1AC First Draft

Posthumanism Aff

Contention one is The Constitution

Text The United States Constitution should declare the embargo on Cuba unconstitutional

The Embargo is unconstitutionalBENJAMIN MANCHAK 2010 (staff writer Boston College Third World Law Journal ldquoNOTE COMPREHENSIVE ECONOMIC SANCTIONS THE RIGHT TO DEVELOPMENT AND CONSTITUTIONALLY IMPERMISSIBLE VIOLATIONS OF INTERNATIONAL LAWrdquo 30 BC Third World LJ 417 Lexis Accessed 2242013 rwg)

Abstract This Comment examines the legality of the comprehensive unilateral embargo imposed by the United States on Cuba within the frame-work of international law It argues that independent of its

humanitarian impact or the dubious legality of its extra-jurisdictional components the comprehensive embargo violates international law because it undermines Cubas right to development International law is and has always

been a component part of US law-it is enforceable in US courts it informs judicial interpretation of US statutes and it guides legislative and executive action in matters of both foreign and domestic policy In addition to its supplementary interpretive function in our

legal system international law is through the Supremacy Clause binding on the United States as a constitutional matter Because of the role international law plays in the United States a direct conflict between federal and international law is constitutional anathema This Comment argues that the tension must be resolved by reference to the substance and timing of the federal enactments that violate international law Thus of the coordinate branches the legislative branch is in the best position to correct the constitutional imbalance The Comment concludes that Congress must either pass new legislation explicitly renouncing the right to development as an international legal norm or in light of the role of international law in our constitutional system execute faithfully its duty to interpret and uphold the Constitution by repealing the legislation that has created the decades-old embargo

Declaring a law unconstitutional prevents it from being enforced and causes the Court to uphold the affTreanor amp Sperling 93 William - Prof Law at Fordham Gene - Deputy Assistant to President for Economic Policy ldquoPROSPECTIVE OVERRULING AND THE REVIVAL OF UNCONSTITUTIONAL STATUTESrdquo Columbia Law Review Dec 93 lexisUnlike the Supreme Court several state courts have explicitly addressed the revival issue The relevant state court cases have concerned the specific issue of whether a statute that has been held unconstitutional is revived when the invalidating decision is overturned n42 With one exception they have concluded that such statutes are immediately enforceablepara The most noted instance in which the revival issue was resolved by a court involved the District of Columbia minimum wage statute pronounced unconstitutional in Adkins After the Court reversed Adkins in West Coast Hotel President Roosevelt asked Attorney General Homer [1913] Cummings for an opinion on the status of the District of Columbias statute The Attorney General respondedpara The decisions are practically in accord in holding that the courts have no power to repeal or abolish a statute and that notwithstanding a decision holding it unconstitutional a statute continues to remain on the statute books and that if a statute be declared unconstitutional and the decision so declaring it be subsequently overruled the statute will then be held valid from the date it became effective n43para Enforcement of the statute followed without congressional action n44para When this enforcement was challenged the Municipal Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in Jawish v Morlet n45 held that the decision in West Coast Hotel had had the effect of making the statute enforceable The court observed that previous opinions addressing the revival issue proceed on the

principle that a statute declared unconstitutional is void in the sense that it is inoperative or unenforceable but not void in the sense that it is repealed or abolished that so long as the decision

stands the statute is dormant but not dead and that if the decision is reversed the statute is valid from its first effective date n46

The court declared this precedent sound since the cases were in accord with the principle that a decision of a court of appellate jurisdiction overruling a former decision is retrospective in its operation and the effect is not that the former decision is bad law but that it never was the law n47 Adkins was thus and had always been a nullity The court acknowledged that after Adkins it had been thought that the District of Columbias minimum wage statute was unconstitutional As the court put it Just about everybody was

fooled n48 Nonetheless the courts view was that since the minimum wage law had always been valid although for a period judicially

unenforceable there was no need to reenact it n49Almost all other courts that have addressed the issue of whether a statute that has been found unconstitutional can be revived have reached the same result as the Jawish court using a similar formalistic [1914] analysis n50 The sole decision in which a court adopted the nonrevival position is Jefferson v Jefferson n51 a poorly reasoned decision of the Louisiana Supreme Court The plaintiff in Jefferson sought child support and maintenance from her husband She prevailed at the trial level he filed his notice of appeal one day after the end of the filing period established by the Louisiana Uniform Rules of the Court of Appeals The Court of Appeals rejected his appeal as untimely even though the Louisiana Supreme Court had previously found that the applicable section of the Uniform Rules violated the state constitution One of Ms Jeffersons arguments before the state Supreme Court was that that courts previous ruling had been erroneous and that the rules should therefore be revived In rejecting this claim and in finding for the husband the Court stated Since we have declared the uniform court rule partially unconstitutional it appears to be somewhat dubious that we have the right to reconsider this ruling in the instant case as counsel for the respondent judges urges us to do For a rule of court like a statute has the force and effect of law and when a law is stricken as void it no longer has existence as law the law cannot be resurrected thereafter by a judicial decree changing the final judgment of unconstitutionality to constitutionality as this would constitute a reenactment of the law by the Court - an assumption of legislative power not delegated to it by the Constitution n52

The Louisiana Court thus took a mechanical approach to the revival question According to its rationale when a statute is found unconstitutional it is judicially determined never to have existed Revival therefore entails judicial legislation and thereby violates constitutionally mandated separation of powers because the initial legislative passage [1915] of the bill has no legitimacy the bills force is considered to be purely a creature of judicial decision-making

Jefferson has little analytic appeal Its view of the separation of powers doctrine is too simplistic Contrary to the Jefferson rationale a revived law is not the pure product of judicial decision-making It is instead a law that once gained the support of a legislature and that has never been legislatively repealed Its legitimacy rests on its initial legislative authorization Moreover the view that a statute that has been found unconstitutional should be treated as if it never existed may have had some support in the early case law but it has been clearly rejected by the

Supreme Court Instead of treating all statutes that it has found unconstitutional as if they had never existed the Court has recognized a range of circumstances in which people who rely on an overturned decision are protected Indeed as will be developed the doctrine of prospective overruling evolved to shield from harm those who relied on subsequently overruled judicial decisions n53 In short the one case in which there was a holding that a statute did not revive does not offer a convincing rationale for nonrevival

Utilizing the constitution is an effective form of resistance and constraint on US imperialism Debates over the constitution shape the behavior of the state

Murphy Erin Conference Papers -- Law amp Society 2010 Annual Meeting p1 0p Limiting the Law of Empire Anti-Imperialism and Imperialist State Formation in the Philippine-American War httpwebebscohostcomehostdetailsid=161a7820-11de-4136-9dfb-8b679be947e440sessionmgr113ampvid=1amphid=119ampbdata=JkF1dGhUeXBlPWlwLHVybCxnZW8sdWlkJmdlb2N1c3RpZD1rYW5zYXMmc2l0ZT1laG9zdC1saXZldb=aphampAN=59237733

In 1898 the United States went to war with Spain Although the Spanish-American War began over disputes having to do with Cuba and started over an explosion on the battleship Maine the final battle was in Manila Bay Philippines In the Philippines as in Cuba there was an ongoing war for independence from Spains colonial rule When the United States replaced Spain as the imperial ruler of the Philippines Filipinos mobilized a war for independence against the US Therefore the Philippine-American War began in 1899 after the ratification of the Treaty of Paris and the war was declared over by President Roosevelt quite symbolically on July 4 1902 as fighting continued in some Filipino provinces through 1913 Throughout US-Philippine imperialist relations the tension over independence remained

and the US finally granted Philippine independence on July 4 1946 From the beginning proponents and critics of US Empire deployed constitutional arguments which generated tension over the status of what came to be known as

unincorporated territories In this paper we argue anti-imperialists used law as a resource in struggling to limit the reach and legal legitimation of US Empire Anti-imperialistsmdashwho were US citizens in the metropole-- contested the Philippine-American War and taking the Philippines as a US colony on both moral and legal grounds Invoking the Constitution and the nationalist narrative of inalienable rights set forth in the Declaration of Independence anti-imperialists endeavored to stop what they saw as

the degradation of democratic institutions and the tyranny of the US in the Philippines In doing this anti-imperialists made anti-imperialism a constitutional project Many anti-imperialists had a particular grasp of legal arguments as lawyer-activists and an especially heightened

constitutional consciousness Therefore they argued for anti-imperialism using legal concepts as resources to influence the path of imperialist state formation in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War and in the midst of the Philippine-American War The significance of imperialist state formation has been couched in terms of the Insular Cases which had a manifest focus on taxation However those involved in the making legal arguments in the Insular Cases (made in terms of tax law) acknowledged in other writings the greater significance for the ramifications of these cases on the formation of the state in determining the

future of the United States in terms of race if Filipinos were to be included in the American polity Our approach suggests that those interested in state formation processes should be attentive to constitutional contests Constitutions represent a states articulation of the scope and the limits of its power Thus constitutions establish sovereignty by drawing geographical boundaries around the extent of state power they enable economic institutions that finance state functions and

legitimate state power and they define the rights of citizenship against encroachments of the state These aspects of constitutions are not surprisingly hotly contested in the course of struggles about the expansion of empire not just in courts

but also in the public debates that shape political decisions PAT-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contention two is Consumption

Current politics conceives of itself exclusively in terms of human agency and relegate everything else to mere ldquomatterrdquo

Jane Bennett is a professor of political science at Johnspara Hopkins University 2010 Vibrant matter a political ecology of things

For some time political theory has acknowledged that materiality matterspara But this materiality most often refers to human social structures orpara

to the human meanings embodied in them and other objects Because politics is itself often construed as an exclusively human domain what para registers on it is a set of material constraints on or a context for human action Dogged resistance to anthropocentrism is perhaps the main differencepara between the vital materialism I pursue and this kind of historicalpara

materialism I will emphasize even overemphasize the agentic contributions of nonhuman forces (operating in nature in the humanpara body and in human artifacts) in an attempt to counter the narcissistic reflex of human language and thought We need to cultivate a bit ofpara anthropomorphism-the idea that human agency has some echoes inpara nonhuman nature - to counter the narcissism of humans in charge ofpara the world

This understanding of nonhuman entities as dead matter ensures an endless quest of consumption that causes extinction ndash humanism ends humanity

Why advocate the vitality of matter Because my hunch is that the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumptionpara It does so by preventing us from detecting (seeing hearing smellingpara tasting feeling) a fuller range of the nonhuman powers Circulatingpara around and within human bodies These material powers which canpara aid or destroy enrich or disable ennoble or degrade us in

any casepara call for our attentiveness or even respect (provided that the term bepara stretched beyond its Kantian sense) The figure of an intrinsically inanimatepara matter may be one of the impediments to the emergence ofpara more ecological and more materially sustainable modes of productionpara and consumption My claims here are motivated by a self-

interestedpara or conative concern for human survival and happiness 1 want to promotepara greener forms of human culture and more attentive encounterspara between people-materialities and thing-materialities (The ecologicalpara character of a vital materialism is the focus of the last two chapters)

This divorced relationship to the natural world frames all other impacts ndash environmental and social violence is a product humanist thought Meaningful existence is only possible within a healthy relationship to the nonhuman world

David Abram PhD in philosophy from State University of New York at Stony Brook 1996 The Spell of the Sensuous Pg 21-22

Western industrial society of course with its massive scale and hugely centralized economy can hardly be seen in relation to any particular landscape or ecosystem the more-than-human ecology with which it is directly engaged is the

biosphere itself Sadly our culturersquos relation to the earthly biosphere can in no way be considered a reciprocal or

balanced one with thousands of acres of nonregenerating forest disappearing every hour and hundreds of our fellow species becoming extinct each month as a result of our civilization excesses we can hardly be surprised by the amount of epidemic illness in our culture from increasingly severe immune

dysfunctions and cancer to widespread psychological distress depression and ever more frequent suicides to the accelerating number of household killings and mass murders committed for no apparent reason by otherwise coherent individuals From an animistic perspective the clearest source of all this distress both physical and psychological lies in the aforementioned violence needlessly perpetrated by our civilization on the ecology of the planet only by alleviating the latter will we be able to heal the former While this may sound at first like a simple statement of faith it makes eminent and obvious sense as soon as we acknowledge our thorough

dependence upon the countless other organisms with whom we have evolved Caught up in a mass of abstractions our attention hypnotized by a host of human-made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves it is all too easy for us to forget our carnal inherence in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures sounds and shapes of an animate earth-our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes as our ears are attuned by their structure to the howling of wolves and the

honking of geese To shut ourselves off from these other voices to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction is to rob our own senses of their integrity and to rob our minds of their coherence We are human only in contact and conviviality with what is not human

Itrsquos try or die for the aff ndash status quo nihilism makes all values and impact evaluation meaningless

Simon Critchley professor of Philosophy at the University of Essex and Directuer de programme at the college international de Philosophie 2001 Continental Philosophy a very short introduction pg 84

The values of modernity or Enlightenment do not connect with the fabric of moral or social relations with the stuff of everyday life That is they fail to produce a new mythic or rational totality what the authors of lsquoSystem-Programmersquo (see pp 129-31) view as the need for a mythology of reason In other words Kant leaves us with a series of reconciled dualisms The moral values of Enlightenment (and this is the core of Hamannrsquos and Hegelrsquos critique of Kant which is inherited by the young Marx ndash where Enlightenment values become bourgeois values) lack any effectiveness any connection to social praxis However not only do the moral values

of Enlightenment fail to connect with the fabric of moral and social relations but - worse still ndash they lead instead to the progressive degradation of those relationships through processes that we might call with Max Weber

rationalization with Marx capitalization with Adorno and Horkheimer instrumental rationality and with Heidegger the forgetfulness of Being Such is Enlightenmentrsquos fateful and paradoxical dialetic As I see it this is Jacobirsquos key

insight and we have seen it unraveling through the story I have been telling Thus to put it rather grandly the problem of philosophical modernity as presented so far is how to confront the problem of nihilism after one has seen how the values of the Enlightenment not only fail to get a grip on everyday life but lead instead to its progressive dissolution In my view this is the problem that Continental philosophers return to again and again either by trying to find a new way to respond to the problem as for example in Habermas and Derrida or by refusing the historical and philosophical terms in which the problem is posed for example in Rorty

Their understanding of causality is wrong ndash the mystery of the nonhuman world cannot be explained away by all-encompassing theories of the world If we cannot know the completely understand the nonhuman world we cannot predict how the world operates

Timothy Morton 2013 Timothy Morton the prominent ecologist literary theorist and object-oriented philosopher Realist Magic Objects Ontology Causality httpquodlibumicheducgippoddod-idxrealist-magic-objects-ontology-causalitypdfc=ohpidno=131064960001001

The title of this book is a play on the literary genre of magic realism para Later in the twentieth century writers such as Gabriel Garciacutea Maacuterquez para developed a writing that incorporated elements of magic and paradox para In magic realist narratives causality departs from purely mechanical para functioning in part to resist the seeming inevitability of imperialist ldquorealityrdquo para in part to give voice to unspeakable things or things that are

almost para impossible to speak according to imperialist ideology Realist Magic argues para that reality itself is not mechanical or linear when it comes to causality para Indeed causality is a secretive affair yet out in the openmdashan open secret para Causality is mysterious in the original sense of the Greek mysteria which para means things that are unspeakable or secret Mysteria is a neuter plural para noun derived from muein to close or shut Mystery thus suggests a rich and para ambiguous range of terms secret enclosed withdrawn

unspeakable This para study regards the realness of things as bound up with a certain mystery in para these multiple senses unspeakability enclosure withdrawal secrecy In this para book I shall be using these terms to convey

something essential about things para Things are encrypted But the difference between standard encryption and para the encryption of objects is that this is an unbreakable encryption ldquoNature para loves to hiderdquo (Heraclitus)para The title Realist Magic is also meant to provoke thoughts about para philosophical realism the idea that there are real things Realism is often para considered

a rather dull affair with all the panache and weirdness on the para antirealist side of the debate We shall see that this is far from the case The para trouble with many theories of causality is that they edit out a quintessential para element of mystery Moreover this might be a defining feature of theories para of causality It seems elementary that a theory of causality should put para

ldquounderstandingrdquo in the place of mystery Causality theories are preoccupied para with explaining things away with

demystification A theory of cause and para effect shows you how the magic trick is done But what if something crucial para about causality resided at the level of the magic trick itself To think this way is to begin to work out an object-oriented view of para causality If things are intrinsically withdrawn irreducible to their perceptionpara or relations or uses they can only affect each other in a strange region out in para front of them a region of traces and footprints the aesthetic dimension Let para us explore an example

The 1AC allows for a better relationship to the natural world ndash imaginings of nonhuman agency humbles humanity and allows for more effective politics

But perhaps the very i dea of thing-power or vibrant matter claims too para much to know more than it is possible to know Or to put the criticismpara in Theodor Adornos terms does it exemplify the violent hubris ofpara Western philosophy a tradition that has consistently failed to mind thepara gap between concept and reality object and thing For Adorno this gappara is ineradicable and

the most that can be said with confidence aboutpara the thing is that it eludes capture by the concept that there is alwayspara a nonidentity between it and any representation And yet as I shallpara argue even Adorno continues to seek a way to access -however darkyIpara crudely or fleetingly-this out-side One can detect a trace of this longingpara in the following quotation from Negative Dialectics What we maypara call the thing itself is not positively and immediately at hand He whopara wants to know it must think more not less37 Adorno clearly rejects thepara possibility of any direct sensuous apprehension (the thing itself is notpara positively and immediately at hand) but he does not reject all modespara of encounter for there is one mode thinking more not less that holdspara promise In this section I will explore some of the affinities betweenpara Adornos nonidentity and my thing-power and more generally betweenpara his specific

materialism (ND 203) and a vital materialismpara Nonidentity is the name Adorno gives to that which is not subject topara knowledge but is instead heterogeneous to all concepts This elusive para force is not however wholly outside human experience for Adornopara describes nonidentity as a presence that acts upon us we knowers arepara haunted he says by a painful nagging feeling that somethings beingpara forgotten or left out This discomfiting sense of the inadequacy of representationpara remains no matter how refined or analytical1y precise onespara concepts become Negative dialectics is the method Adorno designspara to teach us how to accentuate this discomforting experience and howpara to give it a meaning When practiced correctly negative dialectics willpara render the static

buzz of nonidentity into a powerful reminder that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder andpara thus that life will always exceed our knowledge and control The ethicalpara project par excellence as Adorno sees it is to keep remembering thispara and to learn how to accept it Only then can we stop raging against a para world that refuses to offer us the reconcilement that we according topara Adorno crave eND 5)38para For the vital materialist

however the starting point of ethics is lesspara the acceptance of the impossibility of reconcilement and more the recognition

of human participation in a shared vital materiality We are vital materiality and we are surrounded by it though we do

not alwayspara see it that way The ethical task at hand here is to cultivate the ability to discern nonhuman vitality to become perceptually open to it In apara parallel manner Adornos specific materialism also recommends a setpara of practical techniques for training oneself to better detect and acceptpara nonidentity Negative dialectics is in other words the pedagogy insidepara Adornos materialismpara This pedagogy includes intellectual as well as aesthetic exercises Thepara intellectual practice consists in the attempt to make the very processpara of conceptualization an explicit object of thought The goal here is topara become more cognizant that conceptualization automatically obscurespara the inadequacy of its concepts Adorno believes that critical reflectionpara can expose this cloaking mechanism and that the exposure will intensifypara the relt presence of nonidentity The treatment is homeopathic wepara must develop a concept of nonidentity to cure the hubris of conceptualizationpara The treatment can work because however distorting conceptspara still refer to nonconceptualities This is because concepts on theirpara part are moments of the reality that requires their formation (ND 12)para Concepts can never provide a clear view of things in themselves butpara the discriminating man who in the matter and its concept can distinguish even the infinitesimal that which escapes the concept (ND 45)para can do a better job of gesturing toward them Note that the discriminatingpara man (adept at negative dialectics) both subjects his conceptualizationspara to second-order reflection and pays close aesthetic attention topara the objects qualitative moments (ND

43) for these open a windowpara onto nOnidentitypara A second technique of the pedagogy is to exercise ones utopian imagination The negative dialectician should imaginatively re-create what has been obscured by the distortion of conceptualization Thepara means employed in negative dialectics for the penetration of its hardenedpara objects is possibility-the possibility of which their reality haspara cheated the objects and which is nonetheless visible in each one (NDpara 52)

Nonidentity resides in those denied possibilities in the invisiblepara field that surrounds and infuses the world of objects para A third technique is to admit a playful element into ones thinkingpara and to be willing to play the fool The negative dialectician knows howpara far he remains from knowing nonidentity and yet he must always talkpara as if he had it entirely This brings him to the point of clowning He mustpara not deny his clownish traits least of all since they alone can give himpara hope for what is denied him (ND 14)para The self-criticism of conceptualization a sensory attentiveness topara the qualitative Singularities of the object the exercise of an unrealisticpara imagination and the courage of a down by

means of such practicespara one might replace the rage against nonidentity with a respect for itpara a respect that chastens our will to mastery That rage is for Adorno thepara driving force behind interhuman acts of cruelty and violence Adornopara goes even further to suggest that negative dialectics can transmute thepara anguish of nonidentity into a will to arceliorative political action thepara thing thwarts our desire for conceptual and practical mastery and thispara refusal angers us but it also offers us an ethical injunction accordingpara to which suffering ought not to be things should be different Woepara speaks Go Hence the convergence of specific materialism with criticismpara with social change in practice (NO 202-3)para Adorno founds his ethics on an intellectual and aesthetic attentivenesspara that though it will always fail to see its object clearly neverthelesspara has salutory effects on the bodies straining to see Adorno willingly playspara the fool by questing after what I would call thing-power but which hepara calls the

preponderance of the object (NO 183) Humans encounter apara world in which nonhuman materialities have power a power that the bourgeois with its pretensions to autonomy denies40 It is at thispara point that Adorno identifies negative dialectics

as a materialism it ispara only by passing to the objects preponderance that dialectics is renderedpara materialistic (NO 192)para Adorno dares to affirm something like thing-power but he does notpara want to play the fool for too long He is quick-too quick from the pointpara of view of the vital materialist-to remind the reader that objects arepara always entwined with human subjectivity and that he has no desire topara place the object on the orphaned royal throne once occupied by the subjectpara On tha1048760 throne the object would be nothing but an idol (NO 181)para Adorno is reluctant to say too much about nonhuman vitality for thepara more said the more it recedes from view Nevertheless Adorno does trypara to attend somehow to this reclusive reality by means of a negative dialecticspara Negative dialectics has an affinity with negative theology negativepara dialectics honors nonidentity as one would honor an unknowablepara god Adornos specific materialism includes the possibility that therepara is divinity beltind or within the reality that withdraws Adorno rejectspara any naive picture of transcendence such as that of a loving God whopara designed the world (metaphysics cannot rise again [NO 404) afterpara Auschwitz) but the desire for transcendence cannot he believes bepara eliminated Nothing could be experienced as truly alive if somethingpara that transcends life were not promised also T he transcendent is andpara it is not (ND 375)41 Adorno honors Donidentity as an absent absolutepara as a messianic promiselt41048760

Contention three is Exceptionalism

The Cuban embargo is tied to American exceptionalist that will not tolerate dissent from its hegemonic order

Salim Lamrani La Sorbonne University 2003 is last date cited US Economic sanctions against Cuba objectives of an imperialist policy httpwwwthirdworldtravelercomCaribbeanUSEconomicSanctions_Cubahtml

The total blockade of the island imposed on February 7 1962 violates international conventions and runs counter to the most basic juridical

principles Its main objective is to re-establish US neo-colonial domination over Cuba using starvation as a political weapon against the Cuban people The arguments justifying this economic state of siege varied according to time During the Cold War the communist threat that Cuba represented was the paradigm in use although any serious study would smash this theory to pieces Indeed in 1959 there was no Soviet presence in Cuba But Washington stuck to that interpretation Cuba represented a threat for US national security and Kennedy urged Mexico to back them up in their policy of hostility towards Cuba But the answer of a Mexican diplomat was not long in coming If we publicly declare that Cuba is a threat to our security forty million Mexicans will die laughing para The Cold War context used for thirty years as a pretext legitimizing US animosity towards Cuba was actually a fraud since there are no facts to support this theory If there had been any foundations to this thesis the United States would have normalized its relations with

Cuba after the collapse of the Soviet bloc Instead of that Washington launched a new and more serious wave of economic sanctions with the Torricelli Act in 1992 and the Helms-Burton Act in 1996 As the ancient paradigm departed this life in 1991 a new one was created Now it is no more about containing communism but about re-establishing democracy in Cuba a democracy devoted to the interests of Washington No matter if it is ruled by a clone of Gerardo Machado or Fulgencio Batista

whats important is that it should make of its subordination to the United States its main virtue The economic sanctions imposed on the Cuban people are condemned by almost all countries in the international community and for twelve years running by their overwhelming majority Nonetheless not an ounce of change in US foreign policy towards Cuba stands out on the horizon driving international opinion to despair Below is a table summing up the successive votes since 1992para para Number of countries opposing the blockade Number of countries against the end of the blockade Countries voting against the end of the blockade 1992 59 3 United States Israel Romania 1993 88 4 United States Israel Albania Paraguay 1994 101 2 United States Israel 1995 117 3 United States Israel Uzbekistan 1996 137 2 United States Israel 1997 147 3 United States Israel Uzbekistan 1998 157 3 United States Israel Marshall Islands 1999 155 2 United States Israel 2000 167 3 United States Israel Marshall Islands 2001 167 3 United States Israel Marshall Islands 2002 173 3 United States

Israel Marshall Islands 2003 179 3 United States Israel Marshall Islandspara para The only objectives of the United States are to send Cuba back to the pangs and torments afflicting Third World nations and which it has dared to escape to plunder its resources and to destroy its health care system considered uniformly as the pre-eminent model for the Third World according to the American Association for World Health The aim of the blockade is to fulfill the wishes of Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams to incorporate Cuba into the US sphere of influence and to enable foreign capital to devastate it The logorrhea putting forward the argument of human rights problems in Cuba is only a rhetoric motivated by self-interest and designed to conceal a very clear plan to make the Cuban people toe the line and to send it back to the destitute standards of living they were used to fret over before the triumph of the Revolutionpara

Recently President George W Bush not only added Cuba to the list of terrorist states a decision that should cause some mirth among the international community given that this accusation is groundless but he also declared that the restrictions concerning the travels of US citizens to Cuba would be made tighter He also called for the creation of a Presidential Commission for the Assistance to a Free Cuba in order to repay the debt he has contracted during the 2000 election campaign with his extreme-right friends of the Cuban-American National Foundation a powerful entity never reluctant to use terrorism as a tool to express political ideas What is the truthfulness of those declarations It is non-

existent It is easy to guess what kind of Free Cuba the United States wants to create a regime that would be more acceptable to the US as the Washington administration underlined it as soon as 1959 that is to say a nation completely obedient to its orderspara Condoleeza Rice National Security Advisor to President Bush evoked the intolerable case of Cuba and this opinion is not groundless if one sees things from the point of view of US

political strategists Indeed it is intolerable that a Third World country which is moreover in the US backyard dares to brave the masters of the world intending its natural resources to be used by its people and not by Washington financial and economic interests It is intolerable that a nation stifled by a legislative net of sanctions that would be hard to bear even for a European power is still able to resist after 44 years of economic stifling And there is even worse Social policy is unquestionably one area in which Cuba has excelled by guaranteeing an equitable distribution of income and well-

being of the population while investing in human capital according to the report published by the United Nations Economic Commission for

Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) The United States cannot tolerate this heresypara If Cuba submits to the orders of Washington if it accepts to give up its sovereignty and to abandon its resources to the ravenous appetite of multinationals forgetting the needs of its people on the way it will be considered to be part and parcel of the democratic world But as long as it has not fulfilled those conditions it will continue to be the target of Washington attacks As the hero of the 1898 independence war Joseacute Martiacute said Freedom is very expensive and it is necessary either to resign ourselves to live without it or to decide to buy it for what its worth And the Cubans have made

their choicepara As long as Cuba continues to challenge the dominant and dogmatic ideology of free market by providing an example showing that it is possible to free ones country from the distress of under- development not through the implementation of the diktats of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank but by putting

human beings at the center of its plans for society it will be a victim of paramilitary attacks organized from The United States As long as it refuses to implement market and profit discipline US economic terrorism will not ease offpara The roots of the blockade date back not to 1959 but to the beginning of the 19th century since US imperialists have always wanted to take hold of Cuba In 1902 a US bookstore distributed a map of Cuba under the title Our New Colony Cuba The United States will do whatever is in its power to go back to that pre-revolutionary situation to make Cuba become another Puerto Rico Haiti or Dominican Republic places in which the wealth of a minority stands out in sharp contrast with the poverty of the majority and where US multinationals make staggering profits It will also unflaggingly cling to the same voluble and outdated arguments that its representatives keep on repeating

American foreign policy pursues order and control that reduces the world to mere calculation

Spanos 2k (William V Professor of English at Binghamton University Americarsquos Shadow p 191-193) PJ

What I have argued in this book about the relationship between philosophy and imperialism is that the euphoric annunciation of the end of history and the advent of the New

World Order by the deputies of the dominant American culture at the end of the Cold War is symptomatic of the achievement of the global hegemony of America understood not simply as a political order but as a way of thinking I have claimed that this

triumphant American way of thinking is not exceptionalist as it has always been claimed by Americans especially since de Tocquevilles announcement

of the advent of democracy in America but European which means metaphysical an imperial thinking whose provenance resides in Roman antiquity that sees the being into which it inquires as a totalized spatial image a field or region or domain to be comprehended mastered and exploited But this way of putting this imperial metanarrative though necessary in the context of the amnesiac imperatives of thinking the Enlightenment as an epochal emancipatory moment in world history is too general It does not account for the historically specific transformation of this European mode of knowledge production accomplished in the wake of Americas emergence as a global power the fulfillment of the Enlightenments developmental model in the effacement of the visible imperial logos informing traditional metaphysics by way of the apotheosis of the objectivity of empirical science and the advent of the classificatory table Under the aegis of a triumphant America the narrative economy of

European metaphysics has come to its end in the form of a universal instrumentalism a Man-centered thinking for which everything in time and space is seen as a problem that the larger compara tive picture renders susceptible to a final and determinate solution In Heideggers proleptic terms European metaphysical thinking in the technological age dominated by America has become Americanized a re-presentational calculative thinking or planning that has trans formed the uncalculability of being at large into a planetary world picture We get the picture concerning something does not mean only that what is is set before us is represented to us in general but that what is stands before usmdashin all that belongs to it and all that stands together in it as a system To get the picture throbs with being acquainted with something with being equipped and prepared for it Where the world becomes picture what is in its entirely is juxtaposed as that for which man is prepared and which correspondingly he therefore intends to bring before himself and have before himself and consequently

intends in a decisive sense to set in place before himself Hence world picture when understood essentially does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as picture What is in its entirety is now taken in such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man who represents and sets forth Wherever we have the world picture an essential decision takes place regarding what is in its entirety

The Being of whatever is is sought and found in the representedness of the latter Reconstellated into the context of this Heideggerian diagnosis of modernity the American end-of-history discourse undergoes a resonant estrangement What is euphorically represented as good news mdash the global fulfillment (end) of the emancipatory promise of History mdash comes to be seen as the Pax Metaphysica the colonization of the errant mind of humanity at large by a banal and banalizing thinking that has reduced everything including human beings to standing [or dispos able] reserve 2 This end of philosophy in the form of a triumphant instrumentalist thinking that has reduced being to disposable commodity is everywhere manifest in the postndashCold War era And I suggest its most telling symptom is the globalization of (American)

English as the lingua franca of the free market which has as one of its most devastating consequences the Americanization not simply of the Western nation-states but of

entire Third World cultures What for the purpose of my argument this global triumph of American thinking means is that even those who would oppose American global hegemony are insofar as they remain indifferent to the onto logical grounds of its sociopolitical practices condemned to think their opposition according to the imperatives of the discursive practices they would oppose They thus fulfill the expectation of the deputies of American culture who predict that even nondemocrats will have to speak the language of democracy in order to justify their deviation from the single universal standard3 That is to say the fulfillment of the European metanarrative in the globalization of American technological thinking that is the Americanization of the planet has tacitly reduced opposition to a resonant silence It is in this sense that with Heidegger the intellectual who is attuned to the complicity between Western philosophy and imperialism is compelled to call this age of the world picture presided over by America a destitute time or more suggestively a realm of in-between mdash the No-more of the gods that have fled and the Not-yet of the god that is coming4 In the context of the impasse of oppositional thinking in other words heshe is compelled to acknowledge the time of the postmdashCold War occasion as an interregnum This for an opposition that limits resistance to the political means a time of defeat But for the oppositional thinker who is attuned to the ontological exile to which heshe has been condemned by the global triumph of technological thinking it also means the recognition that this exilic condition of silence constitutes an irresolvable contradiction in the Truth of instrumental thinkingmdashthe shadow that haunts its light mdash that demands to be thought In the interregnum the primary task of the marginalized intellectual is the rethinking of thinking itself And as I have suggested it is the event of the Vietnam Warmdashand the dominant American cultures inordinate will to forget it mdash that provides the directives for this most difficult of tasks not impossible

Exceptionalism ensures endless warfare and genocide

Spanos 3 (William V Professor of English at Binghamton University A Rumor of War 911 and the Forgetting of the Vietnam War p 33-34) PJ

This extraordinarily reductive representation and self-righteous inexorable and unilateral practical response to the violence committed against Americans which in large part is the consequence of the Westrsquos and in

recent times of the United Statesrsquo depredations in the East is not as I have suggested unprecedented On the contrary it is the predictable manifestation of a deeply inscribed and naturalized cultural belief in Americarsquos divinely or historicallymdashthat is to say ontologicallymdashordained exceptionalist mission in the worldrsquos lsquolsquowildernessrsquorsquo one that in fact has informed the entire violent history of American expansionism It informed the American Puritansrsquo identification of the Native Americans who resisted their plantation of GodrsquosWord in the forests of New England with the expendable agents of Satan it informed the period of westward expansionism which in the name of Manifest Destiny justified first the wholesale removal and then the extermination of the Native American population and most tellingly it

informed the American representation and conduct of the Vietnam War which to repeat bore witness to the destruction of a Southeast Asian country and the indiscriminate slaughter of untold numbers of its population by the all but full force of the American military machine which we should not forget

included terror the use of psychological and chemical weapons (what in referring to Middle Eastern states American officialdom calls weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction) in the insanely rational name of saving Vietnam for the free world This among other good reasons I cannot go into here is why it seems to me it is worth retrieving the by now strategically buried history of the Vietnam War by way of the highly representative example of A Rumor ofWar 5 at this profoundly perilous moment of world history when the dominant culture in the United States is once again concentering an extremely complex and volatile global condition which it and the West over which it has unilaterally claimed leadership has gone far to produce in the figure of a single but symbolic person (and the Taliban government that harbored him) for the purpose of decisive retaliation For Caputorsquos

memoir perhaps more than any other book about the Vietnam War bears powerful witness if only in a symptomatic way to the dark underside of the American exceptionalism that justified not only the United Statesrsquo

intervention in Vietnam and its unerringly cold-blooded and massively destructive conduct of the war but also

because its rhetoric betrays a deep historical sense the violent American history of which the Vietnam War was only one example

Calculative understandings of the world make nuclear war and genocide possible ndash we control impacts in this debate

Micheal E Zimmerman professor of Philosophy at Tulane University 1990 Heidggerrsquos Confrontation with Modernity

Nevertheless in speaking of the Holocaust in the same breath with the hydrogen bomb Heidegger was making an important point Mass

extermination in the Nazi camps was possible only because of developments within industrial technology Moreover the Nazis spoke of Jews as if they were little more than industrial ldquowasterdquo to de disposed of as efficiently as possible Officials in charge of planning strategic use of nuclear weapons must be trained to conceive as enemy populace in wholly abstract terms Heidegger argued in several places that the hydrogen bomb - an instrument of mass

extermination- was not the real problem facing us Instead the problem is the perversion and constriction of humanityrsquos

understanding of being itself in the technological era Extermination camps and hydrogen bombs from Heideggerrsquos viewpoint were both symptoms of humanityrsquos concept of itself and everything else as resources to be produced and consumed created and destroyed at will

Questions of ontology comes 1st ndash understanding the being of things is a prerequisite to being able to relate ethically towards the world

Nicholas Dungey California State University Northridge The Ethics and Politics of Dwelling Polity Vol 39 No 2 (Apr 2007) pp 234-258

The philosophical claims we make about human nature directly influence our interpretation of the self others and the world we live in For Heidegger and Derrida the philosophical claims we make about human existence and Being reveal modes of togetherness and responsibility that are inherently ethical Moreover for both of them these ethical claims ought to influence the sort of political decisions and actions we make According to Heidegger to engage ethics properly we must raise the questions of who we are and the way we find ourselves in this world It is in this context that he writes Ethics as a mere doctrine and imperative is helpless unless man first comes to have a different fundamental relation to Being113 Ethical understanding is grounded in the ontological situation of human existence and is revealed through a clearer understanding of our being Where the essence of man is thought so essentially solely from the question concerning the truth of Being but still without elevating man to the center of beings a longing necessarily awakens for a peremptory directive and for rules that say how man ought to live14 Heidegger wants to raise the philosophical question of human existence in a way that avoids making man the objective ground of morality

Before we determine rules that regulate our behavior we must philosophically clarify who we are Heideggers philosophy insofar as it reveals the essential relationships that disclose and characterize human existence is itself a form of original ethics And for Heidegger access to such a way of thinking begins with reflection on the essence of dwelling

Contention four is Framework

The judge should vote for the team that engages in the most productive political imagination Itrsquos not merely a question of whorsquos policy option is better but whorsquos policy option allows us the people in the room to become better

Business-as-usual politics glosses over the nonhuman - endorsing our aff counteracts that to encourage more effective political analysis

The political project of the book is to put it most ambitiously to encouragepara more intelligent and sustainable engagements with vibrant matter and lively things A guiding question How would political responsespara to public problems

change were we to take seriously the vitality of (nonhuman) bodies By vitality I mean the capacity of things ediblespara commodities storms metals-not only to impede or block thepara will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces withpara trajectories propensities or tendencies of their own My aspiration ispara to articulate a

vibrant materiality that runSsalongside and inside humanspara to see how analyses of political events might change if we gave the force of things more due How for example would patterns of consumption change if we faced not litter rubbish trash or the recycling but an accumulating pile of lively and potentially dangerous matter What differencepara would it make to public health if eating was understood as anpara encounter between various and variegated bodies some of them minepara most of them not and none of which always gets the upper hand Whatpara issues would surround stem cell research in the absence of the assumptionpara that the only source of Vitality in matter is a soul or spirit Whatpara difference would it make to the course of energy policy were electricitypara to be figured not simply as a resource commodity or instrumentalitypara but also and more radically as an actant

Posthumanism Aff



The Embargo is unconstitutional

Declaring a law unconstitutional prevents it from being enforced and causes the Court to uphold the aff
















