Horrorism

Abstract

How to name the constellation of violence, power and resistance that characterizes the contemporary political scene? Are the traditional political categories sufficient for a representation of our contemporaneity? Can the language of this tradition aptly describe and interpret what is happening today? These questions inform Adriana Cavarero’s new book and lead her to attempt a renaming of the phenomenon of contemporary violence. Language, in fact, has proven unable to renew itself in order to represent, and thus comprehend, the global carnage that stains the beginning of the twenty-first century; indeed, she writes, “it tends to mask it” (2). In the twentieth century violence spread and assumed unheard-of forms, and since September 11, 2001, it marks the global everyday life in a way that escapes the old interpretive frameworks. We have no words to describe a form of violence that strikes everywhere, at any time, and mainly defenceless civilians: the concepts from the past, like war or terrorism misleadingly confine this violence into categories unable to represent the new. Linguistic innovation becomes therefore imperative and Cavarero proposes to situate the new phenomenon in the semantic field of horror: the neologism “horrorism,” apart from the obvious assonance with the word terrorism, is meant to emphasize “the peculiarly repugnant character of so many scenes of contemporary violence” (29).