Nicoline van Harskamp - DeLVe | Institute for Duration, Location and ...

festa7 seeks to start unpacking this problem by presenting some of the histories and
contemporary tactics of such attempts and the humanitarian and human rights activists
caught up in dilemmas and struggling, successfully or not, to liberate themselves from
a mutual embrace with the very organizations they vehemently oppose. Many of these
activists clearly realize that it is counterproductive to accept the myopic pragmatism of
the “lesser evil”, one that leaves a given mode of government intact, and seek ways to go
beyond these actions. Their contemporary deliberations reflect historical ones.
Strategically planned or spontaneous action would always inevitably put activists on the
ground within an arena of political struggles in compromising situations that can easily
deteriorate into a counterproductive complicity, but these forms of practice must look
for ways to, simultaneously and paradoxically, challenge the truth claims and thus the
basis of the authority of the powers they both cooperate with and confront – the very
regimes that placed their bulls before us and then asked us to choose the lesser of their
two horns.
This text originates in discussions around an ongoing programme of workshops, lectures
and films exploring the structure of the “lesser evil” argument that I run together with
Thomas Keenan and Eyal Sivan. I would like to thank Alberto Toscano for his useful comments.
Notes
1. Alain Badiou has been the strongest critic of this notion: “If the lamentable state in which we find ourselves
is nonetheless the best of all real states […] [If humanity] will not find anything better than currently existing
parliamentary states, and the forms of consciousness associated with them, this simply proves that up to
now the political history of men has only given birth to restricted innovations and we are but characters in a
pre-historic situation […] [that] will not rank much higher than ants and elephants”. See Alain Badiou, “Eight
Theses on the Universal”, in Theoretical Writings, ed. and trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum,
2004), 237. Renata Salecl introduced Badiou’s work to the discussion in a workshop titled “Lesser Evils”
organized by Thomas Keenan, Eyal Sivan and myself at Bard College in February 2008. Presentations were given
by the organizers and by Adi Ophir, Ariella Azoulay, Simon Critchley, Joshua Simon, Olivia Custer, Renata Salecl,
Karen Sullivan and Roger Berkowitz. Salecl introduced Badiou’s ideas through a reading of an interview in two
parts Badiou gave to Cabinet Magazine before and after 9/11 (http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/5/alainbadiou.php).
Salecl added new doubts of her own: “Not even knowing what good and evil are, how can we choose
and calculate? When evil is so enjoyable, what does ’lesser evil‘ mean?”
2. For Badiou, according to Salecl, evil is when one lacks the strength to search for the good. The politics of the
“lesser evil” give up on the event, renounce the drive. At the Bard workshop, she asked: “Is there a new theory
of the good ready to fight the self-contents of liberalism?”
3. Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Schocken, 2005), 35. In his presentation to the workshop,
Roger Berkowitz presented Arendt’s argument against the “lesser evil” in the context of her thought on
judgment, as part of what she identified as “the crisis of judgment”.
4. Hannah Arendt, “The Eggs Speak Up” (1950), in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism,
ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2005), 270–284; see especially 271. Arendt claims that Stalin’s
“only original contribution” to socialism was to transform the breaking of eggs from a tragic necessity into a
revolutionary virtue.
GDJE SE SVE TEK TREBA DOGODITI / WHERE EVERYTHING IS YET TO HAPPEN