or infallible. The crux of the problem lies
in that initial assumption of women as a homogenous group or
category ( the oppressed), a familiary assumption in western
radical and liberal feminisms. What happened when this assumption
of women as a oppressed group; is situated in the context of
western feminist writing about third-world women? It is here that I
locate the colonialist move. By contrasting the representations of
women in the third world with what I referred to earlier as western
feminisms self-presentations in the same context, we see how
western feminists alone become the true subject of this counterhistory. Third-world women, on the other had, never rise above the
debilating generality of their object status.
Civil Disobedience Link

This method preserves the civil and cannot come to the
point of decolonizing
If you are getting the idea of what shifting the geography of reason
and enacting geo-politics of knowledge means, you will also be
understanding what the de-colonial option in general (or de-colonial
options in each particular and local history) means. It means, in the first
place, to engage in epistemic disobedience, as is clear in the three
examples I offered. Epistemic disobedience is necessary to take on civil
disobedience (Gandhi, Martin Luther King) to its point of non-return.
Civil disobedience, within modern Western epistemology (and
remember: Greek and Latin, and six vernacular European modern and
imperial languages), could only lead to reforms, not to
transformations. For this simple reason, the task of de-colonial
thinking and the enactment of the de-colonial option in the 21st
century starts from epistemic de-linking: from acts of epistemic
disobedience.
Humanity
Idea of humanity constitutes those outside the idea as
lacking in order to shore up coloniality and recenter
Europeanism
Before, a disclaimer is necessary. Much has been said and written about
Michel Foucaults concept of bio-politics. Bio-politics refers to emerging
state technologies (strategies, in a more traditional vocabulary) of
population control that went hand in hand with the emergence of
the modern nation-state. Foucault devoted his attention mainly to Europe,
but such technologies were applied to the colonies as well. In Argentina (and
South America in general), for example, the push for eugenics toward the end
of the 19th century has been studied in detail lately. The differences
between bio-politics in Europe and bio-politics in the colonies lie in
the racial distinction between the European population (even when
bio-politically managed by the state) and the population of the
colonies: less human, sub- humans, as Smith pointed out. But it is also
important to remember that bio-political techniques enacted on
colonial populations returned as a boomerang to Europe in the
Holocaust. Many have already underlined the uses of colonial techniques
applied to non-European populations to control and exterminate the Jewish
population. This consideration shifts the geography of reason and
illuminates the fact that the colonies were not a secondary and
marginal event in the history of Europe but, on the contrary, colonial
history is the non-acknowledged center in the making of modern
Europe. Thus, body-politics is the darker side and the missing half
of biopolitics: body-politics describes de-colonial technologies
enacted by bodies who realized that they were considered less
human at the moment they realized that the very act of describing
them as less human was a radical un-human consideration. Thus, the
lack of humanity is placed in imperial actors, institutions and
knowledges that had the arrogance of deciding that certain people
they did not like were less human. Body-politics is a fundamental
component of de-colonial thinking, de-colonial doing and the decolonial option. Historically, geo-politics of knowledge emerged in the
Third World contesting the imperial distribution of scientific labor that
Pletsch mapped out. Body-politics of knowledge has had its more pronounced
manifestations in the United States, as a consequence of the Civil Rights
movement. Who were the main actors of the body-politics of knowledge?
Women first white women, soon joined by women of color (and linking with
geo-politics, so- called third world women); Latino and Latina scholars and
activists; Afro-Americans and Native-Americans, mainly.
Despite whatever humanitarian crisis the affirmative

claims to solve, it will ultimately be in vain. The aff
participates in the construction of bare life that is, a
unique biopolitical subject that is subject to the state
while also being excluded from it which reaffirms the
biopower that authorizes the 1AC harms in the first place.
With the inscription of rights comes the inevitability of
the abuse of sovereign authority.
EDKINS 2k
[Jeremy Dept. of Intl Politics U. Wales Alternatives 25:1 p3-]To conclude: One reason why the tale of the concentrationcamp survivor is so compelling is that although it is presented as a space of exception, the camp is nothing more than the
coming to fruition of the horror contained in everyday existence under the sway of sovereign politics in the
West. Thus our response to the camps is in part a recognition of our own predicament as participants in the
reduction of life to bare life and politics to biopolitics. As Foucault reminds us, "we are all governed and, to
that extent, in solidarity."[83] But this is no use if our invocation of the trope of humanitarian crisis repeats
the metaphor that reinforces the very power that produces the humanitarian emergency in the first place . As
Agamben puts it: It is almost as if, starting from a certain point, every decisive political event were doublesided: the spaces, the liberties, and the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers
always simultaneously prepared a tacit but increasing inscription of individual's lives within the state order,
thus offering a new and more dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power from which they wanted to
liberate themselves.[84] This double-sidedness, of course, recalls Jacques Derrida's double-contradictory imperative, where the
question, for example, of whether and in what way to intervene in a humanitarian emergency is a dilemma that has to be resolved in
any particular instance by a decision.[85] Aid cannot be both offered and withheld: only one course of action can take place. But to
seek general rules applicable overall to aid organizations and their operations is to duck the very question of the political that is
inherently involved.[86] Agamben's work enables us to analyze what is at stake in the politics of the decision.
He elaborates how sovereign power operates through the state of emergency and how the very posing of the
question through the trope of emergency is always already on the side of sovereignty. The implication of the
argument in this article is that although the power of the sovereign state over the lives of its populations has been
successfully challenged in the post-Cold War period and the notion of humanitarian concern as overriding sovereignty widely
accepted, this is not a liberation or an emancipation but merely the beginning of another and more
authoritarian form of sovereign control over life. Just as the role of the revolution in the transition to
modern state rule can be seen as an ironic strengthening of central authority, so the role of humanitarian
intervention can be seen as a tightening of a global structure of authority and control. There is a fundamental
biopolitical fracture in the structure of the West.[88] From time to time, the attempt is made to produce a unified political community
by exterminating those that occupy the place of homines sacri, or bare life, whether they be slaves, Jews, gypsies, people of the Third
World, or the underclass. Such attempts inevitably give rise to another homo sacer, in an endless cycle of exclusion, obliteration, and
reincarnation. In this way, every society decides who its "sacred men" will be. However, this limit has been extended further and
further, and "in the new biopolitical horizon of states with national sovereignty ... bare life is no longer
confined to a particular place or a definite category. It now dwells in the biological body of every living
being."[89]
Warming Link
Affirmative impact claims are an opportunity cost with
confronting consumptive root cause of warmingthey
offload impacts into an incompetent South to deny
Northern complicity in global destruction
Grove 2011 (Kevin, Professor of Geography at OSU, Insuring Our
Common Future? Dangerous Climate Change and the Biopolitics of

Environmental Security in Geopolitics 15)
A number of critical analyses have drawn attention to the problematic
ontological and geopolitical assumptions that structure these neoMalthusian arguments. Foremost among these are realist tropes about
safety and threat that specify security in terms of control, domination, and
rival blocs of state territory. For example, Dalby draws on the insights of critical geopolitics51 to suggest that neo-Malthusian analyses are premised on
geopolitical assumptions of a rich, developed North that masters nature and a
poor, underdeveloped South that is unable to do so.52 These assumptions
have two effects. First, the object of security becomes the modern (Northern)
state, whose borders and integrity are threatened by the movement of people caused by the Souths inability to manage environmental degradation.53
Second, scripting global space in terms of an environmentally benign
North and destructive South inhibits consideration of how Northern
production and consumption might be implicated in Southern
environmental degradation. This move absolves the North, and
Northern ways of life premised on carboniferous capitalism, of any
responsibility for environmental degradation in the South.54
Progress/Cap/Development Link
Disinterested idea of progress, saving, or preventing
catastrophe suggests the possibility of an apolitical
world: this also creates the referent of politics as an
abstract category rather than real bodies
Theo- and ego-politics of knowledge also bracketed the body in
knowledge-making (Mignolo, 2007a). By locating knowledge in the mind
only, and bracketing secondary qualities (affects, emotions,
desires, anger, humiliation, etc.), social actors who happened to be
white, inhabiting Europe/ Western Christendom and speaking
specific languages assumed that what was right for them in that
place and which fulfilled their affects, emotions, fears and angers
was indeed valid for the rest of the planet and, consequently, that
they were the depositor, warrantor, creator and distributor of
universal knowledge. In the process of globally enacting the European
system of belief and structure of knowledge, human beings who were not
Christian did not inhabit the memories of Europe, from Greece through Rome,
were not familiar with the six modern imperial European languages and,
frankly, did not care much about all of that until they realized that they were
expected and requested to submit to the European (and in the 20th century
to the United States also), knowledge, belief, life style and world view.
Responses to the contrary came, since the 16th century, from all over the
globe, but imperial theo- and ego-politics of knowledge managed to prevail
through economically sustained institutions (universities, museums,
delegations, state officers, armies, etc.). Now, the type of responses I am
referring to were responses provoked by the making and remaking
of the colonial matrix of power: a complex conceptual structure that
guided actions in the domain of economy (exploitation of labor and
appropriation of land/ natural resources), authority (government,
military forces), gender/sexuality and knowledge/subjectivity. Since
the responses I am referring to were responses to the colonial
matrix of power, I would describe such responses as de-colonial
(Mignolo, 2007b). The cases/examples I offered in Section III also show that in
such responses de-colonial geo-politics of knowledge confronted imperial
theo- and ego-politically based assumptions on the universality of Western
knowledge-making and institutional grounding. But there is still another
dimension in de-colonial politics of knowledge relevant for my
argument: the claim that knowledge-making for well being rather
than for controlling and managing populations for imperial interest
shall come from local experiences and needs, rather than from local
imperial experiences and needs projected to the globe, invokes also
the body-politics of knowledge. Why? Because not only regions and
locales in which imperial languages were not ancestrally spoken and
that were alien to the history of Greek and Latin were disqualified
and the disqualification filled with knowledge-product and

knowledge-making in bodies and institutions where the conceptual
warranty of Greek and Latin legitimized the belief of their dwelling
in the universal, but bodies too. Racism, as we sense it today, was
the result of two conceptual inventions of imperial knowledge: that
certain bodies were inferior to others, and that inferior bodies
carried nferior intelligence. The emergence of a body-politics of
knowledge is a second strand of de-colonial thinking and the decolonial option. You can still argue that there are bodies and
regions in need of guidance from developed bodies and regions
that got there first and know how to do it. As an honest liberal, you
would recognize that you do not want to impose your knowledge
and experience but to work with the locals. The problem is, what
agenda will be implemented, yours or theirs ? Back then to Chatterjee
and Smith. De-colonial thinking presupposes de-linking (epistemically
and politically) from the web of imperial knowledge (theo- and egopolitically grounded) from disciplinary management. A common topic
of conversation today, after the financial crisis on Wall Street, is how to
save capitalism. A de-colonial question would be: Why would you
want to save capitalism and not save human beings? Why save an
abstract entity and not the human lives that capitalism is constantly
destroying? In the same vein, geo- and body-politics of knowledge,
de-colonial thinking and the de-colonial option place human lives
and life in general first rather than making claims for the
transformation of the disciplines. But, still, claiming life and human
lives first, de-colonial thinking is not joining forces with the politics
of life in itself as Nicholas Rose (2007) has it. Roses politics of life in
itself is the last development in the mercantilization of life and of
bio-power (as Foucault has it). In the politics of life in itself political and
economic strategies for controlling life at the same time as creating more
consumers join forces. Bio-politics, in Foucaults conception, was one of the
practical consequences of an ego-politics of knowledge implemented in the
sphere of the state. Politics of life in itself extends it to the market.
Thus, politics of life in itself describes the enormous potential of biotechnology to generate consumers who invest their earnings in
buying health-promoting products in order to maintain the
reproduction of technology that will improve the control of human
beings at the same time as creating more wealth through the money
invested by consumers who buy health-promoting technology. This
is the point where de-colonial options, grounded in geo- and bodypolitics of knowledge, engage in both decolonizing knowledge and
de- colonial knowledge-making, delinking from the web of
imperial/modern knowledge and from the colonial matrix of power.
Morality Link
Their compulsive moralization is a farce that promotes the
hegemony of the law which justifies totalitarianism
Agamben 95( Giorgio, philosopher, Homo Sacer pg 35)
It is truly astounding how Kant, almost two centuries ago and under the
heading of a sublime moral feeling, was able to describe the very
condition that was to become familiar to the mass societies and
great totalitarian states of our time. For life under a law that is in
force without signifying resembles life in the state of exception, in
which the most innocent gesture or the smallest forgetfulness can
have most extreme consequences. And it is exactly this kind of life
that Kafka describes, in which law is all the more pervasive for its total lack of
content, and in which a distracted knock on the door can mark the
start of uncontrollable trials. Just as for Kant the purely formal character
of the moral law founds its claim of universal practical applicability in every
circumstance, so in Kafkas village the empty potentiality of law is so
much in force as to become indistinguishable from life. The existence
and the very body of Joseph K. 36 PART 1 : THE LOGIC OF SOVEREIGNTY
ultimately coincide with the Trial; they become the Trial. Benjamin sees this
clearly when he writes, objecting to Scholems notion of a being in force
without significance, that a law that has lost its content ceases to exist and
becomes indistinguishable from life: Whether the students have lost the
Scripture or cannot decipher it in the end amounts to the same thing, since a
Scripture without its keys is not Scripture but life, the life that is lived in the
village at the foot of the hill on which the castle stands (Benjamin and
Scholem, Briefwechsel, p. 155). And this provokes Scholem (who does not
notice that his friend has grasped the difference perfectly well) to insist that
he cannot agree that it is the same thing whether the students have lost
their Scripture or cannot decipher it, and it even seems to me that this is the
greatest mistake that can be made. I refer to precisely the difference
between these two stages when I speak of a Nothing of Revelation (ibid.,
p. 163).
Poverty Link
Concept of poverty puts a human face of capitalism,
suggesting the possible humanization of a concept which
is fundamentally and integrally not humanizable
because of its consubstantiality with colonialism

Self-Knowledge 7.2)
Slavery, as a particular form of exploitation of labor, is consubstantial to
capitalism. While slavery in the form it acquired in the economy of the
Atlantic since the sixteenth centuries officially came to an end during
the first half of the nineteenth century, it never ended in reality. On
the one hand, not only did people from African descent continue to be
enslaved; when they were not, they continued to be racialized and
marginalized from society. On the other hand, a new form of slavery
developed until today. More so, what never ended was the commerce of
human bodies and, today, the commerce of human organs (Waldby 2006).
Dispensable lives are those that become indispensable when they
become commodities.6 It so happened that human agents who
controlled knowledge and money had the authority (not necessarily
the power) to classify and manage sectors of the human
population. Their authority was an invisible structure that was
nevertheless imprinted on their bodies and minds. That invisible
structure has been described as the colonial matrix of power in
its synchronic as well as diachronic dimensions.[[[[[[[[[ The
colonial matrix of power provided and provides legitimacy to
constant processes of racialization decreeing human lives
dispensable under the progressive and never ending face of
economic growth and capital accumulation. For that reason,
capitalism with a human face is either an honest utopia or a
perverse lie. Good intentions to end poverty are misleading in the
sense that the very concept of poverty was invented and
introduced in the rhetoric of modernity to hide the fact that the
poor are indeed lives that are dispensable and as such they are
either discarded or when necessary made indispensable as labor
force and consumers (The Economist, August 2007, the New Middle Class
in Latin America).7[[[[
Link Aid/Poverty
The affs attempt to play superhero is a faade that hides
the subjugation of other populations from public view
Zembylas 10(Michalinos, professor of Education at the Open University of
Cyprus, PhD in Cirriculum and Instruction, Agambens Theory of Biopower

and Immigrants/Refugees/Asylum Seekers, November 2010, pg 36)
It is precisely for this reason that for Agamben (1998), the failure to
question the separation 0f humanitarian concerns from politicsand
thus the treatment of immigrants/refugees/asylum seekers as bare
life, excluded from the political community and exposed to death at
every turn signals a secret solidarity between humanitarianism
and the powers it should fight. The most obvious examples of this are the
neutrality of the International Committee of the Red Cross, the non-political
actions of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and
the refusal of these organizations to comment on the actions of political
regimes; this distinction is also seen in the general populace of many nationstates in which great compassion is demonstrated by donating
millions of dollars to fund humanitarian aid, while showing great
hostility to those same suffering faces when they are more
proximate strangers (Bretherton, 2006). The identification of the figure of
the immigrant/refugee/asylum seeker as fearsome in political rhetoric and
news media is therefore coupled with humanitarian liberal claims, indicating
how immigrants/ refugees/asylum seekers function as inclusive exclusion of
bare life in the way that Agamben suggests. When zo is included through an
exclusion from political life, then bare life (naked life) is produced.
Humanitarian liberal claims view immigrants/ refugees/asylum
seekers simply as bodies, bare life separate from political life.
Threats Link
Threats constitute mechanisms to construct community
only as the opposition to said threatsthis trades in the
identity of disposability but subordinating humans to
logics

Self-Knowledge 7.2)
Another example, among many, are the Health Care Centers in the U.S. The
New York Times (Sunday, September 23, 2007) reported the story of Habana
Health Care in Tampa Florida. In 2002 the Habana Health Care was
purchased by a private investment firm which bought, around the same
period, another 48 Health Care Centers in the country. Efficiency and
Management were put at work. There was an immediate personnel
reduction; costs in daily life of patients needs were also effi- ciently reduced.
The cost the families of the patient paid was maintained. Consequently,
patients receive less and less attention, several died as a consequence of
careless attention, while the private investors increased their economic
benefits. President George W. Bush was reported as defending the
privatization of Health Care: Democratic leaders want to put more power in
the hand of government by expanding federal healthcare programs. Its so
incremental a step towards governmentrun healthcare for every American.
He[[[[[[[ added that federal programs would lead to a European style
government-run health care (Financial Times, World News, on Friday
September 21, 2007). If you put together the government-run war in Iraq
and the government washing-hands on healthcare, you have two outstanding
examples of dispensability of human lives in benefit of corporate-run
economy and politics supporting it. It is also another good example of
efficiency in management to reduce cost and to increase benefits on the
dispensability of human lives. Thus, the brutal transformation of slavery
in the sixteenth century and the Jews Holocaust in the twentieth
century are two outstanding cases of the naturalization of
dispensable lives in a society in which reducing costs and
increasing production and accumulation of wealth go hand in hand
with politically saving communities from the danger menacing it
(e.g., communists, Jews, terrorists, immigrants, you name it).
These are the final horizons of salvation and the reason for
living[[[[[[[
Postmodernism Link
Postmodernists remain apolitical by recentering an idea
of reason even as they distance themselves from it

Enrique Dussel provides a good point of entry in his Frankfurt Lectures12 . He
argues: Modernity is, for many (for Jurgen Habermas or Charles Taylor) an
essentially or exclusively European phenomenon. In these lectures, I will
argue that modernity is, in fact, a European phenomenon but one
constituted in a dialectical relation with a nonEuropean alterity that
is its ultimate content. Modernity appears when Europe affirms
itself as the center of a World History that it inaugurates: the
periphery that surrounds this center is consequently part of its
self-definition. The occlusion of this periphery (and of the role of Spain and
Portugal in the formation of the modern world system from the late fifteenth
to the mid-seventeenth centuries) leads the major contemporary
thinkers of the center into a Eurocentric fallacy in their
understanding of modernity. If their understanding of the
genealogy of modernity is thus partial and provincial, their
attempts at a critique or defense of it are likewise unilateral and, in
part, false. It is a question of uncovering the origin of what I call
the myth of modernity itself. Modernity includes a rational concept
of emancipation that we affirm and subsume. But, at the same time, it
develops an irrational myth, a justification for genocidal violence.
The postmodernists criticize modern reason as a reason of terror;
we criticize modern reason because of the irrational myth that it
conceals . There are several important issues packed together in these two
dense paragraphs. My own argument, below, attempts to unfold and unravel
some of the radical consequences of Dussels statement for de-colonization
(rather than emancipation) of knowledge and of being.13 Let us begin, then,
by seeking to understand how de-colonization and liberation subsume
the rational concept of emancipation, as Dussel states it, and shift the
geopolitical location of discourse; and from here walk our way toward the
decolonial shift. The concept of emancipation, as Dussel implies,
belongs to the discourse of the European enlightenment and it is
used today within that same tradition. It is a common word in liberal
and Marxist discourses. Thus, beginning with his foundational book
Philosophy of Liberation (1977), Dussel makes the geopolitical choice to use
the keyword liberation instead of emancipation in consonance with the
social movements of national liberation in Africa and Asia, as well as in
Latin America14 Attaching the word liberation to philosophy
complemented the meaning that the word had on all revolutionary fronts of
political decolonization, in Asia and Africa and their struggles for
decolonization. Liberation referred to two different and interrelated
struggles: the political and economic decolonization and the epistemological
decolonization (e.g., philosophy in the case of Dussel; the social sciences in

the case of Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals-Borda15 . Thus, liberation
emerged in the process of de-centering the universal emancipating claims in
the projects grounded in the liberal and socialist traditions of the European
enlightenment. Seen in reverse, the fact that Ernesto Laclau16 , for example,
opts for emancipation instead of liberation might reveal that the two
distinct projects are actually located on different geo-political terrains. The
point here is less to determine which one is right; but, rather, to
understand what each offers and for whom. We must ask: Who needs
them? Who benefits from them? Who are the agents and the
intended targets of emancipating or libratory projects? What
subjectivities are activated in these projects? Does the distinction
even matter when emancipation has a universal ring that seems to
cover the interests of all oppressed people in the world? The
concept and the idea of emancipation in the eighteenth century, was based
on three major historical experiences: the Glorious Revolution of 1668 in
England, the independence of the colonists in America from the emerging
British Empire in 1776; and the French Revolution in 1789. In every historical
account, the three initial historical moments were successful in achieving the
meaning of emancipation. Yet, the Glorious Revolution was led by the ascent
of the British bourgeoisie and supported by the earlier uprising of the
levelers in 1648. Likewise, the main actors of the U.S. Revolution of 1776
were the Anglo-descendent colonizers just as the people that ended up in
the control of the French bourgeoisie in the French Revolution pertained also
to that social stratum. While the Russian Revolution (1917) was, at least
theoretically, the obverse of the Glorious, U.S. and French revolutions, it
responded to the same logic of modernity, although with a socialist/Marxist
content instead of a Liberal one. While emancipation was the concept used
to argue for the freedom of a new social class, the bourgeoisie (translated
into the universal term of humanity and setting the stage to export
emancipation all over the world, although Haiti presented the initial
difficulties to emancipating universal claims) and was recovered in the
twentieth century in Marxist discourse to argue for the emancipation of the
working class or still more recently, for the emancipating forces of the
multitude, 17 liberation provides a larger frame that includes the
racialized class that the European bourgeoisie (directly or indirectly)
colonized beyond Europe (or beyond the heart of Europe, as it was the
colonization of Ireland) and, thus, subsumes emancipation.). What remains
still unsaid and un-theorized is the fact that the concept of
emancipationin the discourses of the European enlightenment-proposes and presupposes changes within the system that doesnt
question the logic of colonialitythe emerging nation-states in
Europe were, simultaneously, new imperial configurations (in relation
to previous monarchic empires, like Spain and Portugal). I am arguing here
that both liberation and decolonization points toward
conceptual (and therefore epistemic) projects of delinking from the
colonial matrix of power. Because of the global reach of European
modernity, de-linking cannot be understood as a new conceptual system
coming, literally, out of the blue. De-linking in my argument
presupposes border thinking or border epistemology in the precise
sense that the Western foundation of modernity and of knowledge

is on the one hand unavoidable and on the other highly limited and
dangerous. The danger of what Ignacio Ramonet (Le Monde Diplomatique)
labeled la pense unique and that before him Herbert Marcuse labeled the
one dimensional man. La pensee however, is not just neoliberalism , as Ramonet implies. La pensee unique is Western in toto, that
is, liberal and neo-liberal but also Christian and neo-Christian, as well as
Marxist and neo-Marxist. La pensee unique is the totality of the three major
macro-narratives of Western civilization with its imperial languages (English,
German, French, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese) and their Greco and
Roman foundations. To de-link from the colonial matrix of power and
the logic of coloniality embedded in la pensee unique, it is
necessary to engage in border epistemology and in alternatives TO
modernity or in a the global and diverse project of transmodernity.
Why global and diverse? -- because there are many beginnings beyond
Adam and Eve and Greek civilization and many other foundational languages
beyond Greek and Latin. With and in each language come different concepts
of economy that of course Adam Smith was unable to think, and other
political theories beyond Niccolo Machiavelli or Thomas Hobbes; and different
conceptions of life which leads to philosophical practices that cannot be
dependent from Greek canonical dictums in matters of thoughts!!! etc.etc.
Conceptual (and theoretical) de-linking is, in the argument I am
advancing the necessary direction of liberation and decolonization,
while transformation within the colonial matrix of power is the
splendor and limitations of any project of emancipation(s).18 Delinking is not a problem for emancipating projects because they
are all presented as transformation within the linear trajectory of
Western history and Western thoughts (once again, from Greek and
Latin categories of thought, to Germans, Englishs and Frenchs)19
Western Post-Structural Link

Starting from Western theories, even if you end up in a
de-colonial critique, is NOT the same as de-linkingmust
be a total break
Coloniality and de-coloniality introduces a fracture with both, the
Eurocentered project of post-modernity and a project of postcoloniality, heavily dependent on poststructuralism as far as Michel
Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida have been
acknowledged as the grounding of the post-colonial canon: Edward
Said, Gayatri Spivak and Hommi Bhabha. De-coloniality starts from
other sources. From the decolonial shift already implicit in Nueva cornica
and buen gobierno by Waman Puma de Ayala; in the de-colonial critique and
activism of Mahatma Gandhi; in the fracture of Marxism in its
encounter with colonial legacies in the Andes, articulated by Jose Carlos
Maritegui; in the radical political and epistemological shifts enacted by
Amilcar Cabral, Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Rigoberta Mench, Gloria
Anzalda, among others. The de-colonial shift, in other words, is a
project of de-linking while postcolonial criticism and theory is a
project of scholarly transformation within the academy. Quijano thus
summarizes the de-colonial shift starting from the decolonization of
knowledge: La crtica del paradigma europeo de la racionalidad/modernidad
es indispensable. Ms an, urgente. Pero es dudoso que el camino consista
en la negacin simple de todas sus categories; en la disolucin de la realidad
en el discurso; en la pura negacin de la idea y de la perspectiva de totalidad
en el conocimiento. Lejos de esto, es necesario desprenderse de las
vinculaciones de la racionalidad-modernidad con la colonialidad, en primer
termino, y en definitiva con todo poder no constituido en la decision libre de
gentes libres. Es la instrumentalizacin de la razn por el poder colonial, en
primer lugar, lo que produjo paradigmas distorsionados de conocimiento y
malogr las promesas liberadoras de la modernidad. La alternativa en
consecuencia es clara: la destruccin de la colonialidad del poder mundial
(italics mine).9 The last statement may sound somewhat messianic but it is,
nonetheless, an orientation that in the first decade of the 21st century has
shown its potential and its viability. Such[[[ destruction shall not be
imagined as a global revolution lead by one concept of Totality that
would be different from the modern one, but equally totalitarian.
The Soviet Union was already an experiment whose results is not an
exemplar to follow. The statement shall be read in parallel to Quijanos
observations about none-totalitarian concepts of totality; to his own concept
of heterogeneous structural-histories (I will come back below to this
concept), and to what (I will develop below) pluriversality as a universal
project. And, above all, it shall be read in complementarity with Quijanos
idea of desprenderse (de-linking).10 In this regard, Quijano proposes a
de-colonial epistemic shift when he clarifies that: En primer termino, la

descolonizacin epistemolgica, para dar paso luego a una nueva
comunicacin inter-cultural, a un intercambio de experiencias y de
significaciones, como la base de otra racionalidad que pueda pretender, con
legitimidad, a alguna universalidad. Pues nada menos racional, finalmente,
que la pretension de que la especfica cosmovisin de una etnia particular
sea impuesta como la racionalidad universal, aunque tal etnia se llama
Europa occidental. Porque eso, en verdad, es pretender para un
provincianismo el ttulo de universalidad (italics mine)11 The argument that
follows is, in a nutshell, contained in this paragraph. First, epistemic decolonization runs parallel to Amins de-linking. A de-linking that
leads to decolonial epistemic shift and brings to the foreground
other epistemologies, other principles of knowledge and
understanding and, consequently, other economies, other politics,
other ethics. New inter-cultural communication should be interpreted as
new inter-epistemic communication (as we will see bellow, is the case of the
concept of inter-culturality among Indigenous intellectuals in Ecuador).
Furthermore, de-linking presupposes to move toward a geo- and biopolitics of knowledge that on the one hand denounces the pretended
universality of a particular ethnicity (bio-politics), located in a
specific part of the planet (geo-politics), that is, Europe where
capitalism accumulated as a consequence of colonialism . Delinking then shall be understood as a de-colonial epistemic shift
leading to other-universality, that is, to pluri-versality as a
universal project. Ill come back to this point in section IV (The grammar
of de-coloniality).
Major post-structural theories (Butler, Agamben, Hardt

and Negri, and Badiou) all rely on universalizations that
produce problematic Eurocentrism
Scheuller 2009 (Mahani, Professor of English at the University of Florida,
Decolonizing Global Theories Today in Interventions 11.2)

The opening of the barriers at Bornholmer Strasse on 9 November 1989 was
not simply a moment that inaugurated the reunification of Germany or the
end of the Cold War. Marked by the crowds of East Berliners as they poured
onto Bosebrucke Bridge into West Germany, this was also an event in the
Zizekian sense that came to symbolize, in political and intellectual circles, a
reunification of the West. Of course, this West was imaginary, highly
ideological, and in reality politically contested through bloodshed.
Former Eastern European countries were (and still are) seen as outside the
pale of western civilization even as they adopted capitalist reforms (see
Pocock 1997); migrants from the former third world increasingly questioned
the coherence of the West; Turkeys liminal status exposed the religious and
ethnic fault lines of Europe; and, more recently, even the idea of a unified
West seemed threatened by Frances decisive political break from the US in
the preamble to the preemptive invasion of Iraq. Yet since the 1990s,
continuing after 9/11 and the unilateral invasion of Iraq in 2003, the idea
of one world and past former divisions seems reproduced in a major
intellectual impetus in Europe and the US: to produce paradigms of
what I call global theory, based on the assumption that the

contemporary moment calls for a resurgence of some form of
universal theorizing.1 And while the particular form of this
theorizing might vary from the search for a new humanism, to a
critique of modern sovereignty, the assumptions and scope of these
theories are universalist. Such a shift has been characterized as a
movement away from the quagmire of micropolitics of radical
theory of the 1960s to an embrace of the idea of emancipatory
knowledge, the development, as Negri puts it, of a new
postdeconstructive ontology,and a bold step beyond the negation
of postmodernism (Negri 1999: 12; see also Passavant 2004: 4). This
emphasis on a new ontology, the object of which is to energize us
with new global possibilities for resistance, can be seen among
others in the work of Hardt and Negri (Empire and Multitude), Giorgio
Agamben (Homo Sacer, State of Exception, The Coming Community), and
Alain Badiou (Ethics), and the new work of Judith Butler (Precarious Life).
But if these new ontologies go beyond the circumscribed limits of
postmodernism to offer us revolutionary or liberatory manifestoes
and theories appropriate to the current moment, they are also
theories that confront us with a postcolonial unease precisely
because they are, like the tradition of colonial knowledge
production, universalizing , albeit in different ways. Whereas the
decolonization movements of the mid-twentieth century and the new social
movements of the 1960s led to a Lyotardian postmodern suspicion of grand
narratives, the contemporary intellectual moment seems to relish
grand narratives. In a section entitled Back to the Eighteenth Century in
Multitude, Hardt and Negri write: What was indeed utopian and completely
illusory in the eighteenth century was to repropose the ancient form of
democracy designed for the city-state as a model for the modern nationstate ...The challenge then was to reinvent the concept of democracy and
create new institutions adequate to modern society and the national[ space.
It is useful to go back to the eighteenth century, finally, to appreciate what a
radical innovation they accomplished. If they did it, then we can too! (Hardt
and Negri 2004: 307)2 But if the contemporary intellectual moment is
an exciting one, calling for a new theoretical project dare one say a
new Enlightenment those of us who are wary of eighteenth-century
Europes racial projects and colonial missions have reason to be
extremely wary of these current projects in which a West-centered
humanism parades as universalism.3 At stake in critiquing
universalist theories today is the fact that the contemporary
moment of hyper-imperialism and intense conflict between the
global North and global South as evidenced by US military
occupations, the battles over scarce resources, the patenting of
indigenous knowleges, and the continual building of walls (at the
Israel-Palestine border, the US-Mexico border) that separate the
West and its allies from the rest requires an analysis sensitive to
particular striations. I suggest, therefore, that what I have called
global theories can operate as colonizing forces which it is our
ethical task to resist, to decolonize. Implicit in this formulation is
the idea that colonial difference continues to be central in

knowledge construction, particularly in theory. Colonial difference
is operative not only in globalization theories which contest the
very idea of imperialism, but also in (universalist) theories that
address the imperial moment, as well as in what have been touted
as radically new global movements. I will begin by briefly analysing the
West-centred basis of the idea of inevitability in Hardt and Negris concept of
empire, then move on to critiquing two universalizing concepts: Agambens
bare life and Judith Butlers vulnerability. I focus on these four major theorists
because they have undoubtedly been the most influential in the humanities
and because their works offer a range of theorizing from questions of
globalization to those of sovereignty, and a feminist-based humanism.
Turning from theory to practice, I will point out the problems of Eurocentrism
in even so ostensibly radical and global an organization as the World Social
Forum. My purpose is not to offer a new third worldist or global South
theorization for the contemporary moment, but rather to demonstrate the
need for vigilance against the global theoretical projects being
generated today
Hardt and Negri Link

Hardt and Negris strong inevitability thesis about Empire
erases the Global south and privileges Western moments
of political becoming
I do not intend to address here the West-centred focus on immaterial
labour and the presumed pervasiveness of the Internet (when access
to electricity is scarce for an enormous number of the Souths poor) or
the equally western emphasis on migrations from South to North to
the neglect of equally massive migrations within the South. Neither
will I attempt to point out the obvious problem of conceiving a
decentred world in the midst of the rise of the neo-cons or the
inadequacy of explaining away US militarist imperialism through
the idea of a global state of permanent warfare, as Hardt and Negri do
in Multitude (2004: 32). My purpose here is to briefly point out the
Eurocentrism present in their logic about the inevitability of
empire.5 Hardt and Negri write: Empire is materializing before our very
eyes. Over the past several decades, as colonial regimes were overthrown
and then precipitously after the Soviet barriers to the capitalist world market
finally collapsed, we have witnessed an irresistible and irreversible
globalization of economic and cultural exchanges. Along with the global
market and global circuits of production has emerged a global order, a new
logic and structure of rule in short, a new form of sovereignty ... Our basic
hypothesis is that sovereignty has taken on a new form, composed
of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a
single logic of rule. This new global form of sovereignty is what we
call Empire. (Hardt and Negri 2000: xi; my emphases) These manifesto-like
sentences from the very beginning of Empire speak through a language
of inevitability about a radically reconfigured new world we all must
recognize. Like other globalization theorists, the authors of Empire
repeatedly use terms such as irresistible, inevitable and
irreversible, so that globalization as a scenario is presented with
the certainty of religious belief (see Steger 2002: 54). As a
consequence, every conflict or struggle gets deterministally viewed
as part of the workings of empire. Empire simply is. Indeed, the cover of
Empire, with a satellite photograph of the earth, points to the audaciously
global nature of their project while simultaneously suggesting an Olympian
distancing from smaller, presumably material details. Yet it is clear in this
opening that a certain western periodizing and historical perspective
is at stake: 1989 is taken to be the crucial moment, not simply for
Europe, but for the world. It is the moment of intensified cultural
and economic exchanges. The overthrow of colonial regimes, while
a prelude to the end of an older system, is a question of the past,
irrelevant to the contemporary moment. But the idea of a worldwide
multitude of the dispossessed against an unlocatable empire, belies the
significance of imperialist views of politically charged differences
such as those between Western civilization and Arab/Muslim

barbarity, touted by the likes of Samuel Huntington (1993: 2249), and
picked up by the Bush administration, that continue to be the source of
major violence in the contemporary world. Despite the experiential
absurdity of such binarisms, their ideological valence is significant.
For Hardt and Negri, empire as irresistible empirical reality is supported by a
temporal logic that both privileges and appropriates the present. Empire,
both in its oppressive machinery and liberatory potential, belongs to the
present, while any call for the nation-state as a bulwark against global capital
is nostalgia (Hardt and Negri 2000: 43). And in this present network, all
struggles since the 1990s are new struggles of a multitude against the
empire of global capital. But to maintain that the Palestinian Intifada and the
Los Angeles riots, while ostensibly different, were similarly directed against
the global order of empire and the post-Fordist regime of social control is to
trivialize the continuing history of colonial violence and occupation of
Palestine, as well as the racial dispossession of AfricanAmericans in Los
Angeles (545). While the Battle of Seattle against a putative empire might
involve Palestinian sympathizers, it is important to stress that the struggle
against Palestinian occupation is of a different order from the
protests against the G8. And even if 1989 is to be taken as a moment
signalling the beginning of economic and cultural globalization and the free
flows of capital, the US control of agencies like the IMF and World Bank needs
to be acknowledged (see Stiglitz 2002: 920). Yet the binary temporal
logic of Empire relegates imperialism, along with anticolonial
nationalist aspirations, to a misguided nostalgia for the past,
whileJJ the idea of a decentred and deterritorializing empire
becomes the master narrative of the present. But even if we
momentarily accept globalization as present reality, it would be
useful to maintain a healthy anthropological scepticism of grand
universals and recognize the particularity of the functionings of
global capital in different spaces (Ong 2006: 122). Stephen Collier and
Aihwa Ongs (2004: 4, 11) term global assemblage, which identifies the
interaction of global forms with situated political regimes, is particularly
useful here because it points to tensions between the whole and the partial,
encompassing and situated, smooth and striated.6 Not only doesEmpire
move through a western periodizing imperative that erases the
specific concerns of much of the worlds South, it also presents the
logic of empire and globalization as always already understood. R.
Radhakrishnans critique of the logic of globalization theories applies well to
Empire. Radhakrishnan writes: The triumph of globality has to do with the
fact that it seems to emanate from reality even as it speaks persuasively for
that reality. As a fait accompli, globality presents itself both as reality and as
a representation of that reality. It is as though the very essence of reality is
global; therefore, any attempt at interrogating globality would be nothing
short of discrediting reality itself. (Radhakrishnan 2003: 88) However, the
closing of this gap between representation and reality, the denial of
this gap in the name of inevitability and irresistibility, can only be
made in the name of those who do not need political representation
or who can claim that their narratives are not representations. It
comes as no surprise, therefore, that at the end of Empire, Hardt and
Negri argue: Today the militant cannot even pretend to be a

representative (413). Subaltern narratives such as the wretched of the
earth, on the other hand, have presented themselves necessarily as
strategic and chosen and many militants (e.g. the Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam, resistance groups like Hezbollah, or indigenous groups like the Maori)
claim representation. But the rhetoric of messianic liberation that
underlies Empire and Multitude is problematically geared towards a
West-centred political amnesia. So when Hardt and Negri
thunderously proclaim never before has the restlessness for
freedom and democracy been so widespread throughout the world
one is compelled to ask how they would characterize the
decolonization of most of Africa and Asia between the 1940s and
1970s (Hardt and Negri 2004: 353).7 What if, instead of 1989 as the
magical date for global thinking, we substituted 18 April 1955, the beginning
of the Bandung Conference, which involved meetings of leaders of the
majority of the worlds population?
Agamben Link
Agambens reliance on the figure of the Muselmann
recreates colonial violence

Yet, on the other hand, in Homo Sacer, bare life is subjectified through a
form of otherness. If camp violently and visibly actualized the figure of the
homo sacer in the inmate, the most extreme figure of camp is the
Muselmann, distinguished from other inmates by embodying the living
dead. Agamben refers to Primo Levis description of this figure who in camp
jargon was called the Muslim, der Muselmann, a being from whom
humiliation, horror, and fear had so taken away all consciousness and all
personality as to make him absolutely apathetic (hence the ironic name
given to him) (185). What distinguishes him from other inmates is his
complete severance from others and from his former selfhood. Mute
and absolutely alone, he has passed into another world without memory and
without grief (185). Indeed, it would seem that the Muselmann is not even
zoe because he is deprived even of animal instincts (see Abrams 2004).
Agamben (1998) writes: What is the life of the Muselmann? Can one say that
it is pure zoe? Nothing natural or common, however, is left in him;
nothing animal or instinctual remains in his life ...Antelme tells us that the
camp inhabitant was no longer capable of distinguishing between pangs of
cold and the ferocity of the SS. If we apply this statement to the Muselmann
quite literally ...then we can say that he moves in an absolute indistinction of
fact and law, of life and juridical rule, and of nature and politics. (185)
Agamben presents this figure for absolute abjection, one we can argue is
the ultimate manifestation of the homo sacer or perhaps defies even
this category to become the final illustration of exception. At the end of Homo
Sacer, Agamben links this figure to contemporary cases of the instantiation
of bare life. As such, this figure becomes central to thinking about bare
life or the life of the homo sacer. But why the Muselmann? What is the
context of the Muselmann appearing as a figure for bare life or abjection? If,
as Edward Said has argued, the Muslim or Arab, indistinguishable in the
discourse on Orientalism, has been the Other of the West, we need to think
about the context in which the word Muselmann appears in the
language of camp. Yet Agamben does not address this issue at all in
Homo Sacer, although he devotes an entire book to this figure, one which
continues his meditations on the concept of bare life: Remnants of Auschwitz.
Here, Agamben searches for a livable ethics through the figure of the
Muselmann, the dehumanized figure for the paradox of a witness who
cannot bear witness but who is the true witness. In The Drowned and the
Saved Primo Levi describes Muselmaner assubmerged complete witnesses
who, even if they had paper and pen, would not have testified because they
were already dead (1989: 63 4; quoted in Agamben 1999: 334). Agamben,
who relies heavily on Primo Levi, uses this figure to describe The
untestifiable, that to which no one has borne witness, has a name. In the
jargon of the camp, it is der Muselmann, literally the Muslim (41). For
Agamben, the Musselmann becomes a figure for a new kind of ethics, for a
form of life without dignity, a bare life that conforms to nothing and is
absolutely immanent (69). But while the idea of a form of life as
immanent might be debatable, there is nothing immanent about
the term Muselmann itself.9 Agamben is well aware of the cultural
coordinates of the terms, but chooses to spend only two pages of
Remnants interrogating the term itself. Agamben begins by citing Ryn and
Klodzinskis 1987 study on the phenomenon of the Muselmann in the
concentration camp: They excluded themselves from all relations to their
environment. If they could still move around, they did so in slow motion,
without bending their knees.... Seeing them from afar, one had the
impression of seeing Arabs praying. This image was the origin of the term
used at Auschwitz for people dying of malnutrition: Muslims (43). He follows
with Wolfgang Sofskys explanation of how the term Muslemann, in common
use in Auschwitz, spread to other camps as well. In Majdanek the living dead
were termed donkeys, in Dachau they were cretins, in Stutthof cripples,
in Buchenwald tired sheikhs and in womens camps Muselweiber/female
muslims. (Agamben, 1999: 44). Agamben does not comment on these
explanations but attempts to provide one of his own: The most likely
explanation of the term can be found in the literal meaning of the Arabic
word muslim: the one who submits unconditionally to the will of God. It is this
meaning that lies at the origin of the legends concerning Islams supposed
fatalism, legends of which are found in European culture starting with the
Middle Ages (this deprecatory sense of the term is present in European
languages, particularly in Italian). But while the Muslims resignation consists
in the conviction that the will of Allah is at work every moment and in even
the smallest events, the Muselmann of Auschwitz is instead defined by a loss
of will and consciousness. (Agamben 1999: 45) I cite this passage at length
because it demonstrates Agambens contradictory awareness of, yet
clear participation in, the discourse of Orientalism. He is cognizant of the
overdetermined nature of western ideas about Islamic fatalism and the
denigration of Muslims in the West, but the complication that the
dehumanization of Muslims might introduce into the numerous
theorizations about a post-Holocaust ethics does not concern
Agamben. Instead of interrogating the idea of Islamic fatalism,
Agamben reproduces it in the very attempt to distinguish between the
Muslims resignation and that of the Muselmann of Auschwitz. In Agambens
very certainty of what constitutes the Muslims resignation, the Muslim as
multiply constituted subject is denied; instead, the Muslim is rendered as
simply a fact, a stable object of knowledge, an ontological fact like
the Orient. What Agamben neglects to address, and what must be
addressed, is how the very idea of the thingness of bare life, the unseakable,
the grey zone as Primo Levi calls it, is thought through a process of
Othering. Why is the Muselmann as figure alone of no concern to Agamben?
How does the Muselmann in the imaginary of Europe take such a central
space that he gets deployed as the very limit of the human? Once we begin
to undertake such an examination, it becomes clear that even the very idea
of bare life, in its erasure of the Muselmann as anything but a figure,
functions contradictorily to, on the one hand, metaphorize this Other out of
existence (the Muselmann is simply the most abject camp prisoner) and to
repeatedly semanticize the figure of the Arab praying or the look of the
oriental as a complete absence of will and feeling. And yet the numerous
scholars using the idea of bare life and the Muselmann in fields as varied as
sociology, philosophy, history, legal studies, and human rights activism have
simply accepted the use of the term Muselmann along with its cultural
coordinates (e.g. Bernstein 2006; McQuillan 2005; Norris 2000; Diken and
Laustsen n.d.). Only Gil Anidjar in his groundbreaking study of the
construction of the enemy pays attention to the use of the term Muselmann
in camp. Anidjars reading demonstrates how Agambens analysis
completely ignores, for instance, the insistent manner in which the
inconsistently transliterated term Muselmann finds its way in camp
jargon (Anidjar 2003: 140). Given the semanticide committed by the
Nazis, their ability to decontextualize words completely, such an
absence of inquiry is particularly troubling (139). Anidjar rightly
refuses to accept Primo Levis explanation that Muslim is simply a
term like Canada or Mexico names given to certain buildings in camp
and which has no referential value and demonstrates instead how
Montesquieu and Hegel see both Jews and Muslims partaking in religions that
demand abjection (Anijdar 2003: 12733). Thus to accept the term
Muselmann as non-referential or to claim that its connotations in camp
literature have no relation with its usage in other contexts is to deny how
Orientalism functions in the most unlikely of contexts, normalizing the
dehumanization of the non-West. The very impossibility of naming the
basest or liminal of human conditions without resort to the figure
of the Muslim/Arab should give us pause. Indeed, the irony today is
that the Muslim/Arab is used as a limit figure standing inbetween
the human and the non-human, a figure which in Guantanamo and
in Palestine embodies the condition where life and law become
indistinguishable and the killing machine becomes operative. This
figure of bare life, concocted out of Orientalism, becomes the
justification for conditions of indefinite detention, occupation, and
ethnic cleansing.[
Agambens refusal to mention indigenous genocide and

global coloniality creates violence and blinds him to
genocide
Colatrella 2009 (Stephen, Leftist activist and author, multiple peer
reviewed published works, Nothing Exceptional: Against Agamben in

Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, vol.9. no.1)
Primitive accumulation, enclosure and expropriation Three omissions will
serve to help us see the limits of Agambens vision, and why these
limitations weaken the very explanatory power of his analysis of even
what he so insightfully describes. First, in neither Homo Sacer nor in
State of Exception is there any mention of Native Americans. This
may seem either tangential or unfair as a complaint. After all, Agamben is
interested in todays political repression and is European. There would seem
to be no particular reason for him to privilege, or even to be interested in
the history of Native America. And perhaps it is only my own background as
an American that leads me to consider this relevant. But I think that neither
Agambens Italian nationality, nor my US nationality are important here.
Homo Sacer is purported to be a concept that enables us to grasp
how and why some members of society, and by implication any of us,
can be stripped of any legal protection or community membership,
and killed or subjected to any lesser punishment including torture,
with impunity. The Native American experience is, arguably, the
paradigmatic case of entire populations being dispossessed, killed
with impunity, provided no protection legal or otherwise, or, as in the case
of the Cherokee and other southern nations, having the formal legal
recognition by both the local states and the US Supreme Court, superseded
by executive power (by President Andrew Jackson to be precise). Granted, no
book can cover every relevant case and Agambens books discussed here are
both short, if dense. But he does, in State of Exception go over a very
thorough history of states of emergency and the use of exceptional powers
by governments all over the world9 . Tracing the roots of both states of
exception and of the construction of homo sacer figures in liberal
democratic countries is a part of the exercise that Agamben is
engaged in. Thus failing to even refer to Native Americans is
significant, both with reference to the historical period when The
only good Indian is a dead Indian was a practical guide to genocide
that more closely approximates homo sacer historically than
anything I can imagine and to the present day when many Native
Americans would argue with reason that little has changed. The
second omission, more difficult to explain by Agambens geographical
origins, is any reference at all to the history of colonialism, or to
conditions in the ex-colonial world of the Global South. Arendt,
despite numerous failings of analysis and history some of which I discuss
below, nevertheless to her credit makes the relationship between imperialism
and racism in the colonies and totalitarianism in Europe a central part of
her analysis in the Origins of Totalitarianism10. Yet there is no discussion
of this relationship in Agamben . In this sense, Agamben represents an
analytical step backwards from Arendt, not a further development of her
insights. The rest of the world has dropped off the mental map. This
is not just a question of priorities, of the brevity of books that
cant cover everything, nor even of Eurocentrism though it
certainly is in part that. It is rather a serious failure of analysis and
historical imagination that, as we will see below, makes Agambens
theoretical discussion less useful and reduces dramatically its
explanatory power. For many decades, in country after country, continent
after continent, European and other colonial powers could act with
impunity and without regard to the life of, let alone legally
recognized rights of the colonized people. The Belgian Congo, and the
horrors of slavery; the repeated experience of mass famine in India (done
away with since Independence and the establishment of democratic
government); the labeling of resistance against expropriation and foreign
rule Mau Mau to define it as an atavistic throwback to savagery to enable the
British rulers to destroy it militarily; over a million dead in the Algerian
struggle for Independence against the French; the near-genocide in Libya by
the Italians, the list could go on for pages. None of it relevant,
presumably, either to states of exception, in which sovereigns are
unconstrained by any legal or customary limit in their actions, nor in

understanding the reduction of person from members of
communities with either customary or legal rights to bare life,
dependent on the self-restraint at whim of others for their survival.
Nor does the history of neocolonialism, with its two million dead in
Vietnam; its horrifying wars by death squad in El Salvador and Nicaragua,
and Guatemala, its horrors in Angola and Mozambique, or apartheid in South
Africa, warrant even a mention from presumably the most up to
date, innovative thinker of the denial of rights and life by state
power writing today . Not to mention Structural Adjustment Programs,
the IMF, World Bank or WTO and the policies that continue, after decades, to
condemn millions to mere survival and worse, and which have regularly
resulted in resistance, repression, and states of emergency by military and
civilian powers. Yet, in failing to see the ex-colonial world, Agamben
has also missed the part of their population that ended up in the
West. I refer of course to the enslaved . In discussing homo sacer as a
legal figure with no rights, no standing, no community membership that
others were obliged to respect, do we not immediately recall Dred Scott ? Is
there nothing that the experience of the American slave can teach
us about homo sacer? If slavery can tell us something about homo
sacer, is it possible that anti-slavery, the struggle for abolition can
tell us something about states of exception and how to fight them?
Could the movement against the Fugitive Slave Act in the 1850s United
States, for instance, be of some help in thinking about our problems today?
**Whatever Being alternative should be resequenced

prioritize Other ways of thinking and then conceive of
Whatever Being as the Western response to alterity**
Bignall 2012 (Simon, Post-Doctoral Fellow at New South Wales, Agamben
and Coloniality, p. 279-281)

However, there are also several worrying issues raised by these
notions. The most obvious of these is that, for many indigenous
individuals, their identification as such is only conceivable in terms
of a collectivist ontology that defines their existence as peoples,
which Agambens emphasis on the radical singularity of being does
not manifestly support. Furthermore, occupation of heterotopic spaces
within the nation has been vital for supporting indigenous peoples
survival and their visions of radical futures following their
experiences of colonisation; such spaces often are characterised by
the assertion of a culturally distinct indigenous ontology and
epistemology, in which a foundational (though often flexible)
indigenous identification provides the basis for a contesting politics
(for example, Soguk 2007). Another concern is that Agamben seeks to
theorise a new form of political community in which the privileged content of
dominant speech is subverted by a new emphasis on the common human
capacity for language, which universally allows whatever beings to
experience [. . .] the fact itself of speaking (Agamben 2000: 115). However,

for many colonised peoples, the universal human potential
associated with having language is sometimes politically
inadequate, coercive and frustrating, especially when actual speech
is forced, when a limited or false interpretation is imposed on actual
speech, or when their human linguistic potential is materialised
within colonial structures (such as courts of law) that are predicated
upon the absence of indigenous structures and modes of expressing
and knowing, which might, for example, privilege the use of silence
as a valid form of political expression. There is a danger that the
notion of full communicability that Agamben associates as a
condition of the coming community corresponds more easily to
Western values of political transparency and equality than to
indigenous conceptions. This is especially the case where privileged
power of access to sacred knowledge is protected by principles of
non-communication or secrecy that exist to resist profanation; for
indigenous communities, the danger posed by full communicability
and desacralisation is especially well illustrated by the profanation
and appropriation of sacred knowledge by colonising experts, who
lack the appropriate frameworks for understanding (and respecting)
such knowledge. 4 of being does not manifestly support.. These
problems suggest that the potential postcoloniality of whatever being
and of the coming community it augurs can only be celebrated with
caution. Postcolonial modes of thinking will not seek to universally
impose concepts of being even radically indeterminate notions
such as whatever being upon diverse peoples with ontological
and epistemological traditions of their own. Nor will they naively
assume that new forms of political community can emerge untainted
by the colonial legacy; the 4 colonial destruction of indigenous
traditions arguably has limited our scope to (re)create the genuinely
common conditions needed for rendering a universal human
experience of the fact itself of speaking. I suggest that aspects of
Agambens thinking about whatever existence and the coming community
offer positive scope for theorists attempting to envisage postcolonial futures
by revising received and dominant Western understandings of being in the
world with others. That is, I suspect that a postcolonial version of
whatever being and coming community can work best as a
Western complement to non-Western ways of self-knowing and
belonging, rather than as indeterminate concepts of the self and
political existence that can be considered as universally applicable.
But if whatever being can really only be employed to reconceive
Western perspectives, we must again wonder about the nature of
the relationship between Western and indigenous frameworks of
political transformation. How can the former (in which sociality is
reconceived by moving beyond essence and identity) understand the
latter (in which identity is the transformative basis of political
community), without a certain tacit condescension towards forms of
sociality still mediated by particular conditions of belonging? And if
we only can draw upon Agambens notion of whatever to rethink
Western traditions of philosophising being and community, then
would only Western beings be able to be united in their potential

for being-called-postcolonial? What conditions would allow for both
settler and indigenous forms of life to join in being-calledpostcolonial, and how could this be decided on mutually agreed
terms? These questions can only be decided through effort of
intercultural communication and understanding and by
reconstructive practice, as culturally diverse peoples coexisting on
single territories strive to engage each other in a shared manner of
collective existence, conceived as such on mutually agreed terms of
relationship.
Butler Link
Butler relies on a Eurocentric concept of the human by
positing a homology of vulnerability

This vulnerability, Butler argues, is constituted and emphasized
through recognition, a notion of subjectivity she derives from Hegel.
Commenting on Hegelian recognition, Butler writes: The struggle for
recognition in the Hegelian sense ... means that ...we are not separate
identities in the struggle for recognition but are already involved in a
reciprocal exchange, an exchange that dislocates us from our positions, our
subject-positions, and allows us to see that community itself requires the
recognition that we are all, in different ways, striving for recognition. (44) To
ask for recognition, or to offer it, is precisely not to ask for recognition for
what one already is. It is to solicit a becoming, to instigate a transformation
(44). To solicit recognition is to emphasize bonds with the Other instead of a
violent and violence-causing separation. Butler further suggests that
recognition involves more than simply validation, but rather an opportunity
for growth. In envisioning a liberatory potential in the possibilities of Hegelian
recognition, Butler follows a line of scholars like Alexandre Kojeve (1989) and
Charles Taylor (1995) who have seen Hegels theorization of recognition
through the dialectic of the lord and bondsman in The Phenomenology of
Spirit (1807) as a productive challenge to ideas of dominance and an
articulation of the possibilities of progressive human relations (see also
Honneth 1995). Hegel (1977: 111) writes: Selfconsciousness exists in and for
itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only
in being acknowledged. The master wishes to be recognized as master
through the slave, but because the latter is a dependent consciousness,
proper recognition cannot occur. The master is therefore not certain of
being-for-self as the truth of himself (111). Hegels articulation thus suggests
the mutual dependence of master and slave on each other for recognition
and this is the Hegel that Butler uses to theorize a radical
incompleteness at the heart of a subjectivity constituted through
recognition. But if a radical human vulnerability, dependent upon
recognition, is to be posited as the basis for a tranformative ethical
encounter, it is important to again ask whether this formulation of
human vulnerability does not, in fact, depend on the erasure of
unevenness that has been the basis for a West-centred humanism.
One of the best critiques of theories of subjectivity based on recognition
came from Frantz Fanon, who in Black Skin White Masks radically
reformulated both Hegel and Lacan by rethinking the concept of recognition
from the perspective of the colonized and raced Other. Fanon argued that
instead of a basic split at the heart of subjectivity, as theorized by
Lacan, there is a fundamental difference for the black person who
finds negative social value through the white colonist who acts as a
social mirror. Dirty Nigger! Or simply, Look, a Negro! ... Sealed into that
crushing objecthood, I turned beseechingly to others ...But just as I reached
the other side, I stumbled, and the movements, the attitudes, the glances of
the Other fixed me there. (Fanon 1967: 109) For the black person, Fanon
suggests, an apprehension of vulnerability and loss leads not to an
empathetic subjectivity, but rather to an objecthood because the dominant
culture denies him human recognition.10 To use Agambens terms here, we
might say that the black person gets constructed as the limit of the human,
as bare life. Fanon writes: There is of course the moment of being for
others of which Hegel speaks, but every ontology is made unattainable in a
colonized and civilized society (Fanon 1967: 109). Critiquing Hegels
exposition of the reciprocity of recognition between master and slave, Fanon
emphasizes the significance of unequal power relations: For Hegel there is
reciprocity; here the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What
he wants from the slave is not recognition but work (220). Butler is well
aware of the risks in postulating a common human vulnerability as the basis
for a transformative ethics and politics and repeatedly acknowledges the
impact of systemic inequalities to ideas of a universalized vulnerability. She
writes: I do not mean to deny that vulnerability is differentiated, that
it is allocated differentially across the globe ...I am referring to violence,
vulnerability, and mourning, but there is a more general conception
of the human with which I am trying to work here, one in which we
are, from the start, given over to the other,J one in which we are,
from the start, even prior to individuation itself, by virtue of bodily
requirements, given over to some set of primary others. (Butler 2004:
31) Here lies the source of Butlers problematic humanism. It is the
attempt to create a homology between the intimate and public
spheres, the use of ahistorical and acontextual psychoanalytic
structures as paradigms for the sociopolitical, the parallel between
national policy as subject (mentioned earlier) and the human
subject
Foucault Link
Foucaults work ruined by his own unacknowledged
colonial imaginaryhe still centers Western epistemology
even by positioning it as the subject/object of a
geneoalogy

One of the main problems in Foucaults work was his own colonial
unconscious, however, and here his influence on Mignolo comes to a
striking end. Foucault characterized the formation of disciplinary
power-knowledge regimes as originating within Europe, and he
presented the development of the modern episteme in such a way
that divorced it from its colonial context. New publications of Foucaults
lectures from the 1970s reveal a sustained discussion of race on his part, and
a real attempt to understand the formative role that constructions of race
have played in the processes of governmental- ity and especially in the
development of bio-power. Yet in these lectures, he does not thematize
race or colonialism in his analyses of knowledge.1 Many of Foucaults
followers, however, seem untroubled by this approach. Perhaps they
accept the common view that colonialism is related to power, to
juridical forms of management and to evaluative conceptions of
difference, and to conceptions of the human, but not necessarily to
the European Enlightenments theory of knowledge, which was, after
all, openly anti-authoritarian. The Enlightenment took on as one of
its main projects to critique the scholasticism and authoritarianism of
the religious-based epistemologies of premodern Europe (Tiles 1993). How
can such a project be supportive of colonialism? Further, how can an analysis
of colonialism aid not only in the critical project of identifying the latent
Eurocentrism still operating in our major concepts but also in the positive
project of reformulating and reconstructing epistemic norms? If the answer
to both questions is yes, then we will have shown that epistemology itself
needs to incorporate an analysis of coloniality. Mignolos work has
answered yes to both questions. He has been in critical dialogue with
Foucaults conceptualization of subjugated knowledges, appropriating and
critiquing as well as re-adapting this concept to the case of colonized
knowledges. He has theorized the relationship of knowledge to power
squarely within a colonial context, even right up unto the present day in his
recent arguments against poststructuralism and postmodernism. This
analysis has both critical and reconstructive implications for epistemology,
especially his critique of colonial knowledge, his call for a geopolitical analysis of knowledge, and his articulation and defense of border gnosis.
Neoliberalism Link
Colonial modernity subordinates alterity so that it is
included but does not disrupt the violent colonial
consensus
Levinson 2007 (Brett, Professor of Comparative Literature at
Binghamton, South Atlantic Quarterly 106.1, Globalizing Paradigms, or, The
Delayed State of Latin American Theory)
This ideal of global liberation via heterogeneity nonetheless risks
turning into its opposite, which Hegel labels bad infinity: the endless
accumulation of more and more that does not alter the totality into
which the more inserts itself.7 In fact, universal heterogeneity,
like speculative capital, can add endlessly onto itself, subject upon
subject, agent upon agent, yet shift nothing at all since one cannot
add to infinity, or affect infinity by introducing others. Having
completed its appropriation of land, air, and sea, hence with no
more places to offer the other, global capitalism lures each new
figure, all comers, into its fold by extending to them a theoretical
lot, a transcendentalhence vacantpurely symbolic territory (it is
called identity). The lack or privation of the other, this vacancy, is hence
converted into the others property, one private property alongside other
private properties in a globe made up of an endless series of private
properties, a pluralism that is thoroughly controlled, monitored, and managed
by, and that is also completely compatible with, Western capitalism. The
subtraction or negation of the other (the emptied site) turns into that others
essence or place which, when added in, makes for and contributes to a
global multiplicity while at the time it adds or alters, precisely, nothing. The
whole, however heterogeneous, goes uninterrupted by
augmentations in number (which are indeed limitless, as borders
break down and novel encounters, hence novel peoples, form),
by all interventions or inventions. The latter, in fact, only avow the
necessity of the totality, affirmingJJJJ it as the only possible space
into which one can go. The famous idea of a neoliberal
consensus, key term of contemporary Latin American political
thought, is therefore but a label for a bad infinity. For within this
consensus, global capitalism or the market appears, increasingly, as
the sole site into which Latin American peoples, even ones not yet
extant, can enter. As an infinity, the consensus is without an
outside, therefore without any present or future alterity. Nothing
more is possible: the more one adds, the more one adds no more,
for history is over. Bets placed on the delay are thus taken off the
table, for, within a totalized heterogeneity, there is no to come,
hence nothing coming in. This is why Latin American subalternism
must indeed fail: full representation of its heterogeneity, its success,
would mean the end even of the potential for the universal
freedom upon which the discourse places its stakes
Latin Identity Link

Claims to elevate and listen to Latin identity reinscribe
Western coloniality and epistemology by advancing a
mode of consciousness which remains colonized by
knowledge practices of exclusionalso applies to binary
categories
For Ramos, Paz, Zea, Edouard Glissant, and the many others in this
tradition who identified colonial alienation of consciousness, the
solution to alienation is a positional shift to our America in which
a philosophy reflective of its own Latin American reality might be
developed. In his most recent work, The Idea of Latin America (2005),
Mignolo expresses doubts about this alternative Latin America
construction, predicated as it is on another exclusionary paradigm.
Before we can go about the process of developing a new
philosophy and new account of our reality, he argues, we need a
more extensive period of epistemological reflection. We need to
develop a decolonial critical theory that will be more thoroughly
delinked from the contemporary variants of the modern imperial
designs of the recent past. The fact that language, space, time, and
history have all been colonized through the colonization of
knowledge must give us pause before we bor- row the founding
concepts of Eurocentric thought, such as center/periphery,
tradition/modernity, and primitive/civilized, or the very evaluative
binary structure that grounds these. Mignolo develops Quijanos concept
of the coloniality of power, then, as a way to name that set of framing and
organizing assumptions that justify hierarchies and make it almost
impossible to evaluate alternative claims. Why was it said that there were no
pre-Colombian books or forms of writing, when it was known that the codices
had been raided and burned in heaps? How could the claim that modernity
represented an expansion of freedom not be challenged by its development
within the context of colonialism? Why do we continue to conceptualize
rationality as separate from and properly in dominion over the realm
of affect, a distinctly Greek and nonindigenous notion, as Mariategui showed
many decades ago? Why is it considered sufficient, even exemplary, to have
one Latin Americanist in a university history department in the United States,
when 5 or 10 or even 15 Europeanists are required? And in philosophy
departments, it is not necessary to have a single one.
Hermeneutics Link
Hermeneutics are the corollary friend of westen
epistemology, not its opposite

However, Mignolo has recently backed off from using the concept of
pluritopic hermeneutics as a positive alternative. His adoption of
pluritopic hermeneutics was aligned with the project of colonial
semiosis, which aimed to effect a rerepresentation of the colonized
other to free it from the hegemonic terms of Eurocentric
conceptual imagery. That is, colonial semiosis is a way of revealing the
multiple realities covered over by colonial systems of meaning. The point is
not simply to reveal multiplicity, but to reveal the lines of tension and conflict,
or the points of contradiction, between colonizing and colonized spaces.
Thus, he explained, colonial semiosis require[d] a pluritopic hermeneutics
since in the conflict, in the cracks and fissures where the conflict originates, a
description of one side of the epistemological divide wont do (17). We need
to be able to see multiple sign systems at work, and under negotiation and
contestation, in any given field of meaning. But now, Mignolo claims that
both epistemology and hermeneutics, whether monotopic or
pluritopic, need to be transcended since they have both
presupposed a subject-object distinction, with epistemology focused
on the de-subjectified object and hermeneutics focused on the nonobjective subject. He explains that Border thinking is the notion
that I am introducing now with the inten- tion of transcending
hermeneutics and epistemology and the corresponding distinction
between the knower and the known. . . . To describe in reality
both sides of the border [which, I take it, he understands a pluritopic
hermeneutics to be attempting to do] is not the problem. The
problem is to do it from its exteriority. . . . The goal is to erase the
distinction between knower and known, between a hybrid object
(the borderland as the known) and a pure disciplinary or
interdisciplinary subject (the knower), uncontaminated by the border
matters he or she describes. To change the terms of the
conversation it is necessary to overcome the distinction between
subject and object, on the one hand, and between epistemology and
hermeneutics on the other.2 (18) I think he is making two points here.
The first is that, although the interpretive reflexivity of hermeneutics
might allow one to represent both sides (that is, colonizer and
colonized) by bringing in the spatial location of meaning, this is not
a sufficient corrective, or even the best way to articulate the goal,
because it leaves unanalyzed the formation of the representational
divide itself. We need to take a further step back to reach the level
of exteriority where representations are made possible in the first
place. It is not enough to acknowledge the interpretive frame if that
frame itself is not theorized in relation to coloniality and its
construction of the colonial difference. His second point is that
hermeneutics is still implicated in the ontological bifur- cation of
subject and object presupposed by epistemology. This unmediated

approach blocks our ability to critique the mediations by which
objects are constructed, and then known.
Arendt/Holocaust Link
Arendtian analysis/analysis that begins from the
Holocaust is centrifugal in a modernist way

Self-Knowledge 7.2)
Hannah Arendt provided a detailed analysis revealing the
dispensability of human lives in the sphere of the political (Law, the
State). Arendts analysis is at once historical and conceptual. Historically, it
traces the avatars of the Jews, in Europe, after they were expelled from Spain
at the end of the fifteenth century. Although Im not claiming that all Jews in
Germany and Poland that were victims of the Holocaust were descendent
from those expelled from Spain, I do claim a direct link between the Spanish
Inquisition, the expulsion of the Jews, and the Holocaust. They are all
logically linked to the colonial matrix of power; they are all
different manifestations of the logic of coloniality. That the
Holocaust cannot be explained through the history of Europe only, as
has been perceived by Martinican poet, essayist and activist Aime Cesaire.
Not only that it cannot be explained through the history of Europe
but that, on the contrary, the Holocaust re- flected on Europe
itself what European merchants, monarchs, philosophers and of-
ficers of the State did in the colonies. Hannah Arendt also perceived the
connections between the Holocaust and European colonization of South
Africa, but her view was still centrifugal (looking from Europe outward)
while Csaire shifted the geography of understanding and made his
observation centripetal (looking from outward toward Europe).
Cesaire (like Cugoano and Williams), narrates, analyses and conceptualizes
coloniality at the intersection of the historical legacies of African slavery and
Western categories of thought while Arendt does it at the intersection of the
historical legacies of Jewish people and Western categories of thought.
However, Jews and Africans are[[[[[[[[[[[ differently located in the ethnoracial classification in the modern/colonial world based on Christian Theology
and Secular Egology. In both cases, nevertheless, the conceptual analysis
is embedded in the memory of a community of people degraded or
suspected from the official rhetoric and sensibility controlling
authority, economy and, above all, the principles of knowledge
(e.g., epistemology). This is what Csaire had to say, being in
France after WWII and close to the impact of the Holocaust. He
suggested a detailed analysis of the steps taken by Hitler and
Hitlerism since he (Csaire) suspected that such study will reveal
that, the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian
bourgeois of the twentieth century that, without being aware of it,
he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his
demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and
that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime
in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as
such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the
white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures
which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the
coolies of India, and the niggers of Africa (pp. 36; italics mine, WM). We
should add the Indigenous, Native, Fourth Nations, Aboriginals of Americas
from Chile to Canada, Australia and New Zealand. As for the analysis that
Cesaire imagined and suspected will reveal what he described in the
paragraph above, was perhaps providedindirectlyby Claudia Koonzs
magisterial The Nazi Conscience (2003). Koonz observes that[[[[[[[[[[[
What surprised Jewish Germans during this period was not the
cruelty of kleptocrats, fanatics, and malcontents, but the behavior
of friends, neighbors, and colleagues who were not gripped by
devotion to Nazism Germans who, in 1933, were ordinary Western
Europeans had become in 1939, anything but. (2003, pp 11-12) The telling
lesson of Cesaires suspicion and Koonzs scholarly conclusion is how
subjectivities have been formed under the naturalization of dispensability of
human lives in the frame of the colonial matrix of power. During the period
of heavy slave trade lives made dispensable for economic reasons
implied that the people involved in slave trade or benefiting
directly or indirectly from it, did not subjectively care. And if they
did not care it was because either they accepted that Africans were
not quite human or did not care because they were getting used
to accepting the fact that there are human lives who are just as
dispensable as human beings even though necessary as workers, be they
enslaved, servants or employed at minimum wage and without health
insurance, etc. In the Holocaust (in which the main victims where Jews
although other irregular people and citizens were also considered
dispensablegypsies as well as Aryan citizens alleged to have damaged
genes or homosexual inclinations, shared a heritage, language and culture
with their tormentors), were declared a problem to be solved (see chapter
on Du Bois, titled What Does It Mean to be a Problem?, by Lewis Gordon in
his Existentia Africana, Routlege, 2000,). To solve the problem it was
necessary to invent strategies (technologies as we say today) to
eradicate them from the community, to make them non-citizens, to
deprive them of all citizenship rights and once they were converted
to things (but not into commodities), to exterminate them. Hannah
Arendt offered the first conceptualization, to my knowledge, of a situation in
which human lives become dispensable when they are stripped of the legal
web that links people to the State, that is, that makes people citizens. Like
Cesaire, who saw the problems in Europe from his experience of colonial
histories, Arendt saw the problems in Africa and Asia from her
experience as a Jew in Germany. That is why Arendts view is
centrifugal while C- saire is centripetal: geo-politics of knowledge
is crucial to delink (or to decouple) from imperial assumptions that
categories of knowledge are one and uni-versal; that is,
knowledge is and should be centrifugal. First of all, Arendt
elaborates on the philosophical implications and shortcomings of
the Rights of Man. Writing while the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights was not yet stamped, Arendts reflection is on the Declarations of the
Rights of Man and of the Citizens that followed the French Revolution but
was preceded by the Bill of Rights in late seventeenth century England and
by the Rights of the People in sixteenth century Spain. These, however,

naturally, are out of Arendts horizon. In any case, her analysis of the Rights
of Man is strictly offered at a time when the Universal Declaration was being
written while she was completing her book. Arendt perceives insightfully that
man, and the people have been taken out of Gods tutelage and placed
under the frame of Man: The peoples sovereignty (different from that of the
prince)was not proclaimed by the grace of God but in the name of Man, so
that it seemed only natural that the inalienable rights of man would find
their guarantee and become an inalienable part of the right of the people to
sovereign selfgovernment (Arendt 1948, 291). Arendt makes clear the link
between the Rights of Man and the emergence of nation-states in Europe,
after the French Revolution which has been relegated as
a[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[ forerunner in most recent Universal Declaration
of Human Rights. What are the connections between both? Arendt points out
that: The full implication of this identification of the rights of man with the
rights of peoples in the European nation-state system, came to light only
when a growing number of people and peoples suddenly appeared whose
elementary rights were as little safeguarded by the ordinary functioning of
nationstates in the middle of Europe as they would have been in the heart of
Africa. The Right of Man, after all, had been defined as inalienable because
they were supposed to be independent of all government; but it happened
that the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall
back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them and
no institution was willing to guarantee them. (1948, 292) Thus, the Rights of
Man and of citizenship came together. One of the dramatic consequences
(particularly today for immigrants in Europe and the US) is that lack of
citizenship implies lack of protection. There are no instances in the Universal
Declaration to protect people who are not citizens or who have been
deprived of their citizenship. Stripped out of their citizens rights,
citizens become legally naked, bare lives as Arendt (and more
recently Giorgio Agamben) conceptualizes it. Thus, dispensable lives
are such either for economic reasons (commodity) or legal-state
reasons (bare life). Multiplication of these two basic technologies
of death can be traced geopolitically in Africa, Asia, South America
and, lately, by US outside of the country: in Guantnamo and Abu
Ghraib. At the time of writing her boo[[[[[[[[[[[[[[ still believed that
Never before had the Rights of Man, solemnly proclaimed by the French and
the American revolutions as the new fundament for civilized societies, been
a practical political issue (pp. 293). The problem here is a generalized
one mainly among scholars and intellectuals whose sensibilities
and subjectivities have been shaped by their dwelling in countries
where the Glorious, the American and the French revolutions took
place. Notice Arendts unconscious move: she mentions first the
French and then the American revolutions. Why? The chronological
order has been displaced by the unconscious hierarchical structure
of coloniality of knowledge and of being: within imperial internal
differences, France (and German and England) comes first and the
US in second place. Racism is pervasive, it operates at all levels.
Furthermore, Arendt seems to be oblivious or unaware that Rights
of the People (Ius Gentium) became a practical political issue in the
sixteenth century with the European discovery and invention of

Indians in the New Worldanother silence produced by the
coloniality of knowledge and, in a way, a manifestation of internal
epistemic racism, to which Immanuel Kant has significantly contributed:
Spain, for Kant, as later for Hegel, belonged to Europes South.[[[[[[[
War on Drugs
The war on drugs is an example of US imperialism we
Otherize traffickers to justify endless violence
Galeano 04 interviewed by Alex Baspineiro, (Eduardo,
Uruguayan writer and journalist, Eduardo Galeano: The War on
Drugs is a Great Imperial Hypocrisy,
http://narconews.com/Issue35/article1122.html 11/8/04)
The so-called war on drugs is a great imperial hypocrisy

specifically of the United States and its allies aimed at militarizing
the region and imposing policies that go against its peoples, said
Uruguayan writer and journalist Eduardo Galeano last week. In Montevideo,
we had the great privilege of interviewing the acclaimed author of The Open
Veins of Latin America, Memory of Fire, and other books. On October 31,
Galeano took part, like the majority of Uruguayans, in the triumph of the
Progressive Conference/Broad Front party, the left-wing coalition whose
candidate Dr. Tabare Vzquez will be the next president of this beautiful
country. We spoke with Galeano about the current insurgency of the Latin
American people, and also about the militaristic anti-terrorism and anti-drug
policies that hold back this continents and the worlds potential. These
policies are simply pretexts to militarize the people, to try to impose
new world orders that have nothing to do with nations own
realities, he emphasized. They are pretexts that insult human
intelligence. The dominant system loves money. The U.S. loves
money. Thats why, in this fight against drug trafficking and
terrorism, as long as there is supply and demand, there will always
be drug use. On the other hand, while there is a supply of weapons,
there will always be wars. In that sense, prohibitionist policies will never
get results, because they dont attack drug supply and demand, which are
the root of the problem. Instead, they serve geopolitical and other interests.
Plan Colombia: Synonymous with Death
Galeano said that Plan Colombia, now being applied in Bolivia, Colombia, and
Peru, is not really aimed at eradicating drugs or fighting trafficking, but is
rather synonymous with death.
The world is being subjected to an invisible military dictatorship imposed by
the United States, he said. And this dictatorship is not just military, but also
economic, political, and social. According to Galeano, the U.S. government
has for years produced a series of demons to justify its
interventionist policy. Years ago, the war imposed by the United
States was against the reds or the communists, he said. Later,
narco-traffickers were identified as the enemy, and the current
pretext is the fight against terrorism. Those are the demons. Those
are the fabricated pretexts used to justify criminal policies.
Framework
Framework: Detachment
Must incorporate epistemology mindful of colonial context
reality structured by this espistemology

Many Latin American philosophersfrom Leopoldo Zea to Enrique Dussel to
Mignolo and othershave pointed out the hierarchical patterns of epistemic
judgment under colonial systems. As Zea succinctly put it, the identity, the
rationality, and the very humanity of the peoples of the New World
were put on trial and judged by the jury of its conquerors (Zea
198889, 36). Amerindian peoples were not considered to be in a position to
present their own epistemic credentials, much less to judge European ones.
This fact is clear. What is also clear is that extra-epistemic concerns are
being used to do epistemic work in cases where, for example, ones
ethnic or racialized identity determines ones epistemic
justification or the status of ones beliefs. But these facts do not, for
most epistemologists, have normative epistemological significance.
Conquerors used bad epistemic practices, and it is assumed that the
effort to establish good epistemic practices can only take negative
lessons from such examples. However, we might also ask, following both
Charles Mills (1997) and Michele Le Doeuff (1991) who have asked similar
questions: what is the relationship between the project of conquest
and this reliance on bad epistemic practices? Could it be that
conquerors are in an epistemically poor cultural, intellectual, and
political context for judgment, and are more likely to develop what
Mills calls epistemologies of ignorance that include substantive
cognitive practices that obscure social realities? If so, this would
indicate that in developing an account of best practices, we need to
consider more than individual epistemic agency and include a much
broader array of structural background conditions that directly
enhance or inhibit the pursuit and identification of truth. The
relationship between justificatory status and ones social identity is not, of
course, foreign to the traditions of Western epistemology. In both ancient and
modern canonical writings, epistemic credibility is associated with identity,
and sometimes determined by it. Gender, age, ones status as a slave, the
sort of work one performed, ethnic identities such as Jewishness, and since
the modern period, ones racialized features were variously used to assess
epistemic competence by philosophers including Plato, Aristotle, Bacon,
Locke, Hume, Kant, and Hegel. (For an interesting take on the modern
prejudices, see Shapin 1994.) Thus, identity-based assessments were
integrated into epistemic practice as well as into epistemologies
that justified favoring certain groups over others with a measure of
presumptive credibility. Much of Mignolos analytics of epistemology,
as well see, concerns its role in creating, developing, and
maintaining a hierarchy of knowledge and knowers particularly
adapted for colonialism, in which the most relevant distinction
concerned ones cultural identity. Much of Mignolos attempt to
formulate an alternative to this imperial epistemology involves an
effort to topple the cultural hierarchy that colonialism enforced. But

more than this, subaltern reason, as he calls it, must aim to
rethink and reconceptualize the stories that have been told and the
conceptualization that has been put into place to divide the world
between Christians and pagans, civilized and barbarians, modern
and premodern, and developed and undeveloped regions and
people, especially to the extent such divisions are based on
putative cognitive capacity (2000b, 98). Such a reconstructive project
demands not only a new sociology of knowledge but also a new
normative epistemology that can correct and improve upon the
colonial worldview.
Subjectivity firstworld only coheres through a here and

now which marks which must remain unsaid and
uncomprehended to make that world intelligible

In The Phenomenology of Spirit (1977), Hegel works through a phenomenology of subjectivity precisely by beginning with the reference points
here and now. These are terms whose meaning cannot be
elucidated without reference to a specific spatio-temporally located
consciousness; we cannot judge either the justification or the
meaning of a claim about here or about now without knowing its
specific context of reference. From these common indexicals, Hegel
meant to show that all knowledge is similarly indexed to a specific
subject, place, and time, in the sense that knowledge is dependent
on justificatory procedures, measuring instruments, theoretical and
metaphysical framing concepts, and categories of analysis that are
intelligible within a given located domaina fact that should not
lead us to skepticism, in his view, but to see that to understand the
world we need first to understand ourselves. This explains why it is
so important that the relationship between the colonized subject
and its here and now is displaced by the colonial imaginary. If
the knowing subject is the point of reference around which all
knowledge claims revolve, what happens when that subject has only
an indirect and long-distance relationship to its own here and
now, or when it has what Ramos called an alienated account of its
own reality (Ramos 1962)? The result is that it can no longer serve as
the reference point for knowledge, or judge the adequacy of claims
of justification. It no longer knows.
Other knowledges keybeginning from an intra-European

standpoint reinscribes violencethinking instead about
modernity as inter-global allows us to see permanent
violence
Escobar 2004 (Arturo, Professo fo Anthrhopology at Duke University, in
Third World Quarterly 25.1 After the Third World?)
Second, if we accept that what is at stake is the recognition that
there are no modern solutions to many of today's modern
problems, where are we to look for new insights? At this level it

becomes crucial to question the widely held idea that modernity is
now a universal and inescapable force, that globalisation entails the
radicalisation of modernity, and that from now on it is modernity all
the way down. One fruitful way to think past this commonly held
idea is to question the interpretation of modernity as an intraEuropean phenomenon. This reinterpretation makes visible
modernity's underside, that is, those subaltern knowledges and
cultural practices world-wide that modernity itself shunned,
suppressed made invisible and disqualified. Understood as
'coloniality', this other side has existed side by side with modernity
since the conquest of America; it is this same coloniality of being,
knowledge and power that today's US-led empire attempts to
silence and contain; the same coloniality that asserts itself at the
borders of the modem/colonial world system, and from which
subaltern groups attempt to reconstitute place-based imaginaries
and local worlds. From this perspective, coloniality is constitutive
of modernity, and the 'Third World' is part of its classificatory logic. Today,
a new global articulation of coloniality is rendering the Third World obsolete,
and new classifications are bound to emerge in a world no longer predicated
on the existence of three worlds
Imagining otherwise is keymodernity is one reality not

the reality and arguments which proceed from the
assumption that its singular are flawedmust rethink
relations and places
Imagining beyond the Third World has many contexts and meanings. I have
highlighted some of them, such as the following: 1. In terms of context, the
need to move beyond the paradigm of modernity within which the
Third World has functioned as a key element in the classificatory
hierarchy of the modern/colonial world system. If we accept either
the need for moving beyond modernity, or the argument that we are
indeed in a period of paradigmatic transition, this means that the
concept of the Third World is already something of a bygone past.
Let it rest in peace, and with more sadness than glory, Third
Worldism notwithstanding. At this level we need to be puzzled by what
seems to be a tremendous inability on the part of Eurocentric thinkers to
imagine a world without and beyond modernity, and they need to be made
aware of that. Modernity can no longer be treated as the Great
Singularity, the giant attractor towards which all tendencies
ineluctably gravitate, the path to be trodden by all trajectories
leading to an inevitable steady state. Rather, 'modernity and its
exteriorities', if one wishes, should be treated as a true
multiplicity, where trajectories are multiple and can lead to multiple
states. 2. It is important to start thinking in earnest about the new
mechanisms introduced by the new round of coloniality of power
and knowledge. So far, this rearticulation of globality and
coloniality is chiefly effected through discourses and practices of

terrorism. These are not completely new, of course; in some ways, they
build (still!) on the regime of classification that took place at the dawn of
modernity, when Spain expelled Moors and Jews from the peninsula and
established the distinction between Christians in Europe and Moors in North
Africa and elsewhere. 'After the Third World' thus implies that new
classifications are emerging, which are not based on a division of the world
into three. Imagining beyond the Third World may contribute to this process
from a critical position. 3. The analysis above also suggests that the
politics of place should be an important ingredient of imaging after
the Third World (fears of 'localisms' notwithstanding, but of course
taking all the risks into account). Politics of place is a discourse of
desire and possibility that builds on subaltern practices of
difference for the (re)construction of alternative socio-natural
worlds. Politics of place is an apt imaginary for thinking about the
'problem-space' defined by imperial globality and global
coloniality. Politics of place may also articulate with those social movement
meshworks and networks that confront NLG. In this articulation lies one of
the best hopes of re-imagining and re-making local and regional worlds-in
short, of 'worlds and knowledges otherwise'. Politics of place could also
give new meaning to concepts of counter-hegemonic globalisa-
tion, alternative globalisations, transmodernity, or what have you.
4. A number of persistent social conditions continues to suggest that
a concept of a third world could still be useful. The concept of
social fascism is a useful notion for thinking about this issue. In
this case it would be necessary to speak of 'third worlds', which
would be made up of vast archipelagos of zones reduced to
precarious living conditions, often (not always) marked by violence,
and so forth. If this scenario is correct, it will be crucial to find
really unprecedented ways of thinking about these 'third worlds'
and the people inhabiting them that go beyond the prevailing
pathologised idioms (underclass, ghettos, warlords, potential
criminals and terrorists, desechables, the absolute poor, etc, all of
which are almost always thoroughly racialised). They could well be
the majority of the world, and thus will have to be central to any
attempt at making the world a better place. What kinds of logics
are coming out of such worlds? These need to be understood in
their own terms, not as they are constructed by modernity.57
Switch Side Bad

Representing both sides does not enable the
interrogation of how those sides came to be formulated:
this perpetuates the colonial
I think he is making two points here. The first is that, although the
interpretive reflexivity of hermeneutics might allow one to represent
both sides (that is, colonizer and colonized) by bringing in the
spatial location of meaning, this is not a sufficient corrective, or
even the best way to articulate the goal, because it leaves
unanalyzed the formation of the representational divide itself. We
need to take a further step back to reach the level of exteriority
where representations are made possible in the first place. It is not
enough to acknowledge the interpretive frame if that frame itself is
not theorized in relation to coloniality and its construction of the
colonial difference. His second point is that hermeneutics is still
implicated in the ontological bifur- cation of subject and object
presupposed by epistemology. This unmediated approach blocks our
ability to critique the mediations by which objects are constructed,
and then known.
Framework: Language
Demand for the opposite content of Enlightenment
misunderstands how thinking works-our inability to name
it is an effect of colonial politics
The spatial/temporal and imperial/colonial differences are organized
and interwoven through what Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano has
articulated as the colonial matrix of power, which was instituted at the
inception of the modern world (according to the narratives told by
European men of letters, intellectuals and historians) or the modern/colonial
world (if we define it through the critical consciousness of dissidents Creoles
and mestizos, as well as from oppressed, exploited and marginalized history
of Indians and Blacks in the Americas). The rhetoric of modernity with
its various distinctions, I have been arguing here, goes hand in
hand with the logic of coloniality, which allows me to make the
strong claim that coloniality is constitutive of modernity; that there
is no modernity without coloniality. Giddens (and Jrgen Habermas and
Charles Taylor as quoted earlier by Dussel) tells half of the story, the imperial
half that we also find in Las Casas, Hegel and Huntington. But what is the
logic of coloniality and how does it work? A terminological question emerges
here? Is the modern world the same as modernity? Is the colonial matrix
of power the same than coloniality? As with any question of language, the
answers are up for grab. The point should be to avoid the modern
expectation that there is a word that carries the true meaning of
the thing instead of the form of consciousness and the universe of
meaning in which the word means. Meaning is not a true value but
a reflection of cognitive (epistemic and hermeneutic) force and
import within particular geo-political designs. As in Jorge Luis Borges
The Garden of Forking Path, once you select one of three courses of action,
the second or the third un-chosen paths become real as possible worlds.
Alternative
Alt: Decoloniality
Must start from the position of the decolonial to solve
Self-Knowledge 7.2)
We arrive here at the crux of the matter: dispensable lives and bare
lives. Bare lives are the consequences of legal-political racism at
work in and for the control of authority. Thus, the concept of
citizenship fulfilled that role and insured the authority of the State
to keep people in and out of it. Citizenship is a legal-administrative entity
that was con-fused with the nationality of the person with his or her citizen
number. For that reason, undesirable nationals (in this case German Jews),
could be deprived of their citizen number because of their nationality; being
Jewish was not exactly belonging to a given religion but to a given ethnicity.
Those who were born free but had the bad luck of being born in
languages, religions, histories, memories, and styles of life that
were not the norm of a given nation-state (say, Spain, France or
Germany), may run into trouble . And the Holocaust was an extreme and
dramatic exercise of the state controlling the nation(s). Dispensable lives
are instead the consequences of the racist foundation of economic
capitalist practices: cost reductions, financial gains, accumulation
to re-invest to further accumulation, are economic goals that put
human lives in second place. Racism is a necessary rhetoric in order
to devaluate, and justify, dispensable lives that are portrayed (by
hegemonic discourses) as less valuable. Once again, the bottom
line of racism is devaluation and not the color of your skin. The
color of your skin is just a marker used to devaluate. Thus, human
lives as commodities and the fact that slavery transforms human
being into commodities, means that they did not just lose their
rights but they lost their humanity. At the other end, the concept
of citizenship served a similar regulatory function for controlling
population. Thus, it is not only the loss of polity itself that expels him (Man)
from humanity, as Arendt has it. Enslaved Africans have been not expelled
but pulled out from their community. It is shortsighted, and self-serving, for
Arendt to say that yet in the light of recent events it is possible to say that
even slaves still belonged to some sort of human community (pp. 297), and
to place bare life and the Holocaust above dispensable lives, human lives
transformed into commodities. Thus, both crimes against humanity
dispensable and bare livesare ingrained in the very logic of coloniality.
Certain lives become dispensable in racist rhetoric to justify economic
control, chiefly exploitation of labor and appropriation of natural. Lives are
dispensable when expelled from humanity not because the loss of polity but
because they are pulled out of their community (enslaved Africans yesterday,
young women and children today) to become commodities. Lives become
bare in racist rhetoric that justifies national homogeneity and ideal citizens.
In the first case, commodity is preferable to humanity; in the second
citizenship is preferable to humanity. Thus, we have here epistemic

racism at its best, working toward controlling economy and
authoritytwo pillars of the modern/colonial world which is also the
world of imperial capitalism (i.e., the Ottomans could be described as
imperial but certainly not as imperial capitalism) and Western Christian
monarchies and Western secular nationstates. This is the moment to
remember Aimee Cesaires view of the Holocaust. What counted for Cesaire
was the application of colonialist procedures to the white man.
Colonialist procedures had been invented and implemented on people
classified as inferior or out-castcloser to animals than to Man or
unbelievers, pagans, derailed by the Devil on uncivilized. Five centuries
after the colonial matrix of power has been put in place and
implemented in relation to non-Europeans, it went back to Europe
like a boomerang. But this time not so much in terms of economy
and the transformation of human lives into commodities, but in
terms of the state and the law. Dispensable lives and bare lives
are subsumedin the language of de-colonial projects that I
engage in hereas two dimensions of the coloniality of being. You
have to have the power of decision and action to be able to extract people
from their community and sell them as a piece of furniture and/or to expel
them from your community even if they were, like you, German citizens but
Jewish nationals instead of ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche). Both have in
common to be a consequence of epistemic imperial racism. 8 In order to
carry on such projects, you have to be able to make human beings to feel
that they are not quite human like you, either because they are a commodity
(or exploited like animals) or because they are made into illegal or criminals
that do not deserve to be in the polity of citizens. Briefly, common to both
the economic legacy of slavery and the political/legal legacy of the
Holocaust, is the epistemic racism of the modern world: the
coloniality of knowledge. The coloniality of being is a consequence
of the coloniality of knowledge (see above). Consequently,
decolonial projects have to start from the decoloniality of knowledge
and of being, in order to de-colonize the economy and authority
(e.g., political economy and political theory).
Start from the position of the de-linking and de-colonizing

to solveour evidence makes clear the quantative vectors
favor the critique of coloniality
IV. The Grammar of De-coloniality: Prolegmena to the De-colonial Shift IV.1The thesis advanced in the last paragraph lead us, directly to, the grammar
of decoloniality. The time has come, and the process is already in
motion, for the re-writing of global history from the perspective
and critical consciousness of coloniality and from within geo and
body-political knowledge. Part of the project of de-linking is, as
Waman Puma clearly saw it at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the
need to write nuevas cornicas. That is, we must formulate a critical
theory that goes beyond the point to which Max Horkheimer carried the
meaning of critique in Kant. Horkheimer was still working within the frame of
the ego-politic of knowledge and the radicalism of his position must be
understood within that frame, and his critical concept of theory could
offer no more than a project of emancipation (epistemic, political,
ethical, economic) within the conceptual frame of the
modern/colonial world. Traditional theory was, to summarize Horkheimers
position in a nutshell, constructed on the basis of givens, on the empirical
acceptance, for instance, of laws in nature that science has only to dis-cover.
Critical theory, on the other hand, would interrogate the very assumptions
that Nature is governed by laws; and will also open the question on the
consequences of such assumptions in and for a capitalist society. Critical
theory should now be taken further, to the point and project of delinking and of being complementary with decolonization. That is, as
the foundations of the non-Eurocentered diversality of an-otherparadigm68 . The Eurocentered paradigms of knowledge (its theoand egopolitical versions) has reached a point in which its own
premises should be applied to itself from the repository of
concepts, energies and visions that have been reduced to silences
or absences by the triumphal march of Western conceptual
apparatus.69 TheJ hegemonic modern/colonial and Eurocentered
paradigm70 needs to be decolonized. But how does epistemic
decolonization works? . What is its grammar (that is, its vocabulary,
syntax and semantics)? There are at least two procedures here. One
would be to show the partiality and limitations of the theo and ego
politics of knowledge and understanding. The other is offered by
growth and expansion of the geo and bio politics of knowledge and
understanding. Both are de-linking procedures. It will not suffice to
denounce its content while maintaining the logic of coloniality, and
the colonization of knowledge, intact. The target of epistemic decolonization is the hidden complicity between the rhetoric of
modernity and the logic of coloniality. For critical theory to
correspond with decolonization, we need to shift the geography of
knowledge and recast it (critical theory) within the frame of geoand bio-politics of knowledge. Thus, the first step in the grammar of
decolonization could be cast, using an expression coming from the
documents of the Universidad Intercultural de los Pueblos Indgenas del
Ecuador, learning to unlearn71 . Dussel and Fanon give us two solid starting
points to do sothe first connected with epistemic geopolitics and the
second with epistemic bio-politics. When critical theory becomes decolonial critique it has of necessity to be critical border thinking
and, by so doing, the de-colonial shift (decolonization of knowledge
and of being) marks the Eurocentered limits of critical theory as we
know it today, from early version of the Frankfurt School, to later
post-structuralists (e.g. Derrida) and postmodernists (e.g. Jameson).
Lets see how the de-colonial shift operates and why it cannot be
subsumed as epistemic break (Foucault) or paradigmatic change (Khun).
The de-colonial shift belongs literally to a different space, to the
epistemic energy and the lack of archive that has been supplanted
by the rumor of the dis-inherited or the damns in Fanons
conceptualization. Dussel identified in Marxs scientific program a shift

within the ego-politics of knowledge to unveil, contrary to Smith whose
theory of political economy was framed within the perspective and
consciousness of the bourgeoisie, the logic of capital from the perspective of
the labor force, that is, the proletariat72 . By so doing, Marx embraced the
perspective of the proletariat, although not necessarily its consciousness.
However, as a German Jew (his early writings were devoted to the Jewish
question), Marx may have felt the racial differential inscribed in his body and
his persona. He translated the racial differential that made the Jews the
damnes within Europe into the subaltern position of the proletariat in class
differential. Marxs analysis resulted in a scientific explanation of the logic of
oppression. It is perhaps the internal (to Europe) colonial wound that gave
Marx (and also Spinoza and Freud) that critical edge, that discomfort and that
anger the pushed them to reveal what the Christian bourgeoisie and its
direct and indirect ideologues were either not seeing or covering up. Internal
de-coloniality is really taking place among those thinkers, except that all of
them very entrenched in European memories and subjectivities were unable
to see the parallel between their situation and the external colonial wound
(e.g., Indians, Africans, Arabs, Muslims, etc.). In that very specific domain,
knowledge meant not so much related to seeking another abstract (and
hegemonic) truth but a true that was hidden by the classical (beginning with
Smiths) theories of political economy. Within the ego-politics of knowledge,
Marx contributed to the emancipation of the proletariat through the exposure
of the logic of capital. Up to this point, Marx continues to be a fundamental
contributor to critical theory. However, emancipation in the Marxian sense
must be subsumed under liberation and de-colonization insofar as the
emancipation of the proletariat in Europe (and the U.S.) cannot be taken as a
model-for-export. A similar observation might be made with respect to the
multitude, understanding multitude not as a new proletariat but as a new
working class (Paul Virno, Michael Hardt and Anthony Negri). In other words,
the new and extended working class is not just oppressed because it is a
working class but because the majority of the most exploited workers belong
to the wrong racial group. In spite of the fact that today whites are also
subjected to similar exploitative rules, they are the quantitative minority of
those laboring, for example, under reprehensible conditions in the
multinational factories throughout the Third World. Although the structure of
capitalism is different today, we should not forget that the colonial matrix of
power organizing the exploitation of labor and underlying capitalism was
based initially on the appropriation of lands with serfdom and slavery as the
primary form of labor and racism as the fundamental argument justifying
exploitation. The colonial matrix of power made possible the industrial
revolution. True, in Northern Europe, when the industrial revolution took
place, race was not a visible issue. The appropriation of land in the colonies
was invisible, and the primary form of labor was waged. Thus, class became
the dominant form of social classification. Isolated from the presence of the
Moors, slightly tainted by Black-African slaves, and totally distant from the
Indigenous population of the America, the class differential was established
among a population of White Anglo Protestant. Today, however, as
immigration changes the demographics of industrial countries and industries
move beyond previous borders to Mexico, China and the Philippines, racism,
the foundation of the colonial matrix of power, is back with a

vengeance and no longer eclipsed, as it was for a short while, by
class differential as the ultimate form for the understanding of
exploitation of labor. What is at stake, in the last analysis, is the
correspondence of race and class. While class refers mainly to economic
relations among social groups and is, thus, strictly related to the control of
labor in the spheres of the colonial matrix of power, race refers mainly to
subjective relations among social groups and is related to the control of
knowledge and subjectivity. Thus, liberation and decolonization projects
in the Americas today must have the colonial matrix of power, and
not the industrial revolution, as a key point of reference. Now, Fanon
and Anzalda can provide another departure point for taking Horkheimers
original critical theory to the terrain of de-linking and to the de-colonial shift.
That is, for taking critical theory to the negated side of the epistemic colonial
difference: to the geo- and bio-logical negated locations of knowledge and
understanding. Fanon brings both the geo- and bio-politics of knowledge and
indirectly shows us the need to re-make Horkheimers critical theory; to
move critical theory from its emancipating to its liberating and de-colonizing
dimension. Anzalda, articulates around the concept of borderland, brings
together a geo- and bio-politics of knowledge that reveals both the racial and
gender foundation of white foundation of hegemonic epistemology. Both
Anzalda and Fanon move epistemology to the terrain where de-linking
projects began to be articulated. Fanon points, as in the epigraph at the
beginning of this discussion, toward the necessary diagnosis of the epistemic
colonization (of souls, of minds, of spirits, of beings) and to the perverse logic
of coloniality that, in his own words, distorts, disfigures and destroys (or
tends to marginalize) every past that is not the past of the Eurocentered
version of history. Let us start with Fanons description of a colonized town in
Algeria in The Wretched of the Earth: The town belonging to the colonized
people, or at least the native town, the Negro village, the medina, the
reservation, is a place of ill fame, people by men of evil repute. They were
born there, it matters little where or how. It is a world without spaciousness;
men live there on top of each other, and their huts are built on top of the
other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes
of coal, of light [] The originality of the colonial context is that economic
reality, inequality, and the immense difference of ways of life never come to
mask the human realities. When you examine at close quarters the colonial
context, it is evident that what parcels out the world is to begin with the fact
of belonging to or not belonging to a given race, a given species. In the
colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the
consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you
are rich. This is why Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched
every time we have to deal with the colonial problem73 . And, that colonial
problem is not a minor one. Quantitatively, there are far more
people affected by colonial than by the modern problems. That is,
the industrial revolution is caught and subsumed in the colonial
problem and, thereby, moves to the periphery. Without questioning the
relevance of Marx and Horkheimer contribution to emancipation, their
insights do not cover the full story, in the same way that the Bible and the
Quran are relevant for the believers but not necessarily for none believers.
To replace sacred text by secular texts do take us to de-coloniality, but to

new forms of abstract and imperially geared universals. One of the benefits
of secularization was, precisely, the emancipation from the sacred insofar
as the sacred became an obstacle for the emancipation of certain social
groups. To turn into sacred figures the authors and texts that so brilliantly
fought for the secularization of the sacred and for the emancipation of people
held hostage to sacred truths, would be contradictory. Secularization is not
by itself a safe place. Uncoupling the State from the Church is not a global
way to go, necessarily in the sense that such uncoupling, as we have been
witnessing since 9/11 doesnt promise or warranty justice, democracy and
equality. At the same time, it would also be incongruous with the
emancipating principles of modernity to take secularization as the sacred
truth and impose, by military force if necessary, the secular on societies who
do not necessarily have a problem with giving priority to the sacred or with
weaving together the sacred and the secular, the Mesquite and the State.
Once we bring geo- and bio-politics into the realm of knowledge
and understanding, we realize that secular modernity has its own
politics, which do not necessarily coincide with the needs, visions
and desires of everyone on the planet, and that new projects
(ethical, political, epistemic) are emerging in which secular
modernity is being transcended by multiple projects of epistemic
decolonization grounded in the geo-and bio-politics of knowledge
De-linking is the bestit explains why poststructural/post-modern interventions fail and disturbs the
anchor of normalcy that perpetuates coloniality

Critical border thinking provides one method to enact the de-colonial
shift and it operates as a connector between different experiences
of exploitation can now be thought out and explored in the sphere
of the colonial and imperial differences. Thus, critical border
thinking is the method that connects pluri-versality (different
colonial histories entangled with imperial modernity) into a universal project of delinking from modern rationality and building
other possible worlds. Critical border thinking involves and implies
both, the imperial and colonial differences. Lets quickly look at some
examples. Decolonizing knowledge and being from the perspective of
Japanese or Russians colonies will be quite different from the perspective of
Englands colonies. In the first two cases, de-colonization from the epistemic
and existential conditions imposed by Japanese and Russian languages
leaves still another layer to deal with, which is the epistemic and epistemic
conditions growingly imposed world wide by Greco-Latin and the six
vernacular imperial languages of Western empires. That is, Japanese and
Russian languages and categories of thought became subordinated to the
hegemony of Western epistemology and its imperial and global reach. Any
project of decolonization must operate in full awareness of its
location within the complex relations structured by imperial and
colonial differences. At the same time, because the West is all over
the rest in a outward expansion and the rest is all over the west
in an in-war mobilization lead by migrations, border thinking
becomes crucial in any de-colonial project that will start from the
weaker end of the imperial and colonial differences. When the
languages and categories began to be activated in order to build a
world in which many world will coexist, by social actors aiming at decolonization of knowledge and being and of delinking from the
imperial modernity, the splendors of human imagination and
creative will open up. Certainly, there is no safe place an any
language can be used, by social actors, to surrender to the languages and
categories of thought of Western capitalism as it is the case also with the
adaptation of corporate values in the power sector of China, Japan, the
Arabic world and Russia. De-linking requires analysis of the making and
remaking of the imperial and colonial differences and it requires
visions and strategies for the implementation of border thinking
leading to de-colonization of knowledge and of being; from here,
new concepts of economy and social organization (politics) will be
derived. Solutions from the political theories of the West, from
Aristotle and Plato to Machiavelli, Hobbes and Locke; to Marx and
Gramsci and to Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss have been exhausted
and without border thinking any exercise in this arena could only
lead to spinning the spin within the bubble of imperial modernity.
De-linking means to remove the anchor in which the normalcy
effect has been produced as to hide the fact that the anchor can
be removed and the edifice crumbled. Trans-modernity would be
the overall orientation of de-colonizing and of delinking projects, an
orientation toward pluri-versality as universal project leading toward
a world in which many worlds will co-exist. Border thinking, once
again, is one of the methods that can help us move to sustain a
visiona plur-versal and not a uni-versal vision--and to implement a set of
strategies to accomplish it. The future could no longer be owned by
one way of life (la pense unique of Ramonet), can not be dictated
by one project of liberation and de-colonization, and cannot be a
polycentric world within Western categories of thoughts. A world in
which many worlds could co-exist can only be made by the shared
work and common goals of those who inhabit, dwell in one of the
many worlds co-existing in one world and where differences are not
cast in terms of values of plus and minus degree of humanness.[[
And that is how I understand Quijanos assertion, quoted above, that
epistemic decolonization is necessary to make possible and move
toward a truly intercultural communication; to an exchange of
experiences and significations as the foundation of an-other
rationality. The exchange works as an alternative to Kosellecks
space of experience, and an-other rationality replaces the
horizon of expectations. In fact, I submit that the horizon of
expectations here will be precisely pluri-versality as a universal
project. That is, the uni-versality of the project has to be based on
the assumption that the project cannot be designed and
implemented by one ethnic group, but has to be inter-epistemic
and dialogical, pluri-versal. Thus, border thinking becomes the

necessary critical method for the political and ethical project of
filling in the gaps and revealing the imperial complicity between
the rhetoric of modernity and the logic of coloniality. Emancipating
projects, as devised in Europe in the eighteenth century (Dussels rational
concept of emancipation), can be kept alive, but they must be extracted
from their appropriation by the rhetoric of modernity to justify the logic of
coloniality (their use as irrational justification of ethnocidal violence). And, as
I have tried to show here, they are far from being meaningful for every one
on earth and should never again become an abstract universal of human
emancipation. We have come full circle back to the geo- and bio-politics of
knowledge as alternatives to the hegemony and dominance of the theo- and
ego-politics organizing the modern/colonial world (that is, as we have
discussed, Europe and the US in their relations of conflict and domination
framed by colonial and imperial differences). Liberation projects that have
emerged and are emerging in the Third World and decolonizing projects
arising from the critical consciousness of the damnes of their racialization
and the ways they have been dispossessed of their humanity (mind and soul)
(Fanon, C.R.L. James, Winter, Gordon, Maldonado Torres) will naturally
subsume European projects of emancipation and open the possibility of
entering into a pluri-versal dialogue of equals in a common march toward a
world in which Free Life will be the horizon instead of Free Trade. The
struggle for epistemic de-colonization lies, precisely, here. The next step,
the work we have to do next, is to link analysis from the
perspective of coloniality and the grammar of de-coloniality (its
ethical, political and theoretical consequences), with strategies,
strategic plans toward the future. Such strategies will and are already
taking place in different locals and histories (from the Zapatistas to the World
Social Forum to progressive Muslims intellectuals and Southern European
critical voices). Will and are taking place in diverse geo- and bio political
genealogies of thought and action. Crucial to the strategies toward the
future, toward a pluri-versal world linked to the assumption of the
universality of the pluri-versal, is to avoid the modern and imperial
temptation of the good and best uni-versal. Christianity, (neo)
Liberalism, Marxism, Islamic fundamentalism, have given enough
proofs that not every body in the planet would submit to any one of
the abstract universal at hand. De-coloniality is a planetary critical
consciousness that emerged and unfolded, precisely out of the limits
of abstract universal of its current manifestations and out of the
dangers that, in the future, a new abstract universal will attempt
to replace the existing ones; or that the existing ones will renew
themselves as new (neo-liberalism, neo-Marxism, neo-Christianism,
neoIslamism, neo-Slavism, neo-Africanism, neo-Judaism, neo-Eurocentrism,
neoConfucianism, neo-Hinduism, etc.).83 Pluri-versality as a universal project
is quite demanding. It demands, basically, that we cannot have it all our own
way. The struggle for epistemic de-coloniality lies, precisely, here:
de-linking from the most fundamental belief of modernity: the
belief in abstract universals through the entire spectrum from the
extreme right to the extreme left. For this reason, to imagine a new
global left means falling back into the old house while just
changing the carpet .[
Alt: Decolonial Thinking

Do not begin from the presumption that what is said
coheres as a result of its reflection of a real realityreject
instead the death that lies behind civilization in order to
embrace the universality of the de-colonial wound for
subjugated populations
ONCE UPON a time scholars assumed that the knowing subject in the
disciplines is transparent, disincorporated from the known and
untouched by the geo-political configuration of the world in which
people are racially ranked and regions are racially configured. From a
detached and neutral point of observation (that Colombian philosopher
Santiago Castro-Gmez (2007) describes as the hubris of the zero point),
the knowing subject maps the world and its problems, classifies
people and projects into what is good for them. Today that
assumption is no longer tenable, although there are still many
believers . At stake is indeed the question of racism and
epistemology (Chukwudi Eze, 1997; Mignolo, forth- coming). And once upon
a time scholars assumed that if you come from Latin America you have to
talk about Latin America; that in such a case you have to be a token of your
culture. Such expectation will not arise if the author comes from Germany,
France, England or the US. In such cases it is not assumed that you have to
be talking about your culture but can function as a theoretically minded
person. As we know: the first world has knowledge, the third world has
culture; Native Americans have wisdom, Anglo Americans have
science. The need for political and epistemic de- linking here comes
to the fore, as well as decolonializing and de-colonial knowledges,
necessary steps for imagining and building democratic, just, and
non-imperial/colonial societies. Geo-politics of knowledge goes
hand in hand with geo-politics of knowing. Who and when, why and
where is knowledge generated (rather than produced, like cars or cell
phones)? Asking these questions means to shift the attention from the
enunciated to the enunciation. And by so doing, turning Descartess dictum
inside out: rather than assuming that thinking comes before being,
one assumes instead that it is a racially marked body in a geohistorical marked space that feels the urge or get the call to speak,
to articulate, in whatever semiotic system, the urge that makes of
living organisms human beings. By setting the scenario in terms
of geo- and body-politics I am starting and departing from already
familiar notions of situated knowledges. Sure, all knowledges are
situated and every knowledge is constructed. But that is just the beginning.
The question is: who, when, why is constructing knowledges (Mignolo,
1999, 2005 [1995])? Why eurocentered epistemology carefully hidden
(in the social sciences, in the humanities, in the natural sciences and
professional schools, in think tanks of the financial sector and the G8

or G20), its own geo-historical and bio-graphical locations? The shift I
am indicating is the anchor (constructed of course, located of course, not just
anchored by nature or by God) of the argument that follows. It is the
beginning of any epistemic de-colonial de-linking with all its
historical, political and ethical consequences. Why? Because geohistorical and bio-graphic loci of enunciation have been located by
and through the making and transformation of the colonial matrix of
power: a racial system of social classification that invented
Occidentalism (e.g. IndiasOccidentales), that created the conditions for
Orientalism; distinguished the South of Europe from its center (Hegel) and, on
that long history, remapped the world as first, second and third during
the Cold War. Places of non- thought (of myth, non-western religions,
folklore, underdevelopment involving regions and people) today have
been waking up from the long process of westernization. The
anthropos inhabiting non-European places discov- ered that s/he had
been invented, as anthropos, by a locus of enunciations self-defined
as humanitas. Now, there are currently two kinds or directions advanced by
the former anthropos who are no longer claiming recognition by or inclusion
in, the humanitas, but engaging in epistemic disobedience and de-linking
from the magic of the Western idea of modernity, ideals of humanity and
promises of economic growth and financial prosperity (Wall Street dixit). One
direction unfolds within the globalization of a type of economy that in both
liberal and Marxist vocabulary is defined as capitalism. One of the strongest
advocates of this is the Singaporean scholar, intellectual and politician
Kishore Mahbubani, to which I will return later. One of his earlier book titles
carries the unmistakable and irreverent message: Can Asians Think?:
Understand- ing the Divide between East and West (2001). Following
Mahbubanis own terminology, this direction could be identified as dewesternization. De- westernization means, within a capitalist economy, that
the rules of the game and the shots are no longer called by Western players
and institutions. The seventh Doha round is a signal example of dewesternizing options. The second direction is being advanced by what I
describe as the de- colonial option. The de-colonial option is the
singular connector of a diversity of de-colonials. The de-colonial path
has one thing in common: the colonial wound, the fact that regions
and people around the world have been classified as
underdeveloped economically and mentally. Racism not only affects
people but also regions or, better yet, the conjunction of natural
resources needed by humanitas in places inhabited by anthropos.
De- colonial options have one aspect in common with dewesternizing arguments: the definitive rejection of being told
from the epistemic privileges of the zero point what we are, what
our ranking is in relation to the ideal of humanitas and what we have
to do to be recognized as such. However, de-colonial and dewesternizing options diverge in one crucial and in- disputable point:
while the latter do not question the civilization of death hidden
under the rhetoric of modernization and prosperity, of the improvement of modern institutions (e.g. liberal democracy and an economy
propelled by the principle of growth and prosperity), de-colonial
options start from the principle that the regeneration of life shall
prevail over primacy of the production and reproduction of goods at
the cost of life (life in general and of humanitas and anthropos
alike!). I illustrate this direction, below, commenting on Partha Chatterjees
re-orienting eurocentered modernity toward the future in which our
modernity (in India, in Central Asia and the Caucasus, in South America,
briefly, in all regions of the world upon which eurocentered modernity was
either imposed or adopted by localctors assimilating to local histories
inventing and enacting global designs) becomes the statement of
interconnected dispersal in which de-colonial futures are being played out.
Alt: Remove Humanity

Calls to save humanity guarantee only changes in degree
rather than in kind for those positioned outside the place
of the ability to speak and enunciatestatus quo
knowledges can never elevate others to the position of
equality with humanity
Perhaps Frantz Fanon conceptualized better than anyone else what I have in
mind for extending Benvenistes formal apparatus of enunciation. In Black
Skin, White Masks (1967 [1952]) Fanon made an epistemic foundational
statement about language that no one in the heated atmosphere of
structuralism and post-structuralism picked up in the 1960s. And it was
still ignored by the most semantic and philological orientation of Emile
Benvenistes approaches to language. This is what Fanon said: To speak
means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the
morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to
assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization . . . The
problem that we confront in this chapter is this: The Negro of the Antilles will
be proportion- ally whiter that is, he will come closer to being a real human
being in direct ratio to his mastery of the French language.8 Fanons
dictum applies to the disciplines but also to the sphere of knowledge in general: the Negro of the Antilles, the Indian from India and from
the Americas or New Zealand and Australia, the Negro from sub-Saharan
Africa, the Muslim from the Middle East or Indonesia, etc., will come closer
to being a real human being in direct ratio to his or her mastery of
disciplinary norms. Obviously, Fanons point is not to be recognized
or accepted in the club of real human beings defined on the basis
of white knowledge and white history, but to take away the
imperial/colonial idea of what it means to be human. This is a case,
precisely, in which the assault to the imperiality of modern/colonial
loci of enunciations (disciplines and institutions) is called into
question. A case in point was the question asked by many philosophers in
Africa and South America during the Cold War, and is being asked today by
Latino and Latina philosophers in the United States.
Alt: Reinscribe Colonial Difference

Our performance injects colonial difference in the order of
representationour performance insists on a memory of
colonialism that erased by the affirmative teams attempt
to redeem and save the existing order

To think through and beyond these persistent limitations in Western
knowledge practices, Mignolo argues that we need to reinscribe what
he calls the colonial difference into the order of representation. If
the Eurocentric imaginary of modernity has forgotten colonialism
and relegated the colonized spaces to the periphery and to the
past in its description of universal reality (even if that past
paradoxically exists in the present), the task of the colonial
difference is to reinscribe simultaneity. To make our America no
longer considered peripheral and behind the now, hierarchical and
binary categories must be replaced with pluralist and egalitarian
ones. Mignolos concept of the colonial difference is thus an
attempt to reveal and displace the logic of the same by which
Europeans have represented their others. Non-Europeans are seen
as existing on the same historical trajectory, but further behind;
their goals are the same, but not achieved to the same degree; their
knowledge is subject to the same justificatory procedures, but it is
less well-developed. In this way, true otherness or difference is
invisible and unintelligible. By use of the term colonial difference,
Mignolo seeks to break out of this logic of the same. He seeks both
to reveal the way in which power has been at work in creating that
difference (that is, the way in which colonialism creates
backwardness both materially and ideologically) as well as the
way in which colonial power represents and evaluates difference.
The coloniality of power, in other words, produces, evaluates, and
manages the colonial difference.
We should embrace the whatever-being as an act to

fight the bio-sovereignty
CALDWELL 04
[Anne assi prof poli sci Louisville Theory & Event vol 7 issue 2, accessed via
project muse]
"Whatever being," as described by Agamben, lacks the features permitting the
sovereign capture and regulation of life in our tradition. Sovereignty's capture of life has
been conditional upon the separation of natural and political life. That separation has permitted the
emergence of a sovereign power grounded in this distinction, and empowered to decide on the value, and
non-value of life (1998: 142). Since then, every further politicization of life, in turn, calls for "a
new decision concerning the threshold beyond which life ceases to be politically
relevant, becomes only 'sacred life,' and can as such be eliminated without
punishment" (p. 139). This expansion of the range of life meriting protection does not limit sovereignty,
but provides sites for its expansion. In recent decades, factors that once might have been indifferent to
sovereignty become a field for its exercise. Attributes such as national status, economic status, color, race,
sex, religion, geo-political position have become the subjects of rights declarations. From a liberal or
cosmopolitan perspective, such enumerations expand the range of life protected from and serving as a
limit upon sovereignty. Agamben's analysis suggests the contrary. If indeed sovereignty is bio-political
before it is juridical, then juridical rights come into being only where life is incorporated
within the field of bio-sovereignty. The language of rights, in other words, calls up and
depends upon the life caught within sovereignty: homo sacer. Agamben's alternative
is therefore radical. He does not contest particular aspects of the tradition. He does not suggest we
expand the range of rights available to life. He does not call us to deconstruct a tradition whose power lies
in its indeterminate status. Instead, he suggests we take leave of the tradition and all its
terms. Whatever being is a life that defies the classifications of the tradition, and its
reduction of all forms of life to homo sacer. Whatever being therefore has no common
ground, no presuppositions, and no particular attributes. It cannot be broken into
discrete parts; it has no essence to be separated from its attributes; and it has no
common substrate of existence defining its relation to others. Whatever being cannot
then be broken down into some common element of life to which additive series of
rights would then be attached. Whatever being retains all its properties, without any
of them constituting a different valuation of life (1993: 18.9). As a result, whatever
being is "reclaimed from its having this or that property, which identifies it as
belonging to this or that set, to this or that class (the reds, the French, the Muslims) -- and it
is reclaimed not for another class nor for the simple generic absence of any
belonging, but for its being-such, for belonging itself." (0.1-1.2). Indifferent to any distinction
between a ground and added determinations of its essence, whatever being cannot be grasped by a power
built upon the separation of a common natural life, and its political specification. Whatever being dissolves
the material ground of the sovereign exception and cancels its terms. This form of life is less postmetaphysical or anti-sovereign, than a-metaphysical and a-sovereign. Whatever is indifferent not because
its status does not matter, but because it has no particular attribute which gives it more value than
another whatever being. As Agamben suggests, whatever being is akin to Heidegger's Dasein. Dasein, as
Heidegger describes it, is that life which always has its own being as its concern -- regardless of the way
any other power might determine its status. Whatever being, in the manner of Dasein, takes the form of an
"indissoluble cohesion in which it is impossible to isolate something like a bare life. In the state of
exception become the rule, the life of homo sacer, which was the correlate of sovereign power, turns into
existence over which power no longer seems to have any hold" (Agamben 1998: 153). We should pay
attention to this comparison. For what Agamben suggests is that whatever being is not any abstract,
inaccessible life, perhaps promised to us in the future. Whatever being, should we care to see it,
is all around us, wherever we reject the criteria sovereign power would use to classify
and value life. "In the final instance the State can recognize any claim for identity -even that of a State identity within the State . . . What the State cannot tolerate in any way, however, is
that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without a
representable condition of belonging" (Agamben 1993:85.6). At every point where we refuse the
distinctions sovereignty and the state would demand of us, the possibility of a nonstate world, made up of whatever life, appears.
Biopower Alt
The alternative is to teat away from the colonialist
framing. We bring in usage of the law and that alloys to
be free from sovereign content and leads to true
liberation.
AGAMBEN 05
[Giorgio philosopher, prof aesthetics U. Verona State of Exception p63-4]
In the Kafka essay, the enigmatic image of a law that is studied but no longer practiced corresponds, as a sort of remnant, to the
unmasking of mythico-juridical violence effected by pure violence. There is, therefore, still a possible figure of law
after
its nexus with violence and power has been deposed, but it is a law that no longer has force or application,
like the one in which the new attorney, leafing through our old books, buries himself in study, or like the one that Foucault
may have had in mind when he spoke of a new law that has been freed from all discipline and all relation
to sovereignty.
What can be the meaning of a law that survives its deposition in such a way? The difficulty Benjamin faces here corresponds to a
problem that can be formulated (and it was effectively formulated for the first time in primitive Christianity and then later in the
Marxian tradition) in these terms: What becomes of the law after it messianic fulfillment? (This is the controversy that opposes Paul to
the Jews of his time.) And what becomes of the law in a society without classes? (This is precisely the debate
between Vyshinsky and Pashukanis.) These are the questions that Benjamin seeks to answer with his
reading of the new attorney. Obviously, it is not a question here of a transitional phase that never achieves
its end, nor of a process of infinite deconstruction that, in a maintaining the law in a spectral life, can no
longer get to the bottom of it. The decisive point here is that the law no longer practiced, but studied is
not justice, but only the gate that leads to it. What opens a passage toward justice is not the erasure of law,
but its deactivation and inactivity [inoperosita] that is, another use of the law. This is precisely what the force-of
law (which keeps the law working [in opera] beyond its formal suspension) seeks to prevent. Kafkas characters and this is why they
interest us have to do with this spectral figure of the law in the state of exception; they seek, each one following his or her own
strategy, to study and deactivate it, to play with it.One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects,
not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good . What is found after the law is not a
more proper and original use value that precedes the law, but a new use that is born only after it. And use,
which has been contaminated by law, must also be freed from its own value. This liberation is the task of
study, or of play. And this studious play is the passage that allows us to arrive at that justice that one of
Benjamins posthumous fragments defines as a state of the world in which the world appears as a good that
absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical (Benjamin 1992, 41).
Must attend to the effects of biopolitics it is critical to

interrogate the relationship of bare life to the 1AC in
order to reveal the patterns of thinking that biopolitics
conceals and move on to a more practical way of doing
things
AGAMBEN 98
[Giorgio philosopher, prof aesthetics U. Verona Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life p4-5]
Foucaults death kept him from showing how he would
have developed the concept and study of biopolitics. In any case, however, the entry of zoe into the sphere of the polis the
politicization of bare life as such constitutes the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of
the political-philosophical categories of classical thought. It is even likely that if politics today seems to be passing through a lasting
eclipse, this is because politics has failed to reckon with this foundational event of modernity. The enigmas
(Furet, LAllemagne nazi, p. 7) that our century has proposed to historical reason and that remain with us (Nazism is only the
most disquieting among them) will be solved only on the terrain biopolitics on which they were formed. Only
within a biopolitical horizon will it be possible to decide whether the categories whose opposition founded modern politics (right/left,
private/public, absolutism/democracy, etc.) and which have been steadily dissolving, to the point of entering today into a real zone of
indistinction will have to be abandoned or will, instead, eventually regain the meaning they lost in that very
horizon. And only a reflection that, taking up Foucaults and Benjamins suggestion, thematically interrogates the
link between bare life and politics, a link that secretly governs the modern ideologies seemingly most
distant from one another, will be able to bring the political out of its concealment and, at the same tine,
return thought to its practical calling.
Impacts
Slow Violence
Catastrophic violence representations trade off with
critiquing slow violencethe real under the radar threat
to life
Nixon 2011 (Rob, Professor of English at UW-Madison, Slow Violence and
the Environmentalism of the Poor p. 2-3)
Three primary concerns animate this book, chief among them my conviction
that we urgently need to rethinkpolitically, imaginatively, and
theoreticallywhat I call slow violence. By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed
destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional
violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is
customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in
time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant
sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of
violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous,
but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions
playing out across a range of temporal scales. In so doing, we also
need to engage the representational, narrative, and strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence. Climate
change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation,
the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other
slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes present formidable
representational obstacles that can hinder our efforts to mobilize
and act decisively. The long dyingsthe staggered and staggeringly
discounted casualties, both human and ecological that result from
wars toxic aftermaths or climate changeare underrepresented in
strategic planning as well as in human memory. Had Summers
advocated invading Africa with weapons of mass destruction, his proposal
would have fallen under conventional definitions of violence and been
perceived as a military or even an imperial invasion. Advocating invading
countries with mass forms of slow-motion toxic- ity, however, requires
rethinking our accepted assumptions of violence to include slow violence.
Such a rethinking requires that we complicate conventional
assumptions about violence as a highly visible act that is
newsworthy because it is event focused, time bound, and body
bound. We need to account for how the temporal dispersion of slow
violence affects the way we perceive and respond to a variety of
social afflictionsfrom domestic abuse to posttraumatic stress and, in
particular, environmental calamities. A major challenge is
representational: how to devise arresting stories, images, and
symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed
effects. Crucially, slow violence is often not just attritional but also
exponential, operating as a major threat multiplier; it can fuel longterm, proliferat- ing conflicts in situations where the conditions for
sustaining life become increasingly but gradually degraded. Politically
and emotionally, different kinds of disaster possess unequal heft.
Falling bodies, burning towers, exploding heads, avalanches, volca- noes,

and tsunamis have a visceral, eye-catching and page-turning power
that tales of slow violence, unfolding over years, decades, even
centuries, cannot match. Stories of toxic buildup, massing
greenhouse gases, and accelerated species loss due to ravaged
habitats are all cataclysmic, but they are scientifically convoluted
cataclysms in which casualties are postponed, often for generations. In an
age when the media venerate the spectacular, when public policy is
shaped primarily around perceived immediate need, a central
question is strategic and representational: how can we convert into
image and narrative the disasters that are slow moving and long in
the making, disasters that are anonymous and that star nobody,
disasters that are attritional and of indifferent interest to the
sensation-driven technologies of our image-world? How can we turn
the long emergencies of slow violence into stories dramatic enough
to rouse public sentiment and warrant political intervention, these
emergencies whose repercussions have given rise to some of the most
critical challenges of our time?
Our 1NC maps and shows the linkages between the

enclaved mentality of the 1AC and the definitions of
violence that are politically interested in only the
catastrophic and avoiding the structuralthe narrative
form of our impact claims constitute an alternative
system for countering violence
Ours is an age of onrushing turbo-capitalism, wherein the present feels
more abbreviated than it used toat least for the worlds privileged
classes who live surrounded by technological time-savers that often
compound the sensation of not having enough time. Consequently,
one of the most pressing challenges of our age is how to adjust our
rapidly eroding attention spans to the slow erosions of
environmental justice. If, under neoliberalism, the gulf between
enclaved rich and outcast poor has become ever more pronounced,
ours is also an era of enclaved time wherein for many speed has
become a self-justifying, propulsive ethic that renders uneventful
violence (to those who live remote from its attritional lethality) a weak
claimant on our time. The attosecond pace of our age, with its restless
technologies of infinite promise and infinite disappointment,
prompts us to keep flicking and clicking distractedly in an insatiable
and often insensatequest for quicker sensation. The oxymoronic
notion of slow violence poses a number of challenges: scientific,
legal, political, and representational. In the long arc between the
emergence of slow violence and its delayed effects, both the causes
and the memory of catastrophe readily fade from view as the
casualties incurred typically pass untallied and unremembered. Such
discounting in turn makes it far more difficult to secure effective
legal measures for prevention, restitu- tion, and redress. Casualties
from slow violence are, moreover, out of sync not only with our
narrative and media expectations but also with the swift seasons of
electoral change. Politicians routinely adopt a last in, first out
stance toward environmental issues, admitting them when times are
flush, dumping them as soon as times get tight. Because preventative
or remedial environmental legislation typically targets slow violence, it
cannot deliver dependable electoral cycle results, even though those results
may ultimately be life saving. Relative to bankable pocketbook actions
therell be a tax rebate check in the mail next Augustenvironmental
payouts seem to lurk on a distant horizon. Many politiciansand indeed
many votersroutinely treat environmental action as critical yet not urgent.
And so generation after generation of two- or four-year cycle politicians add
to the pileup of defer- rable actions deferred. With rare exceptions, in the
domain of slow violence yes, but not now, not yet becomes the
modus operandi. How can leaders be goaded to avert catastrophe
when the political rewards of their actions will not accrue to them
but will be reaped on someone elses watch decades, even centuries,
from now? How can environmental activists and storytellers work to counter
the potent political, corporate, and even scientific forces invested in
immediate self-interest, procrastination, and dissembling? We see such
dissembling at work, for instance, in the afterword to Michael Crichtons 2004
environmental con- spiracy novel, State of Fear, wherein he argued that we
needed twenty more years of data gathering on climate change before any
policy decisions could be ventured.17 Although the National Academy of
Sciences had assured former president George W. Bush that humans were
indeed causing the earth to warm, Bush shopped around for views that
accorded with his own skepticism and found them in a private meeting with
Crichton, whom he described as an expert scientist. To address the
challenges of slow violence is to confront the dilemma Rachel Carson faced
almost half a century ago as she sought to dramatize what she eloquently
called death by indirection.18 Carsons subjects were biomagnification and
toxic drift, forms of oblique, slow-acting violence that, like climate change,
pose formidable imaginative difficulties for writers and activists alike. In
struggling to give shape to amorphous menace, both Car- son and reviewers
of Silent Spring resorted to a narrative vocabulary: one reviewer portrayed
the book as exposing the new, unplotted and myste- rious dangers we insist
upon creating all around us,19 while Carson herself wrote of a shadow
that is no less ominous because it is formless and obscure.20 To confront
slow violence requires, then, that we plot and give figurative shape
to formless threats whose fatal repercussions are dispersed across
space and time. The representational challenges are acute, requiring
creative ways of drawing public attention to catastrophic acts that
are low in instant spectacle but high in long-term effects. To
intervene representation- ally entails devising iconic symbols that
embody amorphous calamities as well as narrative forms that infuse
those symbols with dramatic urgency.
Imperialism
The catastrophes of imperialism trump other impacts
William Eckhardt, Lentz Peace Research Laboratory of St. Louis, February

1990, Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 27, No. 1, jstor, p. 15-16
Wright looked at the relation between modern civilization and war in somewhat more detail, based on his
own list of 278 modern wars from 1480 to 1941, plus 30 more hostilities from 1945 to 1964. Modern war
was not especially different from other civilized wars in its drives or motives of dominance, independence,
and rivalry, but it was quite different in its geographical scope (the world) and in its technologies (from the
Modern Western
Civilization used war as well as peace to gain the whole world as a domain
to benefit itself at the expense of others: The expansion of the
culture and institutions of modern civilization from its centers in
Europe was made possible by imperialistic war It is true missionaries and
hand gun to the atom bomb, from the printing press to the mass media).
traders had their share in the work of expanding world civilization, but always with the support, immediate
or in the background, of armies and navies (pp. 251-252). The importance of dominance as a primary
[Dominance]
is probably the most important single element in the causation of
major modern wars (p. 85). European empires were thrown up all over
the world in this process of benefiting some at the expense of others, which was
characterized by armed violence contributing to structural violence: World-empire is built by
conquest and maintained by force Empires are primarily
organizations of violence (pp. 965, 969). The struggle for empire has
motive in civilized war in general was also emphasized for modern war in particular:
greatly increased the disparity between states with respect to the political control of resources, since there
can never be enough imperial territory to provide for all (p. 1190). This disparity between states, not to
mention the disparity within states, both of which take the form of racial differences in life expectancies,
killed 15-20 times as many people in the 20th century as have

wars and revolutions (Eckhardt & Kohler, 1980; Eckhardt, 1983c). When this structural
violence of disparity between states created by civilization is taken into account, then the violent
nature of civilization becomes much more apparent. Wright concluded that
has
Probably at least 10 per cent of deaths in modern civilization can be attributed directly or indirectly to
war The trend of war has been toward greater cost, both absolutely and relative to population The
proportion of the population dying as a direct consequence of battle has tended to increase (pp. 246,
structural violence has constituted about one-third of all

deaths in the 20th century (Eckhardt & Kohler, 1980; Eckhardt, 1983c), and so far as
247). So far as
structural violence was a function of armed violence, past and present, then Wrights estimate was very
civilization is
responsible for one-third of 20th century deaths. This is surely selfdestruction carried to a high level of efficiency. The structural situation has been
conservative indeed. Assuming that war is some function of civilization, then
improving throughout the 20th century, however, so that structural violence caused only 20% of all
deaths in 1980 (Eckhardt, 1983c). There is obviously room for more improvement. To be sure, armed
violence in the form of revolution has been directed toward the reduction of structural violence, even as
imperial
violence came first, in the sense of creating structural violence, before revolutionary violence
emerged to reduce it. It is in this sense that structural violence was
basically, fundamentally, and primarily a function of armed violence
in its imperial form. The atomic age has ushered in the possibility,
and some would say the probability, of killing not only some of us for
the benefit of others, nor even of killing all of us to no ones benefit,
but of putting an end to life itself! This is surely carrying selfdestruction to some infinite power beyond all human comprehension. Its too much, or
armed violence in the form of imperialism has been directed toward its maintenance. But
superfluous, as the Existentialists might say. Why we should care is a mystery. But, if we do, then the need
for civilized peoples to respond to the ethical challenge is very urgent indeed.
depend upon our choice
Life itself may
On balance U.S. led world order is net worse for stability

and results in an incredible body count along with mass
global suffering
Boggs 2005 (Carl, Professor of Social Science at National University,
Imperial Delusions p. x-xiii)

As, the United States moves to reshape the geopolitical terrain of the world,
'Nith hundreds of military bases in 130 countries added to hundreds of
installations stretched across its own territorial confines, the vast majority
of Americans refuse to admit their nation possesses anything
resembling an Empire. Yet U.S. global expansion is far more ambitious than
anything pursued or even imagined by previous imperial powers. It might be
argued that the "new militarism" is rooted in a "new imperialism" that
aspires to nothing short of world domination, a project earlier outlined
by its exuberant proponents and given new life by the Bush II presidency,
which has set out to remove all vestiges of ideological and material
impediments to worldwide corporate power-by every means at its
disposal. It is hard to resist the conclusion that the United States, its
strong fusion of national exceptionalism, patriotic chauvinism, and
neoliberal fundamentalism fully in place, has evolved into something
of an outlaw, rogue state--the kind of fearsome entity conjured up
by its own incessant propaganda. Celebrations of power, violence,
and conquest long associated with warfare inevitably take its
architects and practitioners into the dark side of human experience,
into a zone marked by unbridled fanaticism and destructive ventures
requiring a culture of lies, duplicity, and double standards.
Militarism as a tool of global power ultimately leads to a jettisoning
of fixed and universal values, the corruption of human purpose, the
degradation of those who embrace it, and finally social
disintegration. As Chris Hedges writes in liVtzr Is a Force That Gives Us
Meaning: "War never creates the society or harmony we desire, especially the
harmony we briefly attain during wartime."1 Here the critical observer is
entitled to ask whether the staggering costs and consequences of
U.S. imperial domination can possibly be worth any of the goals or
ideals invoked as their political justification. We seem to have
reached a point where U.S. leaders see themselves as uniquely
entirled to carry out warfare and imperial agendas simply owing to the
country's status as the world's lone superpower and its preponderance of
military force. In the wake of 9/11 and the onset of Bush's war against
terrorism, the trajectory of U.S. militarism encounters fewer limits in
time and space as it becomes amorphous and endless, galvanized by
the threat of far-flung enemies.As at the height of the cold war, the
power structure embellishes an image of the globe where two apocalyptic
forces-good versus evil, civilized versus primitiv~e locked in a batde to the
death. U.S. expansionism is thereby justified through its quest, its
apparent need, for an increase in both domestic and global power-a
quest destined to bring the superpower to work against even its own
interestsc Empires across history have disintegrated on the shoals of
their boundless elite hubris, accelerated by global overreach,
internal decay, and collapse oflegirimacy, and there is little reason to
think that Pax Americana vv:ill be able to avoid the same fate. While
a feverish nationalism might sustain elite domestic legitimacy
temporarily, it cannot secure the same kind of popular support
internationally, any more than could a United States-managed world
economy that sows its own dysfunctions in the form of mounting
chaos, poverty. and inequality. To the extent the United States is
determined to set itself above the rest of the world, brandishing
technologically awesome military power and threatening planetary survival in
the process, it winds up subverting its own requirements for
international stability and hegemony. In a perpetual struggle to
legitimate their actions, American leaders invoke the familiar and trusted, but
increasingly hollow, pretext of exporting democracy and human rights. With
the eclipse of the Communist threat, U.S. foreign policy followed the path of
"humanitarian intervention," cynically employing seductive motifs like
multiculturalism, human rights, and democratic pluralism-all naturally
designed for public consumption. Few knowledgeable observers outside the
United States take such rhetoric seriously, so its propagandistic merit is
confined mainly to the domestic sphere, although even here its
credibility is waning. "Democracy" becomes another self-serving facade for
naked U.S. geopolitical interests, even as its popular credibility has become
nearly exhausted, all the more with the fraudulent claims invoked to justify
the war on Iraq. Strikingly, the concept of democracy (global or domestic)
receives litde critical scrutiny within American political discourse, the mass
media, or even academia; the de~ocratic ~umanitarian motives of U.S.
foreign policy have become an arncle of fa.tth, and not just among
neoconservatives. Yet even the most cursory inventory of the postwar
historical record demonstrates a pervasive legacy of U.S. support for
authoritarian regimes across the globe and a rathe_r flagr~t contempt for
democracy where it hinders (imputed) nanonal mterests. Throughout the
Middle East and Central Asia the United States has established close ties with
a variety of dictators and monarchs willing to collaborate with American
geopolitical and neoliberal agendas. The recent armed interventions in
the Balkans, Mghanistan, and Iraq have left behind poor, chaotic,
violence-ridden societies far removed from even the most generous
definition of pluralist democracy. The case of Iraq is particularly
instructive. Framing "preemptive" war as a strike against Saddarn Hussein's
tyranny and for "liberation;' the Bush administration-its assertions regarding
terrorist links, weapons of mass destruction, and inuninent Iraqi military
threats shown to be liesscandalously trumpets the old myths while corporate
boondoggles become more transparent by the day. The recent experience of
U.S. involvement in Iraq reveals everything but democratic intent: support for
Hussein throu~hout the 1980s, including his catastrophic wa.t against Iran;
two devastanng military invasions; more than a decade of United States-led
economic sanctions costing hundreds of thousands of lives; surveillance and
bombings spanning more than a decade; repeated coup and assassination
plots~ cynic~ use of the UN inspections process for intelligence and covert
operatlons; atd to terrorist insurgents; an illegal, costly, and dictatorial
military occupation. As elsewhere, U.S. ambitions in Iraq were never about
democracy but were and are a function of resource wars, geopolitical
strategy, and domestic pressures exerted by a powerful war machine. The
Iraqi disaster, occurring fully within the general trajectory of

American global power, illuminates perhaps even more the fragility
and vulnerability of U.S. hegemony than its potency or invincibility,
more the weaknesses than the strengths. A resurgent militarism is
both cause and effect of the deepening crisis oflegitimacy that
befalls domestic and international realms of U.S. imperial power. As I
argue in the final chapter, the resort to overpowering military force in
the service of expansionary U.S. economic and geopolitical goals is
likely to be counterproductive, a sign of eventual if not immediate
decline. Armed interventions, no matter how so phisticated their
technology and logistics, cannot permit elites to shape world politics
as they desire where mass support for that military action is weak or
lacking. Great-power operations are bound to provoke challenges from
subordinate or competing nations, not to mention blowback leading to local
resistance and terrorism, thus restricting superpower maneuverability. And
lopsided domestic spending priorities favoring a bloated Pentagon budget
lead to accelerated decline of the public infrastructure: health services,
education, housing, the environment, and broad social programs vital to the
real strength of any society. Increasing assaults from Republi=s and
Democrats on "government bureaucracy" at the very moment allocations for
military, law enforcement, surveillance, and intelligence functions so
dramatically increase will ouly hasten this downward trend, eventually calling
the imperial mission itself into question. Historical experience suggests
that an elite resort to coercive power works agairist the prospects
for strong hegemony, notably where a legitimation crisis. is already
present, since hegemony depends more on economic well-being,
political stability, culnnal dynamism, and widespread civic
engagement than on brute force. An elite preference for military action
and authoritarian rule weakens the political, cconorrric, and cultural
imperatives of effective governance. Those imperatives were adequately
satisfied in the wake of 911, but the situation changed radically once Bush
embraced the war on terrorism as a launching pad for the Iraq venture, at
which point the ideological gulf between the lone superpower and the rest of
the world deepened. We now face a predicament where the new
militarism, taken up ;vith zeal by virtually every leading American
politician, has through its awesome war-making power already
contributed to destabilization of the same global system it aspires to
dominate.
Refusing to acknowledge imperialisms truth elides its

millions of victimsmilitarism is an everyday structure
that must be contested
Boggs 2005 (Carl, Professor of Social Science at National University,
Imperial Delusions p. xxi-xxv)

The ceaseless global expansion of U.S. military power since the early
1940s is matched by an astonishing public refusal to incorporate an
understanding of that power into the various discourses-political,
educational, media, cultural. The more omnipresent that power has
become, the more it permeates virtually every corner of
international and domestic .life, the more it seems to be ignored or
deflected, suppressed or forgotten, kept safely outside the

established public sphere. The notion of a U.S. militarism appears to
conflict witb two prevailing American mytbs: tbe idea that all
societal institutions are open and democratic, and tbe belief that
U.S. foreign policy is shaped by benign, even noble motives and
interests. The undeniable legacy of militarism that has pervaded, in some
ways transformed, tbe main arenas of American life--political, economic,
cultural, intellectualhas been overwhelmed by the force of patriotic ideology,
imperial arrogance, media spectacles, academic apologies, and (more
recently) post-9/11 fears and insecurities over terrorism. As the world's lone
superpower moves to consolidate its global domination, a stratagem laid out
in many documents and statements and given life by elite interventions
around the globe, critical analysis largely vanishes from sight,
subordinated by an ensemble of celebratory and self-serving
platitudes. If a recycled but upgraded Pax Americana departs
somewhat from classical imperialism in a period of accelerated capitalist
globalization, the pursuit of its agendas requires the broadened use of
military force-or at least tbe threat of such force-which means that
Empire will be sustained through what the well-worn maxim terms
"by any means necessary"-with possibly horrific consequences for
tbe world. Integral to tbe logic of a New World Order created and managed
by the United States (and a few of its allies) is perpetual growth of tbe
Pentagon system and tbe war economy, tbe greatest threat today to
world peace and perhaps even planetary survival. Yet virtually the
entire political culture remains in a state of denial regarding Empire,
detached from all the risks, costs, and consequences of a militarism
veering out of control. Sadly enough, this syndrome engulfS not only
mainstream discourses but oppositional discourses as well. The
contradictions between the actuality of U.S. military power and the insular
public political environment it inhabits could not be more glaring. Never has
such an awesome military machine so dominated the world or its
own social order, its dimensions so vast that they have become easy
to ignore, as if part of the natural landscape, a taken-for-granted
reality. Strangely, even by the end of the twentieth century, the long
and bloody legacy of U.S. imperialism and militarism-begirnting with
the first westward push-was obscure to most Americans, whose view
was distorted by school textbooks, official political discourse, the mass
media, even scholarly writings, except for a few well-known criticS like Noam
Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael Parenti, Edward Herman, Chalmers Johnson,
and Michael Klare. The recent "discovery" of U.S. military power here and
there across the ideological spectrum has been met by a chorus of grateful
voices, hopeful that the Pentagon is up to slaying new dragons in th~ fotnl of
rogue states and terrorists. The most systematic and critical earlier
recognition of the Pentagon system carne from a scholar writing in the mid1950s: C. Wright Mills, in his classic Power Elite (1956), anticipated the
dangers of U.S. militarism to a degree scarcely matched even in intellectual
works written much later-at a time when the military-industrial complex was
far more ensconced and menacing than when Mills was writing. Mills' work,
along v.rith the somewhat later contributions of Fred Cook, Seymour Melman,
and Harry Magdoff, stood virtually alone in its uncompromising critique of the
U.S. war economy, providing future ammunition to the new Left and
succeeding antiwar movements. These conceptual breakthroughs, however,
would be largely abandoned throughout the 1980s and 1990s owing in part to
the famous "Vietnam syndrome," in part to the grov.ring backlash against
movements of the 1960s, in part to an increasing focus on domestic issues.
Aside from a small nucleus of radical intellectuals, it seemed no
longer fashionable to indulge in discourses related to U.S. imperial
power, now considered beyond the pale of rational debate. Much of
what Mills wrote before his untimely death in 1963 was less a reflection on
the existing state of affairs than a prophetic look to the future. Writing in the
early days of the cold war, he was not entirely able to foresee the length and
intensity of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry, the horrors of counterinsurgency war in
Indochina, or later military interventions that would help legitimate American
imperial expansion. Mills did, nonetheless, grasp a fundamental logic of U.S.
capitalism grounded in relentless pursuit of wealth and power across the
globe-a pursuit necessitating a huge military machine. For Mills, the power
elite was comprised of people "in command of the major hierarchies and
organizations of modern society. They rule the big corporations. They run the
machinery of state and claim its prerogatives. They direct the military
establishment."' As he put it: During modem times, and especially in the U.S.,
men had come to look upon history as a peaceful continuum interrupted by
war. But now; the American elite does not have any real image of peace ....
The only seriously accepted plan for "'peace" is the fully loaded pistol. In
short war or a high state of war preparedness is felt to be the normal and
seemingly permanent condition of the U.S.2 Mills saw that the Pentagon had
already become a behemoth political and economic structure in its own right,
its elites increasingly prepared to view world politics in distinctly military
terms. And like Melman later, he understood the crucial role of science and
teclmology in buttressing the war economy. Mills viewed the Pentagon system
as far more than an instrument of foreign policy; it would be integral to the
development of a militarized society and culture. Thus: "American militarism,
in fully developed form, would mean the triumph in all areas oflife of the
military metaphysics, and hence the subordination to it of all other ways
oflife."3 That such tendencies were little more than embryonic at the time
Mills vvas writing lends his insights even greater power. What Mills saw in the
1950s was, oddly enough, a military-industrial complex that few others were
able to see-then or later. The structural and ideological features of the
Pentagon system have been in place since roughly the time of Pearl Harbor.
U.S. military spending remained more or less constant throughout the cold
war years, at $300 billion in constant fiscal year 2000 dollars, fell modesdy
and briefly during the 1990s, and then rose dramatically after 9/11, with
projected levels of$500 billion by 2008. U.S. military forces remain scattered
across the globe, in more than one hundred countries at nearly one thousand
installations, with several hundred ships deployed in the major oceans and
seas and a massive air fleet ready to attack at a moment's notice-all armed
with enough nuclear weaponry to destroy the earth many times over. With
Star \\lars, moreover, the United States is the only nation dedicated to a fullfledged militarization of space, enhancing its surveillance, intelligence, and
strike capabilities. fu of 2003 the Pentagon accounted for nearlv 45 percent of
total world military spending, triple what Russia and Clrina ~ogether allocate,
more than the next nine nations combined, and roughly twenty-five times the
military ourlays of all designated rooue states taken together. The United
States is likely to spend hundreds of bifuons of dollars maintaining its armed
presence in the Middle East, much US cc " "th.e of it going to the occupatlon
oflraq as part of the . . enort to remap region. Since 1990 the United States
has sold nearly $200 billion m arms to 140 countries, and it plans vast new
sales in connection wLth the eastvl~~d expansion of NATO. When framed by
an increasingly aggressive geopolitlcal strategy, defined as full-spectrum
dominance, 1t 15 easy to see how these elements of militarism have
provided U.S. elites with enough power to block rival centers of power-yet
another meaning of the New World Order. &, Mills was the first to foresee, the
war economy, the Pentagon bureaucracy, and an aggressive foreign policy
converge wii:P.in the same matrix of development; they share an identical
logic. Since World War II the US military has provided an international shield
for Western corporate and financialmterests, more globalized today than
ever. At the same time, military Keynes1amsm as a tUun of state qit:ilism has
furnished a major stimulus for domestic economic f!Towth on a foundation of
scientific and technological innovation wedded to :normous corporate
profits.&. Noam Chomsky observes, "It is difficult to imagine a system better
designed for the benefit of the privileged few than the military system:'4
Legitimated by the need to wage global combat agamst a series of
"enemies," the Pentagon system establishes a nearly 1deal umty of state,
economy, and armed forces-a unity not matched by any other nation. The
deflected and sublimated discourse of U.S. militarism has become
one of the tragedies of American public life, obscuring from view the
terrible costs and consequences of Empire: millions of human
casualties resulting from a legacy of foreign interventions, trillions
of dollars in resources drained from the national treasury, ecological
devastation, ongoing threat of nuclear catastrophe, militarization of
society, evisceration of democratic practices, corruption of
international agencies and institutions. While such realities might seem
obvious enough to any rational observer, they ha~e received little attention
within the established public sphere, reflectlng a poverty of discourse that is
simultaneously political, intellectual, and cultural. The post-9/11 milieu has
simply deepened this retreat, even as the role of the U.S. military in world
politics becomes the object of heightened (but uncritical) attention. What
Mills viewed as rather axiomatic in the 1950s lS met today either ""With
silence or celebratory acceptance. . This gulf between discourse and reality is
nowhere more ob~ous th~ in an educational system that seems explicirly
designed to mysnfy soc1al awareness; the topic of U.S. imperial and military
power, except where occasl~ nally celebrated, is largely taboo. This is just as
true for university-level reading as in high school or the lower grades. A
survey of thirty-six widely used college texts m the fields of history, political
science, and sociologythose disClplines expected to address the U.S. role in
world affairs-reveals some fascinating but disturbing information. No fewer
than twenty-seven of these required course readings, ranging in length from
three hundred to six hundred pages, contain absolutely nothing about the
American military m any of 1ts dimenswns. The nine remaining texts present
only minimal references, usually no more than one paragraph and never
more than three pages, all totally lacking in critical perspective. Such
remarkable invisibility of U.S. military power extends beyond

classroom texts to well-known history and social science volumes
that set out to explore major issues in contemporary American
historical development.
**Refuse to privilege American intereststo do otherwise

supports existing power structures**
Mignolo, argentinian semiotician and prof at Duke, 2007 p. online
(Walter, The De-Colonial Option and the Meaning of Identity in Politics)
The rhetoric of modernity (from the Christian mission since the sixteenth
century, to the secular Civilizing mission, to development and
modernization after WWII) occludedunder its triumphant rhetoric of
salvation and the good life for allthe perpetuation of the logic of
coloniality, that is, of massive appropriation of land (and today of natural
resources), massive exploitation of labor (from open slavery from the
sixteenth to the eighteenth century, to disguised slavery, up to the twenty
first century), and the dispensability of human lives from the massive
killing of people in the Inca and Aztec domains to the twenty million plus
people from Saint Petersburg to the Ukraine during WWII killed in the so
called Eastern Front.4 Unfortunately, not all the massive killings have
been recorded with the same value and the same visibility. The
unspoken criteria for the value of human lives is an obvious sign
(from a de-colonial interpretation) of the hidden imperial identity
politics: that is, the value of human lives to which the life of the
enunciator belongs becomes the measuring stick to evaluate other
human lives who do not have the intellectual option and institutional
power to tell the story and to classify events according to a ranking
of human lives; that is, according to a racist classification.5
Structural Fascism
Coloniality is characterized by a soft fascism that exerts
violence on everything and propagates intentional wars to
prop up empire
One of the main consequences, for Santos, of the collapse of
emancipation into regulation is the structural predominance of
exclusion over inclusion. Either because of the exclusion of many of those
formerly included, or because those who in the past were candidates for
inclusion are now prevented from being so, the problematic of exclusion
has become terribly accentuated, with ever growing numbers of
people thrown into a veritable 'state of nature'. The size of the
excluded class varies of course with the centrality of the country in
the world system, but it is particularly staggering in Asia, Africa
and Latin America. The result is a new type of social fascism as 'a
social and civilizational regime'.20 This regime, paradoxically,
coexists with democratic societies, hence its novelty. This fascism
may operate in various modes: in terms of spatial exclusion;
territories struggled over by armed actors; the fascism of insecurity;
and of course the deadly financial fascism, which at times dictates
the marginalisation of entire regions and countries that do not
fulfil the conditions needed for capital, according to the IMF and its
faithful management consultants.2' To the former Third World correspond
the highest levels of social fascism of these kinds. This is, in sum, the world
that is being created by globalisation from above, or hegemonic
globalisation. Before moving on, it is important to complete this rough
representation of today's global capitalist modernity by looking at
the US-led invasion of Iraq in early 2003. Among other things, this
episode has at last made two things particularly clear: first, the willingness
to use unprecedented levels of violence to enforce dominance on a
global scale; second, the unipolarity of the current empire. In
ascension since the Thatcher-Reagan years, this unipolarity reached its
climax with the post-li September regime, based on a new
convergence of military, economic, political and religious interests
in the USA. In Alain Joxe's compelling vision of imperial globality,
what we have been witnessing since the first Gulf war is the rise of
an empire that increasingly operates through the management of
asymmetrical and spatialised violence, territorial control, sub
contracted massacres, and 'cruel little wars', all of which are aimed
at imposing the neoliberal capitalist project. At stake is a type of
regulation that operates through the creation of a new horizon of
global violence. This empire regulates disorder through financial
and military means, pushing chaos to the extent possible to the
outskirts of empire, creating a 'predatory' peace to the benefit of a
global noble caste and leaving untold poverty and suffering in its
path. It is an empire that does not take responsibility for the well-
being of those over whom it rules. As Joxe puts it: The world today is
united by a new form of chaos, an imperial chaos, dominated by the
imperium of the United States, though not controlled by it. We lack the
words to describe this new system, while being surrounded by its images ...
World leadership through chaos, a doctrine that a rational European school
would have difficulty imagining, necessarily leads to weakening states-even
in the United States-through the emerging sovereignty of corporations and
markets.22 The new empire thus operates not so much through conquest,
but through the imposition of norms (free-markets, US-style democracy and
cultural notions of consumption, and so forth). The former Third World is,
above all, the theatre of a multiplicity of cruel little wars which,
rather than being barbaric throwbacks, are linked to the current
global logic. From Colombia and Central America to Algeria, subSaharan Africa and the Middle East these wars take place within
states or regions, without threatening empire but fostering
conditions favourable to it. For much of the former Third World
(and of course for the Third World within the core) is reserved 'the
World-chaos', free-market slavery, and selective genocide.23 In
some cases this amounts to a sort of 'paleo-micro-colonialism'
within regions,24 in others to balkanisation, in yet others to brutal
internal wars and massive displacement to free up entire regions
for transnational capital (particularly in the case of oil, but also
diamonds, timber, water, genetic resources, and agricultural
lands). Often these cruel little wars are fuelled by mafia networks,
and intended for macroeconomic globalisation. It is clear that this new
Global Empire ('the New World Order of the American imperial monarchy')25
articulates the 'peaceful expansion' of the free-market economy with
omnipresent violence in a novel regime of economic and military global- ityin other words, the global economy comes to be supported by a global
organisation of violence and vice versa.26 On the subjective side,
what one increasingly finds in the Souths (including the South within the
North) are 'diced identities' and the transformation of cultures of solidarity
into cultures of destruction.
Discomfort Good
Discomfort suggests the limits of systems and what
exceeds them
Stone-Mediatore 1998 (Shari, Professor of Philosophy, Chandra
Mohanty and the Revaluuing og Experience in Hypatia 13.2)

Finally, when we read a narrative as a response to tensions between
experience and language, we can discern tensions and
ambiguities within the text itself (for instance, Anzaldia's simultaneous
distancing from and embracing of "Mexican-American"). These tensions
reflect the author's struggle to stretch or challenge her language's
accustomed usage in order to reckon with phenom- ena that defy
its logic. As such, these tensions indicate ways that our language
may be vulnerable to further disruption or appropriation. Scott rightly
points out that disruption is an inherent potential of discourse, for any
discourse is indeterminate and conflicts with other discourses (1991, 793).
To achieve this disruption, however, we must recognize that it is
not discourse itself but our experience of discourse and our
reckoning with that experience that propels discursive change.
Discomfort with discourse exceeds what is represented in given
discursive categories. It comes to language only through the
struggle to rethink and remember the tensions between our
experience and our received language and the work of articulating
this by using language against the grain. Mohanty emphasizes that
"the point is not just 'to record' one's history of struggle, or consciousness,
but how they are recorded; the way we read, receive and disseminate such
imaginative records is immensely significant" (1991a, 34). In light of her
analysis, I propose one guideline for responsible reading of stories
of experience: we must not reduce these either to empirical
evidence or to mere rhetorical constructions, but we must attend to
the ways they can help us to discern contradictions in our own
experience and can thereby facilitate our own further oppositional
speaking and writing.
Biopolitics Impact
Sovereign forms of politics operate in management of
biological life. When power of the state that exercise
itself is based on the control of the body this becomes bio
politics. This destroys life and allows manifestation inside
the state of exception.
EDKINS 0
Professor of ptx at wales university-card was cut from alternatives 25:1-page 3-6
According to Agamben's account in Homo Sacer, the first move of classical
Western politics
was the separation of the biological and the political. The natural life of zoe, understood
as the simple fact of living common to all living beings, was excluded from the polis and confined
to the oikos, or domestic sphere(article continues2 pages)
Like the feminists, Agamben argues that the separation of zoe and bios is a practice of
inclusion by exclusion that isconstitutive of sovereignty in the modern Western sense
from the beginning. In other words, the exclusion of zoe from the polis is at the same
time an inclusion. It is not just with the rise of the modern state, as Michel Foucault would
have us believe, that zoe is included in state power. Foucault argues that at the
beginning of the modern era, natural life comes to be included more and more in the
mechanisms and calculations of state power. At this point, politics becomes biopolitics,
and whereas for Aristotle man was a living animal with a capacity for political existence, modern man
becomes "an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question." Modernity for
Foucault is the point at which the species and the individual as a simple living body
become what is at stake in a society's political strategies. At one and the same time
it becomes possible both to protect life and to organize a holocaust. However, according
to Agamben this picture needs to be corrected and Foucault's analysis of power in modernity completed .
Sovereign power in the West is constituted from the start by the very inclusion by
exclusion of natural life: sovereignty is the originary structure in which law refers to
life. More than this inclusion by exclusion, sovereign power in the West is constituted by its ability to
suspend itself in a state of exception, or ban: "The originary relation of law to life is not application but
abandonment." The paradox of sovereignty is that the sovereign is at the same time inside and outside the
sovereign order: the sovereign can suspend the law. What defines the rule of law is the state of exception
when law is suspended. The very space in which juridical order can have validity is created and defined
through the sovereign exception. However, the exception that defines the structure of
sovereignty is more complex than the inclusion of what is outside by means of an

interdiction. It is not just a question of creating a distinction between inside and
outside: it is the tracing of a threshold between the two, a location where inside and
outside enter into a zone of indistinction.
Enacting the affirmatives plan will transform it into

biopower.
Morgensen 11The Biopolitics of Settler colonialism:Right Here, Right Now p.52(As an ethnographer and historian of social
movement, Scott L. Morgensen examines how political communities struggle over differences, challenge or reproduce oppressions, and
confront solidarity and alliance. His past and present research examine how racism and settler colonialism shape queer / trans communities in
North America (see SSHRC grant, below). At once, his theoretical writings examine Indigenous solidarity and the comparative analysis of
settler colonialisms, with notable emphases in critical race theory, the critique of white supremacy, and the study of multiracial alliance work
for decolonizing settler states. An interdisciplinary scholar trained in feminist studies (PhD 2001 Anthropology [Womens Studies], University of
California, Santa Cruz), Morgensen engages the theories and methods of Indigenous, women of colour, and transnational feminisms in his
work, and he holds his students responsible to these movements intellectual leadership.Morgensen is coordinating a SSRHC research project
(2012-16) that will document knowledges of and responses to racism and settler colonialism in Canadian queer / trans politics. Graduate
students seeking opportunities in this research area may inquire for more information.Morgensens first book, Spaces between Us: Queer
Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2011, and won the 2012 Ruth
Benedict Book Prize Honorable Mention from the Association for Queer Anthropology. He is co-editor of the collection Queer Indigenous
Studies, and of Karangatia: Calling Out Gender and Sexuality in Settler Societies, a special issue of Settler Colonial Studies.Morgensen is coeditor of Journal of Critical Race Inquiry. )For more than five hundred years,
Western law functioned as biopower in relation to ongoing practices of European

settler colonialism. Settler colonialism has conditioned not only Indigenous peoples
and their lands and the settler societies that occupy them,but all political,
economic and cultural processes that those societies touch. Settler colonialism
directly informs past and present processes of European colonisation, global capitalism, liberal modernity
If settler colonialism is not theorised in accounts of these

formations, then its power remains naturalised in the world that we engage
and in the theoretical apparatuses with which we attempt to explain it. Settler
colonialism can be denaturalised by theorising its constitution as biopower , as
and international governance.
well as how it in turn conditions all modern modes of colonialism and biopower. My argument critically
shifts recent theories of the coloniality of biopower by centreing settler colonialism in analysis. Wolfe has
observed in histories of the Americas that a settler colonial logic of elimination located
Indigenous Americans relationally, yet distinctly from Africans in the transatlantic

slave trade or colonized indentured labour, thereby illuminating (as Mark Rifkin
notes) the peculiar status of Indigenous peoples within the biopolitics of settler
colonialism.2 Western law is troubled once European subjects are redefined as settlers in relation to the
Indigenous peoples, histories, and lands incorporated by white settler nations. I argue that this tension is
engaged productively by Agambens tracing of the state of exception to homo sacer,
and notably its derivation in Roman law from a thesis of consanguinity. I adapt this
quality to illuminate why and how Western law incorporates Indigenous peoples into
the settler nation by simultaneously pursuing their elimination. I further argue that these
deeply historical processes ultimately enact biopower as a persistent activity of
settler states that were never decolonised and of the global regimes that extend and
naturalise their power. By the twentieth century amid a formal demise of colonial empires, putative
decolonisation of the global South, and global capitalist recolonisation the universalisation of Western
law as liberal governance was ensured by the actions of settler states. Morgensen,The Biopolitics of
Settler Colonialism. 54 genealogy of the biopolitics of settler colonialism will explain that the colonial era
never ended because settler colonialism remains the naturalised activity projecting Western law and its
Theories of the biopolitical state, regimes of global

governance, and the war on terror will be insufficient unless they critically
theorise settler colonialism.
exception along global scales today.
When biopolitics is applied to bare life it will eventually

lead toward extinction and that will be inevitable due to
the cycle of purification and civil war.
AGAMBEN 2k
From meanswithout end,philosopherat U>Verona p35]
Paraphrasing the Freudian postulate on the relation between Es and Ich, one might say that modern biopolitics is supported by
the principle according to which where there is naked life, there has to be a People, as long as one adds
immediately that this principle is valid also in its inverse formulation, which prescribes that where there is a People, there shall be
naked life. The fracture that was believed to have been healed by eliminating the people namely, the Jews,
who are its symbol reproduced itself a new, there by turning the whole German people into sacred life
that is doomed to death and into a biological body that has to be infinitely purified (by eliminating the mentally ill
and the carriers of hereditary diseases). And today, in a different and yet analogous way, the capitalistic-democratic plan to
eliminate the poor not only reproduced inside itself the people of the excluded but also turns all the
populations of the Third World into naked life. Only a politics that has been able to come to terms with the
fundamental biopolitical split of the West will be able to arrest this oscillation and put an end to the civil
war that divides the people and the cities of the Earth. .
Answers to:
A2: Global Violence Decreasing

The statistics you cite are corrupted by speed and
spatialityour critique asks you to rethink what counts as
violence because existing statistical measures dont
accurately represent it

For all the continuing pertinence of the theory of structural violence and for
all the modifications the theory has undergone, the notion bears the impress
of its genesis during the high era of structuralist thinking that tended toward
a static determinism. We see this, for example, in Galtungs insistence that
structural violence is silent, it does not showits is essentially static, it is
the tranquil waters.25 In contrast to the static connotations of
structural violence, I have sought, through the notion of slow
violence, to foreground questions of time, movement, and change,
however gradual. The explicitly temporal emphasis of slow violence
allows us to keep front and center the representational challenges
and imaginative dilemmas posed not just by imperceptible violence
but by imperceptible change whereby violence is decoupled from
its original causes by the workings of time. Time becomes an actor in
complicated ways, not least because the temporal tem- plates of our
spectacle-driven, 24/7 media life have shifted massively since Galtung
first advanced his theory of structural violence some forty years ago. To talk
about slow violence, then, is to engage directly with our contemporary politics of speed. Simply put, structural violence is a
theory that entails rethinking different notions of causation and
agency with respect to violent effects. Slow violence, by contrast, might
well include forms of structural violence, but has a wider descriptive
range in calling attention, not simply to questions of agency, but to
broader, more complex descriptive categories of violence enacted
slowly over time. The shift in the relationship between human
agency and time is most dramatically evident in our enhanced
understanding of the accelerated changes occurring at two scalar
extremesin the life-sustaining circuits of planetary biophysics and
in the wired brains neural circuitry. The idea of structural violence
predated both sophisti- cated contemporary ice-core sampling
methods and the emergence of cyber technology. My concept of slow
violence thus seeks to respond both to recent, radical changes in our
geological perception and our changing technological experiences
of time.
Agent orange proveswhat you count as a casualty is

narrow and insulting
The representational bias against slow violence has, furthermore, a
critically dangerous impact on what counts as a casualty in the first
place. Casualties of slow violencehuman and environmentalare

the casualties most likely not to be seen, not to be counted.
Casualties of slow violence become light-weight, disposable
casualties, with dire consequences for the ways wars are
remembered, which in turn has dire consequences for the projected
casualties from future wars. We can observe this bias at work in the
way wars, whose lethal repercussions spread across space and time,
are tidily bookended in the historical record. Thus, for instance, a 2003
New York Times editorial on Vietnam declared that during our dozen years
there, the U.S. killed and helped kill at least 1.5 million people.31 But that
simple phrase during our dozen years there shrinks the toll, foreshortening
the ongoing slow-motion slaughter: hundreds of thousands survived the
official war years, only to slowly lose their lives later to Agent Orange. In a
2002 study, the environmental scientist Arnold Schecter recorded dioxin
levels in the bloodstreams of Bien Hoa residents at 135 times the levels of
Hanois inhabit- ants, who lived far north of the spraying.32 The afflicted
include thousands of children born decades after the wars end. More than
thirty years after the last spray run, Agent Orange continues to wreak havoc
as, through biomagnification, dioxins build up in the fatty tissues of pivotal
foods such as duck and fish and pass from the natural world into the cooking
pot and from there to ensuing human generations. An Institute of Medicine
committee has by now linked seventeen medical conditions to Agent Orange;
indeed, as recently as 2009 it uncovered fresh evidence that exposure to the
chemi- cal increases the likelihood of developing Parkinsons disease and
ischemic heart disease.33 Under such circumstances, wherein long-term risks
continue to emerge, to bookend a wars casualties with the phrase during
our dozen years there is misleading: that small, seemingly innocent
phrase is a powerful reminder of how our rhetorical conventions for
bracketing violence routinely ignore ongoing, belated casualties
A2: Experience Bad/Unrepresentable

Experiences may be linguistically mediated but particular
experiences enable experience to suggest politics that
might be otherwise
Stone-Mediatore 1998 (Shari, Professor of Philosophy, Chandra
Mohanty and the Revaluuing og Experience in Hypatia 13.2)
In the end, the empiricist approach to experience and Scott's poststructural-
ist approach constitute two polar opposite positions. The former assumes
that, through experience, we gain access to a prediscursive reality; the latter
assumes that our inquiry cannot go beyond discourse, that we can only
analyze discursive mechanisms. Scott rightly criticizes the empiricist
approach, but her own approach is also limited. Equating experience with
representations of experience, she obscures the role of subjective
experience in motivating and informing intervention in representational
practices. The problems with Scott's poststructuralist "experience" come to
the fore in her attempt to reread Delany from this vantage point. In the
second reading, Scott identifies Delany's bathhouse affirmation of his gay
identity as a "discursive event"; that is. not the unveiling of his true self but
"the substitution of one interpretation for another" (Scott 1991, 794). This
theory, however, is inadequate to what Scott's closer attention to the text's
language actually points toward. Although Scott does not theorize this, her
second reading indicates paradoxical, mutually informing relations between
Delany's experience and his writing, relations that make this text more
than merely one discursive production among others. Scott's inability to
confront the implications of her own reading manifests itself in an
unresolved contradiction in that reading. On the one hand, Scott emphasizes
that Delany's bathhouse "experience" is constituted in his interpretation of
that event. Noting that the bathhouse is illuminated by a dim blue light, she
says that what Delany calls his vision is really an interpretation of the blue
light's multiple refractions, an interpretation informed by available
discourses on sexuality. On the other hand, however, her analysis implies an
experience distinct from language that prompts Delany to favor certain
discourses over others and to use that discourse in an innovative, selfconscious manner. For instance, she observes that Delany's bathhouse
reinterpretation of his gay identity was enabled by his "subjective perceptual
clarity" (Scott 1991, 794). Further- more, she suggests that Delany's own
experience-motivated questioning of social categories was crucial to his
innovative writing: on these reflections, Delany finds that "the available
social categories aren't sufficient for [his] story" (Scott 1991, 795). Scott's
rereading of Delany leaves this paradox: Delany's experience is constituted
in his interpretation of the experience, yet the interpretation is guided by his
experiences and reflections on these. When Scott describes the memoir as a
"discursive production of knowledge of the self," she recognizes one side of
the paradox, the constitutive role of language. But she overlooks the
experience that enables Delany to use language in the particular way he
does. The short shrift that Scott gives to this motivating experience is evident
in her failure to explicate "subjective perceptual clarity" or to explain the
relation between Delany's subjective perceptual clarity and his text. Without
paying attention to these relations between Delany's experience and his
writing, Scott cannot distinguish the text's value from other representations
of gay identity or of the sexual revolution; it is merely "the substitution of
one interpretation for another." If Scott intimates, but never fully confronts,
the role of experience in Delany's rewriting of his identity, it is because
"experience" in her theory can be nothing but a mirror of available
discourses (whether these be ruling or oppositional discourses), with no
excess. Ironically, such a theory reverses the empiricist privileging of
subjective experience over language only to retain its one-dimensional,
vision-oriented structure. Scott's insight is that vision is not immediate
contact with an outside world but is always already mediated by discursive
categories; yet she still considers this "seeing" of the world (now understood
to be ideologically constituted) to be all of experience. In effect, experience
for Scott is what Harding calls "spontaneous consciousness": the awareness
one has of one's "individual experience" before any reflection on that
experience or any consideration of the social construction of one's identity
(Harding 1991, 269, 287, 295). As Harding suggests, we cannot call this
experience "immediate," for it is thoroughly mediated by dominant cultural
texts. It is, however, spontaneous, for it is experienced as if it were an
immediate view of one's life and world. Empiricists naturalize this
spontaneously conscious awareness; Scott recognizes this to be prefigured
by discursive principles. For both, though, this exhausts experience.
Indeed, this is why Scott is not concerned to distinguish between experience
and language; in her view, experience can be nothing other than what
codified categories enable one to conceptualize, and hence to "see." Scott's
unwitting narrowing of the realm of experience is also marked by her single
reference to, and subsequent neglect of, the visceral domain. If she were to
address the latter, she would confront aspects of experience that, while
perhaps inextricable from language, are not mediated by language in the
same way or to the same extent as perception.9 Scott's inattention to
visceral experience is symptomatic of her reduction of the many layers of
experience to a spontaneous "vision." To be sure, Scott is interested in the
possibility of "seeing differently." Still, lacking a concept of experience
distinct from discourse, she cannot explain the resources for creating or the
motivations for employing oppositional discourses. Flattening experience
into discursively constituted perception, Scott can recognize only two ways
of treating experience: a naive empiricist presen- tation of experience as
evidence, or an (objectifying) analysis of the language in which others have
represented experience. The only critical project here is the theorist's
analysis of language. Yet Scott's own reading of Delany indicates a text that
fits into neither of these categories, but rather works within the tension
between writing and experience and responds creatively to that tension.
A2: West is Best

West is best style arguments rely on a temporal
displacement that produces exceptionalism as an effect of
intrinsic powers of colonial reason rather than
understanding that exceptionalism is the cause of rather
than solution to colonial subjugation
Hegemony in Mignolos usage of the term is very much taken from the
Gramscian idea of hegemony as the construction of mass consent. That is,
hegemony is achieved through a project of persuasion that works
principally through claims to truth. Europe is ahead because Europe
is smarter and more reflective than the rest of the world; the United
States has the right to hog the worlds resources because it knows
best how to make use of them. Leading liberals like Arthur Schlesinger
make the claim for Western epistemic supremacy without any
embarrassment: Schlesinger claims not that Europe (and the U.S. as
a European nation) has made no mistakes, but that Europe alone
invented the scientific method, which gave it the capacity to critique
its mistakes. Moreover, he claims that, although every culture has
done terrible things, whatever the particular crimes of Europe,
that continent is also the sourcethe unique sourceof those
liberating ideas . . . to which most of the world today aspires. These
are European ideas, not Asian, nor African, nor Middle eastern ideas,
except by adoption(Schlesinger 1992, 127; emphasis in original). The result
of the wide acceptance of such hegemonic claims in the United
States and in Europe is a broad-based consent to imperial war as the
presumptive entitlement of the political vanguard of the human
race; the result of the acceptance of such hegemonic claims in the
colonized world includes such symptomatic effects as the ones Samuel
Ramos and Octavio Paz described when they said that Mexicans have an
alienated relationship to their own temporal reality, and that they
imagine the real present as occurring somewhere else than where
they live. The temporal displacement or alienation of space, which
causes the colonized person to be unable to experience their own
time as the now and instead to see that now as occurring in
another space, is the result of a Eurocentric organization of time in
which time is measured by the developments in technological
knowledge, the gadget porn of iPods and BlackBerrys, and the languages in
which that technological knowledge is developed. Who is developing the
latest gadgets? What language do they speak? These questions show us
where the now resides, and thus, who is behind.
Western tools like development poorly suited to solving

the problems we face todaycombats symptoms not
systems

First, modernity's ability to provide solutions to modem problems has
been increasingly compromised. In fact, it can be argued that
there are no modem solutions to many of today's problems.7 This
is clearly the case, for instance, with massive displacement and
ecological destruction, but also with development's inability to
fulfil its promise of a minimum of well-being for the world's people.
At the basis of this modern incapacity lie both a hyper-technification
of rationality and a hyper-marketisation of social life-what Santos
refers to as the increasing incongruence of the functions of social
emancipation and social regulation.8 The result is an oppressive
globality in which manifold forms of violence increasingly take on
the function of regulation of peoples and economies. This feature
has become central to the neoliberal approach of the American empire
(even more so after the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq). This
modernist attempt at combating the symptoms but not the cause of
the social, political and ecological crises of the times results in
multiple 'cruel little wars' in which the control of territories, people
and resources is at stake.9 Regimes of selective inclusion and
hyper-exclusion-of heightened poverty for the many and
skyrocketing wealth for the few-operating through spatial-military
logics, create a situation of widespread social fascism. The ever
widening territories and peoples subjected to precarious living
conditions under social fascism suggest the continued validity of a
certain notion of a Third World, although not reducible to strict
geographical parameters. In short, the modern crisis is a crisis in
models of thought; modern solutions, at least under neoliberal
globalisation (NLG), only deepen the problems. Moving beyond or
outside modernity thus becomes a sine qua non for imagining after
the Third World.
A2: Perm
Half measures that attempt to more fully universalize and
include cannot sever the 1AC methodologythis
circumscribes the scope of the permutations capacity to
succeed

In some respects Mignolo suggests that the cause of the problem is less
in content than in goal. The target of his critique is rarely the content
of specific epistemological positions or theories but rather of their
imperial assumptions and scope of application. The philosophy of
science, for example, never presents itself as the philosophy of
Western science, but as the philosophy of science tout court. This
leads me to the last aspect of Mignolos critique of epistemology I want to
discuss before turning to the constructive project: his argument with social
science. Mignolo takes issue with Immanuel Waller- steins idea that the
social sciences need to be opened up, arguing that instead of
being opened up, they need to be superceded. Wallerstein wants to
open up the social sciences to a more planetary enterprise, to transcend the
segregated model of area studies in favor of a unified domain of inquiry. Thus
he wants to expand their scope and range of reference as a way to
correct for Anglo- and Eurocentrism. The problem with this plan,
Mignolo suggests, citing Orlando Fals-Borda, Vine Deloria, and others to
support him, is that opening is not the same as decolonizing (2000a,
80). The project of opening up without decolonizing runs the risk of
simply furthering colonial expansion if the methodology remains
dependent on the epistemology of North Atlantic modernitythe
norms of the disciplines and the problems of the North Atlantic (80),
that is, on the conceptual imagery of colonial epistemologies. For
Mignolo, the basic problem is that the systems of knowing and
representing that developed in European modernity were
constituted by and within the coloniality of power. Thus, Mignolo has
moved further and further afield of traditional Western philosophical
concepts in his attempt to disentangle his approach to knowledge
from the snares of colonizing assumptions. For this, as the recent
critical discussion in South Atlantic Quar- terly indicates, he is losing some of
his postmodern allies. Postmodernists, however radical their critiques, are
rarely in the business of reconstructing epistemic norms, a project that in the
next section I will argue has engaged Mignolo.
Subaltern cannot retroactively speakthe exclusion is

done by the 1AC
Johnson 2007 (Adriana, Professor of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine,
South Atlantic Quarterly 107.1, Everydayness and Subalternity)
The subaltern also escapes. But unlike the everyday, it is what is produced
as escaping. The subaltern I am referring to is not simply the dispossessed,
the downtrodden, the rebellious. It is not simply the people, the bodies out
there, but the way they are represented as unrepresentable (as escaping).
Naming, says de Certeau, is not the painting of a reality any more than it
is elsewhere; it is a performative act organizing what it enunciates. It does
what it says and constitutes the savagery it declares. Just as one
excommunicates by naming, the name wild both creates and defines what
the scriptural economy situates outside of itself.26 To understand
subalternity thus is to side with the argument that it is a
discursive effect. This, at least, seems to me the most theoretically
interesting use of the term, although the word subaltern can be, and indeed
has been, used to think through other sorts of problems as well. In his
Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, Ranajit Guha calls our attention
to the way insurgent peasants in India were, much like the Quebra-Quilos
rioters, deemed nonpolitical by the functionaries of the colonial state. They
were excommunicated from the category of the political as well as the
categories of reason and agency (so fundamental to a post-Enlightenment
notion of the human) and assimilated to other, nonhuman categories. The
natural rhetoric that organizes so many representations of peasant
insurgency noted by Guha (peasant rebellions heaved like earthquakes
and spread like wildfire) flags the way the subaltern becomes
unrecognizable in human terms. In other words, since the act of insurgency
shows that these peasants have not been fully subjected, their actions
cannot therefore be understood through the category of the subject. In
saying this I am relying on Althussers formulation of the subject as
fundamentally subjected through ideology, a formulation which makes visible
the articulations between the grounds upon which the modern (human)
subject is constructed and those upon which modern political systems are
built or at least imagined. When I claim the subaltern is the nonsubject,
therefore, what I mean is that this is how they are represented. This use of a
notion of subalternity refers thus not to an autonomous or
external domain but to the rebellions as they were committed to
paper, to the rebellions as they were rendered unintelligible,
turned into the equivalent of nonsense or noise. Gayatri Spivaks
famous and controversial statement that the subaltern could not
speak proposed that such excommunication (to continue with de
Certeaus term) could not be undone retroactively. Denied a
subjectJJJJJ position from which to speak in the first place, they
could not be granted such a position in hindsight. This line of
thought on subalternity addresses therefore the problem of
limitsthe limits of representation and the limits of knowledge.
Not just any limits, however, but limits that are specifically a
consequence of problems of dominance and power. On the one hand,
the nonsense of the subaltern confirms the (colonial) order
because it is an effect of the discursive practices and the grid of
intelligibility of that order. It also confirms the colonial order as what is, by
definition, not nonsense. But this is not the whole story told by
subalternity: the production of the rebellions as sheer noise also
betrays the existence of a pressure on that same order, which is,
after all, responding to an insurgency. Subalternity spells out an
internal limit to a system of dominance , since the subaltern

should be subjugated but is instead insurgent. As Gyan Prakash puts
it, We should understand subalternity as an abstraction used to identity
the intractability that surfaces inside the dominant systemit signifies that
which the dominant discourse cannot appropriate completely, an otherness
that resists containment. But precisely because dominance fails to
appropriate the radical incommensurability of the subaltern, it
registers only the recalcitrant presence of subalternity . . . its
externality to dominant systems of knowledge and power surfaces
inside the system of dominance, but only as an intimation, as a
trace of that which eludes the dominant discourse.27 The concept
of subalternity forces us to keep in view this tension between an inside and
an outside. To the extent that the subaltern surfaces within a discourse, it is
that which the discourse excommunicates; to the extent that such a
manifestation is only a discursive trace of a more radical outside, the
subaltern escapes.[[
**A2: Were Allies/Fighting Symptoms**

Even if you attempt to fight expression of systemic global
injustice, your race, position and inclusions still matter
we can call you to task and advance your agenda
Yet the very absences and gaps within the WSF speak to the
boundaries that mark the movement. The WSF, for instance, has
refused to express opinions on Palestine, Venezuela, or Argentina, and has
excluded participation by representatives of organizations such as the FARCEP (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) which though arguably
anticorporatization, engage in armed resistance (Teivainen 2002: 6256). In
2003 the council rejected demands to make statements about the invasion
of Iraq. While this distancing from issues related to particular nations and
from violence reflects the WSFs Charter of Principles, which is geared
toward avoiding political stances that would commit the diverse
participating groups to a position, it also points to a perceived
disjuncture between the machines of structural readjustment and the
politics of colonialism and imperialism which is untenable at best.14
The WTO, IMF and World Bank are not simply engines of capitalist
globalization, but also, more importantly, of western capitalist imperialism.
The IMF and World Bank, always headed by Americans and Europeans,
respectively, act, as Joseph Stiglitz (2002: 40) puts it, like colonial rulers. So
to simply be apolitical about the colonial occupation of Palestine, for
instance, while exuberantly chanting slogans against the evil trio the WTO,
IMF and World Bank is to deny the workings of colonialism in capitalist
globalization and to engage in a far easier and less confrontational politics of
global resistance.15 The WSF has also been criticized on the grounds of
race. As many observers pointed out, the 2001 and 2002 WSF meetings
were largely white events, without substantial participation from
Asia and Africa. Even the Brazilians participating in the forum were, as a
whole, whiter than the average Brazilian (Teivanien 2002: 626). To partly
alleviate the problem of the parity of participation, the decision was made to
host the 2004 meeting in Mumbai, India. In 2006 the forum was
decentralized and met at three different locations: Caracas, Venezuela;
Bamako, Mali; and Karachi, Pakistan. However, a more diverse racial
participation has not meant that issues of racial oppression are of
major significance for the forum. Indeed, the very terms privileged by
the WSF corporatization, economic globalization, neoliberalism have
invited criticism from various quarters, from people who contend that
issues of self-determination, race and indigeneity get buried under
the rhetoric privileged by the universalizing logic of the WSF. The
question that these groups have taken up is the following: who is
authorized to speak on behalf of a global civil society and who gets
left out?16 Andile Mngxitama (2005: 4), a Johannesburg-based land rights
activist, for instance, points to the indifference to concerns of race and the
lack of prominence given to the black question in global resistance. Indeed,
it was telling that by the time of the fourth WSF in Mumbai, many who felt
that the particular concerns of race and peasantry were being
ignored, organized to form Mumbai Resistance 2004.[[ Others, like Aziz
Choudry (2005: 1), argue that The doomsday scenario of corporate
rule, transnational plunder, environmental and social disaster which
many opponents of the global free market economy warn of has
long been everyday reality for many Indigenous Peoples. To make
this critique is not to question the motivations of the organizers of the
World Social Forum or to suggest that the issues raised in the forum are
not integral to understanding and resisting a rapacious capitalism.
But precisely because the WSF presents itself as a global resistance
movement, we should be vigilant about what constitutes the global
and what gets left out. Whose global resistance and for whom are
questions we should continue to raise. What critics like Choudry
suggest is that by downplaying the importance of movements for
self-determination, these voices for global resistance fail to
acknowledge longstanding injustices and the continued colonization
of settler colonies, issues that ought to be central to a global civil
society. The end of the Cold War and the need to find theoretical paradigms
useful for the post-9/11 world have created in the West an allure for different
kinds of universal theories. Yet, as some critics have suggested,
universalizing or globalizing theories need to recognize the limits of
universalization at the outset. Thus, Etienne Balibar (1995) proffers a notion
of ambiguous universality by contending that no discussion about
universality can proceed with a univocal concept of the Universal.
Similarly, Zillah Eisenstein (2004: 29) reformulates humanism by suggesting
possibilities for multiple partial connections which are similarly different and
differently similar. Instead of universality, she posits the idea of
polyversality. Such healthy scepticisms about global theory are
necessary or theory can ominously parallel the dictates of
neoliberal global capitalism and reflect, largely, the concerns of the
West. It is therefore important to hold on to the postcolonial call to
decolonize theory because like Rey Chow (1992: 157) I believe that the
colonial in the term postcolonial is operative within global
capitalism and global culture and perhaps even more so in global
progressive intellectual culture in which the traces of western
parochialism parading as universalism are so well masked. And yet I
am not suggesting that the task of decolonization is ever complete.
Cultural colonialism continues to reinvent itself in ways that are
unpredictable, non-synchronous, non-linear, and unfamiliar.
Decolonizing theory, if it has to mean anything, must be a continual
process, a dialectical one of critique and self-critique, constantly
alert to processes of recolonization.
A2: Biopolitics Perm

The spectre of law still haunts the permutation bare life
is a product of the system true political action must
sever all ties to biopolitics
AGAMBEN 05
[Giorgio philosopher, prof aesthetics U. Verona State of Exception p87-8]
If it is true that the articulation between life and law, between anomie and nomos, that is produced by the state of exception is effective
though fictional, one can still not conclude from this that somewhere either beyond or before juridical apparatuses there is an
immediate access to something whose fracture and impossible unification are represented by these apparatuses. There are not first life
as a natural biological given and anomie as the state of nature, and then their implication in law through the state of exception. On the
contrary, the very possibility of distinguishing life and law, anomie and nomos, coincides with their articulation in the biopolitical
machine. Bare life is a product of the machine and not something that preexists it, just as law has no court in
nature or in the divine mind. Life and law, anomie and nomos, auctoritas and potestas, result from the fracture of
something to which we have no other access than through the fiction of their articulation and the patient
work that, by unmasking this fiction, separates what it had claimed to unite. But disenchantment does not
restore the enchanted thing to its original state: According to the principle that purity never lies at the
origin, disenchantment gives it only the possibility of reaching a new condition. To show law in its
nonrelation to life and life in its nonrelation to law means to open a space between them for human action,
which once claimed for itself the name of politics. Politics has suffered a lasting eclipse because it has
been contaminated by law, seeing itself, at best, as constituent power (that is, violence that makes law), when it is
not reduced to merely the power to negotiate with the law. The only truly political action, however, is that
which severs the nexus between violence and law. And only beginning from the space thus opened will it
be possible to pose the question of a possible use of law after the deactivation of the device that, in the state
of exception, tied it to life. We will then have before us a pure law, in the sense in which Benjamin speaks of a pure
language and a pure violence. To a word that does not bind, that neither commands nor prohibits anything, but says only itself,
would correspond an action as pure means, which shows only itself, without any relation to an end. And, between the two, not a lost
original state, but only the use and human praxis that the powers of law and myth had sought to capture in the state of exception.
The permutation still proposes action from within a zone

of indistinction. Political action is impossible as long as
bare life is the object of politics.
EDKINS 00
[Jeremy Dept. of Intl Politics U. Wales Alternatives 25:1 p3-]
At the threshold of the modern era, then, the realm of bare life begins to coincide with the political, and inclusion and
exclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoe, right and fact, enter into a zone of indistinction. In these zones of
indistinction, bare life, or homo sacer, becomes both the subject and the object of the political order: it is
both the place for the organization of state power, in the forms of discipline and objectification described by Foucault, and
the place for emancipation from it, through the birth of modern democracy and the demand for human
rights.
This move of biological life to the center of the political scene in the West leads to a transformation of the
political realm itself, one that effectively constitutes its depoliticization. That depoliticization takes place side by
side with the politicization of bare life. Bare life is politicized and political life disappears. This irony is explained
by the way the link forged in modernity between politics and bare life, a link that underpins ideologies from
the right and the left, has been ignored. As Agamben says, "if politics today seems to be passing through a lasting eclipse,
this is because politics has failed to reckon with this foundational event of modernity. ... Only a reflection that ... interrogates
the link between bare life and politics ... will be able to bring the political out of its concealment." Any
attempt to rethink the political space of the West must begin with an awareness of the impossibility of the
classical distinction between private life and political existence and examine the zones of indistinction into
which the oppositions that produced modern politics in the West--inside/outside, right/left, public/private--have
dissolved. Agamben proposes that "it is on the basis of these uncertain and nameless terrains, these difficult zones of indistinction, that
the ways and forms of a new politics must be thought."
In the zone of indistinction, a claim to a politically qualified
life can no longer be effective as such.
The logic of the permutation is the same logic of the state

of exception
AGAMBEN 05
[Giorgio philosopher, prof aesthetics U. Verona State of Exception p87]
Of course, the task at hand is not to bring the state of exception back within its spatially and temporally
defined boundaries in order to then reaffirm the primacy of a norm and of rights that are themselves
ultimately grounded in it. From the real state of exception in which we live, it is not possible to return to the
state of law [stato di diritto], for at issue now are the very concepts of state and law. But if it is possible
to attempt to halt the machine, to show its central fiction, this is because between violence and law,
between life and norm, there is no substantial articulation. Alongside the movement that seeks to keep them
in relation at all costs, there is a countermovement that, working in an inverse direction in law and in life,
always seeks to loosen what has been artificially and violently linked. That is to say, in the field of tension
of our culture, two opposite forces act, one that institutes and makes, and one that deactivates and deposes.
The state of exception is both the point of their maximum tension and as it coincides with the rule that
which threatens today to render them indiscernible. To live in state of exception means to experience both
of these possibilities and yet, by always separating the two forces, ceaselessly to try to interrupt the
working of the machine that is leading the West toward global civil war.
Aff
A2: Mignolo
Mignolos theory implies an attachment to the originary
pure voices of the Otherreinscribes essentialism
Michaelson and Shershow, 2007 (Scott and Scott,Professors of
English at UC-Irvine and Michigan State respectively, South Atlantic Quarterly

106.1 Rethinking Border Thinking )
The third and fifth points on Mignolos new list merely restate this
overhasty accusation in slightly different form. It therefore suffices to
observe that Derrida always acknowledges that both his examples and his
own [[[ thought remain within the tradition he deconstructs, because there
is no absolute outside to a logocentrism and a metaphysics that begin at
the very dawn of all that one might call thought, consciousness, or
experience. Deconstruction aspires at most to reach the point of a certain
exteriority in relation to the totality of the age of logocentrism
(Grammatology, 161), for it involves the rigorous interrogation of structures
of thought from whose orbit one can never absolutely escape. Similarly,
Mignolos opposition, in the second of these five claims, between
representing or taming the voice is either a distinction
without a difference or, perhaps, something even more
problematic. As Derrida famously suggests, the European tendency to
privilege speech over writing manifests a nostalgia for an imagined
self-presence of the voice that writing dilutes or contaminates. At best,
therefore, Mignolos third claim merely restates one more time that
Amerindian and European signifying practices are fundamentally
different: in this case, because Amerindian signification is said to
be somehow wild and naturalstill in need of tamingwhile
European signification is said to be somehow domesticated. At
worst, however, one must suspect that Mignolos claim itself
springs from a kind of nostalgia for some unadulterated Amerindian
voice imagined as not yet disturbed in the plenitude of its selfpresence and self-possession[[
Mignolo reinscribes violence by pointing to an originary

space itself outside politicswhat one does with the
paradox of speech and politics outweighs the
identification of that speaking situation itself
In any case, Mignolos argument eventually retreats from these
halfarticulated claims to a far more conventional anthropological
defense of the intellectual achievements possible even in a largely
oral culture. Thus, he suggests, Mexicas put the accent on the act of
observing and telling out loud the stories of what they were looking at
(movement of the sky or the black and the red ink) (105). One need not
object to this descriptive claim to observe that it simply inverts the
traditional Eurocentric privileging of writing to celebrate the cultural
possibilities of oral culture and living speech. But then Mignolo

takes the point one step further, suggesting that the fact that
contemporary linguistic science was founded on the experience of
speech and suppressed writing from its field of inquiry does not
necessarily mean that writing in the West was never preferred over
speech; that it was a sign of a superior level of culture and a true measure
of civilization (118). If this is meant to be another critique of Derrida, it
once again betrays a fundamental misunderstanding, for Derrida
argues that logocentrism is always characterized by precisely this
paradox: it privileges the voice against a writing seen as
secondary to it, and at the same time JJJJ privileges writing for its
ability to record and document the achievements of civilization. For
example, Plato exemplifies the logocentric privileging of living speech as
against the written word and yet, in the Laws, celebrates how legal
prescriptions once put into writing remain always on record, as though to
challenge the question of all time to come.11 Thus, by one and the same
gesture, (alphabetic) writing, servile instrument of a speech dreaming of its
plenitude and its self-presence, is scorned and the dignity of writing is
refused to nonalphabetic signs (Grammatology, 10910). Here again, one
can readily join Mignolo in granting such dignity to New World
inscriptions and in conceding that oral records can indeed serve as the
equivalent of written ones, provided one also remembers that, precisely
as such, all such inscriptions or records are also sites for that
differing/ deferring of presence that, beyond all oppositions of
phone and graphie, inescapably haunts every form of signification.
In arguing to the contrary, Mignolos project as a whole evidently
succumbs to what Derrida calls an ethnocentric oneirism, the
dream and myth of a speech originally good, and of a violence
which would come to pounce upon it as a fatal accident
(Grammatology, 109, 135)
1AR: A2: Not Our Mignolo

Attachment to purity of Other signification underwrites
Mignolos work

Mignolos vision of the radical alterity of Amerindian signifying
practices then proves to be the absolute foundation for his
analysis, in Local Histories/ Global Designs, of what he calls border
thinking or border gnosis. In the later book, Mignolo describes the
process of linguistic colonialization as not just an imposition of
European writing practices on Amerindians, but a broad
epistemological process in which an American complementarity was
subjugated by a European and Eurocentric binarity or dualism.
Border thinking emerges in the wake of such subjugation as a
curative or restorative technique by which that originally good
Amerindian signification finally overcomes the effects of colonial
violence. But what, precisely, is border thinking? Let us cite several of his
numerous definitions while highlighting certain metaphors to whose
problematic and conflicting force we will return in the analysis that follows.
Border thinking begins from a bilingual situation, one characterized by
dichotomous concepts (Local, 82, 85; emphasis added). It is the absorbing
and displacing [of ] hegemonic forms of knowledge into the perspective of
the subaltern, an intense battlefield with the subalternization of[[[[
knowledge and legitimation of Occidentalism at stake (12, 13, emphases
added). It is a double critique that attempts to think from both
traditions and, at the same time, neither of them (67). It is the
moment when the reason of the master is absorbed by the slave and
when subaltern reason incorporates (phagocytes) another reason to his or
her own (157; emphasis added). It is a translating of European
cosmologies by Amerindian gnosis (163). And it is, finally, something
whose result is new loci of enunciation or, following douard
Glissant, an openness to the unforeseeable diversity of the world and the
production of unheard and unexpected forms of knowledge outside of
Europe and Amerindian cognitive patterns (5, 81, 154). From this
welter of definition, we observe, first, that for Mignolo border thinking
emerges out of an assumed dichotomy. That is, Mignolo postulates
the existence of at least two languages, ways of reasoning, ways of
interpreting the world and, in short, at least two radically different
modes of being and knowing. One has been suppressed or subordinated
by the work of the colonial difference. Then, with the emergence of border
thinking, the subordinated term of the dichotomy comes forward and,
alternately or simultaneously, absorbs, displaces, battles, or incorporates
the master term in order to fashion something unprecedented and new. The
problems with such formulations, at once figural and conceptual,
begin with their initial premise. That which is dichotomous has
been cut and divided, split in two, or forked and branched, and
implies an original point of originan original wholenessrather
than two separate origins (see OED, s.vv. dichotomous, dicho-). In

the context of the colonial situation, the idea of dichotomy would
thus imply an original relatedness, even though such relational
identities were forged within a context of deeply asymmetrical
power relations. By using this term, Mignolo thus comes
dangerously close to suggesting a counterthesis to his own, and to
aligning himself with something like Anne Nortons analysis of the
incompleteness of any particular identity: Hegels account of the
dependence of the identity of the master on the servant draws attention to
another sense in which each identity is partial. Each identity is dependent on
those against which it defines itself.12 Mignolo himself, however, claims
that his project is no longer conceivable in Hegels dialectics
(Darker, 67), and he might well be pleased to be thus understood as
radically outside the Western philosophic tradition. But to imagine
something fundamentally notHegelian is to imagine differences
that are not in relation, and a worldJJJJJJJ constituted by monadlike cultures whose status is simply to be different as such. This
would be, in Rodolphe Gasches words, an attempt to think the
absolutely singular, which from the standpoint of thinking is a
thoroughly idiosyncratic notion that resists the universalizing bent
of thought and which does not fit any of the classical definitions
of philosophy.13 Thus Mignolo posits a so-called dichotomy in which,
however, two entities at once confront one another historically and yet lack
any original relation. This sheer assertion of radical difference not
only positions his project outside philosophy but also disenables
the very possibility of critical thought.
A2: Colonialism/Eurocentrism Link

These link arguments generate their coherence through a
romanticization of the Other which implies their
naturalized existence outside of a binary relationship to
Europeattempts to escape from the violence of language
itself result in political paralysis
Mignolos other conceptual metaphors share a similar incongruity.
Mignolo claims that subaltern reason absorbs or incorporates
hegemonic forms of knowledge, formulations that imply a certain fusion
or combination. He also claims, however, that those hegemonic forms
have been displaced by the subaltern term in order to make room for
it. The two terms also engage in battle, something that implies struggle and
conflict without any necessary implication of their final combination (a
battle might logically result, for instance, in one or the other terms
obliteration or destruction). As we will eventually show, this unstable
fibrillation among this set of metaphors exposes Mignolos project
to one or more readings that directly contradict his avowed
intentions. Now, just as Mignolo claims, in The Darker Side of the
Renaissance, that Amerindian signifying practices are radically distinct from
European ones, so in Global Histories/Local Designs he suggests, more
broadly, that a modern (Western) epistemology is absolutely closed off to
its other, and unable to recognize Amerindian alternatives (Local, 9,
emphasis original). A brief detour here through the thought of sociologist
Anibal Quijano will be helpful in further assessing this claim.14 Mignolo often
acknowledges his debt to Quijano, whose problematic opening moves are
reproduced and amplified in Mignolos text. Quijanos notion of the
coloniality of power describes social relations within the last five hundred
years of historical capitalism (27)15 and includes a set of four institutions:
the capitalist enterprise proper, the bourgeois family, the nation-state,
and Eurocentrism (545).16 The last of these institutions, Eurocentrism, is
defined by Quijano in terms of two of its nuclear elements, evolution
and dualism, which produce race as a basic category for
purposes of classification and domination (542). As Delgado de Torres
tellingly explains, the coloniality of power defines a set of social
relations between colonizer and colonized that are internal to
Europe itself (Reformulating, 27; emphasis added). Or, [[ as Quijano
puts it, a binary, dualist perspective is particular to Eurocentrism
(Coloniality, 542; emphasis added).17 Quijanos first assumption, therefore,
is that Europe should be understood as a closed, self-sufficient cultural
totality, which during the conquest and colonization of the Americas
encounters other, alternative local totalities and attempts to impose its
totality on theirs. As Mignolo argues, There is nothing outside the totality of
a given local history, other than other local histories perhaps producing
either alternative totalities or an alternative to totality (Local, 329). For
Quijano, similarly, the world is composed of a great number of different

peoples, each with its own history, language, discoveries, and cultural
products, memory and identity (Quijano, Coloniality, 551). But as
Michaelsen has argued at length elsewhere, such an assumption, which
undergirds anthropologys traditional understanding of the
concept of culture itself, cannot be intellectually sustained.
There are no individual, cultural totalities; instead, the globe is
composed of nothing but relations, in which each presumed totality
depends on manifold others for its bordered sense of coherence.18
Local histories, then, literally do not exist, and epistemologically
cannot exist, for the same reason that any individual identity
cannot exist: such identities are forever-incomplete political
projects, rather than given, original existants; and as projects,
they seek to efface their intersubjective limits, ceaselessly
attempting to purge all of the other identities upon which they
fundamentally depend. No people, then, has ever had its own
identity, much less its own cultural products (including language):
We are stitched together and shot through with all of our others
(Michaelsen, Limits, 58). Nothing can escape this logic, including fifteenthcentury New World contact, which radically reconfigured (already)
relational identities (38). Quijanos second, related assumption is that
dualism is the exclusive and specific property of Europe and Eurocentrism.
Even Quijano himself, however, has difficulty maintaining this position
consistently; at one point, for example, he approvingly cites Immanuel
Wallerstein regarding a trait common to all colonial dominators and
imperialists, ethnocentrism (Quijano, Coloniality, 541). This
ethnocentrism, or the division of the world into an accented
us/them dichotomy, would be one possible expression of a dualist
or binary ontology, as Quijano makes clear (552). And if, historically,
all colonial dominators and imperialists are ethnocentric, then all
such dominators are dualist at their core. But a list of such JJJJJJ
dominators would perforce have to include many New World
examples prior to the European invasions, such as the Iroquois,
Mayan, Mexica, and Incan empires. It would thus be impossible to
limit ethnocentric dualism to Europe in particular. Notwithstanding
this apparently obvious problem, Mignolo follows Quijano closely here.
Though he never says so with much emphasis, Mignolo comprehends
Amerindian gnosis as fundamentally different from a Western or
European one, precisely because it is grounded in a logic of
complementarity rather than dualism or binarity: The Sun and the
Moon, in Amerindian categories of thought are not opposite, contrary or
contradictory; they are complementary. To extend deconstruction beyond
Western metaphysics or to assume that there is nothing else than Western
metaphysics will be a move similar to colonizing global designs (Local,
326).19 We first note that the division of the world into binarity
(Europe) and complementarity (its others, including Amerindia)
runs uncomfortably close to the long history of the romanticization
of the other.20 In particular, it seems a mere variation on the
anthropological distinction between societies premised on
individuality and difference, and those grounded in community or
cooperation.21 The introduction of such an old, essentialist binary

into Mignolos text should give any reader pause. If Mignolo were
correct, however, this would mean that Amerindian logic is
fundamentally nonhierarchical and nonexclusive and that
Amerindian gnosis involves no structural oppositions at all. Such
gnosis would have, then, no inflections, no hierarchies, and no
values of any kind. No term or concept could ever be privileged; each would
be deemed necessary to its othersupplying its lack, and completing the
other, rather than opposing it.22 But this completion would necessarily
imply a higher order of synthesis: if man is not privileged over
woman, for instance, and such terms are instead
complementary, then they would necessarily find their completion
in some higher, perhaps neo-Platonic, third sex concept, or,
perhaps, life or human being. But then, by the same logic, even
the human being would necessarily be judged as complementary
with regard to that which is animal or inanimate, and so forth,
endlessly foreclosing inflection and hierarchy. In every possible
register (race, culture, class, caste, gender, sex, age, or the like),
difference would undergo no valuation. There would be
differences, perhaps, but they would exist in peaceful
coexistence rather than violent hierarchy.23 At the limit of this
thought, the citizen and the stranger would necessarily be thought in
comple-[ mentary fashion, disenabling the very possibility of the state
and sovereignty, all basic structures of governance, and indeed, all
modes of thinking and decision making that begin from systematic
discrimination. We must conclude, therefore, that the positing of
radical complementarity implies a withdrawal from the political
decision in general, into an alternative, arcadian space in which
nothing ever need be decided. But as Derrida writes: We know
what always have been the practical (particularly political) effects of
immediately jumping beyond oppositions, and of protests in the
simple form of neither this nor that (Positions, 41). In other words,
complementarity, rather than fundamentally opposing binarity,
leaves every available term for discrimination in place,
preventing any means of intervening in the field effectively
(Derrida, Positions, 41).[
A2: Border Thinking Alt

Border thinking is reconstituted Eurocentrism that cannot
escape from the speech situation of differencedont
judge the plan against an ideal critique that occurs only at
the level of subjectivity but assign the probability of the
alternatives access to their terminal impact to zero
In effect, complementarity functions for Mignolo as a way to describe
a border thinking in which somehow neither Europe nor Amerindia
is privileged. Border thinking, we recall, involves absorption, displacement,
and battle between the two sides of the fundamental colonial dichotomy; it
is not merely a new form of synchretism or hybridity (Local, 12) but,
rather, a thought where indigenous and Western wisdom interact, an
intersection between Western metaphysics and the multiple non-Western
principles governing modes of thinking of local histories (Local, 319, 326,
emphases added). Yet it often becomes clear that even Mignolo is
unable to sustain or rigorously think this variously named
combination of European and Amerindian ways of knowing in which
neither predominates. At one point, Mignolo considers how theories
travel, confronting as they do other forms of knowledge that, by contrast,
have stayed put; and when this happens, he concludes, There are
several possibilities. One is to force the adaptation of the arriving theory. . . .
And still another, provoked by the discomfort of the theories that stayed
put . . . is to close the doors and the eyes and to propose a defense of the
dwelling place facing the danger brought by travelers. And still another is
to think, critically, at the intersection of the dwelling place and the new
travelers, from the right and from the left, and to look at all of them
critically. (Local, 175) How exactly are we to understand this place of
intersection and interaction which is neither a hybrid nor a
syncretic combination, this site which is neither atavistic nor
cosmopolitan and yet from which all can be seen? Is this not
precisely that nonplace of the European Enlightenment gaze that,
at once everywhere and nowhere, claims the whole domain of
knowledge as its privileged domain? And then, at other moments
of Mignolos text, border thinking seems conversely to be little
more than a displacing or replacing of European thought by its
Amerindian counterpart. Mignolo ends his book with this plea: The last
horizon of border thinking . . . points toward a new way of thinking in which
dichotomies can be replaced by the complementarity of apparently
contradictory terms (Local, 338). Here, border thinking reveals itself
to be simply synonymous with that complementarity which has
already been identified as the definitive characteristic of Amerindian
gnosis. In this case, border thinking is no more than a
displacement of the Westa battle in which subaltern
knowledge wins everything, but at the cost of any possibility of
double critique and absorption, and therefore of the unforeseeable

or unknown. Thus, on the one hand, border thinking emerges when
the colonial difference eventually overcomes the European thought
that confronts it; on the other hand, border thinking appears
finally to be indistinguishable from the most classical aspirations
of European thought.
A2: Mignolo Switch Side

Mignolo relies on a simplification of the process of
heremeneutics (and hence, debate)

I remain unconvinced that hermeneutics presupposes an unmediated
subject-object opposition, because it comes precisely out of a
Hegelian rejection of such dualism, and because the concept of
horizon works effectively to show that neither understanding nor
truth can be accounted for if we accept such bifurcations. In general,
Mignolo is often operating with what appears as an overly simplified
account of Western philosophical positions, although simplifications are
understandable and arguably even necessary to try to think at the very broad
level of coloniality. And moreover, for those (like me, at least occasionally)
who want to remind Mignolo and others of the complexity of the Western
epistemological tradition, we would still be rightfully called to account for the
uniform way in which that very complex tradition effects a simplification and
repudiation of non-Western thought. That is, if Western epistemology is truly
complex, as it would certainly seem if one sets Putnam or Quine or Brandom
against Frege or Russell or Popper, then how does one explain the lack of
complexity in the way in which most Western philosophers attend to the
thought that originates from feminists or any of those outside the West?
Western epistemologys internal complexity is somehow able to coexist with
a uniform resistance to engaging with the implications of the fact that its own
historical genealogy precisely maps onto the period of European colonialism.
For this reason I believe we should consider seriously Mignolos insistent
claim in recent years that paradigms originating in the West do not need to
be expanded or pluralized but more robustly transcended.
A2: Decolonial Option

This alternative is apolitical because it is premised on a
pure and uncontaminated view of politicsworking within
existing democratic structures is better
The Nation-State and Democracy It remains only to consider the more
practical opposition allegedly put in play by the redemptive
possibilities of border thinking: the contrast between an alleged
Amerindian democracy and the European nation-state. Here we
begin, one more time, by following Quijano, whose elaboration of the
problem of the nation-state will prove yet again to rest on a concealed
contradiction. Quijano suggests that the nation-state is an intrinsically
European phenomenon and therefore, following the argument we
have previously summarized, embodies a dualist or binarist
ontology. Nationstates in Latin America itself were founded on the European
model, which explains at least in part their long histories of racial violence.
He cites several examples of Latin American states (Argentina, Uruguay, and
Chile) that were premised, at their foundations, on the conquest and land
divestment of indigenous peoples, followed by a project of racial
homogenization through extermination. This is, one must conclude, a
kind of limit case that indicates with particular vividness how the
nation-state as such must always embody an ethnocentric dualism
(56264). One might therefore expect that Quijanos project would involve a
critique of the nation-state to the limit of its foundation: that is, to the limit[
of its division of the world into citizens and strangers. Instead, however,
Quijano adopts a decidedly liberal framework for merely judging particular
states on the basis of their relative processes of democratization (559). For
example, Quijano makes this surprising observation about the United States:
In spite of the colonial relation of domination between whites and blacks
and the colonial extermination of the indigenous population, we must admit,
given the overwhelming majority of whites, that the new nation-state was
genuinely representative of the greater part of the population (560). The
Latin American nation-state, therefore, must be capable of moving in either
of two opposing directions: it can achieve the homogenization required to be
representative, on the one hand, by the exclusion of a significant part of
the population, or, on the other hand, by means of the fundamental
democratization of social and political relations. And, of course, it is this
total democratic inclusion which for Quijano provides for the possibility
of stable and firmly constituted nation-states (564). As we have
argued elsewhere, however, such inclusion is not achievable, for
fundamental reasons of sovereignty and law: The decision to enact
the most minimal social contract . . . cannot but divide and
exclude along one line or more at the moment of its sovereign founding
(102).24 The figure of the subperson, or what Giorgio Agamben refers to
as bare life, is fundamental to state formation.25 Whether the
subperson is categorized according to race, gender, class, and/or

religion, one or more of these categoriesor some equally exclusive
or even empty categoryis necessarily foundational for any state.
Elsewhere we have also characterized the dream of a nonexclusive state,
divested of the power to make a sovereign cut or decision between mere
beings, as a characteristic of political liberalism par excellence.26 We will
suggest here that Quijanosand Mignolosvision of democracy has all
the same problems. Deciphering Mignolo on the question of the
nationstate is difficult, however, because his remarks on the subject are
fleeting and opaque. He notes that the European universal proclamation
of democracy was blind to the local histories in which that very proclamation
was taking place in relation to almost three hundred years of colonialism
and the constitution of the modern/colonial world system (Local, 317).
European democracy, for Mignolo, has no transcendental value but
is instead a kind of empty signifier that has been invoked by figures
such as Pinochet, Allende, Stalin, Reagan, and the elder Bush (Local, 317).
Border thinking, however, holds out the possibility of reconfiguring
JJJJJ democracy in complementary and nondualist terms. Here the
Zapatista insurgency in Chiapas, Mexico, will be the prime example: The
Zapatistas are again showing the limits of democracy in its regional
eighteenth-century definition and recasting it based on the five hundred
years of particular local histories in the Americas. . . . Democracy was
taken off the domain of global designs and reconverted to the needs of
Chiapass local history where indigenous and Western wisdom interact
where the colonial difference is being addressed and border thinking
enacted. Government of the people, by the people, and for the people has
next to it today another dictum: To rule and at the same time obeying.
(Local, 319) Mignolo appears here to be setting two sorts of
democracies in opposition to one another. The first is Abraham
Lincolns democracy: of the people, by the people, and for the
people, as the Gettsyburg Address (1863) has it. The other is
Amerindian democracy: To rule and at the same time obeying. If
we understand Mignolos formulation, the latter mode of
democracy wholly collapses the distinction between the sovereign
and the subject, and between the very ideas of sovereignty and
law (or between the unprecedented decision and the subjects
compliance with its codification in the form of law). Mignolo here
appears to be referring to something like direct democracy, in
which all citizens immediately or directly participate in the political
decision-making process.27 Zapatista democracy favors participatory
democracy or horizontal structures of governance within the community
to the point where the EZLN (Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacin Nacional) has
advocated in its communiques the full renunciation of the executive branch
of government, substituting a communitarian consensus-based model for
executive decision making.28 So Mignolo must be taking Lincolns famous
phrase as defining representative rather than direct democracy. He might
even be going so far as the reading proposed by Giorgio Agamben, who
detects in the tripartite structure of the Gettysburg clauses a repetition
that implicitly sets another people against the first, so that of the people
refers merely to a ruling class who feel a sense of compassion for an
excluded class (for the people). For Agamben, Lincolns Gettysburg

Address is radically incommensurate with the peoples sovereignty . . .
claimed as a principle.29 In either case, Mignolos point seems to be
that the Zapatistas have resolved the problem of political
exclusivity and founded, in Chiapas, aJJJ polity of absolute inclusion
that surmounts the pesky difficulties of representation.30 They have,
in other words, achieved the dream of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Of the
Social Contract (1762) postulated a general will of all as an antidote to the
problem that force produces no right.31 We have no desire here to critique
the Zapatistas insurgency and its historically significant challenge to
neoliberal governance in Mexico and elsewhere. But it is obvious that
consensus-based decision making is no cure-all for the problems of
representative government, nor does it simply put an end to the
exclusion of some political subjects. Indeed, as Jacques Rancire
suggests, by abolishing dissensus and placing a ban on political
subjectivization, consensus reduces politics to the police.32 Even
Rousseau himself recognized that under the regime of a politics of
consensus, whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be
constrained to do so by the entire body: which means nothing
other than that he shall be forced to be free (Social, 53). We also
observe, finally, that Mignolos dream of an absolutely unmediated
democracy could exist at all only if the two seemingly opposed
actions of ruling and obeying could somehow take place, as the
dictum itself suggests, at the same time.33 We would thus have to
imagine beings who both obey and rule; and not merely in turn, sometimes
doing one and sometimes the other, but both at once. The beings capable of
this extraordinary simultaneity of ruling and obeying would thus somehow
have extricated themselves from the problem of time itself, both
philosophically and practically. By the same token, the democracy
constituted by the gathering of such beings would exist as if in a
continuous present, capable of neither improvement nor decline,
and in fact closed off to new events in its own infinite and absolute
completion. Such a political vision is all the more unexpected in
that, after all, Mignolos project is otherwise an essentially
historical one. Mignolo analyzes and celebrates, above all, a border
thinking that emerges only after a historical confrontation and
interaction of two radically different ways of thinking and being;
and as such, border thinking is something that must have been, at
some particular time and place, new. And yet the democracy that
emerges from such border thinking apparently no longer exists in
time or history at all. In other words, Mignolo seems to envision a history
that leads via a particular necessary sequence of events to a particular telos
and then stops. This teleological vision simply reinstalls in the
future Mignolos arcadian vision of a originally good Amerindian
voice. For us, as for Derrida, on the contrary, democracy JJJJJJJJ is
always to come, something that can never be made absolutely
present once and for allprecisely because, as democracy, it must
question and interrogate every border, remaining infinitely incomplete and
open: to the unforeseeable, to the future, and to the unexpected arrival of
the other. And this, indeed, will take time.
A2: Epistemology
Mignolos theory of anti-espistemology is based on its
own epistemic truth which holds the fact of colonization
to have emerged externall as a warrant for the ballot
this contradiction suggests one can speak of suffering
without linking to the coloniality critique
But I would press Mignolo on two points. The first concerns his notion of
truth. Mignolo rejects the project of reclaiming epistemology and
advocates for the shift to gnoseology, because he sees epistemology
as fundamentally a project that is pursuant of truth, and because he
sees truth as necessarily imperial, territorial, and denotative. But it is
difficult to interpret Mignolos own project in any way other than as
a project concerned with truth and with the way in which the colonial
systems of knowing inhibited and precluded both the understanding
and the identification of truth. The denotative approach might have
limited application to the shift he has in mind, but there is still an
epistemically based normative distinction operating in his critique of
the coloniality of power. Take for example Mignolos use of Glissants
concept of diversality, a concept he contrasts to universality but also to
plurality in which alternatives are not in active integration or interaction.
Diversality maps differences as coconstitutive and as potentially integrated,
in the way that a bicultural identity can shift between multiple frames of
reference without collapsing the differences but also without organizing them
into hierarchies. As opposed to imperial resolutions, Glissant wants to
maintain the fundamental ambiguity of colonial identity, that doubled reality
that is alive to more than one here and now. This is not merely an ethically
or politically motivated alternative to universality, I want to suggest, but a
metaphysically motivated one. It is an alternative model for conceptualizing
subjectivity and knowledge that might make sense of the existence of many
worlds as well as to make visible their interrelationality and connectedness.
This surely has political advan- tages, but it also can make possible an
advance in descriptive adequacy for pluritopic horizons.
A2: Agamben Eurocentric

Agambens understanding of coloniality articulated away
from its roots solves your link
Durantaye 2012 (Leland de la, Professor of English at Harvard, Agamben
and Coloniality, p. 236-237)

This allows us to understand better Agambens idea of a paradigm, as well
as what he has chosen to illustrate through his paradigm of colonialism. We
might still ask, however, what all this has to say about colonialism. In what
way does this analysis speak to the problem this volume was conceived of to
address? In a certain sense the answer is simple: it has little to say. That is, it
has little to say if what is at issue are historiographical questions
about the formation of colonies and the process of colonisation,
whether in the ancient or the modern world. If, however, the
question is one of how we might view both the practical and
theoretical questions of colonialism today, then it has much to say.
The problems of colonialism and post-colonialism are far from
confined to relations between colonies and their mother cities.
These problems are of another order, and often manifest themselves
in conflicts within given cities and states the problems of African refugees
in Paris, those of Turkish guest workers in Berlin, of Indian emigres in
London, with the list extending on and on. The question Agamben raises is
not how colonialism became a paradigm for certain states of
exception a question which his reader might more readily have expected,
and which, of course, might be profitably raised and explored. It is, instead,
how the idea of a division between a mother city and its colonies, how this
disparity and disjunction ceased to be merely spatial and practical and has,
instead, become intimately bound up with life in all our cities, how our cities
have become sites of increasingly complex compartmentalisation,
observation and subjectification. This is not an absolute evil, to be sure, but
neither should it be seen as anodyne. If gone unchecked it would seem to
betoken a dark future and it is in the name of the urgency or emergency such
a situation presents that Agamben makes these strategic remarks. Here, as
elsewhere, the strategy will be as complex as the situation and it is by no
means exhaustively mapped out in this brief talk. But that in the name of
which such a strategy is to be formed is named therein: what Agamben calls
ungovernability [ ingovernabilit ]. Universalised ungovernability is, of
course, anarchy. But the question does not lie there. Contemporary
societies increasingly control and subject, discipline and punish their
subjects and the problems posed by colonialism and postcolonialism are intimately related to this phenomenon. This process
is not mere progress, and should not be viewed with an indifferent
eye. If thought is politics, then the freedom and potentiality which
are the highest values of thought are also the highest ones of
politics. For Agamben, it is thus in the name of this idea of politics
that a strategy is to be formed whose aim is an ungovernability
which is our first home and true heritage.
Neolib Alt Fails

Neoliberalism undercuts and configures in advance
various resistances
Levinson 2007 (Brett, Professor of Comparative Literature at
Binghamton, South Atlantic Quarterly 106.1, Globalizing Paradigms, or, The

Delayed State of Latin American Theory)
Finally, it is important to emphasize in this vein that the requisite of visibility
within twenty-first-century Latin America is the market. Leftist political
activity, therefore, often happens because of the market, which
supplies the visibility (even if only on Democracy Now, late at night):
the expropriation of land by Wal-Mart, the spectacular arrest of a
drug dealer, a made-for-television natural disaster, or a coup
orchestrated for CNN. The disparate groups that come forward as
political forces within such settings, to be sure, generate global
interventions. But they do not do so without a scene: without a
place, without advantageous material and market conditions. Not all
others enjoy such things. A market stand and a stand in the
market, hence an affirmation of, and a certain complicity with, the
very neoliberalism that the interventions combat, is a vital
requirement for any countermarket politics. As long as visibility
paves the way for politicsand it doesso too does the demand
for publicity, hence for a market that undercuts the intervention in
advance. We now understand why anti-neoliberal global politics from Latin
America frequently recovers categories of the state-form to effect its
intercession. Because political force is always already assimilated into the
market via the visibility that is its origin, recourses to state-form topoi resist
this market in advance, and they do so beyond whatever practical
application the gestures may have. Every political embrace of globalization
must find a form of visibility by means of which it makes public its resistance
to globalization: the stateform is merely the most visible and effective of
those means. None of this, to repeat, is a question of strategy, charisma,
creativity, or lack thereof. It is the logic of a modern politics that hinges on
the aesthetic, the visible[
A2: Language K/Eurocentrism

Your move to point out how your concepts are different
from ours even though our programs are aligned fractures
the movement for decolonizationyour move participates
in racial biopolitics
Sandoval 2000 (Chela, professor of Chicano studies at University of
California at Santa Barbara, Methodology of the Oppressed p. 68-69)

More obvious for contemporary cultural theorists in the human and social
sciences, though, is the commitment to this mode of differential and
oppositional consciousness that has emerged in the writings of a
diverse array of scholars, including Stuart Hall, Audre Lorde, Donna
Haraway, Cornel West, Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha, Jacques Derrida, Michel
Foucault, Gloria Anzalda, Gayatri Spivak, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe,
Hayden White, Patricia Hill Collins, Jose Esteban Muoz, Emma Perez, and
Trinh T. Minh-ha. They all have developed separate terminologies for a
theory and method of oppositional consciousness, or at least
explored and specified the varying dimensions of its differential
form. It is no accident that over the last twenty years of the twentieth
century new terms such as hybridity, nomad thought, marginalization,
la conciencia de la mestiza, trickster consciousness, masquerade,
eccentric subjectivity, situated knowledges, schizophrenia, la
facultad, signifin, the outsider/within, strategic essentialism,
differance, rasquache, performativity, coatlicue, and the third
meaning entered into intellectual currency as terminological inventions
meant to specify and reinforce particular forms of resistance to dominant
social hierarchy. 2 Taken together, such often seemingly contending
terms indicate the existence of what can be understood as a crossdisciplinary and contemporary vocabulary, lexicon, and grammar for
thinking about oppositional consciousness and social movements
under globalizing postmodern cultural conditions. Oddly, however,
the similar conceptual undergirding that unifies these terminologies
has not become intellectual ground in the academy for recognizing
new forms of theory and method capable of advancing
interdisciplinary study. 3 This divisive and debilitating phenomenon
plagues intellectual production, and it is not unlike the division that
plagues the rest of the social world, the academic manifestation of
which can be recognized as a racialization of theoOn retical
domains, itself another symptom of the twenty-first century
biopolitical race and gender wars predicted by Foucault. Let us
examine this apartheid in more detail before we investigate its remedy, which
the subsequent chapters begin to unravel in the works of Roland Barthes and
Frantz Fanon, among many others.
Interdisciplinarity Counter-K
Your move to insist that we are not part of an antieurocentric movement ignites the difference- based
paradigm wars and destroy a productive leftist
interdisciplinarity

Critical and cultural studies in the U.S. academy, and the theoretical
literature on oppositional forms of consciousness, difference,
identity, and power, have been developed as divided and racialized,
genderized, and sexualized theoretical domains. Throughout the latter
half of the twentieth century, these studies often looked something like this:
white male poststructuralist theory, Euro-American white feminist theory,
ethnic studies or postcolonial cultural theory, U.S. third world feminist
theory and method, and queer theory, a newly coalescing intellectual
domain that is claiming its own place in this structure that regulates
academic canon formation. 4 In spite of the profoundly similar
theoretical and methodological foundation that underlies such
seemingly separate domains, there is a prohibitive and restricted
flow of exchange that connects them, and their terminologies are
continuing to develop in a dangerous state of theoretical apartheid
that insists on their differences. It is easy to outline the territories of
this theoretical imaginary: the domain of white male
poststructuralist theory (primarily concerned with power, subjectivity, and
class) has been challenged for ignoring the theoretical contributions
developed out of Euro-American/white feminist, postcolonial, and/or
third world feminist theoretical domains. Euro-American white feminist
theorizing, on the other hand (conceived as primarily interested in power,
subjectivity, and sex/gender issues), has been criticized for reluctantly
drawing from the domain of white male poststructuralism (except when
transcoded through French feminisms), postcolonial, or U.S. third world
feminist theoretical domains. Postcolonial criticism (focused primarily on
issues of power, subjectivity, nation, race, and ethnicity), unlike the others, is
perceived as freely exchanging with the realm of white male poststructuralist
theory (this cross-exchange has an old volatile history, as witnessed in 1940
60 Sartre/Fanon/Barthes relationships). Such generous attention also is
criticized, however, for rarely extending to U.S. third world feminist
scholarship, and even less to white feminist theory. Queer theory, for all its
interdisciplinary innovation, is generally considered the primary domain of
sex studies in relation to minoritarian and majoritarian behaviors. As I have
argued earlier, however, the theoretical project of U.S. third world feminism
insists on a standpoint, the theory and method of oppositional
consciousness, Anzaldas la conciencia de la mestiza, which is, I
argue, capable of aligning such divided theoretical domains into
intellectual and political coalition. Insofar as academic disciplines
generate division in this way, they continually reproduce an
apartheid of theoretical domains. These divisions further
demonstrate the articulation of knowledge with power inasmuch as

what is being reenacted on a conceptual level are colonial
geographic, sexual, gender, and economic power relations. Such
divisions encourage what Cornel West describes as the appropriation
of the cultural capital of intellectuals of color and women, 5
insofar as their contributions are folded into some appropriate
category and there go submerged and underutilized, as we have
witnessed in the relationship between U.S. third world and
hegemonic feminist academic forms (or, as we shall see in chapter 4, in
the scholarly relations between the Fanon of 1951 and the Barthes of 1957).
Paradoxically, however, each of these divided (by race, gender, and
sex) theoretical domains is also uniformly, fundamentally, and to all
appearances unconsciously committed to the advancement of a
similar deep structure of knowledge.
Coalition consciousness solves your linkand your

attempt to divide the movement triggers a racial and
violent retrenchment

Against Intellectual Apartheid: Coalitional Consciousness Jameson and
others have maintained that neocolonial postmodern globalization has
transformed the utility of previous modes of oppositional consciousness,
bringing into question those forms of resistance that were effective under
prior sovereign organizations of power. But, paradoxically, these same global
cultural conditions are also driving the generation of an effective
new form of consciousness that can puncture the postmodern
illusion of a linear-homogeneous plane that typifies the new
transnational space. The differential form of social movement and
consciousness in opposition is that punctum. However, the very cultural
dynamics that shatter, move, and transform identity, and that
appear to horizontalize social positionalities, also serve to divide
intellectual work in the university into the fragmented, postmodern,
and racialized theoretical domains identified earlier, making a
collectively shared vision and language of resistance difficult to
identify and agree upon. Although a separate set of vocabularies and
terminologies is developing within each of the theoretical domains in cultural
studies for thinking about consciousness in opposition, there is as yet no
agreed-upon interdisciplinary approach for bringing these languages
together in the shared project that underlies their many
articulations: a theory and method of consciousness-in-opposition
that focuses on the citation and deployment of a differential form.
Nevertheless, this differential mode of oppositional consciousness is being
manifested in the academic world under varying terminologies, concomitantly
and symptomatically from across disciplines as part and parcel of semiotics,
poststructuralism, postmodernism, New Historicism, the critique of colonial
discourse, and as represented in the cultural theory accomplished by
feminist, ethnic, queer, film, and contemporary social, political, global, and
historical studies across disciplines. These domains thus join in their efforts to
understand, confront, and recommend new strategies for egalitarian social
change at this juncture of human social organization. I am proposing that a

shared theory and method of oppositional consciousness and social
movement is the strategy of articulation necessary to resolve the
problematics of the disciplinization and apartheid of academic
knowledges in the human and social sciences. Such a shared
understanding of resistance would permit studies of domination,
subordination, and their escapes to converge around a single and
shared project. If centers of power, whether conceived as
communist, capitalist, or something else are now attached to
dislocation, the technologies of a differential mode of oppositional
consciousness represent a concomitant microphysics of power
capable of negotiating this newest phase of economic and cultural
globalization. As we saw in chapter 2, people of color in the United States,
familiar with historical, subjective, and political dislocation since the founding
of the colonies, have created a set of inner and outer technologies to enable
survival within the developing state apparatus, technologies that will be of
great value during the cultural and economic changes to come. In the next
chapter, we see that formerly marginal, subordinated, and polyform
citizen-subjects are claiming a difficult coalitional psychic terrain,
and in so doing an original postempire yet transnational citizenship
is emerging, made possible through the decolonizing activities of
what is defined as the methodology of the oppressed. Theory,
however staid and final, even when it situates identity in a
desperate move toward final knowledge, is also capable of enabling
the development of a common community of understanding that
can, in its collective will, further politically oppositional goals. In the
rest of Part III and in Part IV, in the interests of furthering the aim of mapping,
negotiating, and reconfiguring the contemporary social landscape and its
academic outposts, the terminologies developed by first world thinkers are
transcoded in order to advance the differential mode of consciousness, and to
make visible its guiding apparatus, the methodology of the oppressed. The
idea here is to advance the possibility of connection, of a
coalitional consciousness in cultural studies across racialized,
sexualized, genderized theoretical domains: white male
poststructuralism, hegemonic feminism, third world feminism,
postcolonial discourse theory, and queer theory. This advance
requires a trespassing operation that will lead to a topography and
poetics of theoretical space within which the methodology of the
oppressed becomes freed from its repression in academic discourse:
a theory uprising that is useful to all these theoretical domains. 13
Chapter 4 details the forms of subjectivity, processes, and procedures that
compose the methodology of the oppressed. Chapter 5 examines the forms
and contents that permit supremacism. Chapters 6 and 7 demonstrate how
all that has passed, our studies of postmodern globalization and its
resistances, oppositional consciousness, differential social movement and
U.S. third world feminism, the methodologies of the oppressed and of
supremacism, together makes visible the provisions of a hermeneutics of love
in the postmodern world.
Oppositional consciousness solvesits shared, not

exclusionary
California at Santa Barbara, Methodology of the Oppressed p. 162)
Every social order structured around domination and subordination
releases power relations that crush citizen-subjects into
positionalities, escape from which only certain kinds of resistances
prove effective. 14 But whether a social order is predominantly
feudal, market-capitalist, monopoly-capitalist, or postmodern in
function, theorists across disciplinary divides can agree generally
that the first world during the late twentieth century experienced a
great social, economic, and political divide a mutation that has
transfigured the kinds of powers, dominations, subordinations, and
resistances that can be constituted. For Jameson, this mutation resulted
in a cultural pathology that produces in the citizen-subject a hysterical
exhilaration akin to schizophrenia, out of which effective forms of oppositional
consciousness are unlikely to rise. Foucault, however, perceives this great
new cultural and social mutation that is postmodernism as helping
to saturate all citizen-subjects with forms of oppositional
consciousness that are capable of confronting the most psychically
intrusive forms of domination and subordination yet devised. Both
thinkers understand that the forces released by this third-stage transmutation
of cultural economics are saturating the psyche of the individual citizensubject in a new kind of power.
Shared conditions under globalization mean that we

should conceive of selves as united rather than divided

It has been assumed that the oppressed will behave without
recourse to any particular method, or rather, that their behavior
consists of whatever acts one must commit in order to survive,
whether physically or psychically. This is exactly why the methodology of
the oppressed can now be recognized as the mode of being best
suited to life under neocolonizing postmodern and highly
technologized conditions in the first world; for to enter a world
where any activity is possible in order to ensure survival is to enter
a cyberspace of being. In the past this space was accessible only to
those forced into its terrain. As in Haraways definition above, this
cyberspace can be a place of boundless and merciless destruction for it is
a zone where meanings are only cursorily attached and thus capable
of reattaching to others depending on the situation to be
confronted. Yet this very activity also provides cyberspace its
decolonizing powers, making it a zone of limitless possibility, as in
the examples of the gentle abyss in Barthess formulation, the realm of
differance, the processes of the middle voice, or in Fanons open door of
every consciousness, and Anzaldas coatlicue state. Its processes are
closely linked with those of differential consciousness. This benevolent
version of cyberspace is analogous to the harsh cyberspace of computer and
even social life under conditions of globalization in Haraways pessimistic

vision. Through the viewpoint of differential oppositional
consciousness, the technologies developed by subjugated
populations to negotiate this realm of shifting meanings can be
recognized as the very technologies necessary to all first world
citizens who are interested in renegotiating postmodern first world
cultures, with what we might call a sense of their own power and
integrity intact. But power, integrity and morality as Anzalda
suggests, 46 will be based on entirely different terms than those
identified in the past when, as Jameson writes, individuals could glean a
sense of self in opposition to a centralizing dominant power that oppressed
them, and then determine how to act. Under global postmodern
disobediencies the self blurs around the edges, shifts in order to
ensure survival, transforms according to the requisites of power, all
the while (under the guiding force of the methodology of the oppressed as
articulated by Fanon and the rest) carrying with it the integrity of a selfconscious awareness of the transformations desired, and above all,
a sense of the impending ethical and political impact that such
transformations will perform.
We are a single apparatusyou attempt to break it up

California at Santa Barbara, Methodology of the Oppressed p. 183)

With the transnationalization of capitalism, when elected officials
are no longer leaders of singular nation-states but nexuses for
multinational interests, it also becomes possible for citizen-subjects
to become activists for a new decolonizing global terrain, a psychic
terrain that can unite them with similarly positioned citizenssubjects within and across national borders into new, post Westernempire alliances. Barthes, in spite of his commitments to the
metamorphosis of dominant cultures and forms of consciousness, banished
himself from this imagined community. But the new countrypeople who
fight for egalitarian social relations under neocolonial
postmodernism welcome citizenry to a new polity, a new homeland.
The means for entry is the methodology of the oppressed, a set of
technologies for decolonizing the social imagination. These
technologies semiotic perception, the deconstruction of
supremacy, the meta-ideologizing of signification, the differential
perception and deployment of consciousness, are all processes that
are guided by democratics, the practitioners commitment to the
equal distribution of power. All these technologies together, when
also joined to those of differential social movement and to those of
differential consciousness, operate as a single apparatus that I call the
physics of love. Love as social movement is enacted by revolutionary,
mobile, and global coalitions of citizen-activists who are allied
through the apparatus of emancipation.
Interdisciplinarity Impact
Interdisciplinarity checks cracks, fissures, and errors in
specialized realmsonly an interdisciplinary approach
shores up internal theories while also solving external
impacts
Nissani 1997 (Moti, Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Wayne State
University, Ten Cheers for Interdisciplinarity in Social Science Journal

34.2)
Crossdisciplinary Oversights The gaps among [the social science]
disciplines are much too large .... As a result, many sociologists ... [long
continued] to draw their imagery of the Protestant Ref- ormation from Max
Weber, although professional historians have long since relegated his
theories to the dustbin. In the same way, sociologists long continued to draw
their imagery of primitive societies from Patterns of Culture far after the time
when anthropologists had dismissed Benedict's ethnographic depictions as
quite misleading. In neither case does the rejection of the work deny the
intriguing quality of the conceptual scheme, but it does brand the specific
historical or ethnographic accounts as so fallacious empirically that the
concepts would not be utilized without the most careful reconsideration.
And, both cases serve to illustrate how the gap between disciplines
has led to one of them relying on theories and data which are quite
invalidated among the originating discipline (Wax, 1969, pp. 81-82).
Insulated from related disciplines and lacking a clear notion of its bearings
relative to what others have done, intensive study within a single [social
science] discipline The problem is by no means confined to the social
sciences. At the turn of the century some biologists believed that dominant
genes would increase in frequency in relation to recessive genes. In this
case, the interdisciplinary corrective was put into effect by the
mathematician Hardy. Nor is this predicament confined to the past. The
writings of some contemporary economists often fly in the face of basic
ecological concepts. Most books, one noted economist says, discussing
environmental and resource problems begin with the proposition that there
is an environmental and resource crisis. If this means that the situation of
humanity is worse now than in the past, then the idea of a crisis--and all that
follows from it--is dead wrong. In almost every respect important to
humanity, the trends have been improving, not deteriorating. [Therefore,
global and U.S. trends will go on] improving instead of deteriorating. Had
our economist consulted an introductory logic text, he might have perceived
that this passage employs a persuasive definition of "crisis" (humanity's
situation is worse now than in the past), instead of the more appropriate
lexical definition ("an unstable state of affairs in which a decisive change is
impending"--Webster Interna- tional). Had he consulted a middle-of-the road
ecology text, he might have realized that this passage ignores the widely
accepted theoretical definition of "crisis." Or take the following lines, quoted
approvingly in an eighth edition of a logic text. "The school-book pictures of
primitive man sometimes omit some of the detractions of his primitive life-the pain, the disease, famine, the hard labor needed just to stay alive." Now,
the assertion about hard labor ignores anthropological findings that some
"primitive" tribes enjoyed much leisure. Or take, finally, the key assertion in
an influential, and otherwise excellent, education treatise, that, of all the
animals, "man is the only one to treat not only his actions but his very self
as the object of his reflection." A passing acquaintance with ape behavior
and, especially, with Gordon Gallup's work on self-awareness in chimpan-
zees and orangutans (Gallup, 1979), would have surely led this author to
qualify both this statement and its implications. This comedy of errors could
be expanded to fill volumes. Such oversights can be found in works of
the highest quality: they are part and parcel of the scholarly condi-
tion. In the non-existent world of pure disciplinarity, the people who
commit such errors and their colleagues, being strict
disciplinarians, would have not been in a position to catch them.
And all those fancied strict disciplinarians who could spot such
errors would have never learned of their existence. Zealous divisions of
this type are of course fictional (Ruscio, 1986). The routine detection of
crossdisciplinary oversights shows that we do not yet live in a pure
disciplinary world. Nonetheless, the oversights that do escape notice for
years suggest that the world in which we do live is Disciplinary Cracks
According to most interdisciplinary theorists, some problems of
knowledge are neglected because they "fail to fit in with
disciplinary boundaries thus falling in the interstices between
them" (Huber, 1992, p. 285; see also Campbell, 1969; Kavaloski, 1979;
Kockelmans, 1979). For instance, it seems reasonable to suppose that
psychology has something to do with price raising, but, in 1977, this
problem fell outside the domain of both psychology and economics; it
therefore received insufficient attention (Boulding, 1977). Before this
sensible claim can be accepted, it must be borne out by the historical
record. So far, this record is open to an opposite interpretation: potentially
productive questions in No Man's Lands do eventually get attention.
Witness, for example, the ongoing search for extraterrestrial life, which shifts
along between astronomy and biology. Or witness explorations in scientific
parapsychology, which fall between psychology and mysticism. Perhaps, as
Ruscio (1986) argues, the disciplines are not in practice as sharply
demarcated as most theorists suppose. Disciplinary researchers seem
capable of filling productive, yet unoccupied, niches, so that the opportunities
for fruitful research in the gray areas among the disciplines are perhaps not
missed for long. Regardless of the historical reality of unexplored gray
areas, one point is perfectly clear: such areas include important topics which
often require interdisciplinary research. Complex or Practical Problems
Suppose that you wished to understand the Soviet-American Cold War.
Suppose further that you were interested in fathoming this entire conflict,
not merely one or another of its aspects. A few years and a few bookshelves
later, you might realize that most experts have failed to arrive at a selfcontained portrait because they examined this subject from a
single disciplinary perspective. An integrated approach, you might
conclude, holds a greater promise of bringing you closer to a finn grasp of
this complex subject than any important but one-sided study. Thus, in this
particular instance, you may begin with history. At some point of your
ambitious undertaking, you would realize that history falls short, and that
the Third World policies of both America and Russia are important to your
subject. At another point you might conclude that the theories and practices
of totalitarianism and democracy must be understood as well. You may
prolong this branching out process for a while, until a reasonably coherent
picture emerges. If you persevered, your broad synthesis may well embody
a deeper understanding than any uni-disciplinary approach could possibly
muster. Or suppose you wanted to understand the nature of political
liberties. You might examine the subject from a philosophical perspective,
and, if you are an original thinker, come up with some interesting
observations. Or you might examine it from a historical standpoint, focusing
perhaps on the conflict between Athens and Sparta, or between the Third
Reich and France. Or, if you happened to be a science historian, you might
focus on the similarities between scientific and democratic decision-making.
All these disciplinary contributions may be valuable. But some hunters for
truth go beyond this point: when their quarry ignores human-made "no
trespassing" signs, they continue the chase. If, besides this interdisciplinary
resolve, they also have an original mind, they may end up writing an epochmaking book on the Open Society and its Enemies. In such cases, those who
stop at the disciplinary edge run the risk of tunnel vision. Besides these
obvious intellectual costs (cf. Saxe, 1945), narrow disciplinarity is
frequently accompanied by a social cost. It is possible, for instance,
that the high costs and risks humanity endured throughout the
Cold War period are traceable in part to the tunnel vision of
decision-makers and their academic advisors (Nissani, 1992). Human-
ity's use of new reproductive technologies is open to a similar interpretation:
The failure to engage wisdom of an adequate breadth for addressing the
subject at hand, along with the disciplinary norms that encourage such
failure, are painfully evident even in the best of the recent books on the
impact of the new reproductive technologies ... [books which] fail to
transcend the narrow boundaries of their own argumentative fields to offer
broad-based and widely comprehensible options for our collective future
(Condit, 1993, p. 234). Bertrand Russell's (1960, p. xv) characterization of
politics may still merit our attention: "It is the custom among those who are
called 'practical' men," he says, "to condemn any man capable of a wide
survey as a visionary: no man is thought worthy of a voice in politics unless
he ignores or does not know nine tenths of the most important relevant
facts." Even well-meaning statesmen may err because they do not
understand the technical, social, or scientific aspects of a policy: It is
dangerous to have two cultures which can't or don't communicate ....
Scientists can give bad advice and decision-makers can't know
whether it is good or bad. On the other hand, scientists in a divided
culture provide a knowledge of some potentialities which is theirs alone. All
this makes the political process more complex, and in some ways more
dangerous, than we should be prepared to tolerate for long, either for the
purposes of avoiding disasters, or for fulfilling ... a definable social hope
(Snow, 1964b, p. 98). The intellectual, social, and personal price of narrow
compartmentalization has been often remarked upon (Boulding, 1977;
Easton, 1991; Eliade, 1977; Gaff, 1989; Gass, 1972; Mayville, 1978; Petrie,
1986). Indeed, history might have been different if the experts who
developed fire retardants in children's nightwear examined their mutagenic
potential (Swoboda, 1979), if the people who put together the Aswan Dam
had been trained to remember the large picture, if the people who marketed
thalidomide looked beyond its tranquilizing and economic potential. An
interdisciplinary background may have not caused industry experts to
adopt a more balanced view of the tobacco/cancer link, but it might have
tempered their outfight advocacy of smoking In more general terms, "recent
history is filled with cautionary tales [all showing] the dangerous, sometimes
fatal, narrowness of policies recommended by those who possess expert
knowledge." Experts prefer quantifiable variables, they tend to ignore
contextual complexity, and their scope is often limited (Marx, 1989). All too
often, experts forget that "problems of society do not come in disciplineshaped blocks" (Roy, 1979, p. 165). Of the many episodes which capture
our society's disciplinary dilemma in more personal terms, I should like to
relate one. It involves a nuclear weapons scientist who gradually became
alienated from his work. His epiphany came in the experience he had in the
mid-1980s when visiting the Soviet Union for the first time: Walking in Red
Square ... [seeing] so many young people ... he began to weep
uncontrollably .... Before that, Moscow had been no more than a set of lines
at various levels of rads and pressures and calories per square centimeter
that one had to match with the bombs. (Lifton & Markusen, 1990, pp. 273274) Again, for all I know, the production of nuclear weapons could be
justified on moral grounds, but this is not the point here. To democrats and
humanitarians, the frightening point is this: in this word of
specialists, a highly educated person can be unaware of the social
and moral dimensions of her actions. H. G. Wells said someplace that
history is a race between education and catastrophe, but this captures only
part of our plight. Ironically, in this age, one may know much about a subject
and yet know little about its ramifications. I for one know decent people who
know everything about the chem- istry of CFCs and nothing about the ozone
layer (Nissani, 1996); everything about internal combustion engines and
nothing about global warming; everything about minimum wage legislation
and nothing about poverty. Compartmentalization, besides lack of education,
is the enemy; an enemy that can only be conquered through holistic
scholarship and education: Previously, men could be divided simply into the
learned and the ignorant, those more or less the one, and those more or less
the other. But your specialist cannot be brought in under either of these two
categories. He is not learned, for he is formally ignorant of all that does not
enter into his specialty; but neither is he ignorant, because he is "a
scientist," and "knows" very well his own tiny portion of the universe. We
shall have to say that he is a learned ignoramus, which is a very serious
matter, as it implies that he is a person who is ignorant, not in the fashion of
the ignorant man, but with all the petulance of one who is learned in his own
special line (Ortega y Gassett, 1932). To sum up. Many complex or
practical problems can only be understood by pulling together
insights and methodologies from a variety of disciplines. Those who
forget this simple truth run the intellectual risk of tunnel vision
and the social risk of irrespon- sible action. In some areas,
interdisciplinary research has long been practiced, e.g., materials research
or American studies. Such areas, and the habit of holistic vision they foster,
should become more numerous. Future specialists will perhaps be able to
see their field "as part of a wider context, to reflect on the impact of their
discipline' s activities on society, and to enhance their ability to contribute to
social developments" (Huber, 1992, p. 290).
Interdisciplinarity key to education

Nissani 1997 (Moti, Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Wayne State
University, Ten Cheers for Interdisciplinarity in Social Science Journal

34.2)
Despite the barriers and drawbacks, the foregoing discussion forcefully
calls for a mild shift (in both attitudes and institutional arrangements)
towards interdisciplinary knowledge and research. To overcome
the negative sides of specialization, to retain its vitality, the
academy must cultivate interdisciplinary knowledge and research. It
must never forget that a vibrant community of scholars--just like a
thriving ecosystem-- nurtures specialists and generalists, diversity
and interconnections. No doubt, most academics "will go on tending their
own garden" (Sherif, 1979, p. 218). This is all as it should be, provided these
specialists "force themselves to define all of the available research on that
problem as of possible relevance, and to see themselves as contributing to
the resolution of a problem rather than as adding information to an isolated
discipline" (Condit, 1993, pp. 245-246). No doubt too, and despite the
hardships, a few creative individuals will continue to tread from one
garden to another. We should see to it that their less-traveled
paths are not overrun with thistles. The case for interdisciplinary
education, it seems to me, is not as straightforward as its knowledge and
research counterparts. Because educational philosophies are shaped in part
by ideology, intuition, and aesthetics, the controversy about the extent,
timing, and need for holistic education may well be irresolvable. Here I can
do no more than offer a personal view. The soundest course of action
may again involve enriching the vast disciplinary archipelago with
idiosyncrasies and bridges. At the global level, this implies a wide
range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary educational programs. At
the institutional level, this implies encouraging students to take at
least one consciously integrative course.
Solves war
Karlsson 11(Lars, information officer at the University of
Gothenburg, Cross-disciplinary research could mean more
effective military interventions,
http://www.samfak.gu.se/english/News/News/News_Detail//crossdisciplinary-research-could-mean-more-effective-militaryinterventions.cid979339 2/18/2011)
Several academic disciplines study how to achieve success in
military interventions in internal wars, not least peace studies and war
studies. But the fact that researchers in the various disciplines formulate the
problems differently and use different scientific methods means that they
often reach different conclusions. A thesis from the University of Gothenburg
shows that an interdisciplinary approach could improve the research

and thus benefit military operations. Research is generally carried out
within the framework of different academic disciplines. These disciplines
colour researchers perceptions of the world around them and how the
research is carried out. This, in turn, is considered to benefit the development
of knowledge as it focuses and delineates the research. But advocates of
interdisciplinary research argue that disciplines restrict researchers, and
that some problems fall outside the scope of the disciplinary
framework. This means that knowledge about these problems is
difficult to develop. Using this as a basis, Kersti Larsdotter has written a
thesis that investigates how military interventions in internal wars are studied
within the disciplines of peace studies and war studies, and how the
differences between the two disciplines affect the development of knowledge
in the field. She used the ISAF mission in Afghanistan as a case study. Military
interventions interpreted differently depending on discipline The findings
suggest that military interventions in internal wars are interpreted and
studied in different ways depending on the disciplinary perspective used. For
example, different relationships are central to the two perspectives. Peace
studies focus primarily on the relationship between the warring parties in a
conflict, which means that its theories often concerns how the intervening
forces can improve the chances of the parties achieving a peace agreement,
increase the trust between the parties, increase the cost of continued
fighting, and increase the benefits of ending the conflict. War studies, by
contrast, focus on the relationship between the warring parties on the one
hand and the local population on the other, which means that its theories
mainly concerns how the intervening forces affect the relationship between
the local population and the warring parties. By protecting the population and
offering food and other necessities the military forces are considered to
influence the population to support the state actor in a conflict, and thus
reduce support for the insurgents. To pave the way for a more rational
approach to increasing knowledge about military interventions in civil wars,
the thesis proposes that research on military interventions should be
integrated rather than carried out in parallel in the two different
disciplines. For example, including both types of relationship in the
theories on military interventions could improve our knowledge of
these interventions, says Larsdotter. How, for example, do the conduct
of military forces affect the relationship between the warring
parties, and the relationship between the warring parties on the one
hand and the local population on the other? The findings of the thesis
also have implications for the execution of military interventions in
internal wars. The various aspects studied in the different disciplines
are important for strategy, tactics and doctrines, and should
therefore also be included in the planning and execution of these
interventions. If the military forces focus solely on how to change
the relationship between the warring parties on the one hand and
the local population on the other, they could impact on the
relationship between the warring parties in ways they hadnt
predicted, says Larsdotter. The inclusion of this relationship in the
planning of military operations could reduce the risk of unforeseen
consequences.
Biopolitics Answers
Agambens alternative can never be conceptualized as
anything but negativity and nothingness it cant
positively create change.
DERANTY 04
[Jean-Phillipe Borderlands E-journal prof philosophy Macquarie U. vol3 #1 www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au]
Agambens coming community is a community of subjects that exist only as negative potentialities
(actualities that are the possibility of not-being, actualisations of potentiality), the "whatever singularities". Because he has
severed the concept of the community from all normative ties, and has rejected all conceptual and
normative distinctions (between state of nature and civil state, law and violence, nomos and physis, normal state and exception,
etc.), this community-to-come can only be ever described negatively, as beyond all forms of community, and
accessed only in the flight from all present and all immanence. It is difficult to avoid thinking that the
assumed messianism of this radical politics is only a form of negative theology.
Theories of biopower can be articulated without

categorically rejecting politics the kritik eliminates the
possibility of politics as a site of resistance.
DERANTY 04
[Jean-Phillipe Borderlands E-journal prof philosophy Macquarie U. vol3 #1 www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au]
As Rancire suggests, when the "biopower" hypothesis is transformed into a "biopolitical" thesis, the very possibility of politics
becomes problematic. There is a way of articulating modern disciplinary power and the imperative of politics
that is not disjunctive. The power that subjects and excludes socially can also empower politically simply
because the exclusion is already a form of address which unwittingly provides implicit recognition. Power
includes by excluding, but in a way that might be different from a ban. This insight is precisely the one that
Foucault was developing in his last writings, in his definition of freedom as "agonism" (Foucault 1983: 208-228):
"Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free" (221). The hierarchical,
exclusionary essence of social structures demands as a condition of its possibility an equivalent implicit
recognition of all, even in the mode of exclusion. It is on the basis of this recognition that politics can
sometimes arise as the vindication of equality and the challenge to exclusion.
Agambens critique is historically flawed it relies on an

overgeneralization of the ideology of exceptionalism and
an ignorance of multiple political and social factors.
MESNARD 04
[Phillipe Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 5.1: Summer 04 p139]
This deliberate lack of an historical outlook is the source of other errata and misinterpretations by
Agamben. For instance, his interpretation of politics in terms of all or nothing stems from a specific period
characterised by the unrivalled rule of a state of terror, which has become the sole articulation between the
law and the norm. It is a period in which the law is no more than its own ideological falsification (the rule of
racial laws and criminalisation), and the norm has assumed the caricatured appearance of the law. The repressive Nazi regime, built
upon the SS apparatus, strengthened by its administrative and legal institutions and cemented by an overwhelming propaganda
machine, steered German society through a radical period which was exacerbated by the war and the total war. Exceptional
procedureswere widespread throughout the Reich, but no one even tried to pretend that these were the
norm. By striving to locate in the camp what he calls the very paradigm of political space, Agamben erects aninsurmountable
frontier around concentration camps which become, in fact, isolated from their surrounding society, and turns them into an exclusive
outside. Consequently, Agamben fails to envisage the global system which surrounded the camps, and included numerous social and
economic interfaces present on the entire territory of the Third Reich. Agambens attempt to locate a paradigm in the
camp is seriously flawed, because any paradigm must be conceived and constructed from the viewpoint of
a whole society.
West Is Best (This is Racist)

Colonialism is good. Empirics prove.
Chris Blatmann 12 Assistant Professor of Political Science & International and Public Affairs at Columbia
University. I use field work and statistics to study poverty, political participation, the causes and consequences of violence,
and policy in developing countries. http://chrisblattman.com/2012/07/03/was-colonialism-good-for-growth/
(wascololialismgoodforgrowth?)
A large
literature suggests that European settlement outside of Europe shaped institutional, educational, technological, cultural, and
economic outcomes. This literature has had a serious gap: no direct measure of colonial European settlement.In this paper, we (1)
construct a new database on the European share of the population during the early stages of colonization and (2) examine its impact on
We find a remarkably strong impact of colonial European

settlement on development.According to one illustrative exercise, 47 percent of average
global development levels today are attributable to Europeans. One of our most
surprising findings is the positive effect of even a small minority European population
during the colonial period on per capita income today, contradicting traditional and recent
views. There is some evidence for an institutional channel, but our findings are most consistent with human capital playing a
the level of economic development today.
central role in the way that colonial European settlement affects development today.I read hastily, but see important new data and
patterns. I dont really buy the instrumental variables (sorry, Bill) but then again I dont really buy any of the historical instruments
people use to get around thorny causality issues. That doesnt make me a total party pooperI just think we have to take all the causal
claims and mechanisms pretty cautiously.Some
people rankle over any rosy glow put on colonialism.

Most of the authors of the long run growth papers know this acutely, but it bears
repeating that good for growth necessarily applies to peoples not exterminated.If you
are still angry about the rosy glow, its also helpful to put in colonialism perspective:
Development in most places in most of history has basically been a process of violence
and coercion, either by your own elites or invading ones. When historical events are
good for growth they are often very bad for the generation that experienced them, in
Africa or elsewhere. So good for growth does not necessarily mean good.This leads
me to think: What is interesting about modern growth policy is that it is one of the first to
try to respect human rights. I wonder to what extent growth take-offs require a trade-off between welfare of people alive
today versus welfare of future generations. There are reasons to think there are some win-win solutions (e.g. education investments)
but I am not so sure it is true generally.I think a lot of development policy requires trickier trade-offs between those alive today and
unborn future generations than is commonly appreciated. More on that on that elusive day when I have more time to write.

Decolonize 1NC Shell

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LINK: <You should probably insert a good specific link.

Vote negative-- de-linking begins without generating

University, DELINKING: THE RHETORIC OF MODERNITY, THE LOGIC OF

possibility of another political economies and political theories.

decolonization (political and epistemic) that are, at once, articulated

sixteenth to the first have of the eighteenth century. Theo-logy was, as

Their managerial approach to the environment is part of a

racism had two major devastating consequences: the economic and

racism is ample (Semyonov et al. 2006). There is in any case a

Fluid Identity Link

Claims about fluidity reimpose American imperialism

Connecticut College, Harvard Educational Review 70:4, American Indian

Our critique solves genderfolds in under our terms of

University, Toward a Decolonial Feminism in Hypatia 25.4)

Utilizing category of women in the 1AC triggers

juridico-discursive model of power (1980: 134-135), the principal

Civil Disobedience Link

Despite whatever humanitarian crisis the affirmative

Common Future? Dangerous Climate Change and the Biopolitics of

and the disqualification filled with knowledge-product and

Dispensable and Bare Lives Coloniality and the Hidden Political/Economic

Cyprus, PhD in Cirriculum and Instruction, Agambens Theory of Biopower

Dispensable and Bare Lives Coloniality and the Hidden Political/Economic

University, DELINKING: THE RHETORIC OF MODERNITY, THE LOGIC OF

decolonization (e.g., philosophy in the case of Dussel; the social sciences in

sense that the Western foundation of modernity and of knowledge

Western Post-Structural Link

de-colonial epistemic shift when he clarifies that: En primer termino, la

Major post-structural theories (Butler, Agamben, Hardt

Decolonizing Global Theories Today in Interventions 11.2)

what I call global theory, based on the assumption that the

the idea that colonial difference continues to be central in

Hardt and Negri Link

such as those between Western civilization and Arab/Muslim

Negri argue: Today the militant cannot even pretend to be a

Decolonizing Global Theories Today in Interventions 11.2)

Agambens refusal to mention indigenous genocide and

reviewed published works, Nothing Exceptional: Against Agamben in

unconstrained by any legal or customary limit in their actions, nor in

**Whatever Being alternative should be resequenced

and Coloniality, p. 279-281)

experience [. . .] the fact itself of speaking (Agamben 2000: 115). However,

would only Western beings be able to be united in their potential

Decolonizing Global Theories Today in Interventions 11.2)

Epistemology of Coloniality The New Centennial Review 7.3)

Latin Identity Link

Epistemology of Coloniality The New Centennial Review 7.3)

subject and object presupposed by epistemology. This unmediated

Dispensable and Bare Lives Coloniality and the Hidden Political/Economic

by the Rights of the People in sixteenth century Spain. These, however,

sixteenth century with the European discovery and invention of

The so-called war on drugs is a great imperial hypocrisy

Epistemology of Coloniality The New Centennial Review 7.3)

effort to topple the cultural hierarchy that colonialism enforced. But

Subjectivity firstworld only coheres through a here and

Epistemology of Coloniality The New Centennial Review 7.3)

Other knowledges keybeginning from an intra-European

problems, where are we to look for new insights? At this level it

Imagining otherwise is keymodernity is one reality not

coloniality is chiefly effected through discourses and practices of

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