© Columbia University Press
Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence
November, 2008
Cloth, 168 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-14456-8
$29.50
/ £20.50
"Essential." — Choice
"A highly welcome and intelligent philosophical reflection on contemporary forms of violence and our attempts to name them—and thereby unflinchingly come to grips with them." — Paul Kottman, New School University
"This moving and humane book never stops delivering, from small details such as Adriana Cavarero's insightful dissection of the term 'casualty' and her analysis of the leers on the faces of the photographed women torturers at Abu Ghraib, to large claims—that horror is the real aim of terrorism and that its worst offense is an ontological crime: that of erasing the singularity of persons and transforming all humans into mere insignificant body matter. By contrast, even Medea, Cavarero notes in one of this book's many breathtaking moments, knew the sons she killed by name and 'loved them in their unrepeatable singularity.’" — Bonnie Honig, author of Democracy and the Foreigner
"Adriana Cavarero has the courage and intellectual force to compel us to place horror and terror back within the ambit of humanist inquiry and philological scrutiny. In shying away from theories of speechlessness or the speechlessness of theory, she insists on the autonomy of the experience of horror—for our growing global archive of victims—from the intentionalities of terror. In so doing, Cavarero makes us think again about war, force, victimization, politics, and innocence. A remarkable meditation on the macabre world of modern political violence that will appeal to a wide range of readers." — Arjun Appadurai, Godard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University