出版社：Faculty of Philosophy, University of Bucharest
摘要：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). In an analysis that spans
from Greek mythology, through the main political thinkers of modernity like Hobbes,
Schmitt, Foucault and Arendt, the horrors of Auschwitz and Bataille’s eroticization of
violence, Primo Levi and Joseph Conrad, to suicide bombers and the tortures at Abu
Grahib, Cavarero unravels the roots, iconography and poignant actuality of contemporary
“horrorism.
