The K outweighs and turns the case – the forms of violence foregrounded by the 1AC are contingent aberrations that spur subjective vertigo for the Human because unlike blackness, they’re not ontologically condemned to the condition of objective vertigo, a life constituted by disorientation which is a never-ending paradigmatic necessity.

Subjective vertigo is vertigo of the event. But the sensation that one is not simply spinning in an otherwise stable environment, that one’s environment is perpetually unhinged stems from a re- lationship to violence that cannot be analogized. This is called objective vertigo, a life constituted by disorientation rather than a life interrupted by disorientation. This is structural as opposed to performative violence. Black subjectivity is a crossroads where vertigoes meet, the intersection of performative and structural violence. Elsewhere I have argued that the Black is a sentient being though not a Human being. The Black’s and the Human’s disparate rela- tionship to violence is at the heart of this failure of incorporation and analogy. The Human suffers contingent violence, violence that kicks in when s/he resists (or is perceived to resist) the disci- plinary discourse of capital and/or Oedipus. But Black peoples’ subsumption by violence is a paradigmatic necessity, not just a performative contingency. To be constituted by and disciplined by violence, to be gripped simultaneously by subjective and ob- jective vertigo, is indicative of a political ontology which is radi- cally di erent from the political ontology of a sentient being who is constituted by discourse and disciplined by violence when s/ he breaks with the ruling discursive codes.vi When we begin to assess revolutionary armed struggle in this comparative context, we find that Human revolutionaries (workers, women, gays and lesbians, post-colonial subjects) suffer subjective vertigo when they meet the state’s disciplinary violence with the revolution- ary violence of the subaltern; but they are spared objective verti- go. This is because the most disorienting aspects of their lives are induced by the struggles that arise from intra-Human con icts over competing conceptual frameworks and disputed cognitive maps, such as the American Indian Movement’s demand for the return of Turtle Island vs. the U.S.’s desire to maintain territo- rial integrity, or the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional’s (FALN) demand for Puerto Rican independence vs. the U.S.’s desire to maintain Puerto Rico as a territory. But for the Black, as for the slave, there are no cognitive maps, no conceptual frame- works of suffering and dispossession which are analogic with the myriad maps and frameworks which explain the dispossession of Human subalterns. The structural, or paradigmatic, violence that subsumes Black insurgents’ cognitive maps and conceptual frameworks, sub- sumes my scholarly e orts as well. As a Black scholar, I am tasked with making sense of this violence without being over- whelmed and disoriented by it. In other words, the writing must somehow be indexical of that which exceeds narration, while being ever mindful of the incomprehension the writing would foster, the failure, that is, of interpretation were the indices to actually escape the narrative. The stakes of this dilemma are al- most as high for the Black scholar facing his/her reader as they are for the Black insurgent facing the police and the courts. For the scholarly act of embracing members of the Black Liberation Army as beings worthy of empathic critique is terrifying. One’s writing proceeds with fits and starts which have little to do with the problems of building the thesis or finding the methodology to make the case. As I write, I am more aware of the rage and anger of my reader- ideal (an angry mob as readers) than I am of my own interven- tions and strategies for assembling my argument. Vertigo seizes me with a rash of condemnations that emanate from within me and swirl around me. I am speaking to me but not through me, yet there seems to be no other way to speak. I am speaking through the voice and gaze of a mob of, let’s just say it, White Americans; and my efforts to marshal a mob of Black people, to conjure the Black Liberation Army smack of compensatory gestures. It is not that the BLA doesn’t come to my aid, that they don’t push back, but neither I nor my insurgent allies can make the case that we are worthy of our suffering and justified in our actions and not terrorists and apologists for terror who should be locked away forever. How can we be worthy of our suffering without being worthy of ourselves? I press on, even though the vertigo that seizes me is so overwhelming that its precise nature—sub- jective, stemming from within me, or objective, catalyzed by my context, the raging throng—cannot be determined. I have no ref- erence points apart from the mob that gives no quarter. If I write “freedom fighter,” from within my ear they scream “terrorist”! If I say “prisoner of war,” they chant “cop killer”! Their denun- ciations are sustained only by assertion, but they ring truer than my painstaking exegesis. No rewall protects me from them; no liberated psychic zone offers me sanctuary. I want to stop and turn myself in.