Dirty hands as a ‘weapon of the weak’: ‘Heroism’, ‘aristocratism’, and the ambiguities of everyday resistance

This article explores an insufficiently problematised aspect of conventional Dirty Hands (DH) analyses: the suggestion that such analyses are animated by a ‘heroic’ and ‘aristocratic’ flavour. In doing so, the article suggests that the problem of DH should not be merely seen as a lamentable, sparse privilege of the powerful—those who, in certain temporarily static situations, are compelled to act immorally on behalf of the democratic state, for the sake of realpolitik, the common good, or the dictates of justice. Rather, it argues that some manifestations of that phenomenon might also constitute a habitually powerful ‘weapon’ in the pharetra of the weak—the excluded, the marginalised or the dispossessed who are compelled to act immorally, systematically and covertly, against the democratic state, for the sake of resisting the injustices they encounter in their daily lives. By engaging with the philosophical literature on ‘everyday resistance’, and African–American social and political history—specifically, daily, evasive acts of subversion in the Jim Crow South—the article thus elaborates a novel account of DH-as-a-weapon-of-the-weak and offers a new perspective on scholarly debates about the ethics of resistance. Specifically, it enhances our understanding of the potentialities of resistance in the context of democratic politics without reproducing troubling myths of heroic agency: it illustrates how certain practices of everyday resistance gain their strength by virtue of their connection to the moral vices of subterfuge, and betrayal on the one hand, and their implication in forms of complicity on the other