The modern Greek word for monster τ?ρας, word which, according to J. B. Hofmann's Etymological Dictionary of Ancient Greek, in ancient Greek meant rare an unusual natural phenomenon, including wonder and everything that functioned as sign, an inauspicious omen, not unlike Latin monstrum, which also meant an that functioned as divine omen or portent sign, deriving from word monere, to warn, link between abnormal or unusual shape and warning being established from fact that or prodigious animals were regarded as signs or omens of impeding evil. Although seems to have its origin in another Greek word, τρ?eιν (to tremble), both words and terrifying would be translated in Greek as τeρατ?δeς.However relevant or not above etymological observations may be, fact that in contemporary English, terror and monstrous meet in context of acts classified as terrorist, notably in case of which, as Jacqueline Rose notes, is most often considered peculiarly monstrous . . . aberration performed by freaks of nature (or culture).1 In addition to terror, third signifier attaches itself to contemporary English semantic cluster of monstrous: as reaction with which acts, such as suicide bombing, supposed to be met. In his On Suicide Bombing, Talal Asad devotes an entire chapter, titled Horror at Suicide Terrorism, to question: Why do people in West, at least liberal moralists, react to verbal and visual representations of suicide bombing with . . . such horror?2 Though I will propose different response than Asad's, I concur with him, and with Rose, that, in her words, bombing kills far fewer people than conventional warfare, so that the reactions it provokes must . . . reside somewhere other than in number of dead. Evidently, Rose continues, dropping cluster bombs from air not only less repugnant: it somehow deemed, by Western leaders at least, to be morally superior and, hence, human rather than monstrous act. Beyond our history of official nuclear attacks, as Asad reminds us,Unimaginable cruelties perpetrated in secret or openly, by dictatorships and democracies, criminals and prison systems, racially oriented immigration policies and ethnic cleansing, torture and imperial wars all evident in world today.3And, while official and mainstream discourse labors to justify such policies and acts as reasonable and necessary for sustenance of civilization and freedom, why, as Asad asks, are there so many articles, books, TV documentaries, and films dedicated to reinforcing suicide bombing as horrendous monstrosity?4Incitement to HorrorI would like to begin by foregrounding that meeting representations of terrorist acts with horror reaction that reconfirms and seals labor of their characterization as monstrous, namely, to render them cases of inhuman aberration, thereby relegating them to domain outside humanity. If oldest, most ingrained definition of human thinking animal, experience of horror deprives human of its humanity, insofar as horror excludes, precisely, thought.That horror and thought exclude each other confirmed by otherwise divergent theoreticians who unanimously concur in that horror not cognitive but physiological or affective extra-discursive state of being. Not unlike state of, say, feeling nausea, horror state of being, whose manifestation, based on etymologies of Greek φρiκη [phrike] and Latin horror, may be described, as Adriana Cavarero writes, as a state of paralysis, reinforced by feeling of growing stiffon part of someone who freezing, and further, through her mythological reference to prototypical figure of horror, Medusa, as state of petrification. …
Read full abstract
Oct 6, 2017
Open Access