Foucault Parts 1 & 2
In part 1, Nae talks about reading Foucault on the negative against policy teams either as a kritik of biopolitics and/or how biopolitics influences other literature bases. Nae recommends watching the introduction to Foucault video that was released yesterday because it explains a lot of key terminology Foucault uses that Nae will also use. Foucault is important because it shows up in lots of other literature bases, so knowing about biopolitics can be important for lots of other arguments.
There’s a lot of different arguments in debate that you can use Foucault against because it spreads such a wide literature base. Nae found biopolitics and Foucault useful as a debater because the management of life questions most impact scenarios policy teams use. Nae also found it particularly useful against affirmatives that used the state as a normative political tool to talk about race, gender, and sexuality. This makes biopolitics useful in not only impact calculus debates but also framework style debates. For the thesis, there’s a broad range of things you could say about the management of life and its relationship to the resolution.
In part 2, Nae continues talking about how to execute Foucault against policy teams. Foucault is a really strategic argument in debates because it can match up against util style impacts and questions how debate creates epistemology.
On the link level, Nae recommends using biopolitics not only to critique particular institutions, plans, and ideologies, but also to indict debate. Contesting the affirmative on both of these levels allows you to more successfully indict the affirmative. Nae gives some really good tips for how to make links and use them against the perm through the management of life. Biopower can also be successful against teams that try to decrease the role of using the state.
Using the concept of what it means to live and what life is can be really useful at the impact level of the debate and make sure your links have strong internal links to your impacts. It can also help you contest the impact comparison and top level portions of the debate.
For the alternative, there are a lot of different options and Nae recommends going farther to the left with something that rejects the usage of state power. Nae thinks that alternatives that go further to the left are better equipped at answering permutations.
