The Tactics and Ethics of Humanitarianism Alberto Toscano

The Tactics and Ethics of Humanitarianism
Alberto Toscano
Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism,

and Development, Volume 5, Number 1, Spring 2014, pp. 123-147 (Review)
Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/hum.2014.0003
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/536274
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]
Essay Review
The Tactics and Ethics of Humanitarianism
Alberto Toscano
After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights

Robert Meister
New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. x Ⳮ 526 pp.
The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from

Arendt to Gaza
Eyal Weizman
London: Verso, 2011. viii Ⳮ 196 pp.
Among intellectuals of a more oppositional cast, the idea that reference to human
rights has served as a threadbare cloak for both Realpolitik and depoliticization is
uncontroversial. Ever since its consolidation in the 1970s as a crucial ingredient in the
legitimation of U.S. superpower, the notion that international politics should be
subordinated to human rights has shadowed military operations whose claim to act in
the name of humanity is easily debunked.1 The invasions and occupations of Iraq and
Afghanistan, together with the deployment of a bewildering arsenal of supra- and
infraterritorial violence, from renditions to drone strikes, have done much to eliminate
the moral halo that still accompanied the notion of humanitarian intervention well
into the 1990s.
But persuasive as efforts to trace the rhetoric of humanitarianism to imperial expe-
diency have been, they have not exhausted the attractions and ambiguities of the
discourse of human rights. The innervation of human rights in mentalities and prac-
tices that transcend the task of legitimation means that they cannot simply be reduced
to a screen for capitalist imperatives and raison d’état. This is particularly true of the
concerns of the two volumes under review: transitional justice, investing human rights
with the power to cauterize histories of violence and reestablish peaceable polities
‘‘after evil’’; and moral technologies of calculation, calibrating a violence that requires
constant economizing if it is to have the ‘‘least of all possible evils’’ as its output.
Both Meister and Weizman take as their implicit starting point the conviction,
most forcefully advanced in Alain Badiou’s Ethics, that post-theological invocations of
evil have bolstered the postpolitical politics of parliamentary capitalism, and given
succour to the neocolonial and neoimperial activities of liberal democracies. But in
moving beyond the ideology critique of human rights, to asking how the prevention
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of ‘‘evil’’ comes to shape contemporary power, they push us toward a more fine-
grained interrogation of a ‘‘sentimental humanitarianism’’ that, despite having lost the
bombast of its early days, continues to limit our political horizon.
These two projects can also be mined to reconstruct the politics of human rights
as a politics of time. In both, what mediates between the seemingly transcendent
rhetoric of evil and the empirical demands of force are schemas—transition and calcu-
lation—which are profoundly temporal, weaving together categories like urgency, crisis,
memory, strategy, and forecasting, but also foreclosing those temporal categories of
futurity (liberation, revolution, justice) that have traditionally defined projects of
emancipation.2
Transitions without Justice

Contemporary human rights discourse is counterrevolutionary.3 This verdict is
bolstered by the genealogical nuance and psychoanalytic insight with which Robert
Meister constructs his challenge to the elision of politics by ethics that has marked the
post-1989 period. Periodization is foregrounded in After Evil, which diagnoses the past
two decades as the reversal of a two-hundred-year-long period in which, after their
Jacobinic (rather than Jeffersonian) inception, the rights of man were the normative
dynamo behind revolutionary politics. Briefly: ‘‘The main idea that post-cold war
humanitarianism claims to supersede is the revolutionary concept of justice-as-
struggle’’ (Meister, 21). In this shift of human rights from the register of revolution to
that of counterrevolution, in this occlusion of justice under the sign of order and
pacification, the temporal and political idea of transition, so critical to Meister’s
design, operates on at least two levels.
First, the shift from the dominance of an emancipatory agenda to that of a reac-
tionary consensus. Not that prior to 1989 the ball was firmly in the court of
radicalism—indeed, the emergence of a distinctly counterrevolutionary articulation of
human rights can be dated to the mid-seventies, to the time of the boat people, Jimmy
Carter’s Human Rights Doctrine, the nouveaux philosophes, and the emergence of a
phalanx of humanitarian NGOs. Rather, it is a matter of identifying the consolidation
of a common sense that sees the struggle for the good as subordinate, or contrary to,
the prevention of evil. Second, we have the various institutional, paralegal, and ideo-
logical operations encapsulated by the idea of transitional justice. The latter is recast
by Meister as a political, temporal, and psychoanalytic paradigm that grounds our
moment in persuasive practices that put the idea of root-and-branch social transfor-
mation beyond the pale. It is Meister’s sustained interrogation of the very idea of
transitional justice that sets his work apart from other critiques of human rights.
Late twentieth-century human rights discourse can be seen to have arisen in the
volatile marriage between, on the one hand, an anti-authoritarian, post-1968 ethics of
conviction and, on the other, an indictment of communist state repression. The flim-
siness of a position that prided itself in speaking truth to power, but was selectively
championed by one of the two superpowers, was for the most part resolved after 1989,
with erstwhile radicals celebrating the fact that power itself could at last speak the
truth. Sentimental humanitarianism and disenchanted Realpolitik celebrated their
union under the sign of NATO. Though complementing them, and animated by
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similar disquiets, Meister’s account steers clear of familiar exposés of the new military
humanism.
Instead, he unearths a metahistorical, phantasmatic matrix behind the counterrev-
olutionary understanding of human rights, not by revealing the contortions of ethical
legitimations for military intervention but by considering how the main positive insti-
tutional invention of the human rights turn—truth and reconciliation
commissions—can allow us to observe how time, justice, and agency are articulated
in our present moment. If political transitions are processes aimed at constituting a
‘‘we,’’ what does the new figure of transition (antithetical to transitions deemed to
herald new men and women) tell us about the subjects of human rights discourse?
A first impression is that the heroic, futural we of liberation has given way to the
fragile we of survival, the precarious collectivity of the vulnerable. But this would be
to take at face value the paradigmatic character given to the story of the survivor or
witness in contemporary ethical thought. Meister tells us that ‘‘today’s globally
dominant view of human rights is no longer addressed to victims who would become
revolutionaries but, rather, to beneficiaries who do not identify with perpetrators. It
encourages them to acknowledge past evil as what they would have opposed so that
future evil will not have been a repetition of it. The effect of such confession and
conversion is to make the moment of its occurrence—which is always present—
discontinuous with the now repudiated past’’ (viii, emphasis original). His ethico-legal
categorization of subjects—into victims, perpetrators, and beneficiaries—is crucial to
his endeavor to draw human rights discourse outside of its comfort zone. It is a materi-
alist gesture, welcome in its ‘‘vulgarity,’’ though also prey to the individualist pitfalls
of any cost-benefit analysis when it comes to social thought: not every revolution is a
matter of retaliation or redress.
Who, then, is this ideal addressee of human rights discourse? Not, contrary to a
romantic view of human rights, the victim. Neither is it, primarily, the unvictimized
rescuer. No, it is the beneficiary—that is to say, those who have accrued privileges
from the violations of human rights. Human rights culture, ‘‘which identifies itself
with the innocence of past victims, is, in fact, an ideology of continuing beneficiaries
whose complicity in the former violation is now masked’’ (260). By these lights,
human rights discourse would amount to a kind of transfiguration of the victor that
combines a temporal adjustment with a spatial dislocation. The beneficiary is trans-
formed into an ethical spectator who can evade the irksome question of his ongoing
relationship to the wrongs at hand by entertaining a counterfactual scenario. The
‘‘never again’’ is linked to an inner moral theater: how would I have acted? We can
imagine the likes of British prime minister David Cameron engaging in this kind of
exercise precisely as a way of disavowing his continued benefit from the payouts given
to his slaver ancestors in the wake of abolition.4 The ethical present of the spectator is
thereby disjoined from the persistence of past wrongs. In the mirror of moral horror
and compassion, the beneficiary can forget his material ties to ongoing harm and
enjoy his pity: ‘‘Only when we imbue the victim’s suffering with our own sense of
moral worth do we equate feeling good about ourselves with feeling bad about him’’
(171, emphasis original).
For such a transition to succeed, a fictional link to the original injustice (how
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would I have acted under slavery?) has to displace the actual link, that of benefit.
Coming after evil entails always being before a justice that is either postponed or
abrogated. Why? Because justice is an ‘‘intertemporal . . . struggle against the ongoing
effects of bad history’’ (8, emphasis original). The character of our present is at stake:
is it a point whence we can look back on wrongs, and forward to their prevention; or
is it a time still infused with a violence that calls for moral and material transfor-
mation? Is evil something we once beheld and can now avert, or is it written into our
everyday lives (as exploitation, privilege, humiliation, exclusion, and so on)?
Where contemporary human rights discourse joins the continuity of memory with
the discontinuity of a subject innocent of his benefit, a revolutionary thinking of
justice demands the rupture of political novelty in order to undo the evils that endur-
ingly structure our present. If the new is the just, it is because the end of evil must be
conjoined with the beginning and not the postponement of justice, by a political
break: the destruction and foundation of an order—not, or not only, the conversion
of a subject. For Meister, ‘‘evil cannot be past until justice here and now becomes
imperative’’ (x). Liberal theories of transition ‘‘assume that it is never too late for
repentance and always too soon for justice. I assume, along with Dante, that, even
when repentance comes too late, justice can never come too soon’’ (79, emphasis
original). For human rights liberalism, this neutralization of justice is grounded in a
time of emergency. In After Evil, however, the indefinite postponement of justice is
constitutive of the dominant understanding of transition, inasmuch as demanding
justice in the present—the redistribution of ill-gotten gains, or the reversal of iniq-
uitous privilege—is deemed to interfere with the imperative to come to terms with
past evil, and with the creation of a precarious ‘‘we’’ out of both victims and benefi-
ciaries, now suitably separated from perpetrators.
To get a sense of what is at stake in this process, consider two cases that Meister
dwells on at length: North American slavery and South African apartheid. Both are
dominated at the unconscious level by the perpetrator-beneficiary’s ‘‘projective identi-
fication’’ onto the victim; that is, the tendency to transfigure one’s own historical
violence against subjugated groups into the fearful imagination that, at the earliest
opportunity, the oppressed will revolt and massacre the oppressors. Drawing on
Melanie Klein, Meister regards this psychic structure of violence, in which the domi-
nator re-experiences his own aggression toward the dominated as a fear of the latter’s
violent designs, as the very ‘‘basis of politics’’ (148).5 This projective identification
need not be directly malevolent. This, for example, is the case for affirmative action,
as justice postponed rather than affirmed, for ‘‘mainstream affirmative action jurispru-
dence is poised between two white fantasies: the fantasy of black gratitude for having
been rescued and of black hatred for having been persecuted. Both these fantasies are
projective identifications: in neither are the interests of present-day blacks themselves
politically negotiable’’ (105).
Meister provides a timely exemplification of this process in his analysis of the
‘‘survivor story’’ that underlay Abraham Lincoln’s efforts to recast America as a nation
‘‘after slavery.’’6 Contrary to the revolutionary project of ‘‘immediatist’’ abolitionism,
the justice of Nat Turner and John Brown, or the radical-reformist project of Black
Reconstruction, which Du Bois recounted so brilliantly, Lincoln’s project of national
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unity demanded the forging of a nonantagonistic ‘‘we.’’ For this post-traumatic
collective subject to emerge—amalgamating erstwhile slave-hands and slave-
masters—the ongoing injustice of slavery after its abolition cannot be truly recognized.
In this mythic framework, the collective suffering of war atones for but does not
redress the evils of slavery, exorcising the upsetting effects of victors’ and victims’
justice. Meister is enough of a materialist to note that this national myth is no doubt
entangled with class expediency and political compromise, restored order and
continued exploitation. He also notes how much this narrative of racial reconciliation
rested on a deeper injustice to those who did not survive as part of the nation but
whose claim to sovereignty had to be quashed in order to permit the symbolic unity
of the post–Civil War polity: the indigenous population. Meister is particularly acute
in delineating what we could call the psychic time of power: ‘‘National recovery is,
essentially, a survivor story, and in Lincoln’s own story of America it was not essential
for indigenous people to survive. He assumed that we, as their successors, were to
survive them. Since Lincoln, we have become a single nation based on the equality of
newcomers and natives and also on the denial of the general proposition that indi-
geneity confers a special right to self-determination’’ (102, emphasis original).
Meister’s account is more persuasive as a philosophical reconstruction of the
fundamental fantasies of the U.S. polity than as an excavation of the practical and
ideological relations between racism and settler colonialism. He effectively identifies
some of the unspoken presuppositions behind U. S. conceptions of political freedom,
for instance in this paraphrase of the state’s founding creed: ‘‘We who have come
together in this place have the right not to be ruled from afar so that we can exercise
the right we do have to rule or displace those who were here before us’’ (127, emphasis
original). One doesn’t have to scratch so far under contemporary discourse about a
postracial state to find the national and international effects of disavowed settler-
colonialism and a Herrenvolk democracy that, now moralized and stripped of explicit
biological features by narratives of exceptionalism, continue to underlie American
liberalism. What is particularly remarkable about this imperialist structure of feeling
is how it combines an idea of race based on settlement with an exterminatory raciali-
zation of the native.
Here we can already see the dialectic of settler and native—of race and place—that
made conceivable the modern politics of collective extermination. As pure dialectic, it
is inherently reversible: the settler can declare himself to be a native and declare the
native to be a foreigner. When, for example, the Dutch settler becomes an Afrikaner
and the Puritan settler an American, the new story is that the indigenous people were
just earlier settlers. They are, within the terminology used, a different race—invaders
from a different time and therefore subject to displacement, absorption, extermi-
nation, or all three (126).
Relying on the notion that projective identification is politically foundational,
Meister seems to wish to ground the very idea of national, popular, and territorial
sovereignty in a disavowed racial logic of extermination. As he writes, drawing on the
legal vocabulary that permeates the book,
Territorial rule is a species of property-based remedial justice (distinct, for example,
from monetary reparation inter vivos) in which the people are an intergenerational
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community—the living, the dead, and the yet unborn—that can imagine itself as
the victim of extermination. Thus popular sovereignty is, essentially, dominion by
a people over land as a permanent defense against racialized persecution. (133,
emphasis original)
Though one cannot falsify a statement about the fantasy structure of a given politics,
I wonder to what extent the dialectic of race and place specific to the experience of
settler-colonial Herrenvolk democracies can be generalized, especially when such
democracies depended, in their conception of representation as in their historical
responses to subaltern challenges, on the neutralization of popular sovereignty.7 Do
all politically constituted peoples need to imagine themselves as (potential) victims of
exterminatory violence? For whom, and at what level, can sovereignty be recoded as
‘‘remedial justice’’?
The limits of a psycho-political analysis are also discernible in chapter 6, ‘‘Still the
Jewish Question?,’’ where the absence of a methodological check on what counts as a
verifiable ‘‘structure of feeling’’ mixes the insightful with the improbable. On the one
hand, for instance, Meister can be acute about the ways in which U.S. geopolitical
thought is overdetermined by its imagination of Israel.8 He writes of ‘‘the Israeliness
of the way the U.S. expresses itself in matters of human rights. Through Human
Rights Discourse . . . the U.S. has appropriated Jewish American victimary identity to
describe its own global hegemony—that we have always been an Israel is now taken
to explain why the U.S. is hated by anti-Semites throughout the world’’ (203, emphasis
original). On the other, he proposes a Judeo-Christian Pauline matrix to human rights
discourse as determining the place of Israel within the political imaginary. Despite the
unique place of anti-Semitism in the history of European racism, I doubt that ours is
a moment in which ‘‘everyone who claims political high ground is also claiming to be
either the authentic claimants to the grievances traditionally raised by Jews or the
rescuers of those legitimate claimants,’’ or that this ‘‘is why, among all the states that
have bad practices, Israel is singled out as the one state that should not have them’’
(198, emphasis original). When it comes to Israel we should be especially careful to
distinguish political fantasies and ideologies from the material and geopolitical prac-
tices of states. That said, Meister’s excavation of the way in which the temporal
structure of Zionist thought resonates with human rights discourse, namely in Ben-
Gurion’s vision of Jewish Holocaust victims as ‘‘retroactive future citizens of a State
of Israel that did not exist at the time of their death’’ (193), is striking and suggestive.9
Meister’s quasi-transcendental inquiry into human rights discourse is on firmer
footing in his engagement with the South African Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (TRC), here presented as the high point of a legalized ethics of tran-
sition. The South African case brings home the epochal premise for the work of
reconciliation: the declaration of death that affects the two names of revolutionary
justice in the twentieth century, socialism (or communism) and anticolonialism.
Human rights discourse is resolutely postsocialist and postcolonial (which explains
how it can cohabit with neoliberalism as with neocolonialism). It is a discourse that
participates in the multifaceted process of displacing the foundation of a new, just
society—recall the original program of the African National Congress and its
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allies—by rearticulating political victory as a moral victory stripped of claims to
material justice, abolishing the racial order without undoing its ongoing consequences
or threatening its historical beneficiaries.10
Demonstrating the capacity of his triad of victim/perpetrator/beneficiary to
produce acute political insights, Meister proposes that the ‘‘crucial, and controversial,
assumption behind the TRC is that an evil can be truly dead even though its benefi-
ciaries continue to prosper from it’’ (54, emphasis original). He adds:
The legislation establishing the TRC effectively gave it two years to transform this
political compromise into a moral victory over apartheid. Its central assumption
was that the struggle against apartheid had been won morally, if not militarily,
and that the nation as a whole could realize that victory by achieving a consensus
that apartheid was an evil that must never be repeated. What could it mean to
‘‘live on’’ after this moral victory? Was having won consistent with pursuing the
rest of the agenda for which the liberation movement struggled? Or must the
historical struggles against capitalist exploitation and settler colonialism be aban-
doned now that majority rule had been achieved? Was having won the democratic
struggle for majority rule consistent with continuing the struggle against capitalist
exploitation (and for workers’ rule)? With having won the struggle against settler
colonialism (and for native rule)? Who had won those struggles if they were now
abandoned? The symbolic task of the TRC was to enact a backward-looking logic
of having won that could supersede the forward-looking goal of winning all three
struggles at once. (51)
The moral architecture of transitional justice sutures the open wounds and
accounts of the past, in a present defined by reconciliation but implicitly determined
by its neglect of the structures of injustice, reproduced in and as racialized capitalism.
Remembering and recounting are pitted against analyzing and contextualizing, in a
manner that echoes Meister’s potent criticism of Levinas’s ethics of alterity as
providing, from the standpoint of a peacemaking ‘‘third party,’’ a lofty rationale for
‘‘justice’’ without redistribution, a mere ‘‘redistribution of affect’’ (61), which makes
possible ‘‘an adjournment of the politics of hastening the future and that of undoing
the past’’ (46).
The discourse of transition here operates to rescind the link between benefit and
violence, and to transform the beneficiary into a virtual witness to the past wrongs
that he could have but wouldn’t have committed. Just as it cleanses the beneficiary of
the stain of the perpetrator, allowing the continued and now innocent enjoyment of
privilege, transition gleans the good victim from the bad—the one who won’t rest
content with a moral victory. Where true justice would require structural redress and
a new foundation, transition conjures up a moral spectacle. Performance replaces
remedy. The TRC accordingly relies on a ‘‘melodramatic mode of presentation’’ whose
project is ‘‘to equate the experience of pain with the achievement of truth and the
infliction of cruelty with evil’’ (63, emphasis original). There thus seem to be two
primary, and interlinked, modes of averting the consequences of the impersonal guilt
that accompanies benefiting from evil: a ritual of self-reproach, performing individual
culpability the better to distance collective guilt; and an even more powerful
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procedure, which consists of becoming a virtual actor in a reenactment, be it as
bystander or, more enjoyably, as potential rescuer.
The equation of evil with cruelty in human rights discourse—for which cruelty is
‘‘the only thing worth fighting against’’ (38)—involves a promotion of the body in
pain, a ‘‘somaticized’’ ethics that also sidelines the less palpable intergenerational forms
of suffering: ‘‘Evoking physical pain as the clearest form of social injury thus becomes
an ideological means to force closure on social grievance by allowing those whose pain
has stopped to stand in for all who still suffer the consequences of an injustice that is
past’’ (65). We can extract from Meister’s characterization of the TRC as the ‘‘high-
water mark’’ of human rights discourse, a broader political aesthetic of human rights
that would rely on the primacy of witnessed or recounted suffering over the spatial
dilation and temporal endurance of structural violence.11
By bringing together urgency and memory (remembering past suffering so that we
can promptly respond to its emergence, to emergency), human rights discourse allows
the pressing claims of the body in pain to occlude any claim to systemic transfor-
mation. This notionally immediate body of suffering is carefully preformatted; it must
not be the body that strives to disburse itself of the stings left by its tormentors
through the physical catharsis of revenge. That body of justice was memorably asserted
by the Jewish resistance fighter and intellectual Jean Améry, recognizing in The
Wretched of the Earth the lineaments of his own wartime ordeal:
I was my body and nothing else: in hunger, in the blow that I suffered, in the
blow that I dealt. My body, debilitated and crusted with filth, was my calamity.
My body when it tensed to strike, was my physical and metaphysical dignity. In
situations like mine, physical violence is the sole means for restoring a disjointed
personality. In the punch I was myself—for myself and for my opponent. What I
later read in Frantz Fanon’s Les damnés de la terre, in a theoretical analysis of the
behavior of colonized peoples, I anticipated back then when I gave concrete form
to my dignity by punching a human face.12
Contrary to the cathartic time of retaliation, the time anchored in the testimony of
suffering bodies is a time of ‘‘permanent transition’’ or ‘‘permanent recovery,’’ which
bases much of its legitimacy on the belief that the institution of justice (in radical
decolonization, agrarian reform, and so on) would herald another evil, yet another
turn in the ‘‘cycle of violence.’’ For the advocates of transitional justice ‘‘it is better to
live in a time when everyone believes that things have changed radically—that they are
not a continuation of past evil—even though everything appears to be nearly the same
as when evil ruled.’’ The case for this conception of justice consequently rests ‘‘on the
moral quality of the time it creates’’ (102, emphasis original).
Meister finds that quality wanting. No doubt this stems at least in part from a
tentative fidelity to a revolutionary or emancipatory conception of justice. It is unfor-
tunate in this respect that he does not dwell on the thinking and practice of
revolutionary transition. Attention to the strategic and moral complexities of trans-
formative rather than transitional justice—from Toussaint Louverture’s struggles with
the plantation system in postrevolutionary Haiti to Lenin’s reflections on the persis-
tence of capitalism and the menace of the bureaucracy during the period of the New
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Economic Policy—could have enriched the contrast between counterrevolutionary
transition and revolutionary justice. Meister’s tack is different, not to directly revive
revolutionary thought (in the manner of other critics of the human rights paradigm
like Badiou) but to propose experimental modalities of transtemporal justice that
would forestall the depoliticizing impetus of permanent transition.13
The conceptual vocabulary that Meister relies on for this purpose is drawn from
law.14 This is in keeping with the aim of producing an immanent critique of a
discourse that combines a moralization of politics with insistent reliance on legal ideas
and metaphors. The centrality of human rights ‘‘show trials’’ to his investigation fits
with this critical aim; witness Meister’s patient defense of the precise legal reasoning
innervating the Nuremberg tribunal, which he reads against a cultural interpretation
that informs the theory and practice of contemporary transitional trials. There ‘‘is
nothing in human rights culture that demands resistance now’’ (271, emphasis
original); its function is to comfort a ‘‘would-have-been opponent of past evil,’’ for
whom ‘‘now is never the time to renounce one’s present gains’’ (284). Contrariwise, a
noncultural, legal reading of the tribunal is pitted dead against this instrumentalization
of human rights for the sake of emergency. According to Meister,
the cultural interpretation of Nuremberg is a perversion of its meaning. The

tribunal’s judgment struck a blow against the Nazi culture of official impunity: it
removed the legal obstacle to enforcing international criminal law against official
violators who rationalized their acts based on emergency conditions . . . This is
precisely what compliant U.S. officials have feared since 9/11—and their fears have
become more justified as a consequence of the very legal opinions through which
they sought protection. The Nuremberg precedent assumes that, from the
perspective of government officials, it is always an emergency, whether declared or
not, that starts them down the path to human rights violations. (281, emphasis
original)
As with the hermeneutic triad of beneficiary/perpetrator/victim, which turns a

legalistic human rights discourse against itself by introducing a materialist third term
(the beneficiary), Meister’s attempt at a détournement of property law to traverse the
limits of the politics of ‘‘permanent recovery’’—in chapter 8, ‘‘Adverse
Possession’’—can be understood as an effort at immanent critique. But whereas the
critique of the temporal, psychic, and performative dimensions of transitional justice
is powerful, this experiment with legal thinking, though not devoid of provocative
insight, is far less persuasive. Meister’s ‘‘modest proposal’’ is to displace the depoliti-
cizing character of dominant understandings of how historical evils are to be addressed
by embracing market forms of reparation. The proposal is to engineer legal and
financial devices for historical redress based on ‘‘a gain-based model of reparative
justice’’ (233, emphasis original), allowing a transgenerational redistribution of
wrongly acquired wealth. We could view this exploration of legal technologies of repa-
ration as a provisional response to the closure of a political horizon, be it revolutionary
or radically reformist. Is justice possible in a market order? Notwithstanding his antic-
apitalist sympathies, Meister thinks so, writing that ‘‘historical justice—justice across
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time—is entirely conceivable to market societies that, nevertheless, resist it’’ (245,
emphasis original).
The move from political redress to reparation based on loss and damage appears
intended as a kind of critical overidentification with market society; it turns to capi-
talism’s grounding in property law, which for Meister ‘‘retains the possibility of
‘restitution,’ which is a nonpossessory right created through the operation of law as a
remedy for past injustice’’ (234). Persuaded that ‘‘restitutionary remedies are central
to the functioning of property-based societies’’ (235), Meister proposes treating the
constructive trust, presented by Benjamin Cardozo as ‘‘the remedial device through
which preference of self is made subordinate to others’’ (240), as a particularly
germane mechanism to think beyond mainstream conceptions of transition as a moral,
rather than material, remedy; accordingly, ‘‘historical grievances in market economies
can be conceived as options held in a constructive trust’’ (250). Demonstrating his
abiding concern with the settler-colonial matrix of his own society, Meister rests much
of his argument on extrapolation from indigenous property claims against colonial
dispossession. This allows him to argue that property creation
is also available as a partial remedy for historical injustices that cannot or will not
be reversed. At a time when the British Crown was giving land grants to the
colonizers of North America, indigenous occupants sometimes requested and
received in the form of property a portion of the land that had been taken in the
name of the Crown. Had such property grants been more extensive, and more
scrupulously honored, their cumulative proceeds might have curtailed the differ-
ential benefits accrued by settlers and, at least conceivably, left indigenous holders
better off than they would have been had there been neither conquest nor the
economic development that followed. But this opportunity for justice was not
forever lost. A similar result could be replicated today by creating a fund that
models retroactively the hypothetical present value of the endowments of which
indigenous peoples were unjustly deprived and which have subsequently enriched
the present holders as a direct consequence of indigenous impoverishment.
(238–39)
The very idea of the indigenous being ‘‘better off ’’ after the remedy than before
the wrong is indicative of the problem at the heart of Meister’s suggestion.15 Forced
entry into the rule of property is intimately interwoven with the material damages and
bodily cruelties of settler violence and dispossession. The very standards that would
‘‘measure’’ an improvement are the standards of forms of property and commodifi-
cation imposed upon the colonized. This is not to say that material redress is
insignificant to indigenous struggles, which would then be relegated to the merely
ideal or cultural, but rather that any reflection on this particular mode of injustice
would require thinking of property itself, or of the propertization of indigenous forms
of use, as unjust. To remain within the regime of property, in however remedial a
form, would mean still remaining prior to justice. Meister writes that ‘‘historical
injustice should be viewed, primarily, as a form of property—the creation of an
asset—rather than as personal liability for a harm . . . why not counteract the ongoing
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wealth effects of historical injustice by creating legal estates in property for disadvan-
taged groups?’’ (238, emphasis original). But he neglects that it is property that lies at
the core of the historical injustice of settler-colonialism, as it does, albeit in a radically
distinct way, with regard to slavery.
Whereas the category of the ‘‘beneficiary,’’ however reductive, allows Meister to
generate some acute counterintuitions about the blind spots of human rights, the
proposal to ‘‘commodify past injustice’’ is fundamentally corrupted by neglecting the
historical injustices written into the propertization of (indigenous) land and the
commodification of (slave) bodies. As a tactical proposal, a lesser evil, or even a
symbolic intervention, commodified remedy qua property claim may be effective
(though one would have wished for a more systematic exposition of how it would
concretely work), but I don’t think it poses a real challenge to the transitological
paradigm that Meister targets—even when, in some beguiling if confounding passages,
he explores the possibility of using the financial frame of options to recast the tempo-
rality of remedy.16 Meister’s bizarre example—giving First Peoples exclusive marijuana
licenses as a form of redress—brings home the fact that commodification is but a
different, and in some circumstances more pernicious, form of depoliticization than
the self-interested moralizing of transitional justice. Though it appears to deal mate-
rially with the question of benefit, it is at the cost of reinforcing the very system of
property that perpetuates the injustice of dispossession. As the ‘‘granting’’ of licenses
by the state suggests, the turn to commodified remedies also evades the real challenge
to such injustices represented by indigenous subjects’ reclamation of practices of use
and forms of sovereignty antithetical to the settler-colonial state and its market order.
In this sense, the rather linear vision of socialism as the limit of intramarket forms
of remedy, with which Meister closes his discussion of ‘‘adverse possession,’’ though
it rightly raises the problem of a political foundation of equality as true justice, fails
to reflect on struggles for justice today which, like the Idle No More movement in
Canada, involve a present challenge to historical injustice—an attempt to transform
society in light of that injustice, and not the demand that remedies be granted while
perpetuating the apparatus of dispossession, or accepting that political subjectivity be
articulated as the claim of property owners. If, as Meister notes, the ‘‘rule of law in
the aftermath of evil is expressly meant to decollectivize both injury and responsibility
and to redescribe systemic violence as a series of individual crimes’’ (28), isn’t this all
the more true for the rule of property law?
It is in fact by challenging this rule of (commodified) property that we can also
question Meister’s claim that there are ‘‘two paradigms of historical injustice. The first
is based on class struggle and revolves around the triad of perpetrator/victim/benefi-
ciary; the second, based on anticolonial struggle, revolves around the dyad of native/
settler’’ (304). Though early figurations of the proletariat in Marx relied on the notion
of an absolute wrong, victim and perpetrator are inappropriate terms to map the
capital relation, eliding as they do the systemic nature of economic compulsion, and
overlaying a notion of criminal harm on a conflict whose injustice is to be found in
the character of the relation itself, not simply in the relative ratios of benefit. Socialism
is not the redistribution of property but its abolition (or its transformation into a
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decommodified form: ‘‘social property’’). Moreover, Meister’s triad either individu-
alizes the class relation, again reinscribing one of the founding injustices of capital for
Marx—its atomizing drive—or treats classes as mega-individuals of sorts, such that
we could envisage the proletariat making claims for redress against the bourgeoisie.
Though the historical differences between (and within) class and anticolonial
struggles are many, it is important not only to think of colonialism in terms of its
modalities of exploitation (in other words, to think about imperialism) but also to
reflect on property as a crucial historical and analytical point of contact between these
supposedly different forms of injustice. Exploring the historical dynamics of injustice
is not, however, the principal aim or core strength of After Evil. That lies instead in
its eye-opening delineation of the temporal grammars and deep-seated fantasies that
underlie contemporary humanitarian ideology. At that level, I think the critique is
both incisive and irrevocable. In Meister’s words,
Human Rights Discourse depends upon a highly particular and contestable view
of what really happened in the twentieth century, and, above all, of whether it was
the beneficiaries of past injustice who (mostly) won. Today’s provisional winners
always want more time: the time that they have is never sufficient for justice to be
done. Their professed compassion for victims is a distinctive ethical attitude that
refuses apathy but that can also substitute for justice insofar as they consider it to
be an intrinsically valuable state of mind in a way that outrage, for example, would
not be. In monotheistic religion the role of prophets, rather than messiahs, is to
argue that something more must be done for the present time to end. (313,
emphasis original)
Destructive Measures, Forensic Methods

Where Meister digs beneath the liturgy of human rights discourse to reveal how it is
shaped by the fantasies of beneficiaries of injustice, Eyal Weizman’s The Least of All
Possible Evils traces the multiple ways in which the imperatives of rescue and
prevention are operationalized into insidious rationales for violence. The psycho-
political critique of the first is complemented, but also displaced, by the historical and
technical criticism of the second. Reading the two books in tandem sensitizes us to
the distinct manifestations of the post-1989 turn to ethics, in which quasi-theological
claims about otherness and evil refracted and informed practices that neutralized
radical political claims and worked to establish resilient frameworks of domination.
Both projects also touch on the ideological origins of human rights discourse in an
antitotalitarianism whose radical suspicion of state power soon accommodated itself
with belligerent imperial liberalism.
Though the origins of a counterrevolutionary antipolitics of human rights have
been the object of several persuasive historical narratives, its material enactments have
received far less scrutiny. Here is where Weizman’s chosen prism—the forms of calcu-
lation spawned by claims to the absolute value of human life—is so effective. Rather
than showing how human rights discourse has served as the fig leaf for geopolitical
designs, Weizman explores how humanitarianism has participated in the formulation
of new economies of violence, embodied in complex apparatuses of agency, calcu-
lation, and aggression. The shift from the register of the absolute, which characterized
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the claims of human rights against the political, to its incorporation into apparatuses
that calculate how much violence to inflict on humans, arguably provides a far deeper
criticism of what Weizman terms our ‘‘humanitarian present’’ than any mere
comparison between rhetoric and action. Humanitarianism, by this reckoning, does
not simply provide new ornaments for the enduring dynamics of domination: it mate-
rially transforms how violence is shared out.
The shift from the absolute evil that must ‘‘never again’’ be allowed to the ‘‘lesser
evils’’ that are required for preventing and preempting the greater—or the passage
from the transcendent claims of human rights to its mundane operations—finds its
matrix in that economic theology through which Leibniz, later lampooned in
Voltaire’s Candide, proposed to think of God as a calculating agency minimizing
necessary evils for the sake of a greater good. Contemporary liberalism, rejecting the
maximalist demands of justice, inherits this calculative approach, this drive ‘‘to
approximate the optimum proportionality between common goods and necessary
evils’’ (Weizman, 3). As Agamben has suggested in The Kingdom and the Glory, it
prolongs, in its economic machinations and military projections, a logic of providence
that is capable of forecasting and discounting the ineliminable risk of ‘‘collateral
damage.’’
Despite their repeated claims about the need to testify for the incalculable, human
rights and humanitarianism, together with international human rights law, have been
morally and materially enlisted in the project of calculating and ‘‘economizing’’
violence. Here the biographical and narrative dimension of The Least of All Possible
Evils is essential. As Weizman traces the increasing entanglement of the humanitarian
in the military, of the principled prevention of cruelty in the practical calibration of
violence, across three different experiences (Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in 1980s
Ethiopia; lawyers challenging the course of the apartheid wall in Israel/Palestine; the
emergence of forensic architecture within the field of human rights), he is also laying
out the case for a more fine-grained morphology and periodization of our humani-
tarian present—one that could track, in and through practices and technologies, how
the ‘‘heroic’’ moment of human rights as witnessing and unarmed intervention, which
reached its apogee in the 1980s, has made way to a far greater integration of humanitar-
ianism in the practices of state violence.
Though The Least of All Possible Evils follows Weizman’s remarkable earlier work,
Hollow Land, in wearing its method and philosophy lightly, preferring to draw
complex theoretical questions out of the research cases and objects themselves, it
retains a strong methodological impetus. This is evident in its preference, against most
critiques of the instrumentalization of human rights, for a conception of power as a
multiplicity, or assemblage, comprising a diversity of actors and objects. Against what
he presents as the tragic dilemma between accepting or refusing calculation, which
stems from a classical conception of power, the latter’s ‘‘contemporary forms . . . are
no longer so singular and unified . . . they may appear to take on the shape of a
multiplicity, a diffuse field of forces. It is a form of power that not only changes
forward; it surrounds, envelops and embeds. Political activists must constantly invent
new forms of struggle that are recognisant of this paradigm of power, but which also
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evade and subvert its embrace, attempt to rewire its webs in order to escape its calcu-
lation’’ (23–24, emphasis original). There are many echoes here of a contemporary
tendency to think of power in a networked or molecular manner, to emphasize the
elasticity and contingency of strategy and materiality, over the monolithic agency of
the state. Yet where an ambient spontaneous philosophy of multiplicity (often asso-
ciated with the works of Foucault, Deleuze, or Latour) can shade into a politics of
difference incapable of making any meaningful distinctions, Weizman’s approach
reinscribes a strong critique of violence into the terrain of ‘‘assemblages.’’
If, in our humanitarian present, ‘‘spatial organizations and physical instruments,
technical standards, procedures and systems of monitoring—the complex humani-
tarian assemblage that philosopher Adi Ophir called ‘moral technologies’—have
become the means for exercising contemporary violence and for governing the
displaced, the enemy and the unwanted’’ (4), then what is called for is not an aban-
donment of critique (as suggested by Latour) but its recalibration. To identify and
counter extreme violence today is to confront how it can be bolstered by the very
calculations enlisted in its diminution; how our problem may no longer be the
‘‘banality of evil’’ pervading a bureaucratic juggernaut but elastic and distributed prac-
tices of lessening violence. Humanitarianism is integrated into militarism through
calculation, no longer the dilemma of violence and nonviolence but rather the
‘‘balance’’ between ‘‘keeping violence at a low enough level to limit civilian suffering,
and at a level high enough to bring a decisive end to the war and bring peace’’ (9).
But the decision to inhabit the complexity of this humanitarian present, without
assuming a ‘‘clean hands’’ stance—indeed, the decision to explore the ethics and
tactics of those who, like Rony Brauman of MSF or Palestinian lawyers against the
wall or Marc Garlasco of Human Rights Watch, are immersed in the assemblage of
humanitarian violence—does not entail defusing the conflictual moment of politics.
After all, Weizman is forthright in recognizing that ‘‘it is through this use of the lesser
evil that societies which see themselves as democratic can maintain regimes of occu-
pation and neo-colonization’’ (9); that this is a process with its own abyssal, and
abysmal, political anthropology, instituting ‘‘the growing distance between the post-
human colonizer and the barely human colonized’’ (16). The racialization of the
enemy is an immensely reliable instrument in synthesizing the multiplicity of moral
technologies with the expediency of political dualisms.
We can provisionally identify in this uneasy dialectic between multiplicity and
radical antagonistic difference one of the tensions in Weizman’s account, which is also
a tension in the humanitarian present itself. If the militarization of humanitarianism
and the humanization of militarism have drawn ethical absolutes into a polyvalent
regime of calculation, it would appear that we have entered into a moral space that is
entirely relative and quantitative. Our humanitarian condition would thus be one in
which ‘‘all political oppositions are replaced by the elasticity of degrees, negotiations,
proportions and balances’’ (4). And the discourse of proportionality, establishing ‘‘a
field of equivalence in which different forms of potential and actual violence, risk, and
damage become exchangeable’’ (12), would provide the very schema for a calculative
ethics.17
But there are at least three ways in which this plural assemblage of calculation is
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conditioned by often incalculable oppositions. First, to the extent that the very fact of
calculation establishes difference with a political enemy and the legitimacy of ordered
violence. Regardless of the absolute quantity of violence, ‘‘we’’ act proportionally,
while ‘‘they’’ engage in a ‘‘disproportional’’ (21) violence without measure (‘‘theirs,’’
as Baudrillard might have observed, is a nonexchangeable, nonequivalential violence).
Second, and now from the vantage point of resistance, ‘‘to make oneself ungovernable,
one must make oneself incalculable, immeasurable, uncountable’’ (17). Third, those
who struggle to formulate tactics and ethics from within the makeshift ‘‘fields of
equivalence’’ that pervade both military and humanitarian practices do so with
reference, however labile, to certain principles which appear to exceed the domain of
calculation.
Incalculability, not absolute but relative, has many names, among them contin-
gency, indeterminacy, accident. In the absence of an omniscient, divine calculator, the
paradigm of the lesser evil is always entangled with a plurality of partially calculable
events. It is also infused by a particular kind of temporality. Though Weizman,
following his studies of the architecture of occupation, makes incisive use of spatial
and forensic criticism—diagnosing the humanitarian present through its built artifacts
and topographic arrangements, its creation and destruction of space—this present is
also the bearer of its own kinds of temporality. The technics of time of humanitari-
anism is about governing the unpredictable. In this regard, though he doesn’t explore
it further, Weizman makes a suggestive comparison between military and financial
calculations:
Like the finance specialists who acknowledge the impossibility of prediction but
do little else than calculate, the economists of violence are weighing their options
and hedging their risks under the assumption of unpredictability and uncertainty.
It is the very act of calculation . . . that justifies their action. Indeterminacy, the
very principle that makes the economies of liberal capitalism generate profit, or
burst after a sequence of failures, is also central to the conduct and potential
outcomes of the war on terror. But along with the growing capacity of techno-
logical means also grows the incalculability of their consequences. (12)
Often running against the grain of this technics of indeterminacy is an ethics of time,
whose key category is that of urgency. Much of the history of the increasing entan-
glement of humanitarian reason with raison d’état, in both its tragic and cynical
aspects, can be told as the tale of moral urgency being overpowered by military emer-
gency and political exception.
Though Weizman’s propensity is to draw a political ethics out of the tactical
response and resistance to certain moral technologies, evading the dramatic posture
traditionally associated with the problem of ‘‘dirty hands,’’ the first of his three narra-
tives—that of the response of Rony Brauman and Médecins Sans Frontières to the
Ethiopian famine and the war that served as its horizon—sounds a note that cannot
but be termed tragic. Indeed, for all of its methodological sympathy with object- and
network-centered materialisms, Weizman’s is also a biographical method, concerned
with the response of individuals in/and institutions to the rise of a calculative humani-
tarianism. What Brauman and MSF faced in the mid-1980s was the negative dialectic
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between the ethics of conviction (the seemingly absolute principle of responding to
imminent catastrophe) and the ethics of responsibility (the realization that the conse-
quences of conviction may, in spite of themselves, increase evil).
Weizman tells this tale, like the others, with narrative poise and a taste for detail,
almost as though he were enacting that very ‘‘journalism of ideas’’ that Michel
Foucault called for in the late 1970s. Here I want to extract only the salient episodes.
Foremost among these is the humanitarian epiphany that principle and purity are no
bulwark against collaboration with evil—the very nemesis for an organization like
MSF, founded on the criticism of the Red Cross’s dereliction of duty in World War
II:
It was thus not just famine but, crucially, the famine-relief effort, sponsored by
burgeoning public donations, that aggravated the situation. In an MSF board
meeting in March 1985, Brauman explained that ‘‘in Ethiopia we have realized
that aid can kill. Through deportation financed by international aid. The more
aid was coming into Ethiopia, the more people were dying. Although [the donors]
believe they supported Ethiopia, in fact their money was used for purposes which
were killing people—which were lethal.’’ (33)
It is here that Brauman drew on Arendt’s account of the collaboration of Jewish

councils with Nazism—an honest effort to lessen evil which played into the greatest
evil—to argue that under certain circumstances ‘‘abstention or withdrawal may be
preferable to action’’ (33). This exit option is just one of the possible tactics and ethics
accompanying the realization that humanitarianism is not an immaculate external
actor in the theater of war (and cruelty); that ‘‘aid participates in, perpetuates, trans-
forms and manipulates crisis: that the very presence of humanitarian missions changes
the dynamic of the conflict into which they are inserted’’ (49).
Here Brauman’s biography partakes of the ideological genealogy of our humani-
tarian present. Brauman belonged to a wave of post-1968, Maoist-inflected radicalism
that celebrated direct action and moral absolutism, castigating the Realpolitik of state
socialism. In the 1970s this volatile ultra-Bolshevism mutated, with great celerity, into
a modern strain of Cold War anticommunism, combining the critique of Stalinism
with a repudiation of Third-Worldism. The ‘‘culture of immediate and direct action,’’
shared by Brauman and his erstwhile comrades in the Gauche prolétarienne and the
French far left, ‘‘was easily transferred to the humanitarian culture of emergency’’
(37–38). A key ingredient in this shift was the conversion to the anti-utopian credo
according to which the attempt to institute the Good is an omen of great evil, as well
as a related shift from political to moral absolutism. But the apparent absoluteness of
an anti-utopian ethical stance, faced with the material realities of conflict, can serve to
justify some very relative choices. The politics that regards the military might of liberal
democracies as a lesser evil replicates another theological doctrine, that of the Pauline
katechon, of an agency or authority able to serve as a ‘‘brake’’ against the coming of
the Antichrist (a doctrine criticized from within theology for indefinitely postponing
redemption). The figure of Brauman is of interest precisely to the extent that his
practice dramatizes the ethical tension between the absolute demand to prevent cruelty
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and the relativizing calculus of the lesser evil, with its suggestion that it is ethically
imperative to collaborate with certain forms of violence in order to lessen others.
The general trend that defines our humanitarian present has been that of integ-
rating human rights and military force, prevention with preemption, rescue with
invasion, under the sign of calculation. As Weizman recounts, in the wake of the
massacres in Rwanda and Bosnia, ‘‘a number of leading agencies, OXFAM and some
parts of MSF included, started to lobby for military intervention. It was a call that
blurred the difference between those humanitarian organizations that saw their role as
the relief of suffering and human rights groups that concentrated on calls for account-
ability; accordingly, these two kinds of organization started to draw increasingly closer,
gradually blurring into the ‘integrated’ humanitarian-political-legal approach now
favoured by the UN and many nongovernmental organizations’’ (50). Brauman’s
trajectory has instead distanced him from the organization he helped to found, to
repudiate the tendency that would let humanitarianism serve as the supplement d’âme
for power politics, consolidating a new military humanism which bears many continu-
ities with the old colonialism.18 Brauman has instead opted for a humanitarian
medicine at a distance from military and political power, a minimalist humanitari-
anism: ‘‘his meaning of ‘the lesser evil’ ’’ designates the project of humanitarianism at
its most minimal, as one that ‘‘ ‘takes no political stand, makes no claim to transform
society, and doesn’t come to make war or peace, promote economic development,
help administer justice, or export democracy or human rights values’ ’’ (53).
But this ethical position is also a tactical and technical one, since it involves
reflecting on the impact of one’s own practice in a field that is at once political and
epidemiological. It has required reckoning with the space of the camp, conceived of
as an ‘‘epistemic space’’ that communicates the conflict and registers its incidence on
bodies but also serves to govern those very bodies as populations subject to imperialist
biopolitics. We encounter here another level of integration, where humanitarian agents
become the instruments through which states seek to inhibit the potentially destabi-
lizing movement of migrants. Here too, against the practice of the great part of
humanitarian NGOs (and echoing the principles of Gino Strada’s Emergency, an
organization whose practice would have fit interestingly in Weizman’s schema),
Brauman’s solution is that of a minimal ethics, embodying a tactical critique of the
political architecture of humanitarianism.
Weizman highlights Brauman’s conviction that, against this spatializing tendency
towards military-legal-humanitarian integration, (relatively) independent ‘‘humani-
tarian spaces’’ must be produced. These need not be literal spaces, ‘‘but rather sets of
operational categories, or space-bound circumstantial conditions, that make inde-
pendent humanitarian work possible. In the absence of such conditions a mission
might become counterproductive and relief organizations would do better not to
operate, or be forced to withdraw, when these no longer exist’’ (57). In Brauman’s
words,
the humanitarian space is primarily a way of measuring the humanitarian condi-

tions. They are not absolutes. How freely you can talk to patients, how freely you
can move around or go to other places to see the problems, how freely you can
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monitor the delivery and distribution of goods. . . . [The] humanitarian space is a
tool for measuring our distance from powers. (57–58)
In dialogue with the research of Manuel Herz and Michel Agier, Weizman makes a
powerful case both for considering the camp as the spatial condenser of the political
strategies that define our humanitarian present—especially those that involve the
management and racialization of migrant populations—and for taking Agier’s idea of
‘‘aid without a camp’’ as a minimalist starting point for rethinking politics. Since it
constitutes the clearest statement of Weizman’s political response to the dilemmas of
humanitarianism, it is worth here quoting him at some length:
Humanitarianism should indeed aim to provide no more than the bare minimum
to support the revival of life after violence and destruction. As long as refugees are
alive, the potential for political transformation still exists. The very life of refugees,
their life as refugees, poses a potent political claim with transformative potential,
one that represents a fundamental challenge to the states and state system that
keep them displaced. This is the reason that generations of political leaders . . .
emerge from among the refugees to become the vanguard of political struggles.
The refugees’ return to politics has unpredictable consequences, which are and
must always remain beyond the horizons of humanitarians and aid groups. Only
when humanitarianism seeks to offer temporary assistance rather than to govern
or develop can the politics of humanitarianism really create a space for the politics
of refugees themselves. This shift demands that we think about the politics of aid
. . . primarily from the question of the politics of refugees, their claims, their rights
and their potential actions, their wishes, their exercise and their evasion of power,
their potential return. It might be that only with the ultimate refusal of aid at a
time of their choice . . . with refugees constructing their own spaces, self governing,
posing demands and acting upon them—that the potentiality of their political life
will actualize. Then, where there were camps there could be cities. (61–62)
Humanitarianism could thus represent a kind of ‘‘pre-political’’ condition, a hope-

fully vanishing mediator for emancipatory politics rather than the baleful reduction of
politics to the management of bodies, be they affluent or abject. The ethical and
tactical minimalism that Weizman draws from Brauman is thus one possible answer
to the crucial question he poses at the outset of The Least of All Possible Evils, with
reference to another locus classicus of theology, Augustine, namely, ‘‘how to engage
in political practice within the complex existing force-fields of the present in a way
that also aims to break away from them?’’ (21). To refer back to the earlier tension
between calculation and incalculability (or equivalence and excess, elasticity and oppo-
sition), this passage from the camp to the city would allow us radically to circumscribe
the claims of humanitarianism and of the ‘‘ethical turn’’ more broadly, or, inversely,
to break out of the logical space within which we can even calculate what a lesser evil
might be.19 At the level of our political reflection, this would not, of course, put paid
to the problems associated with the notion of the lesser evil. In a political, rather than
humanitarian, present—as Weizman’s own passing references to revolutionary varia-
tions on the lesser evil suggest (22–23)—calculation remains a critical necessity. But
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the emergence of politics beyond the twin closures of liberal democracy and humani-
tarian intervention involves establishing different parameters for calculation, different
orders of priority, and a critique of violence that is not reducible to its ‘‘proportion-
ality.’’ This is another way of saying that Weizman’s technical and spatial criticism
could also be transferred beyond its remit to conceptualize the problems immanent to
transformative political practice.
But The Least of All Possible Evils, in spite of its passing gesture toward a politics
beyond humanitarianism, remains preoccupied with the practices immanent to calcu-
lation, and the manner in which they oblige us to think the entanglement of tactics
and ethics. In his second case study, on legal challenges to Israel’s security wall,
Weizman combines spatial criticism with a reflection on the ambivalence and
complexity of enlisting the law in the struggle against settler-colonialism. His sensi-
tivity to the way in which architecture and artifacts inhabit a political space that is
anything but smooth or transparent allows Weizman to move beyond an ideology
critique of legal resistance as always-already legitimizing the very forms of domination
it is struggling against. He enjoins us instead to think the ‘‘security wall’’ not as a
brutal immobile object but as a plastic (if still brutal) diagram that registers the
pressure of a plurality of political and material agents (though one, we should add,
very clearly overdetermined by the overall trajectory of settler-colonial strategy).20
This plasticity is precisely the problem that confronts the Palestinian lawyer
Muhammad Dahla, in his appeal to the Israeli High Court of Justice, on behalf of the
villagers of Beit Sourik, separated by the wall from their agricultural land. The elasti-
cized architecture of occupation is governed not only by military and political
expediency but by the manner in which legal challenge and forensic reasoning, framed
by a discourse articulating rights with proportionality and security, collaborate in the
production of this neocolonial space. In Weizman’s study the plasticity of the wall is
forensically represented by the three-dimensional model of its trajectory, around
which the courtroom debate pivots (and which the book records in multiple court
drawings and diagrams). The model, too, is not a transparent medium but a dense
transmitter in this power struggle:
Shaped by a legal process, the wall could be said to have been forensically engi-
neered. It has given the principle of proportionality a material and spatial
dimension. Material proportionality, then, must be the name of the process by
which proportionality analysis helps configure structures and territorial organi-
zation. It is the process by which an ethical/legal economy intersects with the
science of engineering and the making of things. Through it, the law is mobilized
in material action, arranging the distribution of rights across architectural forma-
tions and technological systems. Material proportionality gives a new meaning to
the concept of security. Security is no longer understood as existing on one side
of an equation, on the other side of which sit livelihood and humanitarian issues.
Rather, it forms an integrated logic that includes issues like livelihood, human
rights, and humanitarian concerns within the logic of security. (77–78)
As in the case of Brauman, Weizman is attentive to the way that this very
arrangement makes the position of ‘‘immanent critique’’ a precarious one indeed. The
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technical-legal dispositifs of material proportionality implicate legal resistance in the
very management of the space of occupation, at the same time that such resistance
tries, and sometimes succeeds, in wresting local victories that cannot be easily
dismissed. Weizman’s attention to the multiplicity of the ‘‘wall’’ as ‘‘interwoven and
heterogeneous’’ (80) assemblage might at times make us forget the context of radical
asymmetry and political antagonism that allows this multiplicity to function in a
remarkably unilateral manner. Nuanced calibration and brutal subjugation can go
hand in hand. And this is indeed what Weizman sees at work in Gaza, ‘‘the proper
noun for the horror of our humanitarian present’’ (6).
It is in the context of the ‘‘disengagement’’ and siege of the Strip—that grim
harbinger of an ‘‘era of colonialism without colonies’’ (141), punctuated by high-tech
onslaughts—that Israeli military lawyers and technicians calibrate how much damage
to inflict on the population. The cruelty that is euphemized by quantity is highlighted
in the account of how Israel’s policy of modulating flows in and out of Gaza translates
into chilling calculations of the minimum amount of calories necessary for repro-
ducing the biological life of its population. The economy of violence is here also to
be understood in terms of how to enact domination in its cheapest, most streamlined
form, generating a space that, though formally not occupied, is subsumed by Israel’s
military menace and biopolitical monitoring. It is in this form that we witness a
comprehensive form of violence that, while leading to relatively few direct deaths
compared to some other conflicts (Chechnya, Congo), deploys, through its
Malthusian calculus, a ‘‘rather more subtle form of killing . . . one that is undertaken
through degrading environmental conditions to affect the quality of water, hygiene,
nutrition and healthcare; by restricting the flow of life-sustaining infrastructure,
forbidding the importation of water purifiers and much-needed vitamins (mainly B12),
by restrictions on planning and by making it difficult to travel’’ (86). Politicide and
spatiocide are here relayed by infrastructural violence, a key weapon in the arsenal of
the new military urbanism.21
Here is the other side of the lesser evil, so to speak: rather than the difficult
resistance of Palestinian lawyers finding themselves the inadvertent ‘‘architects’’ of the
very apparatus they are combating, the crucial participation of Israeli lawyers in
gauging, and thus legitimating, the violence of the Israeli state. The political suspicion
cast on the very idea of law as a means of ‘‘civilizing violence’’ is all the starker: ‘‘Might
it be that these legal technologies contributed not to the containment of violence but
to its proliferation?’’ (90). Just as space is anything but a transparent medium, so is
law anything but a univocal instrument; it too is a force-field, open to forensic analysis
and use.22 In the deeply asymmetric conditions of ‘‘lawfare’’ in Israel/Palestine, as in
any situation of radically unbalanced power relations, those who seek to enlist law
against domination will often find themselves compelled to assert law’s fixity against
advocates for violence whose casuistry increasingly relies on performing a sui generis
critical legal theory—turning them, in Michael Sfard’s bitterly ironic quip, into ‘‘anar-
chists against the law’’ (95).23 Those trying to staunch the bloodshed may try to treat
law as a limit where those who rationalize state violence prefer to operate with variable
thresholds, always open for recalibration. Where his treatment of the architecture of
rescue allows Weizman to delineate, albeit negatively, a space for politics, mediated by
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a minimalist humanitarianism, the imbrication of law and warfare in the context of
Israel’s settler-colonial project seems to leave little room for maneuver, even when,
locally, that room is vital (as it no doubt is for the villagers of Beit Sourik).
Weizman’s final study takes its cue from the work of Marc Garlasco, the senior
military analyst for Human Rights Watch, who had honed his capacity to read the
signs of destruction on the other side of the humanitarian divide—as a targeting expert
for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency—and was dismissed as a consequence of the
scandal about his penchant for collecting Nazi war memorabilia. From the latter fait
divers, Weizman draws one of the lessons of his turn to forensics, encapsulated in the
chapter’s noir title: ‘‘Forensic Architecture: Only the Criminal Can Solve the Crime.’’
For Weizman, the director himself of a Centre for Research Architecture that is
currently working alongside a UN rapporteur on drone strikes, Garlasco functions not
only as a personification—a human allegory of the predicament of the lesser evil—but
as a foil for reflection on his own research practice.24 Garlasco is a disturbing foil,
inasmuch as he embodies the integration of humanitarianism and militarism under
the aegis of minimizing evil: ‘‘Agreeing on the common ground of the necessity to
control, reduce and make military violence more efficient, each of these organizations
[armies and human rights groups] agreed, for its own reasons, about the importance
of the ‘lesser evil’ in reducing civilian casualties’’ (117).
Enlisting his own experience of the devastating deployment of U.S. proportion-
ality unto Serbian territory, the HRW analyst can ‘‘reverse engineer’’ the destruction
of Gaza, gauging the traces of Israeli ordnance in the signifying rubble of building.
He too knows that space is not an empty, abstract medium. This plasticity also obtains
for intact spaces:
Concrete, plaster and other exposed surfaces register transformation in humidity,

air quality, salination and sometimes also the abrupt or violent events that happen
to them, or next to them. In this case buildings must be seen as frieze shots in
processes of constant formal transformation—they are diagrams of the social fact
itself and of the forces and complex flows that are constantly folded into their
form. (111)
This attention to space is all the more relevant in this age of infrastructural violence,
when the built environment turns into ‘‘more than just a target or a battleground’’; it
is ‘‘turned into the very things that kill’’ (100). Forensic architecture, more a trans-
versal combination of practices ‘‘at the intersection of architecture, history and the
laws of war’’ than a discipline per se, ‘‘must refer to an analytical method for recon-
structing scenes of violence as they are inscribed in spatial artefacts and in built
environments’’ (101). Relying on a hermeneutic of reversibility—‘‘rewinding’’
destroyed space until it reveals the tools of its demolition—but also on a mathematics
of probability and indeterminacy, forensic architecture is the strange offspring of our
humanitarian present and its ambivalent potentialities. Chief among them, perhaps,
is the key ethico-technical shift in the culture of human rights of which Garlasco is a
herald of sorts: from the witnessing of victims to the testimony of objects.
Intersecting a widespread if frequently overblown orientation toward the object in
contemporary theory, Weizman points us to the manner in which, from its very legal
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beginnings, forensics was the product of arrangements that were simultaneously tech-
nical and rhetorical. Forensics is born for the forum, in which humans must function
as intercessors or prostheses of the objects, so that the latter may speak. So when, as
in the Roman practice of prosopopoeia, a voice is given to the voiceless object, so that
it can teach us a lesson or reveal to us its biography, this is the product of a complex
arrangement, at once spatial and rhetorical. As Weizman summarizes,
The principle of forensics assumes two interrelated sets of spatial relation. The
first is the relation between an event and the object in which traces of that event
are registered. The second is a relation between the object and the forum that
assembles around it and to which its ‘‘speech’’ is addressed. Forensics is therefore
as concerned with the materialization of the event as with the construction of a
forum and the performance of objects and interpreters within it. (105)
This is no posthuman space but rather one of arduous translations and mise-en-
scènes.25 When the skulls of victims or perpetrators are made to ‘‘speak,’’ we are
confronted with humans turned into objects and turned back into quasi-subjects
through elaborate technical apparatuses.26 Rather than positing a new ontology of
objects by transcendental fiat, Weizman traces the emergence of some very localized
but momentous ontologies, such as those of ‘‘material witnesses’’ (a term he borrows
from his collaborator Susan Schuppli), which are at the same time rhetorics and force-
fields of conflict.
Forensic architecture does not take us out of the economy of violence that suffuses
the humanitarian present. Indeed, it is a practice of purposeful immersion, in a sense
perversely purposeful, as Weizman recognizes when he acknowledges that it depends
on a methodological fetishism, investing seemingly excessive energies into the object
so that it may become ‘‘an entry point from which the reconstruction of larger proc-
esses, events and social relations, conjunctions of actors and practices, structures and
technologies, may take place’’ (128). Though in one regard forensics does not observe
the gap between knowledge and action (you must intervene in the ruins in order to
recast them as buildings), from a political vantage point it must. On the one hand,
we have the menace, evident in legal-military-humanitarian assemblages, of a seamless
integration. On the other, the risk that forensic knowledge be distanced from any
effective intervention, turned into an ornament, an aesthetic. In the concluding pages
of The Least of All Possible Evils we can register how posing this problem requires
thinking of spatial criticism along a temporal axis. Unlike Meister, Weizman does not
seem drawn to the ruptural horizon that links novelty to justice. He is, however,
interested in bridging the gap between spaces of destruction and times of construction.
Ending on a frustratingly brief reflection on what it would mean to think of refugee
camps as spaces that could ‘‘provide a platform for political mobilization’’ (147),
Weizman gestures toward a Janus-faced forensic architecture, in which the material
ontology of a violated present could be linked to the archaeology of an emancipated
future. This forward-facing forensics would be pragmatic and practical, not prophetic,
‘‘evaluating the necessary works needed for reconstruction and their cost’’ (146).
We are perhaps allowed to wonder whether the prophetic and the pragmatic,
principle and realism can really be disjoined, whether the reconstruction of which
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Weizman writes does not demand a stronger repudiation of the anti-utopianism that
stifles our humanitarian present, consigning us to a time of indefinite postponement
or permanent recovery—a repudiation intimated in Weizman’s own acknowledgment
of that politics which refuses the very terms of calculation. In his Spirit of Utopia,
Ernst Bloch defined Marx’s historical materialism through the very same trope that
Weizman applies to Garlasco’s forensic architecture. Perhaps in order to think
ourselves beyond the lesser evil and into justice we too may need a ‘‘sufficiently
complicated sensibility,’’ the kind that, according to Bloch, allowed Marx ‘‘to think
purely economically alongside capital, against its injustices, just as the detective is
homogeneous with the criminal—where nothing but the economic aspect has to be
considered,’’ but also allowed him ‘‘to imagine a higher life, as soon as the space and
the liberation of the idea have been won, and the measureless lies, as well as the
unwitting embellishments, excuses, superstructures, variables of purely economic
functions, can be destroyed.’’27
NOTES
1. See the illuminating historical account in James Peck, Ideal Illusions: How the U.S.
Government Co-Opted Human Rights (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010).
2. Meister emphasizes this dimension of his project from the outset, presenting it as an inquiry
into the ‘‘the temporal dimension of human rights—the pasts they bring to closure—the futures
they foreclose’’ (7).
3. I won’t follow his practice of capitalizing it, but it is important to note that Meister uses
‘‘Human Rights Discourse, capitalized as a proper name, to designate the transformation of
Auschwitz-based reasoning into a new discourse of global power that claims to supersede the
cruelties perpetrated by both revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries during the previous two
centuries’’ (2–3).
4. See Sanchez Manning, ‘‘Britain’s Colonial Shame: Slave-Owners Given Huge Payouts after
Abolition,’’ Independent, February 24, 2013.
5. It certainly seems to address the psycho-political background of the Trayvon Martin killing
and the interpretation of the ‘‘Stand Your Ground’’ law.
6. I say timely, because it is this very narrative that prolongs itself in the ‘‘post-racial’’ homilies
that greeted the presidency of Barack Obama, a figure emblematic for Meister of that
‘‘undamaged,’’ unresentful victim which the discourse of transition requires. As Meister notes,
‘‘former victims establish that they were morally undamaged by allowing beneficiaries to keep
most, if not all, of their gains from the discredited past without having to defend those gains as
legitimate’’ (23).
7. For a remarkable verification of the former issue, see the racial-settler Mormon mythology,
which stages white settlement as a return to a land from which settlers had been genocidally
displaced by ‘‘native’’ Americans, thereby legitimating a politics of extermination and dispossession
as a historical revenge. See the account of the Book of Mormon in Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner
of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (New York: Anchor, 2004), 70–71. On the latter issue, see Ellen
Wood, Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press), 1995.
8. This point is also made, in a complementary fashion, in Retort’s Afflicted Powers: Capital
and Spectacle in a New Age of War (London: Verso, 2005).
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9. I would also take issue with the thesis that ‘‘once we understand that Human Rights
Discourse is secular religion (our own version of universal truth), it lies open to criticism on
religious grounds’’ (298). In my view, the grounds of criticism here should be strictly profane. I
have tried to criticize the contemporary tendency to think of politics as secularized theology in my
Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (London: Verso, 2010).
10. The fact that Meister’s analysis of human rights discourse relies throughout on a contrast
with the temporal and subjective tenor of emancipatory politics allows him to pose some chal-
lenging questions for any thinking of justice beyond the dominant ethics, for instance, ‘‘how to
reconcile the moral attitudes that made it possible (and legitimate) to engage in revolutionary
struggle with the moral attitudes that make it possible (and legitimate) to stop’’ (70).
11. Meister’s account is bolstered by Lauren Berlant’s incisive critique of ‘‘a logic of fantasy
reparation involved in the conversion of the scene of pain and its eradication to the scene of the
political itself ’’ (69). But see also his own formulation: ‘‘The TRC must be considered the high-
water mark of fin de siècle Human Rights Discourse because it largely succeeded in getting partici-
pants and onlookers to profess the feelings it made imperative and to disavow the feelings it made
criticizable’’ (68).
12. Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Real-
ities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2009), 91.
13. Meister’s treatment of Badiou exaggerates the ‘‘miraculous’’ character of the latter’s theory
of the event and does not distinguish between fidelity and outright faith. Greater attention to the
centrality of the difference and articulation between subject and individual, central to Badiou’s
Ethics, could have provided Meister with some ammunition against human rights discourse’s cult
of finitude and alterity.
14. Meister also makes a provocative use of constitutional reasoning in his brief legal genealogy
of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, suggesting that the rights it confers are
‘‘conceived by analogy with the right of out-of-state citizens under local majority rule. We thus
begin by imagining ingathered ‘nations’ of blacks, women, the elderly, the disabled, and so
forth—able to make laws suitable to themselves and under which the present legally created disad-
vantages would be fully offset by legal advantages. This is the mythical moment of ‘separate but
equal.’ Protection under the Fourteenth Amendment kicks in when federal courts recognize the
diasporic nature of all such groups in order to enforce their rights not to be disadvantaged by laws
as they are’’ (99, emphasis original). The idea that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates a kind
of ‘‘virtual Liberia’’ into the legal infrastructure of the Union could have been contrasted more
systematically with the partial recognition and ultimate suppression of indigenous claims to sover-
eignty.
15. I owe the inspiration for the following critical remarks to conversations with Brenna
Bhandar.
16. ‘‘The real challenge is to develop a financial model that explains how the constructive
value of unjust enrichment fluctuates over time as the political, social, and economic relations of
affected groups also change’’ (247).
17. Note that this field of equivalence is also a field of reversibility: ‘‘Increasing the harm to
civilians can be undertaken and monitored using the same tools conceived to reduce it’’ (19).
18. See Anne Orford’s critique of ‘‘responsibility to protect’’ in ‘‘International Territorial
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Administration and the Management of Decolonization,’’ International and Comparative Law
Quarterly 59, no. 1 (2010): 227–49.
19. As Weizman notes, the idea of the lesser evil always requires a more or less closed space of
options and possibilities (6).
20. The wall ‘‘is of course only the most visible element within an assemblage of walls, sepa-
rated roadways and checkpoints, as well as the invisible web of permit systems, which enact the
politics of separation across the entire length and depth of Palestine. The details of the route are,
however, not the direct product of top-down government planning. The route’s folds, stretches,
wrinkles and bends plotted the relative force of different participants brought to bear on it by the
different parties and the relative force of their arguments. It is in this context that the wall started
appearing as a ‘political plastic’—a spatial product made and remade as political forces assume
physical form, a diagram of the balance between the forces that shape it. Danny Tirza, the wall’s
main planner and the representative of the Ministry of Defence in the Beit Sourik trial, called the
legally inspired fluctuations of the route ‘a political seismograph gone mad’ ’’ (77).
21. See Sari Hanafi, ‘‘Spacio-Cide: Colonial Politics, Invisibility and Re-Zoning in the Pales-
tinian Territory,’’ Contemporary Arab Affairs 2, no. 1: 106–21; Baruch Kimmerling, Politicide: Ariel
Sharon’s War against the Palestinians (London: Verso, 2003); Stephen Graham, Cities under Siege:
The New Military Urbanism (London: Verso, 2010), in particular chap. 8, ‘‘Switching Cities Off.’’
22. ‘‘Much like the route of the separation wall, the thresholds of the law will be pulled and
pushed in different directions by those with different objectives’’ (91).
23. Here Weizman could have possibly drawn more theoretical sustenance from Walter
Benjamin’s critique of violence, by exploring the idea of the police as the operative point of
indistinction between law-preserving and law-making violence.
24. See http://www.forensic-architecture.org (accessed August 22, 2013).
25. This is why diagrams and images play more than an illustrative role in The Least of All
Possible Evils, not least in the Hamas archive of images of the destruction of Gaza that closes the
book, though I for one would have wanted its analysis to be more extensive.
26. See the beguiling theoretical tale recounted by The Least of All Possible Evils’ companion
volume: Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman, Mengele’s Skull: The Advent of a Forensic Aesthetics
(Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012).
27. Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony A. Nassar (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 2000), 242.
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The Tactics and Ethics of Humanitarianism

Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism,

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The Tactics and Ethics of Humanitarianism

After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights

The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from

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Transitions without Justice

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the cultural interpretation of Nuremberg is a perversion of its meaning. The

As with the hermeneutic triad of beneficiary/perpetrator/victim, which turns a

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Destructive Measures, Forensic Methods

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It is here that Brauman drew on Arendt’s account of the collaboration of Jewish

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the humanitarian space is primarily a way of measuring the humanitarian condi-

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Humanitarianism could thus represent a kind of ‘‘pre-political’’ condition, a hope-

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Concrete, plaster and other exposed surfaces register transformation in humidity,

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