The Politics of Horror

I’m interested in the way that Cavarero situates horror as a supremely physical force acted out on singular bodies and, fundamentally, a crime against ontology, the very nature of being.  While this analysis makes a lot of sense to me, and in a lot of ways I understand the distinction between terror and horror to be a really important one, I am wary of Cavarero’s focus on the ontological nature of the individual.  As humanist and concerned with the integrity and suffering of embodied beings as her perspective appears, the lack of engagement with a broader geo-political context makes me nervous. 

In terms of her assertion that horror is beyond political strategy and has more to do with the limits of what is ontologically possible, I see her failing to interrogate the sources of horrific violence and their relationship to power.  An attempt at analyzing horror without this lens, while far from “fetishizing” it through a focus on the aesthetic and importantly privileging the perspective of its victims, seems to lend itself to a conceptualization of the actors of horror as monolithic in their rather philosophical aims.   More concretely, I am worried that suicide bombers coming from populations historically suffering from violent oppression and an insidious politics of terror will end up occupying the same position as Hitler’s Nazis in this idea of horror.  This is certainly not to say that horror ever has a justification in its context, or that the dehumanizing and destruction of any individual being is any less tragic based on the situation of the victim and the perpetrator within a broader sociopolitical context. 

That said, maybe horror isn’t horror unless it has the (historical, social, political, physical) heft to act out this violence of destruction, because it seems like the very premise of horror is power, a certain omnipotence on the part of the actor and the manipulation of the victim’s (inherent) vulnerability. In that case, I wonder where the line is drawn between horror and destructive, literally self-dismantling violence – because I think the latter can have a much more complicated motive than the perverse production of “invulnerability”. 

In regards to that, I wonder how important it is that horror is seen.  To what extent does it involve vision and in what is its relationship to spectacle?  The Armenian genocide and Nazi concentration camps were not really intended to be witnessed on a broad scale, were they?  But public acts of terrorist violence often are.  I also wonder if this connects to Bautille’s engagement with Sade and the eroticization of horror and ontological destruction.  In what circumstances and for whom is horror produced as spectacle (maybe extending to a discussion of film), and what does purpose does this serve?  What different meanings and uses are at play when horror isn’t produced as public effect?

I guess my main question is - and I realize this is very much going against an underlying principle of Horrorism – how do we understand the relationship between the actor of horror and what they are doing?  What is gotten out of horror by its perpetrator?  Because while philosophically Cavarero’s idea of dehumanization, ontological violence and a perverse fascination with (in)vulnerability makes sense to me, I find it hard to believe, if this doesn’t translate into material, political or other more tangible benefits for horror’s perpetrators at some level, that this is enough of a reason to do it .

p.s. Sorry this is late!