Even a low risk of a net benefit means you should default neg – NO ethical system could sanction expanding benefits to butchers and executioners of innocent people. Humans are capable of extraordinary violence and evil---the aff justifies acceptance of horrifying acts in the name of openness – some things are just ethically unacceptable.

In positioning the neighbor as the monstrous other, Žižek reads the neighbor against Lacanian structures of the Imaginary, Symbolic, and the Real. More specifically, Žižek distinguishes between Imaginary others, which are our mirror-like relationships of mutual recognition; The Symbolic Big Other, which is “the impersonal set of rules that coordinate our coexistence”, and finally, The Other qua Real, which is “the impossible Thing, the ‘inhuman partner,’ the Other with whom no symmetrical dialogue, mediated by the symbolic Order, is possible” (“Neighbors” 143). To understand the radical Otherness inscribed in the element of the neighbor it is crucial to understand how these three Lacanian dimensions are connected. For Žižek, the neighbor as the Thing means that, “beneath the neighbor as my semblant, my mirror image, there always lurks the unfathomable abyss of radical Otherness, of a monstrous Thing that cannot be gentrified”(ibid). Žižek designates the figure of the neighbor as the ultimate object of desire in its intensity and impenetrability—the neighbor that disturbs, tortures, and is always too close. Importantly, between the Imaginary Other and the Impenetrable Real Other must step in the Symbolic Other that gentrifies their chaotic dimensions: In order to render our coexistence with the Thing minimally bearable, the symbolic order qua Third, the pacifying mediator, has to intervene: the “gentrification” of the Other-Thing into a “normal human fellow” cannot occur through our direct interaction, but presupposes the third agency to which we both submit ourselves—there is no intersubjectivity (no symmetrical, shared, relation between humans) without the impersonal symbolic Order (“Neighbors” 143-4). The neighbor is fittingly given a more unsettling dimension as the impenetrable Other, the enemy whose radical ambiguity and traumatic character do not prepare the ground for a possibility of an authentic encounter. Consequently, the impossibility of such encounters brings about the alienation of social life, which is woven into the practices, rituals, and social texture of everyday life: Even if I live side by side with others, in my normal state I ignore them. I am allowed not to get too close to others. I move in a social space where I interact with others obeying certain external “mechanical” rules, without sharing their inner world (Žižek, Violence 59). “Sometimes alienation is not a problem, but a solution,” indispensable for peaceful coexistence (ibid). Brutality feels at home in Višegrad, and the ethnic cleansing of this city was an ordinary affair, writes Maass. “Bosnia makes you question basic assumptions about humanity, and one of the questions concerns torture. Why after all should there be any limit?” (51). At the beginning of the war, paramilitary Serb forces came to town, rounded up unarmed Muslim men, and loaded them into refrigerated meat trucks. An older Muslim man who was forced to push the corpses into the river managed to escape, and later gave his testimony. The Serbs took these men to the railing of the Višegrad bridge, the man confessed, forcing them to lean forward, at which point they would either slit their throats or shoot them. They threw them all into the river. ... They ordered me and a man who was even older than me to walk toward the bridge. We came across the body of an old man with a mutilated head. They ordered us to drag him toward the bridge. As we were dragging the old one, his skull was falling open and the brain came out. We dragged the body to the bridge and they ordered us to throw it into Drina. There were two more bodies on the bridge. They had their throats cut. We were ordered to throw them into the river as well. On one of the bodies, four fingers on the left hand were freshly cut off (9). This is the neighbor When confronted with neighbor-on-neighbor violence whom do I save? The neighbor? Myself? Who do I attack? If I attack, am I just another neighbor? As a journalist, Peter Maass is not supposed to get involved in the events he covers, so he stands aside and watches a man on the verge of execution because it is a prudent thing to do. Is this much different from the “Serbs who prudently kept quiet as their Bosnian neighbors were shot or packed off to prison camps?” (21). A tragically misplaced ethical conviction? Perhaps. What about brutal acts of torture about which we know but choose to ignore? The atrocious reality of the death camps, tortures, and mass executions does not reside in the immediate reality of the violence, but in Maass’s blindness to this accumulated atrocity—the fetishist disavowal (i.e., how this violent event appears to him, not the violent event itself). In an act that suspends symbolic efficiency of witnessing torture and suffering, the watcher relies on a gesture of fetishist disavowal: “I know, but I don’t want to know that I know, so I don’t know. I know it, but I refuse to fully assume the consequences of this knowledge, so that I can continue acting as if I don’t know it” (Žižek, Violence 53). This disavowal involves a violation of his spontaneous ethical proclivity, brutal repression, and self-denial. For Levinas, what would make this event ethical, is precisely Maass’s proximity to the Other, for his proximity makes him answer for his responsibility to the neighbor. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas takes into account the self-referential face of the neighbor. To encounter the face and claim that a face can “guarantee itself,” is to acknowledge the face as the nonlinguistic point of reference between the ‘big Other’ of the symbolic order and the neighbor-as-Other (202). For Žižek, however, the human face is always already caught up in the symbolic order, engaged as that which gentrifies the reality of the neighbor (“Neighbors” 146). The neighbor is therefore never revealed in the face of the Other, but in his/her defacement: “Far from displaying ‘a quality of God’s image carried with it,’ the face is the ultimate ethical lure…The neighbor is not displayed through a face; it is in his or her fundamental dimension a faceless monster” (ibid 185).