“From the Medusa and de Sade to Hiroshima and Abu Ghraib, she demonstrates how great swaths of our language are structured around rationalizations for the perpetration of horror.”

​A powerful contemplation on what lies at the heart of violence, not psychologically necessarily, but sociologically, linguistically, mythically.

Cavarero struggles to articulate the ‘uniqueness’ of humanity through much of her feminist philosophy. Here she largely succeeds in the meaning and import of its erasure through not terrorism (an act of violence with an intention to cause fear) but horrorism (an act of violence upon the uniqueness of the individual with neither purpose nor interest in anything but paralysis).

In this, she draws powerfully from contemporary acts of war, terror, and private horrors. From the Medusa and de Sade to Hiroshima and Abu Ghraib, she demonstrates how great swaths of our language are structured around rationalizations for the perpetration of horror (whether from individuals or states).

There is little actionable here; but she demands a different framing for the behavior we have ever reasoned and worded our of existence: horrorism.