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Sophocles' Ajax by John Tipton
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Bright Oblivion
A Review by Emily Wilson

Human civilization is premised on the idea that human beings should not kill one another. But in war, killing other people must somehow become acceptable -- morally, legally and psychologically. One way to achieve this is to imagine the enemy in nonhuman terms. "They," our opponents, must be as unlike us as possible: we can kill them if we see them as demons, foreigners, heretics, dots on the radar screen -- or, most common, as animals.

But by denying the opposition any humanity, and therefore making them killable, we risk making ourselves something less than human. The Chorus in John Tipton's haunting new version of Sophocles' Ajax comments on the hero's crazed attempt to massacre his own comrades in arms: "now it closes hoods the head/theft of feet that can move/to thrash for an oar/dropped from a quick ship." The images of hooded prisoners from Abu Ghraib told us more than we wanted to know about how hard it is to look an enemy in the eye. In medieval and early modern Europe...
 
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