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

GDJE SE SVE TEK TREBA DOGODITI / WHERE EVERYTHING IS YET TO HAPPEN
5. Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment
6. In an article on segregation in southern schools, after making her readers understand she was against
all forms of racism, she voiced scepticism about federally enforced integration, claiming it politicized the
educational system, which she believed should be immune to such forces, and insisting that the survival of
the Republic may require that the battle line be drawn somewhere else. Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little
Rock”, Dissent 6, no. 1 (1959): 45–56.
7. Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (New York: Bantam, 1974).
8. Michael Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
9. Ibid., 152.
10. In the “Lesser Evils” workshop at Bard, reading Ignatieff’s book, Thomas Keenan pointed to the impossibility
of calculating evils. Rejecting the notion of grades of violence, he used a Derridean formulation when he
argued: “Is not the slightest violence always already the greatest violence?” He pointed as well to the fallacy in
the supposed difference between qualitative and quantitative judgment on evil, asking whether the quantitative
cannot cross a threshold and become qualitative itself.
11. Adi Ophir, The Order of Evils, section 7.100 as well as 7.2 and 7.3. See for example 7.335.
12. This under the following conditions: that they are “applied to the smallest number of people, used as a last
resort, and kept under the adversarial scrutiny of an open democratic system”. Furthermore, “assassination
can be justified only if […] less violent alternatives, like arrest and capture, endanger […] personnel or civilians
are not possible, and] where all reasonable precautions are taken to minimize collateral damage and civilian
harm”. Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil, 8, 129–133.
13. It is this principle that guarantees, paradoxically, that all ‘greater goods’ could necessarily become ‘greater
evils’. Health economists have a chilling and interesting version of this economy of calculations, a “value of statistical
life”, or VSL, to cope with what some of its proponents see as the following conundrum: the ‘prevention
of every possible accidental death would be intolerably costly in terms of both money and the quality of life’.
See Nina Power and Alberto Toscano, The Philosophy of Restoration: Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May’, forthcoming
in Boundary 2.
14. Slavoj Žižek, In Defence of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), 349.
15. Michel Feher, “The Governed in Politics”, in Non-governmental Politics, ed. Michel Feher (New York: Zone,
2007), 12–27, esp. 21.
16. David Kennedy, The Dark Sides of Virtue: Reassessing International Humanitarianism (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2004), 235–323, esp. 295.
17. Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman, Ethical Realism: A Vision for America’s Role in the World (New York: Pantheon
Books, 2006).
18. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977–1978, ed. Arnold I.
Davidson, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 164–173. The immanent disorder exercised
by the pastorate was “an art of conducting, directing, leading, guiding, taking in hand, and manipulating
men, an art of monitoring them and arranging them…an art of taking charge of men collectively and individually
throughout their life and at every moment of their existence” (173).
19. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population.
20. Augustine thought that prostitutes should be tolerated “because they fulfill a similar function in society to
that of the cesspool in the palace”. Speaking through Evodius, Augustine says: “It is much more suitable that
the man who attacks the life of another should be slain than he who defends his own life; and it is much more
cruel that a man should suffer violation than that the violator should be slain by his intended victim” (118, De