“From Figure to Ground”: A Conversation with Eyal Weizman on the Politics of The Humanitarian Present

The following dialogue between Zachary Manfredi and Eyal Weizman took place in the spring of 2013. The primary topic of discussion was Weizman’s recent book The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza.¹ The book traces the logic of “the lesser evil” as it plays out in three different sites: Rony Brauman’s role as the leader of Médecins sans frontières in the Ethiopian famine of 1983; a recent trial involving the wall between Israel and Palestine; and the use of forensic evidence in human rights tribunals. Covering a broad range of topics (military and humanitarian interventions, the relationship between left activism and biopolitics, the development and deployment of forensic technologies, the history of testimony in human rights tribunals, the production of visual fields of violence, and the politics of genocide), the interview’s themes all relate to the larger question of how new political practices and technologies of documenting violence have reconfigured the worlds of human rights and humanitarianism.

Zachary Manfredi:

I’d like to begin with a discussion of the first chapter of your new book, The Least of All Possible Evils, which is titled “The Humanitarian Present.” One of the things I really loved about the book is your description of the humanitarian present as the scene of the collusion between technologies of humanitarianism, human rights, humanitarian law, and military and political powers. Under this set of conditions, you describe how more rigid political oppositions are being replaced with the elasticity of degrees, negotiations, proportions, and balances. In this sense, the book provides something that I think is missing from much contemporary scholarship: it traces different humanitarian rationalities in the context of technologies of law and science, and then examines how these rationalities in turn inform practices on the ground. I wondered if you could discuss your general approach for thinking through these questions. How do you come to investigate the particular subjects and objects in the book? Do you first look to political situations and then reflect back on the configuration of technologies operating in them? Or, as someone with a background in forensics and forensic architecture, do you examine the dissemination and development of new technologies and then find where they are applied? Or is your work informed by a more complex amalgamation of different approaches?

Eyal Weizman:

I wanted to write a book on Gaza, and to address Gaza I had to shift registers. Hollow Land was grounded in an architectural approach that sought to analyze a territorial occupation—the instruments of control were territorial settlements, checkpoints, the wall, and so forth.² In Gaza the technologies of control were no less spatial, material, and real, but they operated according to a logic that was no longer strictly speaking territorial. For example, since 2005 there were no colonies in Gaza anymore, the wall around Gaza was not really invading on its internationally agreed boundaries—the “death zone” that extends from it into Gaza notwithstanding. Control was enacted with the help of different kinds of technologies—they were humanitarian technologies in relation to the siege over Gaza and legal technologies when it came to the distribution of violence in attacks from the air or on the ground. Both were systems of calculations that measured life and death by different means. The former comes to determine what are the minimum conditions to sustain life—when humanitarians advised the military on various thresholds like calories and electricity—and the latter, that of the legal advisers to the military, gives advice on what could be targeted and who could be killed. In this sense the book was an attempt to combine two registers: spatiality and calculation. I also noticed that the term “lesser evil” kept on creeping in, whichever direction I researched. So the project started with a more theoretical investigation. And helped by my friend Adi Ophir and many others, I started looking at the logic of the lesser evil theoretically and historically, and how it reorganized the field of...