Photography, tragedy and Osama bin Laden: looking at the enemy

This essay brings together three central concerns - tragic drama (focusing particularly on Antigone), photography (looking at recent images of the war in Afghanistan) and ethics (especially the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Susan Sontag and Judith Butler) - to consider the importance of the visual in tragic theatre, tragic theory and images of tragic events. I argue that fear is as important as pity in the work of tragic response for the formation of the citizen body, and that the task of looking at our enemies - both in tragic drama and in photographs taken in recent or current conflicts - raises challenging questions about recognition and self-recognition which are central both to the tragic tradition and to contemporary political debate.