Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence

by Adriana Cavarero, William McCuaig (Translator)

Words like "terrorism" and "war" no longer encompass the scope of contemporary violence. With this explosive book, Adriana Cavarero, one of the world's most provocative feminist theorists and political philosophers, effectively renders such terms obsolete. She introduces a new word—"horrorism"—to capture the experience of violence.

Unlike terror, horrorism is a form of violation grounded in the offense of disfiguration and massacre. Numerous outbursts of violence fall within Cavarero's category of horrorism, especially when the phenomenology of violence is considered from the perspective of the victim rather than that of the warrior. Cavarero locates horrorism in the philosophical, political, literary, and artistic representations of defenseless and vulnerable victims. She considers both terror and horror on the battlefields of the Iliad , in the decapitation of Medusa, and in the murder of Medea's children. In the modern arena, she forges a link between horror, extermination, and massacre, especially the Nazi death camps, and revisits the work of Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt's thesis on totalitarianism, and Arendt's debate with Georges Bataille on the estheticization of violence and cruelty.

In applying the horroristic paradigm to the current phenomena of suicide bombers, torturers, and hypertechnological warfare, Cavarero integrates Susan Sontag's views on photography and the eroticization of horror, as well as ideas on violence and the state advanced by Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt. Through her searing analysis, Caverero proves that violence against the helpless claims a specific vocabulary, one that has been known for millennia, and not just to the Western tradition. Where common language fails to form a picture of atrocity, horrorism paints a brilliant portrait of its vivid reality.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Horror, Politics

168 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2007

About the author

Adriana Cavarero teaches philosophy of politics at the University of Verona, Italy, and is a visiting professor at New York University. Her field of research includes classical, modern and contemporary thought, with a special focus on the political significance of philosophy. Two main concerns shape her approach to the Western philosophical tradition. First, the 'thought of sexual difference', a theoretical perspective that enables the deconstruction of Western textuality from a feminist standpoint. Second, the thought of Hannah Arendt, reinterpreted in its most innovative categories: birth, uniqueness, action and narration. The result is an inquiry that foregrounds the individual and unique existence of the human being, as related to body and gender. Cavarero resists both the solitary abstraction of the philosophical Subject, and the volatile fragmentation of the postmodern subject, in the name of the living uniqueness of a self being generated through plural relationships with other human beings, and the acceptance of the constraints of individuality and the body.

Reviews

[Karl Steel · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Today it is particularly senseless that the meaning of war and its horror--as well, obviously, as its terror--should still be entrusted to the perspective of the warrior....The civilian victims, of whom the numbers of dead have soared from the Second World War on, do not share the desire to kill, much less the desire to get killed" (65).

"the instant of time that blows the bodies of the 'human bombs' and their victims to pieces today annuls the dimension of time: time in which to face up to the reality of one's own crime and to answer for it singularly. Closed in on itself, suicidal horrorism thus takes pride in the unappealability of its work in the service of an instantaneous and irresponsible violence. In this sense, it is no surprise that books on female suicide bombings written by women who are disposed to understand them, if not justify and sympathize with them, have a tendency to minimize the ethical responsibility of the bombers" (103)

I think other people are likely to to get a lot more out of this book than I did. Adriana Cavarero rightly demands that we should try to apprehend violence from the perspective not of the warrior (or 'terrorist') but from that of the victim. The victim, we should presume, does not care about whether or not he or she is being mutilated, tortured, or killed by a state actor, a criminal, or suicide bomber. Nor does the victim care about the motivation of the agent of violence: here's she might have used one of Zizek's favorite quotes, this from Deleuze: "si vous êtes pris dans le rêve de l'autre, vous êtes foutu!", since these dreams of the other, dreams whether for 'freedom and democracy' or for the Caliphate or whatever, do not matter to the victim. What matters is the pain and death, especially when the victim, caught unawares, has been unable to defend him or herself from the violence. This latter point, too, is key to Cavarero, as she observes that what distinguishes modern warfare from Homeric violence (her paradigm) is the particular suffering of the defenseless. Not the battlefield, but the bombed out city, or marketplace, or supermarket, or the theater filled with corpses and poison gas, is the picture of modern mass violence. For those interested in a richer philosophy and politics of war, for those interested in engaging in further debates with Bataille (she's against him), Arendt (largely for), suicide bombing (particularly when committed by women), and contemporary modes of violence, I imagine this book is indispensable. But it absolutely needs to be paired with Zizek's Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, in large part because Cavarero never considers the systemic violence of global capitalism itself. To use Zizek's terminology, she is so committed to studying subjective violence that--symptomatically--she does not see the system of violence that sustains her own way of life.

We might save Cavarero's analysis by imagining what a 'horroristic' study might make of the fancy widget-maker (fwm): does the fwm care whether or not she is making a fw for the international yuppie smart set? Would it be all the same to her if she were manufacturing, say, toilet plungers? I suspect so. Cavarero demands that warriors and terrorists alike try to understand the violence they commit from the perspective of the victim. What might happen to our (where our= "the international yuppie smart set") love of our fw when we try to apprehend it from the perspective of the worker? Alternately, in my own work, I may demand that we try to understand nonhuman death from the perspective of the nonhuman. What does the cow care whether its meat is properly cooked? What does the sheep care whether its skin will be used for Chaucer or, god help it, Lydgate? Cavarero could ask such questions, but she is relentlessly and unthinkingly anthropocentric, a stance that is becoming increasingly unforgivable for any critical theorist given the growing body of critical animal theory. However, when she writes, "Horror has to do precisely with the killing of uniqueness....it consists in an attack on the ontological material that, transforming unique beings into a mass of superfluous beings whose 'murder is as impersonal as the squashing of a gnat' [qting Arendt Origins of Totalitarianism:], also takes away from them their own death" (43), this surely applies as much to animals, medieval or modern, as it does to the human animal caught up in some totalitarian fantasy.

I have to confess to a perhaps petty annoyance with her typical litany of historical horrors: Stalinist Ukraine, Maoist China, Palestine and Israel, Iraq, Guernica, the Khmer Rouge, Chechnya, Rwanda, German and Japanese firebombed (& otherwise) cities, Nanking, the Holocaust, Armenia (with a few scattered references to Italian cases). There's no evidence that she considered why this representative litany occurred to her and not, say, the Congo of King Leopold or the DR Congo of the twenty-first century: my sense is that consideration of these other African killing fields would require an analysis of her own complicity as a citizen of a wealthy European nation. I suffer an even pettier annoyance when she writes: "Any review of the refined arts of war developed over the course of the century would have to dedicate a separate chapter to the aerial bombardments inaugurated by German forces over Guernica and Coventry" (51). Why not Italian forces over Ethiopia in the year before Guernica, or, arguably, RAF forces over Sulaymaniyah? (and while it's tempting to suggest the Zeppelin raids of English, beginning in 1915, the difference between these and Sulaymaniyah, Ethiopia, or Guernica is that the English could defend themselves: the Kurds, Ethiopians, and Basques could not, and thus stand as better representatives of horrorism (unlike the inhabitants of Coventry)). And perhaps pettiest of all: her moments of sloppiness, e.g., "...in this massacre there are not even innocents anymore, given that, whoever they are, each one is as good as the next in the abstract role of example. Although called infidel or miscreant, the absolute enemy loses all quality and assumes the role of anyone at all, with respect to whom the eventual faith of every singular victim--who sometimes, and certainly in modern Iraq, believes in the same god as his murderers--is just an accident" (75). Good point on the purposeful randomness of the victims of modern mass violence, but, c'mon, this not only elides the religious differences between Sunni and Shia, it also elides the fact that Christians, Jews, and Muslims all worship the same God! Sheesh. Just like Catholics and Protestants, who have gotten along, as we know, famously well.

[Marcos · Rating 5 out of 5]

agarrar el horror y diseccionarlo etimológicamente de un modo tan profundo que te permite comprender todas sus derivas históricas, sociológicas, mediáticas, bélicas y espectaculares. cavarero da cuenta de la obturación del lenguaje a la hora nombrar la violencia, que lo excede, que precisa de una renovación semiótica inmediata para ser verosímil respecto a aquello que pretende aludir.

[Jessica Schad Manuel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Have you ever thought about the difference between horror and terror? That is what Adriana Cavarero invites readers to consider in this book. The etymology of terror points to fear as a physical state instead of a psychological dimension. Terror describes the physical fear of a trembling body. It leads to flight and is associated with panic - an all-encompassing (pan) fear. With horror, there is physical repulsion or repugnance, an intense disgust. Instead of inspiring flight, the victim feels frozen. It comes from violence enacted against the body. Each person is what she calls a unique existent, and horror questions the ontological dignity of the human. When naming contemporary violence, she says that what is at stake is not human life but the human condition. Horrific acts intentionally disfigure the body's uniqueness, which makes these acts different from terror. This book is not light reading but feels very timely. Book Oblivion spent three weeks discussing it together this month, but I imagine I will be thinking about it for a long time.

[Annalisa Franze’ · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn’t like this book that much just cause I wasn’t interested in this subject. Still, objectively it was a pretty good book. I really appreciated the writing, and I feel like, if you like this kind of book, or you are interested in this subject, you will probably enjoy it.

2.5/5⭐️

[Balente1978 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pur essendo una donna, la misoginia che mi accompagna fin dalla più tenera età mi spinge ad evitare (se non in rare eccezioni) scrittrici femminili, tanto nella narrativa, quanto nella saggistica.
Adriana Cavarero è stata un’inaspettata quanto godibilissima sorpresa.

Tutto il testo è un’analisi filosofica, psicologica ed antropologica riguardo la violenza sull’inerme.
Per chi (come me) non provenga da studi classici la prima reazione è quella di chiudere il libro.
Continuando la lettura la si scopre piacevolissima.
E il merito è dovuto senza dubbio alla scorrevolezza del linguaggio usato dall’autrice: ecco perché ritengo che questo possa davvero essere un documento che meriti la più ampia diffusione.
Colpiscono subito le ricchissime (e ben documentate) citazioni che percorrono l’intero scritto, con uno sguardo particolare all’opera di Hannah Arendt e di Susan Sontag.
Di quest’ultima viene citato il saggio “Davanti al dolore degli altri” riguardo il moderno bombardamento di immagini e video che vanno a documentare l’orrore proprio dei conflitti. Tuttavia questi strumenti non vengono giudicati come morbosi, bensì eticamente indispensabili al fine di far comprendere come “gli esseri umani commettano dappertutto cose terribili ai danni dei propri simili“.

Ad essere interessante è che non si mettano in luce i crimini ed i loro esecutori, ma lo sguardo è spostato sulle vittime, sulla loro assoluta vulnerabilità davanti agli attacchi.
Nella quarta di copertina una frase riassume al meglio: “Assunto il punto di vista della vittima inerme, invece che quello del guerriero, Cavarero può costruire un’ontologia della vulnerabilità condizione umana che ci veda esposti alla dipendenza dall’altro: alla sua cura come al suo oltraggio” .

Per fornirvi un quadro sintetico dei punti sviluppati dall’autrice può tornarvi utile l’indice dei capitoli:

1-Etimologie: “terrore” ovvero del sopravvivere;
2-Etimologie: “orrore” ovvero dello smembramento;
3-Della guerra;
4-L’urlo di Medusa;
5-La vulnerabilità dell’inerme;
6-Il crimine di Medea;
7-Orrorismo, ovvero della violenza sull’inerme;
8-Chi ha visto la Gorgone;
9-Auschwitz o dell’orrore estremo;
10-Erotiche carneficine;
11-Tanto mutilato che potrebbe essere il corpo di un maiale;
12-Il piacere del guerriero;
13-Aggressività planetaria;
14-Per una storia del terrore;
15-Orrorismo suicida;
16-Quando la bomba è il corpo di una donna;
17-Torturatrici che sorridono all’obiettivo.

Come si può vedere, il percorso dell’autrice è un viaggio alla scoperta della violenza sull’inerme che inizia dall’etimologia propria di due sostantivi ormai abusati e, troppo spesso, usati come sinonimi: terrore ed orrore.
Ed anche come, purtroppo, alle condizioni che da questi scaturiscono si sia ormai fatta l’abitudine.

Dalla semplice lettura dei titoli dei capitoli è chiaro come l’opera attraversi diverse fasi storiche e come di queste vada ad analizzare le differenti forme di crimini verso l’inerme o, per usare un termine più moderno, i danni collaterali.
Pur divisi i capitoli si integrano e si incatenano vicendevolmente.
Basti pensare alla mitologica figura di Medusa e collegarla alla parte finale del libro, dove si analizzano l’Esercito delle Rose di Arafat, la fazione femminile delle Tigri Tamil, le vedove nere degli attentati ceceni in Russia (dall’attacco alla metropolitana, passando per il teatro Dubrovka, per giungere alla scuola di Beslan) per arrivare alle soldatesse americane tristemente note per le foto nel carcere di Abu Ghraib.
I cicli della Storia.
Vero.
Verissimo.
Che però mi fa tornare alla mente un’altra figura mitologica: un orrendo uroboro che continua, imperterrito, a mordere la propria coda.

L’impatto tuttavia maggiore l’ho avuto nel capitolo dedicato ad Auschwitz.
Sicuramente il motivo del mio interesse risiede nel fatto che l’Olocausto ebraico della Seconda Guerra Mondiale sia stato il primo vero argomento di Storia Contemporanea affrontato in modo approfondito e consapevole durante i miei studi.
I Nazisti operarono in modo da trasformare i prigionieri in morti viventi, cadaveri ambulanti.
Si è manipolata la Natura umana fino a ridurre le persone ad esseri assolutamente superflui.
E questo concetto di Biopolitica calza perfettamente anche a ritroso nel tempo, con gli stermini e le sottomissioni dei popoli indigeni delle Americhe, dell’Africa e dell’Australia al fine di colonizzarne i territori.
Storia non dissimile da quella che si ripete con le umiliazioni delle carceri in Iraq.
E nuovamente l’uroboro si morde la coda.

Godetevi poi appieno la lettura dell’appendice “The horror! The horror! Rileggendo Conrad” , dove si analizzano l’opera “Cuore di Tenebra” e il suo adattamento cinematografico “Apocalypse Now” di Francis Ford Coppola.
Si pone l’accento sull’autocritica della modernità, sul suo essere macchina di espansione e dominazione.
Sempre dello stesso autore vengono esaminate altre due opere “Con gli occhi dell’Occidente” e “Agente Segreto”.

[samantha · Rating 3 out of 5]

• Introduction: scenes of a massacre
o Baghdad 2005 suicide driver blows up cat in crowd killing 26 Iraqi citizens and one US soldier. Most were children to whom the Americans were handing out candy.
o Mass murderers of this kind give themselves glorious names: “martyr” and “combatant.” In the West, they tend instead to be called terrorists.
o If we observe the scene of massacre from the point of view of the helpless victims rather than that of the warriors, however, the picture changes: the end melts away, and the means become substance. More than terror, what stands out is horror.
o Language of war calls “collateral damage” Again what stands out is horror
o As violence spreads and assumes unheard-of forms, it becomes difficult to name in contemporary language
o One thing is certain: the words “terrorism” and “war” evoke concepts from the past and muddle them rather than give them fresh relevance.
o Names obviously do not change the substance of an epoch that has managed to write the most extensive and anomalous, if not the most repugnant, chapter in the human history of destruction. Nor can the crude reality of bodies rent, dismembered, and burnt entrust its meaning to language in general or to any particular substantive
o Yet on closer inspection, violence against the helpless does turn out to have a specific vocab of its own, one that has been known for millennia.
o Beginning with the biblical slaughter of the innocents and passing through various events that include the aberration of Auschqitz, the name used is “horror” rather than “war” or “terror” and it speaks primarily of crime rather than of strategy or politics.
o A neologism is always a risk, even more so when it is coined at a scholar’s desk. But linguistic innovation becomes imperative
• 1. Etymologies. “Terror”; or, on Surviving
o Terror from terreo and tremo with root *ter, indicating the act of trembling. Greem tremo or treo, “to fear but not as a psychological dimension but as a physical state” Realm of terror is physical experience of fear as manifested in a trembling body.
o Connoting flight, too
o Terror connotes the one that acts immediately on the body
o panic from Greek god pan, tellurian power that incarnates the totality of the universe. Total feel, sudden and unexplainable, caused by the presence of the god.
• 2. Etymologies. Horror; or, on Dismembering
o Although it is often paired with terror, horror actually displays quite opposite characteristics. Latin horreo, alludes to bristling sensation (gooseflesh), especially the bristing of hair on one’s head. Linked also to well-known symptom of being frozen. (gooseflesh reaction to colf, phrisso from latin frigus. Horror is paralysis
o Horror cannot be inscribed in the terminological constellation of fear without problems
o There is something of the frightful there but, more than fear, horror has to do with repugnance.
o Horror linked with vision through Medusa. a scene unbearable to look at and the repugnance it arouses. Violent death is part of the picture, but not the central part.
o Gripped by revulsion in the face of a form of violence that appears more inadmissible than death, the body reacts as if nailed to the spot, hairs on end.
o Medusa is a severed head. The body is revulsed above all by its own dismemberment, the violence that undoes it and disfigures it.
o Not a disgust for killing, because killing would be too little. This is about destroying the uniqueness of the body, tearing at its constitutive vulnerability.
• 3. On War
o Italian war Guerra and English war come from Gemrnic erra. a contxt of fierce combat and disaprray.
o Greek polemos from verb pallo is not dissimilar: what comes to the fore in it is the movement of hurling oneself and of vibrating.
o War nourishes both terror and horror. Death is the protagonist of war, in fact violent death that cuts short the lives of young warriors.
o The effect is irresistible: they all quake and flee
o But nestled within terror there is horror, like the nucleus of an even more profound and at the same time excessive violence, and it is horror above all that spreads over the scene of war’s massacre.
o In the universe of epic, the wounded body has been penetrated, cut, or torn.
• 4. The Howl of Medusa
o We must gaze straight into her eyes, without yielding to the temptation to look away: horror has the face of a woman. When a woman steps to the front of the stage of horror, the scene turns darker and, although more disconcerting, paradoxically more familiar.
o Medusa doesn’t even have a body
o Mouth must be open
• 5. The Vulnerability of the Helpless
o Th e uniqueness that characterizes the ontological status of human is also in fact a constitutive vulnerability, especially when understood in corporeal terms
o The “I” is not closed but rather open
o it is precisely the thematization of infancy that allows the vulnerable being to be read in terms of a drastic alternative between violence and care. In the case of the biblical story of the sacrifi ce of Isaac, the alternative assumes a diff erent aspect: the choice posed is between a hand that strikes and one that does not rise to do so.
o For the situation of the infant, however, the arresting of a violent hand is not enough. It is necessary that the alternative inscribed in its primary vulnerability should also bring into account a hand that cares, nourishes, and attends
• 6. The Crime of Medea
o Murders her own children in revenge. The clever Medea knows many ways of committing murder
o Th e dismemberment of the body, canceling its uniqueness and reducing it to flesh without figural unity,
o Generative nucleus of horror
• 7. Horrorism, or, Violence Against the Helpless
o Ample repertory of human violence
o Why not simply speak of horror, without going to the trouble of adopting a neologism that may cause some annoyance? A neologism assumes that there exists something new, diff erent, recent. But what is so new about carnage and torture, aft er all?
o what is new is the way in which the massacre is now perpetrated
o the most ancient horror renews itself, reaching the extremity of an axis that originates at its own core
o To call it terrorism on the basis that it forms part of a terror strategy of a particularly atrocious kind would be inadequate. Calling it horrorism, on the other hand, helps us see that a certain model of horror is indispensable for understanding our present
o Medusa and Medea are the ancient icons of today’s spreading horrorism. Medusa reminds us that the “killing of uniqueness,” as Hannah Arendt would say, is an ontological crime that goes well beyond the inflicting of death. Medea confirms that this crime is visited on a body not just vulnerable but reduced to the primary situation of absolute helplessness (vulnerable and helpless are not synonymous terms) The scene is entirely tilted toward unilateral violence
 vulnerability is a permanent statusl helplessness depends on circumstance. Helplessness is attacked not produced.
 Death may come at the end, but it is not the end in view
o Horrorism is characterized by a particular form of violence that exceeds itself in death

[Rachel Kendall · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating read - looking at the 'other side' of terrorism, more specifically suicide bombers and how their mode of murder is, in a way, more horrific than others because they blow themselves and innocent people up, mingling victim and murderer body parts in the process. Identification of the body can be very difficult and often limbs etc of the terrorist are mistaken for those of a victim. Also a large number of suicide bombers are female, and a surprising number of those were pregnant. Also looks at the Medea myth and the Gorgon's gaze, but I wouldn't say it's a 'feminist' book. An interesting read for anyone studying terrorism and those who, like myself, are fascinated with human behaviour.

[Steve Chisnell · Rating 4 out of 5]

A powerful contemplation on what lies at the heart of violence, not psychologically necessarily, but sociologically, linguistically, mythically.

Cavarero struggles to articulate the 'uniqueness' of humanity through much of her feminist philosophy. Here she largely succeeds in the meaning and import of its erasure through not terrorism (an act of violence with an intention to cause fear) but horrorism (an act of violence upon the uniqueness of the individual with neither purpose nor interest in anything but paralysis).

In this, she draws powerfully from contemporary acts of war, terror, and private horrors. From the Medusa and de Sade to Hiroshima and Abu Ghraib, she demonstrates how great swaths of our language are structured around rationalizations for the perpetration of horror (whether from individuals or states).

There is little actionable here; but she demands a different framing for the behavior we have ever reasoned and worded our of existence: horrorism.

[Eoin Hoey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Masturbatory, in that it is verbose, somewhat meandering, and despite engaging with various aspects of contemporary violence, does not attempt to define as a concept, or explicitly outline the distinguishing components of, the titular term, horrorism.
An interesting enough read, but generally fails to add, in a truly meaningful way, to anything other than 'a conversation'. I really wish this had a functional conclusion, I couldn't see myself referencing this in an academic context.

[mandarina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Denso y teórico pero muy interesante reflexión sobre la violencia contemporánea, sus orígenes y sus diferentes manifestaciones. Muestra muy bien la hipocresía de la sociedad occidental en aceptar y normalizar ciertas violencias siempre que sean en nombre de la guerra mientras que condenan otras iguales.

[Simone · Rating 3 out of 5]

certainly eurocentric and somewhat irresponsible to center the horror of jihadist suicide bombings, as opposed to, say, one of the many atrocities perpetrated by the nations from which she is writing and drawing wisdom from, but i still found a great deal to chew on in this slim, dense volume.

[Stefani · Rating 4 out of 5]

But what about ecological horror? Show me the atrocities against the vulnerable and defenseless animals and plants.

[Duncan Swann · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too academic, some nice ideas but overall EXTREMELY repetitive. God, I hate the word "ontological".