The 1AC is crisis management. They have pointed towards violent symptoms of this global regime without pointing towards the violent crisis that constitutes its foundation. Colonial racial capitalism undergirds the 1AC advocacy and legitimizes a future world that murders countless bodies in the name of the preservation of a few.

What attracts me to this scenario is the short-circuiting of a whole series of expectations and assumptions, not only about psychoanalysis, but about crisis, time, illness, cure, capitalism, life, death, and politics—the very problems around which this book is organized. The lesson here is that if you really want to understand a system and make significant change (and not just manage symptoms), you must look away from what appears to be the immediate crisis and toward the crisis that is at work even when the system is functioning well. This crisis constitutes the system itself; the system cannot function without its internal crisis. Psychoanalysis is less about digging up buried treasures than about carefully inspecting the ground—a relent- less listening to and intervention with the patient when he or she is most functional and thus symptomatic (or most symp- tomatic and thus functional). Psychoanalysis, therefore, is not a last-ditch effort at disaster relief. It might serve as an object lesson to study why this project of psychoanalysis departs so radically from the vast majority of cultural representations of psychoanalysis, representations in television, film, not to mention many clinical case studies in which the ‘‘aha moments’’ are perfectly cued by close-ups, cloying music, or narrative momentum. Crisis is not what happens when we go wrong; crisis is what happens when we go right. The logic of this last sentence will serve as a sort of mantra throughout this work. Take, for example, capitalism: crisis is not what happens when capitalism goes wrong, but when it goes right. In this light, Alan Greenspan’s mea culpa in October 2008 (when the bankruptcies and bailouts began to flow) is particularly revealing. Greenspan was shocked; he thought he understood how things worked. But what really shocked Greenspan is that today’s capitalism is still capitalism. He believed that we were in some mode of production that could have the productivity and wealth-generation of capitalism without capitalism’s crises, or at least a capitalism in which the crises could be managed by mathematicians and derivative dealers. What a horror it must have been for Greenspan to realize that capitalism is still the system it has always been: one that cannot suspend its fundamental rules of profit creation and expansion under any circumstances (and thus cannot suspend class conflict, gender inequality, imperial violence, brutal dispossessions, ecological destruction, and psychological suffering). The point is that crisis is built right into the system of capitalism—not only when it busts, but when it booms. Exploitation occurs within capitalism, therefore, not only when pen- sions disappear, jobs are slashed, and factories burn down, but it is also present when contracts are obeyed and factories are clean and safe. To prove this point, one should consider the valorization of surplus value and the logic of the commodity. For example, the inequality built into capitalism is due not simply to the pursuit of profit or so many bad capitalists, but to the seemingly natural and benign control a capitalist has over a worker’s labor power. That labor power is reproduced daily with the making, selling, and buying of commodities—especially when the capitalist is kind, com- passionate, and humane. Such an understanding of capitalism, one that emphasizes a larger structural logic over the personalities of the individual actors, is, in fact, the foundation of all economic theories, from neoclassical to Marxist. Moreover, understanding capitalism in such a way compels us not to moralize cheaply about factory layoffs or be incredulous about financial meltdowns. These should be expected by anyone who under- stands capitalism. In other words, these adverse effects are not simply about greedy politicians and corrupt executives. There are plenty of them. But to focus on them is a strategic error. In March 2009, headlines were filled with outrage over the bonuses paid to Wall Street executives. The problem, however, was, and still is, not the bonuses at American International Group, but the radical inequality of income that sustains the larger economic system itself. Yes, outrage should be directed at the executives who received lavish bonuses despite selling the very financial products that exacerbated the meltdown. But a more focused and sustained outrage should be directed at the hard socioeconomic fact that these executives make $15,000 an hour compared to the $8 an hour of the custodial staff. Somehow this legal and even celebrated model of wealth distribution does not deserve our condemnation, but the latest scandal or public humiliation does. The great trauma of the economic meltdown of 2008, I believe, is only now descending upon us. That trauma has to do with the recognition that capitalism is still here, that despite the most significant economic crisis since the Great Depression the very structures in place since capitalism’s inception have not substantially changed. It is brutal enough to lose one’s job or one’s home due to the crisis, but when very little changes in the process then we lose on both fronts. We lose our savings and our exhilaration, if not our joy, at watching the system give way—not to mention our desire, however unconscious, for the the world to be organized differently. This rethinking of crisis returns us to the anecdote about the psycho- analyst and to the problem of time. If crisis is always at work and not a sign that something has gone wrong, then how might we understand the time of crisis? Crisis used to be defined by its short-termness—requiring a decision on the spot, with no possibility of deferral, evasion, or repression. A crisis means we can, perhaps, suspend our usual rules and ethical standards because we must ‘‘act now!’’ But something has happened on the way to the shelter. The bombs have been launched, but they are suspended overhead, allowing us to continue on with our lives under the shadow of destruction. If crisis is always already with us, if it is the rule of the system rather than its exception, then in what cases could we justify suspending our principles? Would we have to live by them all the time? Or would this new temporality of crisis demand the rethinking of our society’s cherished principles altogether? Rethinking the meaning of crisis not only affects our temporal experience of the present, but also colonizes and preempts claims upon the future. Paul Virilio once argued that what defines the post–Cold War moment of accelerated communications and military technologies is a deadly simultaneity, a temporality in which a target is destroyed the mo- ment it becomes visible. “When a missile threatening in ‘real time’ is picked up on a radar or video, the present as mediatised by the display console already contains the future of the missile’s impending arrival at its target.” To see the enemy is to have already killed him. This logic intensifies an older paradigm in which one first scopes a target before trying to kill it. The converse logic holds that one kills the target even though one does not see it. Instead of precision bombs, we have under this converse logic carpet or cluster bombs and casualties, intended and unintended, that are identi- fied after the fact. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the improvised weapons detonated by suicide bombers, also fall into this lethal category. This series of military logics, however, requires one more turn: today one kills the target but it does not die, at least not immediately. The target has been killed but has yet to die. There is a time warp at work, one in which the future has already come and is still to come, a double future. We can think about ecological predictions that forecast the end of natural resources and how it is already too late to reverse this categorical trend, or we can return to the military realm and consider how posttraumatic stress disorder attacks the soldier in the future for acts committed or witnessed in the present. In both cases there is a looping of time in which the future is spelled out in advance, granting to the meantime an impossible location that is heading somewhere and nowhere at once. But this is not a simple fortune telling, a determination already decided and thus eliminating contingency. This is, rather, a radically different experience and operation of time, one in which categories such as determination and contingency are refunctionalized. Or, even more to the point, this is an experience of time that enables the very shifting of how time works. The paradigmatic condition illustrating the already dead is that of the medical patient who has been diagnosed with a terminal disease only to live through medical advances that then turn the terminal illness into a chronic one. The disease remains life threatening, still incurable, even though it is managed and controlled, perhaps indefinitely. The patient is now afforded a meantime that functions like a hole in time, an escape route to somewhere else and a trap door to where he began. Freud could only anticipate this double future in 1937 in a letter to Marie Bonaparte, written two years before his death and while he was in great physical and psycho- logical pain (due to oral cancer and Nazi advances in Austria, respec- tively): ‘‘In order to find all of this bearable, one must remind oneself constantly that one really has no right to be living any longer.’’ Freud’s statement is symptomatic of his moment, while something qualitatively different is at work today. Of course, our present shares much in common with the modernity of Freud’s time, but to tease out the differ- ences we might want to invert Freud’s statement: in order to find the current moment unbearable, we must remind ourselves that we really have the right to die. This is less about euthanasia, masochism, or legalized suicide than a certain relation to time, a relation to the present and the future, as well as the capacity to shape these temporal realities. Whereas Freud’s project was to make the unbearable bearable by way of psychoana- lytical practice, ours is to make the bearable unbearable by any means possible or, and perhaps more important, by any means impossible—un- bearable to the extent that we cannot help but act toward another way of feeling and being, and impossible to the extent that we cannot help but act even even in the face of an unavoidable fate.≥ What is the relation between unbearability and revolution? Or between bearability and the status quo? Or between deadening environments (both social and ecological) and our relationship to death itself? This is where politics, culture, and medicine come together, especially around the con- cept of the already dead and the problem of time. We have entered a new chronic mode, a mode of time that cares little for terminality or acuteness, but more for an undying present that remains forever sick, without the danger of sudden death. The maintenance of the status quo becomes, if not quite our ultimate goal, what we will settle for, and even fight for. If the system cannot be reformed (the cancer eradicated, the ocean cleaned, the corruption expunged), then the new chronic mode insists on maintaining the system and perpetually managing its constitutive crises, rather than confronting even a hint of the terminal, the system’s (the body’s, the planet’s, capitalism’s) own death. In this work, I produce this concept of ‘‘the chronic,’’ place it in the context of late capitalism, and track it in the political-economic, cultural, and medical realms. Departing from how changing medical practices (dominated by a new paradigm of targeted drug therapy and biotechnology) have reconfigured standard notions of ‘‘cure,’’ as well as the meanings of ‘‘acute,’’ ‘‘terminal,’’ ‘‘crisis,’’ and ‘‘mean- time,’’ I explore the radical and reactionary effects of this temporal shift.