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.
