Eyes Wide Shut

Eyes Wide Open, an exhibit the American Friends Service Committee is touring, purports to be an eloquent portrayal of the human costs of war. When I saw it at the Judson Memorial Church in the West Village, almost 1,000 soldiers boots were lined up in neat rows, filling the room. In one corner, a smaller heap of shoes represented the many more thousands of Iraqi lives that have been lost.

As the official U.S. death count reaches 1,000, and George W. Bush continues to gain in the polls, it is time to reconsider the utility of such humanitarian approaches to war protest. The AFSC are a religious organization dedicated to what they describe as the sanctity of human life. But it ought to be painfully clear to all that appeals to the sanctity and sacredness of human life do not function in the way that the AFSC believes they do. Besides the obvious insult to Iraqi lives given in the arrangement of their exhibit (calculated no doubt to reach that mythical 'moderate' audience out there who bemoans the loss of 'our boys' but would take unction at any moral equivalence between them and faceless foreigners) there is the deeper point that the war itself has been conducted in the name of religious values, among them the sanctity of human life.

The war on terror, which provides the overarching public rationale for this administration, is of course presented as a war of life against death. Critics bemoan that terror is not an enemy, it is a tactic, and as a tactic, it can never be warred against, much less defeated. Precisely the point. In declaring an unwinnable battle, this administration does not weaken but rallies its supporters around a cause, life itself, which as the philosopher Giorgio Agamben argues in Homo Sacer, is that which can be killed without sanction. To misunderstand Bush and his co-religionists as somehow heretics from their faith, as peace Christians like the AFSC are obliged to, is to fail to understand that the sacredness of life is not a religious or legal but fundamentally political theory. It is not a doctrine that rashly promises to protect individual dignity no matter what the cost, but a political discourse founded upon of a zone of exception containing a bare life that can be killed.