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  • On Dismembering
  • Anjuli Raza Kolb (bio)
Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence. by Adriana Cavarero. Translated by William McCuaig. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. 154 pages. $29.50 hardcover, $22.50 paperback.

In a speech delivered in 1998, Eqbal Ahmad illustrated the recursive sterility of the word terrorism by citing a US State Department bulletin that read, “Terrorism is a modern barbarism that we call terrorism.” Ahmad’s statement reveals some degree of prescience: few topics have occupied more of our international discourse in the last ten years than the debate over how to define terrorism. But the fact that his lecture predated the events of 11 September also serves as an important reminder of the extent to which, for those whose view extended beyond American shores, this “novel” form of violence was already posing definitional problems for decades before the turn of the millennium. In her recent book Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, Adriana Cavarero makes a powerful and deeply researched case for confronting the limitations of our present vocabulary for describing acts of terrorism. She offers the concept of horror, which, she explains, implies more than the threat of violent death; it arises from the refracted effects of the “aim to destroy the uniqueness of the body, tearing at its constitutive vulnerability. What is at stake,” she continues, “is not the end of a human life, but the human condition itself, as incarnated in the singularity of vulnerable bodies” (8). Cavarero begins with [End Page 413] two philological chapters that establish the corporeal differences between terror, with its etymological connection to trembling and flight, and horror, whose equally physiological symptoms manifest as a deathlike chill or paralysis. From this essential difference, Cavarero argues passionately for horrorism as the proper name for contemporary suicide violence indexed by “the body that blows itself up in order to rip other bodies to pieces” (29). This act, she holds, atomizes the anatomy of the killer and the killed, merging their identities and fates in grim intimacy.

Cavarero draws on Carl Schmitt’s theories of enmity and the partisan in order to pin down her definition of horrorism as a “worldwide aggressiveness that identifies the ‘infidel’ as the absolute enemy and merges him with the defenseless” (73). Though the point is understated, she implies that a definitional and phenomenological slippage between “real” (specific) and “absolute” (unlimited) enemies causes the merging of the enemy and the defenseless that is the defining characteristic of horrorism. For Cavarero, the paradigm of such a merging is the explosion into pulpy bits of young Stevie’s body in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), a dismembering that, she claims, “reveal[s] the horrorist nucleus of the supposedly terrorist basis of the bombing” (121). The book’s other examples of horrorist violence are wide-ranging, moving through a series of mostly female suicide bombers: teenagers in Chechnya, a woman who attempted to detonate in a pedestrian tunnel in Gaza, and a girl who managed to do so in a Jerusalem supermarket. She also identifies horrorism in the violence committed by youth and other vulnerable people: a fifteen-year-old boy exploded by remote control in Lebanon in 1981, Khomeini’s “martyrs” in the Iran–Iraq War, and, perhaps most grisly of all, a 2005 episode in Baghdad in which an explosive device was hidden inside a dead body. This relatively new form of violence, Cavarero suggests, registers both the eclipse of traditional forms of warfare as well as how “a certain model of horror is indispensable for understanding our present.”

The study illustrates the history and prehistory of horror as an aesthetic and political category, beginning with the feminine face of horror embodied in the mythological figures of Medusa, the gorgon whose weaponized gaze turned her enemies to stone, and Medea, Jason’s jilted bride who sought glory and revenge by killing the sons they bore together. Both of these figures, in their combination of victimhood and violence, present the “superabundance of signifieds” (32) that characterizes acts of horrorism as spectacles that exceed preexisting hermeneutics of violence and right, blame and responsibility. In shifting our perspective from terror to horror, this book, which draws on Cavarero’s formidable previous [End...

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