Tournament:  | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge:
Such forms of technological thought only create the conditions that are the pre-requisite for nuclear wars—the consequences of such thought are more devastating than extinction
Caputo, 93—professor of Humanities at Syracuse, founder of weak theology, MA from Villanova, PhD from Bryn Mawr in Philosophy (John Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger, 1993 p. 136-141, Miller)

In his essay "The Thing" Heidegger remarks….. more inward, profound, essential, authentic, ontological destruction.

The affirmative’s emphasis on quick-fix solutions ignores the root cause of their harms and ensures error replication – temporarily suspending our calculative thought is critical to re-engaging ontology
Korous, 97 (Copeland winner, all around bad ass, Yale JD, Emory BA Philosophy, Become What you Are  1997 22-25)

The thought that inhabits critique….. potential energy waiting to be unleashed.

Tournament: West Pt | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge:
1NC – Death (Short) 

Our lives exist perpetually in the middle – subjects in the middle of becoming objects – people in the middle living – people in the middle of becoming corpses.  Life is an a-subjective current of folded consciousness, a stream of life, and we slip on and on through the middle of it – never seeing the forest for the trees.   The truth is that the river runs through us too – united in pure immanence.  However, the restrictive identity of “self” survival imprisons us in the ego and the body, preventing any lines of flight or becoming.
Mark ’98 (John, Gilles Deleuze: Vitalism and Multiplicity, p. 29-33)

It's organisms that die, not life. Any work of art points a way through for life, finds a way through the cracks. Everything I've written is vitalistic, at least I hope it is, and amounts to a theory of signs and events. (N. 143) In the final piece of work published before his death, a short article entitled 'Immanence: a life .…’ Deleuze presents a concise statement of his philosophical concerns. Although he does not use the word 'vitalism', the ideas presented here arc undoubtedly vitalist in inspiration. The article begins by defming a transcendental field. That is to say the field which constitutes the basis of his philsophy: transcendental empiricism. This field is defined as '… a pure a-subjective current of consciousness, an impersonal prereflexive consciousness, a qualitative duration of consciousness without self’.24 Obviously, this 'pure' current of consciousness has links with the notions of impersonal, indefinite discourse dealt with above. Pure immanence exists in opposition to the world represented and mediated through the framework of the subject and the object. The notion of immanence goes to the heart of Deleuze's transcendental empiricism which embraces both vitalism and multiplicity: Pure immanence is A LIFE, and nothing else. It is not immanence to life, but the immanence which is in nothing is itself a life. A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence; it is sheer power, utter beatitude. Insofar as he overcomes the aporias of the subject and the object Fichte, in his later philosophy, presents the transcendental field as a life which does not depend on a Being and is not subjected to an Act; an absolute immediate consciousness whose very activity no longer refers back to a being but ceaselessly posits itself in a life.25 To illustrate what he means by this use of the definite article, a life, Deleuze describes a scene in Dickens' Our Mutual Friend, in which 'a universally scorned rogue' is brought back to life. Those working to bring him out of his coma respond not to the individual, but to a pre-individual power of life which is 'impersonal but singular nevertheless'. Deleuze also perceives the pre-individual nature of life in young children; Very young children, for example, all resemble each other and have barely any individuality; but they have singularities, a smile, a gesture, a grimace -events which arc not subjective characteristics. They are traversed by an immanent life that is pure power and even beatitude through the sufferings and weaknesses.26 Deleuze's problematising approach to the question oflife and work derives in part from his vitalist perspective. The act of writing itself is an attempt to make of life something more than personal, ' ...  to free life from what imprisons it' (N, 143). One of the aims of philosophy and art is to render visible the forces that have captured life. Artists and philosophers may be frail individuals, but they are literally 'vital' penonalities by virtue of the excess of life that they have seen, experienced or thought about: 'There's a profound link between signs, events, life and vitalism: the power of non-organic life that can be found in a line that's drawn, a line of writing. a line of music. It's organisms that die, not life' (N, 143). The writer comes into contact with things that threaten to overwhelm the individual; … he possesses irrnistible and delicate health that stems from what he has seen and heard of things too big for him, too strong for him, suffocating things whose passage exhausts him while nonetheless giving him the becomings that dominant and substantial health would render impossible. The writer returns from what he has seen and heard with red eyes and pierced eardrums. 27 Deleuze's vitalism is in this way linked to his 'anti-humanism'. A sign is created when thought encounters 'non-organic life'. The 'outside' 85 Deleuze sometimes calls it. Signs are also an expression of the flux and indeterminacy of life. The sign is an expression of the pre-individual, of the flux of life where the constraints of identity have yet to be applied. Philip Goodchild has argued that Deleuze's project represents a 'practical vitalism', which enables thought to come into contact with the power of life.28 The theme of vitalism in Deleuzc's work has also been taken up in some detail recently by Mireille Buydens in Sahara: l'esthetique de Gilles Deleuze (1990).29 Buydens argues that Deleuze's 'transcendental' field is constituted by a 'swarm' of pre-individual singularities. This fluid structure is that of the rhizome or the multiplicity. Vitalism is a way of connecting with, of being in the presence of, this pre-individual world of flux and becoming. Deleuze's vitalism is expressed in his preference for verbs, particularly in the infinitive form, over nouns: 'infinitives express becomings or events that uanscend mood and tense' (N, 34). For Buydens, the theme of vitalism comes first and foremost from Bergson. She draws attention in particular to Bergson's Creative Evolution (l911), where the 'elan vital' is described as a form of becoming, which eludes analysis and the material form in which it can be perceived. Buydens also points to Nietzsche and Spinoza as thinkers who influence Deleuze in his development of vitalism.  Of course, the theme of vitalism requires a discussion of Deleuze's reading of Bergson, and this will be dealt with in the following chapter. However, it is important to understand that other thinkers, such as Nietzsche and Spinoza, help Deleuze to develop the question of vitalism. For example, Perra Perry claims that Deleuze's innovative reading of Nietzsche in the 1960’s enabled Deleuze, in his subsequent work, to reactivate some of the debates generated by turn-of-the-cenrury vitalism in France.) Also, in the introductory chapter,'The Life of Spinozs', in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (Spinoza: Philosophie pratique 1981) Deleuze presents a portrait of a frail individual whose very individuality is the product of powerful lines of force. Spinoza's life was on one level startlingly ascetic, undermined as it was by illness and characterised by a nomadic, propertyless existence. However, Spinoza was able to embrace an affirmative, joyous conception of life. He pre-empts Nietzsche's distaste for resentment and bad conscience, the tendency to turn against life and to fight for one's own enslavement. It is this later tendency that marks Spinoza out as pre-empting the 'modern' question of fascism. In his Theological Treatise Spinoza is preoccupied with the question of why people are apparently so willing to be separated from the positive force of life. Why do they submit so willingly to the forces that imprison life? Why are the people so deeply irrational? Why are they proud of their own enslavement? Why do they fight 'for' their bondage as if it were their freedom? Why is it so difficu.lt not to win but to bear freedom? Why does a religion that invokes love and joy inspire war, intolerance, hatred, malevolence, and remorse? (S:PP, 10) Ultimately, as Todd May claims, this is the question which makes all of Deleuze's work political. 32 Theories of ideology and false consciousness only recognise the injustices and oppressions we suffer against our will or because we are somehow duped into believing that they are good for us. Deleuze, however, poses a question which is both much more direct and more subtle: why do we desire what oppresses us? This is one of the aspects of Anti-Oedipus that Foucault so admires, when he talks of Deleuze and Guanari's attempt to tackle the problem of fascism; ' ...  the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us' (AD, xiii). Becoming: Starting in the Middle One never commences; one never has a tabula rasa; one slips in, enters in the middle; one takes up or lays down rhythms. (S;PP, 123) It is never the beginning or the end which are interesting; the beginning and end are points. What is interesting is the middle. (D, 39) The 'indefinite life' that Deleuze talks of in his very last article 'Immanence: a life ... ' takes place 'in the middle'; 'This indefinite life does not have moments, however close they might be, but only meantimes des entremps, between-moments.''' Starting in the middle, becoming, constitutes a guiding principle in Deleuze's work: 'being is becoming'. As Bergson points out, the intellect tends to spatialise, to immobilise the flux of life which is being. In this way, perception of being is reduced and impoverished. For this reason, Bergson promotes the development of a philosophical intuition. This is a problematising method which attempts to come to terms with the irreducible flux of being. In developing this Bergsonian perspective Deleuze goes some way to creating an image of thought which is subtle enough to seize the flow of life.l4 This is also a question of the indirect, impersonal 'style' that Deleuze develops; 'Your writing has to be liquid or gaseous simply because normal perception and opinion are solid, geomeuic' (N, 133). Deleuze also admits that the middle is the most comfortable place for him to be. It corresponds to his 'habit' of thinking of things in terms of lines rather than points (N, 161). For Deleuze, the 'English' have a particular tendency to begin in the middle, whereas the 'French' are obsessed with tools, beginnings and foundations: The English zero is always in the middle. Bottlenecks are always in the middle. Being in the middle of a line is the most uncomfonable position. One begins again through the middle. The French think in tenns of trees too much: the tree of knowledge, points of aborescence, the alpha and omega, the roots and the pinnacle. (0, 39) In the later part of his career Deleuze continued to develop the question of that which is in the middle with his work on Leibniz and the Baroque concept of the fold. Leibniz's 'monadic' conception of matter undermines distinctions between organic and inorganic matter, interior and exterior, and bodies and souls. If matter is continuous and endlessly folded, it must express a concept of movement which is always in the middle: Everything moves as if the pleats of matter possessed no reason in themselves. It is because the Fold is always between two folds, and because the between-two-folds seems to move about everywhere: Is it between inorganic bodies and organisms, between organisms and animal souls, between animal souls and reasonable souls, between bodies and souls in general? (LB, 13) The conjunction 'and' helps us to think in terms of the middle, to escape the way in which thought is conventionally modelled on the verb 'to be'. 'And' is a tool for producing a sort of 'stammering' in thought and language; it is the possibility of diversity and the destruction of identity. Multiplicity is not the sum of its terms, but is contained in the 'and'; AND is neither one thing nor the other, it's always in between, between two things; it's the borderline, there's always a border, a line of flight or flow, only we don't see it, because it's the least perceptible of things. And yet it's along this line of flight that things come to pass, becomings evolve, revolutions take shape. (N,45) 

The affirmative approaches the world with the tautological rationality of viviocentrism – that is life-centeredness.  Viviocentrism is a noble lie that informs all aspects of their advocacy and it is the same binary logic of natural mastery that justifies racism, sexism, anthropomorphism, etc. Opening our minds to death allows a transcendence of the tyranny of life and creates the conditions for the ultimate erosion of all borders and conceptions of the natural – put the burden on them to justify physical existence as a roll for the ballot
Heisman 10 (Mitchell Heisman (The opposite of a bullshitter, suicide practitioner, and University at Albany bachelor's degree in psychology) 2010
Suicide Note, online @ http://www.suicidenote.info/, loghry

There is a very popular opinion that choosing life is inherently superior to choosing death. This belief that life is inherently preferable to death is one of the most widespread superstitions. This bias constitutes one of the most obstinate mythologies of the human species. This prejudice against death, however, is a kind of xenophobia. Discrimination against death is simply assumed good and right. Absolutist faith in life is commonly a result of the unthinking conviction that existence or survival, along with an irrational fear of death, is “good”. This unreasoned conviction in the rightness of life over death is like a god or a mass delusion. Life is the “noble lie”; the common secular religion of the West. For the conventional Westerner, the obvious leap of faith to make here is that one’s “self” and its preservation constitute the first measure of rationality. Yet if one begins reasoning with the unquestioned premise that life is good, or that one’s own life or any life is justified, this is very different from bringing that premise itself to be questioned rationally. Anyone who has ever contemplated his or her own mortality might question the ultimate sanity of the premise of self-preservation. Even if it is possible to live forever, moreover, this makes not an iota of difference as to the question of the value of existence. Most people are so prejudiced on this issue that they simply refuse to even consider the possibilities of death. Humans tend to be so irrationally prejudiced towards the premise of life that rational treatment of death seldom sees the light of day. Most people will likely fall back on their most thoughtless convictions, intuitions, and instincts, instead of attempting to actually think through their biases (much less overcome them). Yet is choosing death “irrational”? For what reason? For most people, “irrationality” apparently refers to a subjectivity experience in which their fear of death masters them — as opposed the discipline of mastering one’s fear of death. By “irrational”, they mean that they feel compelled to bow down before this master. An individual is “free”, apparently, when he or she is too scared to question obedience to the authority of the fear of death. This unquestioned slavery to the most common and unreasonable instincts is what, in practice, liberal-individualists call rationalism. Most common moral positions justify and cloak this fear of death. And like any traditional authority, time has gathered a whole system of rituals, conventions, and customs to maintain its authority and power as unquestionable, inevitable, and fated; fear of death as the true, the good, and the beautiful. For most people, fear of death is the unquestionable master that establishes all other hierarchies — both social hierarchies, and the hierarchies within one’s own mind. Most are humbly grateful for the very privilege of obedience and do not want to be free. I propose opening your mind towards the liberation of death; towards exposing this blind faith in life as a myth, a bias, and an error. To overcome this delusion, the “magic spell” of pious reverence for life over death must be broken. To do so is to examine the faith in life that has been left unexamined; the naïve secular and non-secular faith in life over death. Opening one’s mind to death emerges from the attempt to unshackle one’s mind from the limitations of all borders. It leads to overcoming all biological boundaries, including borders between the “self” and the larger world. It reaches towards the elimination of biologically based prejudices altogether, including prejudice towards biological self preservation. The attempt to go beyond ethnocentrism and anthropomorphism leads towards overcoming the prejudices of what I call viviocentrism, or, life-centeredness. Just as overcoming ethnocentrism requires recognition of the provincialism of ethnic values, overcoming viviocentrism emerges from the recognition of the provincialism of life values. Viviocentric provincialism is exposed through an enlarged view from our planet, our solar system, our galaxy, and the limits of our knowledge of the larger cosmos we live in. Overcoming the prejudice against death, then, is only an extension and continuation of the Western project of eliminating bias, especially biologically based biases (i.e. race or sex based biases). The liberation of death is only the next step in the political logic that has hitherto sought to overcome prejudices based on old assumptions of a fixed biological human nature. Its opposite is an Aristotelian, teleological conception of nature; a nature of natural slaves, natural aristocracy, natural patriarchy, natural inferiority of women, natural racial kinds, natural heterosexuality and, finally, natural self-preservation. This older, teleological view suggests that individual self-preservation is an expression of a fixed biologically based nature that culture and/or reason is incapable of changing, altering, or overcoming. Just as it was considered unnatural or even insane that men be loosed from “natural” subordination to their king, or that women be unchained from “natural” subordination to their fathers and husbands, today it is considered unnatural that death be liberated from its “natural” subordination to the tyranny of life. From this point of view, one can recognize that the pro-choice stance on abortion and the right to die stance on euthanasia have already opened paths over conventional pro-life superstitions. These developments towards the liberation of biological death may lead to what may be the highest fulfillment of egalitarian progress: the equality of life and death. Further liberations of death should challenge one’s convictions in the same way that egalitarianisms of the past have challenged common assumptions and convictions: the equality of all men, the equality of the races, the equality of the sexes, the equality of sexual orientations, the equality of the biological and physical, and the equality of life and death. Overcoming the “will to live”, then, represents one of the final steps in overcoming the provincial and “primitive” life instincts probably inherited from our evolutionary past, i.e. inclinations towards patriarchy, authoritarianism, sexism, kinism, and racism. It is not only a contribution to civilization but a culmination of the progress of civilization, that is, the application of reason to human existence. Only when the will to live itself is civilized, can one be free to acknowledge that reason itself does not dictate a bias towards life.

Tournament: West Pt | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge:
In the face of a crisis of suffering, we are presented with two options:
1) the world of the 1AC—a life-denying will to calculate the greatest good and manage the herd—dooming us to mediocrity and hatred for the world.  Or,
2) the alternative—we can accept that chaos and discord are inevitable, that preventing suffering is impossible, and escape nihilism by affirming life as it is.
Owen and Ridley, 2000 (David Owen is Reader in Political Philosophy and Deputy Director of the Centre for Post-Analytic Philosophy at the University of Southampton. He is the author of numerous books and articles in social and political philosophy with a focus on Nietzsche. Aaron Ridley is a professor of Philosophy at the School of Humanities at the University of Southampton. He has also written multiple books about Nietzschean ethics. Why Nietzsche still? page 149-54)

The threat here is obvious: What is to be feared, what has a more calamitous effect than any other calamity, is that man should inspire not profound fear but profound nausea; also not great fear but great pity. Suppose these two were one day to unite, they would inevitably beget one of the uncanniest monsters: the "last will" of man, his will to nothingness, nihilism. And a great deal points to this union. (GM III:I4) So suicidal nihilism beckons. The one response to the situation that is absolutely ruled out is the one that has so far proved most successful at addressing problems of this sort, namely, adoption of the ascetic ideal, because the present crisis is caused by the self-destruction of that ideal. But Nietzsche argues that two plausible responses to the crisis are nonetheless possible for modern man. Both of these involve the construction of immanent ideals or goals: one response is represented by the type the Last Man, the other by the type the Ubermensch. The first response recognizes the reality of suffering and our (post-ascetic) inability to accord transcendental significance to it and concludes that the latter provides an overwhelming reason for abolishing the former to whatever extent is possible. This has the effect of elevating the abolition of suffering into a quasi-transcendental goal and brings with it a new table of virtues, on which prudence figures largest. In other words, this response takes the form of a rapport a soi characterized by a style of calculative rationality directed toward the avoidance of suffering at any cost, for example, of utilititarianism and any other account of human subjectivity that accords preeminence to maximizing preference satisfaction. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche portrays this type as follows: "What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?" thus asks the Last Man and blinks. The earth has become small, and upon it hops the Last Man, who makes everything small. His race is as inexterminable as the flea; the Last Man lives longest. "We have discovered happiness," say the Last Men and blink. They have left the places where living was hard: for one needs warmth. One still loves one's neighbor and rubs oneself against him: for one needs warmth. Sickness and mistrust count as sins with them: one should go about warily. He is a fool who still stumbles over stones or over men! A little poison now and then: that produces pleasant dreams. And a lot of poison at last, for a pleasant death. They still work, for work is entertainment. But they take care the entertainment does not exhaust them. Nobody grows rich or poor any more: both are too much of a burden. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both are too much of a burden. No herdsman and one herd. Everyone wants the same thing, everyone is the same: whoever thinks otherwise goes voluntarily into the madhouse "Formerly all the world was mad," say the most acute of them and blink. They are clever and know everything that has ever happened: so there is no end to their mockery. They still quarrel, but they soon make up-otherwise indigestion would result. They have their little pleasure for the day and their little pleasure for the night: but they respect health. "We have discovered happiness," say the Last Men and blink. (Z: I "Prologue" 5) Nietzsche's hostility to this first form of response is evident. His general objection to the Last Man is that the Last Man's ideal, like the ascetic ideal, is committed to the denial of chance and necessity as integral features of human existence. Whereas the ascetic ideal denies chance and necessity per se so that, while suffering remains real, what is objectionable about it is abolished, the Last Man's ideal is expressed as the practical imperative to abolish suffering, and hence, a fortiori, what is objectionable about it – that is, our exposure to chance and necessity. This general objection has two specific dimensions. The first is that the Last Man's ideal is unrealizable, insofar as human existence involves ineliminable sources of suffering-not least our consciousness that we come into being by chance and cease to be by necessity. Thus the Last Man's ideal is predicated on a neglect of truthfulness. The second dimension of Nietzsche's objection is that pursuit of the Last Man's ideal impoverishes and arbitrarily restricts our understanding of what we can be and, in doing so, forecloses our future possibilities of becoming otherwise than we are. Thus the Last Man's ideal entails an atrophying of the capacities (for self-overcoming, etc.) bequeathed by the ascetic ideal. Nietzsche brings these two dimensions together in Beyond Good and Evil: "You want, if possible – and there is no more insane 'if possible' – to abolish suffering. ... Well-being as you understand it – that is no goal, that seems to us an end, a state that soon makes man ridiculous and contemptible – that makes his destruction desirable" (BGE 225). The second response to the nihilistic threat posed by the selfdestruction of the ascetic ideal is definitive of the Ubermensch type. This response recognizes both the reality and the ineliminability of suffering and concludes that an affirmation of chance and necessity must therefore be built into the very conception of what it is for something to function as a (postascetic) ideal. So this response, insofar as it cultivates an affirmation of chance and necessity (i.e., amor fati), overcomes the (ascetic) hatred of or (modern) dissatisfaction with this-worldly existence. Yet the success of this overcoming is conditional on the exercise and development of the very capacities and disposition that are the bequest of the ascetic ideal. The disposition to truthfulness is a condition of recognizing the ineliminability of chance and necessity. But actually to recognize, let alone affirm, this awful fact about human existence requires the exercise of the capacities for self-surveillance (so that one can monitor oneself for the symptoms of self-deception in the face of this fact), self-discipline (so that one can resist the understandable temptation to deceive oneself about this fact), and self-overcoming (so that one can develop, in the face of this temptation, one's capacities for self-surveillance and self-discipline). Thus the ascetic ideal provides the tools required to overcome the crisis precipitated by its own self-destruction. In other words, the Ubermensch's ideal simply is the exercise and cultivation of the capacities and the disposition required to affirm the fact that chance and necessity are ineliminable. And because chance and necessity are ineliminable, and therefore require perpetually to be affirmed anew, such exercise and cultivation must itself be perpetual, a process without the slightest prospect of an end.
The contrast with the Last Man's ideal is stark. Whereas the latter offers a feeling of power to its devotees by positing as realizable the unrealizable ideal of no more suffering-that is, of a fixed, final, completed state of being – the Ubermensch’s ideal offers a feeling of power predicated only on the continual overcoming of the desire for any such state. What the Last Man longs for, in other words., the Ubermensch distinguishes himself by unendingly and truthfully refusing to want. It is of the first importance that the Ubermensch's ideal should represent a process as inherently valuable, rather than a product (such as the Last Man's completed state of life without suffering). There are two reasons for thinking this important. The first is the one mentioned above given that chance and necessity are ineliminable features of living a life, a life oriented to the affirmation of this fact must recognize the ineliminably processual character of such an affirmation, and hence the ineliminably processual character of an ideal that serves rather than denies "the most fundamental prerequisites of life" (GM III:28). The other reason is that this ideal exhibits the form of practical reasoning that Nietzsche's genealogy itself deploys. By contrast with, say, Kant's conception of practical reasoning, which centers on an opposition between the real and the ideal (between the heteronomous and the autonomous), and denies "the most fundamental prerequisites of life," Nietzsche's conception involves a continual process of movement from the attained to the attainable; and it is precisely this that the rapport a soi constitutive of the Ubermensch exhibits. Thus, while Kant offers a juridical conception of practical reasoning structured in terms of the idea of law, Nietzsche offers a medical or therapeutic conception articulated through the idea of the type or exemplar. Which is to say, Nietzsche's genealogical investigation (at its best, i.e., its most self-consistent) exemplifies precisely that commitment to the affirmation of life which it recommends, that is, to an Ubermenschlich rapport a soi. Process, not product; Dionysus, not Apollo.

Social services are the embodiment of the ascetic ideal of that Last Man—they create an underclass that is increasingly vulnerable to statist coercion.
Arnold 05 (Kathleen, Assistant Professor of political and feminist theory @ U. of Texas, San Antonio, “Asceticism in Contemporary Political Theory: Marx, Weber, Nietzsche and Beyond,” Theory and Event, ProjectMUSE)

In conclusion, the prescription of asceticism while intended for the entire populace, has been aimed at the working poor and welfare recipients as the exemplar of a group that is simultaneously being molded into good, docile citizens while being punished for "excesses." Despite the gap between rich and poor, employment opportunities for women, sexism, racism and the crisis in affordable housing, these groups are blamed for their poverty. The ascetic values underlying policy and cultural solutions imply that the poor will achieve some sort of self-mastery and thus, fitness for citizenship, if they only buckle down. Nevertheless, this espousal of asceticism is an attempt to master groups falling under the rubric of the biological through eradicating or neutralizing difference and the power relation is one of coercion more than independence or self-will. In this way, the dynamics of power in the liberal capitalist state have allowed for the coexistence of seemingly contradictory power mechanisms, both democratic and non-democratic. However, this seemingly paradoxical coexistence is an integral part of liberal capitalism: "bare life" is crucial to political identity, power and the economy and elucidates the deployment of prerogative power in the domestic arena. This (partial) intellectual history of ascetic ideas thus suggests how and why the moral imperatives of welfare and the ascetic practices linked to workfare and work in the global economy do not signal the decreasing importance of the state, much less sovereignty, in late modern politics. The purported disappearance of the nation-state has been claimed on two fronts: in the context of the global economy first, and second, in the dismantling of welfare and affirmative action programs. However, these developments do not demonstrate the absence of state but rather, the increasing influence of economic logic in matters of sovereignty, both internal and external.129 Ascetic ideas provide the crucial nexus between the deployment of prerogative, on the one hand, and the dictates of capitalism, on the other. The increasing predominance of a capitalist and ascetic ethos thus brings politics to the level of bare life and facilitates the greater influence of bio-power and disciplinary power, thus enabling the suspension of law. 

Tournament:  | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge: