The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza

223 Pages·2012·6.42 MB·English

by  Eyal Weizman

The Least of All Possible Evils
Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza

EYAL WEIZMAN
The research for this book was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) project Forensic
Architecture and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts This edition first published
by Verso 2011
© Eyal Weizman 2011
The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the images in this
book. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of
copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any omissions and would be grateful if notified of any
corrections that should be incorporated in future editions.
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
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Contents
1. The Humanitarian Present
665
Lesser Evildoers
Pangloss’s Law
Calculating Machines for the Reduction of Evil
An Ethical Governor
War of the Mad
Bulls and Spiders
2. Arendt in Ethiopia
On Omelettes and Eggs
The Politics of Compassion
Challenging Third Worldism
Humanitarian Optics
The Testimony of the Dead
Armies of Compassion
Minima Moralia
Aid Archipelago
Polis and the Police
3 The Best of All Possible Walls
Material Proportionality
Wallfare
Milgram in Gaza
A Legislative Attack
Anarchists Against the Law
4. Forensic Architecture: Only the Criminal Can Solve the Crime
Before the Forum
Speaking Bones
The Era of Forensics
Dying to Speak
The Forensics of Forensics
Forensic Fetishism
The Thirtieth Civilian
The Design of Ruins
The Devil’s Advocate
Epilogue: The Destruction of Destruction
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
Itzhak Ben Israel explains to Yotam Feldman his mathematical equation for the destruction of Hamas by
eliminating (arresting or killing) its operatives. ‘The Lab’ 2011.
1
The Humanitarian Present
Having survived the butchery of a gruesome battle, Candide escapes the army
and comes upon his long-time tutor Pangloss. The two decide to set out on a sea
journey. A tempest wrecks their ship, killing almost all aboard. Pangloss and
Candide are washed ashore in Lisbon upon a plank. ‘Hardly do they set foot in
the city . . . than they feel the earth tremble beneath them; a boiling sea rises in
the port and shutters the vessels lying at anchor. Great sheets of flames and ash
cover the streets and public squares; houses collapse, roofs topple on to
foundations, and foundations are levelled in turn; thirty thousand inhabitants
1
without regards to age or sex are crushed beneath the ruins.’ But master
Pangloss, emerging from under a pile of the city’s rubble – drawings of which
later generations will regard as the ‘first media representations of a distant
2
catastrophe’ – argues that there is no effect without a cause. He explains to
Candide that divine calculations, obscure to the human mind, mean that all that
happened is ‘for the very best’. For Pangloss, of course, all was always for the
best in the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire’s grotesque satirical adventure
novel continues across seas and continents, witnessing the cruelties, violence and
destruction of both the human and divine order: from war in Europe through
storms and earthquakes to the colonialism of the eighteenth century in the
Americas. Indeed across the Atlantic, our two protagonists observe how the
Jesuits in Paraguay, claiming to have arrived there to help and redeem the
indigenous peoples, actually abuse and enslave them.
Candide was written in the wake of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, tsunami and
fire, and in the middle of the Seven Years’ War, which wreaked havoc across
Europe and its American colonies. In the shadow of this catastrophe a new order
of urban planning emerged in Lisbon, a gridded geometry that was later exported
to the American colonies. The sequence of devastation, described above,
prompted Voltaire to challenge and ridicule Leibnizian optimism and with it the
concept of ‘necessity,’ which implies that destructive events somehow serve an
invisible and mysterious purpose in a world in which the relationship between