Olivier Legrand

By Ellis Weintraub and Ximena Vega Several months ago, an Arab lawyer named Khaled Kasab Mahameed was heading to Ramallah with the head of a Holocaust survivor organization in order to make arrangements between the PLO and that organization. With the two men was a former PLO combatant who had spent three years in an Israeli jail. At the Qalandiya checkpoint, the soldiers held them up for questioning. When asked for his ID, Khaled surprised the soldier with a picture that he had slipped into his ID card - a picture of a Jew murdered in the Holocaust. The astounded soldier called over his fellow soldiers and officers, and they listened to Khaled explain his motivations and thoughts. The soldiers became deeply moved; one officer turned red in the face and told Khaled, “I have no gun.” “You see,” explained the middle-aged Khaled to us over a long afternoon, “this is the power of the Holocaust. A picture is truly worth a thousand words.”   Khaled decided to create a museum dedicated to […]

Human dignity needs a new guarantee which can be found only in a new political principle, in a new law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity while its power must remain strictly limited, rooted in and controlled by newly defined territorial entities (Arendt 1973, ix).     It is important for understand the work of Agamben to come to Arendt one. Through is impressive work Anna Arendt had questioned the base of European modern politic. She has insisted that human dignity needs a new guarantee because the old guarantee, from the nineteenth-century, the Kantian idea of peaceful cosmopolitan republics respecting the natural rights of man, had been destroyed. I will focus on her research on the refugee condition and the concept of worldlessness. For Arendt, the refugee was the archetypical figures that revealed the contraction between universal rights and national sovereignty (Blecher 2005: 731). It is the loss of rights which is the defining attribute […]