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3 - Mourning bin Laden: Aeschylus, Victory, and the Democratic Necessity of Political Humanism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 July 2017

Simon Stow
Affiliation:
College of William and Mary, Virginia
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Summary

This chapter considers the ways in which a tragic mode of mourning might help the American polity address the problems of democracy in the post-2001 era. Arguing that the moment of the polity’s greatest triumph, the assassination of Osama bin Laden, might also be the moment of its greatest defeat, it draws on Aeschylus’ The Persians to consider what it might mean for a polity to mourn its enemies. Doing so, it argues, would provide an opportunity for the polity to consider its enemies in all of their complexity, thereby resisting the temptation to reduce politics to morality. The benefits of this, it argues, would not be confined solely to the domestic. By tempering the mênis that has driven recent American foreign policy, mourning for the enemy promises a more considered response to the actions of the nation’s foes, encouraging a critical perspective more akin to that of tragedy’s audience than that its protagonists, and with it, a less self-defeating engagement with those who would do America harm. It thus demonstrates that Bonnie Honig’s rejection of mourning predicated upon shared humanity is misplaced, and that such responses to loss offer a far more productive form of politics than she suggests.
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Chapter
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American Mourning
Tragedy, Democracy, Resilience
, pp. 103 - 148
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2017

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