Afterall / The Showroom Seminar with Eyal Weizman

665 The Lesser Evil

The Showroom
63 Penfold Street
London NW8 8PQ

In this seminar, Eyal Weizman will present ‘Only the Criminal Can Solve the Crime’, chapter three of a trilogy concerned with the political and theological question of the lesser evil. (Chapter one, ‘Arendt in Ethiopia’, and chapter two, ‘The Best of All Possible Walls’, will be on display in advance of the lecture.)

Eyal Weizman is an architect based in London, where he is the director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His books include The Lesser Evil (Nottetempo, 2009), Hollow Land (Verso, 2007) and A Civilian Occupation (Verso, 2003). Weizman also co-authored an article on Israel’s future colonisation that appeared in Afterall issue 20.

This project seeks to investigate the politics of the lesser evil through probes into three intense controversies involving conflicts of space. In ‘Only the Criminal Can Solve the Crime’, it delves into the interfaces between conflict, the urban and the laws of war. As the rubble of 20,000 destroyed and damaged buildings is still scattered through the streets and camps of Gaza, the battle of forensics has began: who can speak in the name of this rubble? And what new reality can emerge in its stead? Has the chaos, death and destruction been actually instigated with the terrible force of the law?