The horror of ‘horrorism’: laundering metropolitan killings

Modern colonialism carries many names. But ‘horror’ is not one of them. How and why is this? Why does the slaughter of the ‘native’, the ‘Indian’ and the ‘slave’ not register as crime or horror? This essay explores these questions though a close reading of philosopher Adriana Cavarero’s Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence. Horrorism has become an increasingly influential source for critical international scholarship concerned with broadening the frames of violence beyond those offered by strategic and legalistic lenses. Its focus on the dismemberment of the body and discovery of a new form of ontological violence offer a fruitful avenue of inquiry for theorising the wounding and violation wrought by practices of terror and counter-terror. This essay cautions against such a supposition. A close reading of the key claims and conditions of possibility of horrorism reveals it to be constituted through the erasure of colonial violence. Tracing the lineaments of this erasure shows that horrorism functions not as a sign of newness but of Western revanchism in a time of crisis. However, this does not make horrorism redundant, for it offers valuable insights for understanding the pervasive failure to consider the horrors perpetrated by the West against non-Western others.