From Horrorism to the Gray Zone

Abstract

This etude problematizes the continuity between Cavarero’s earlier work on horrorism and her later ethics of inclination. The genocidal legacy of the twentieth century brings to completion the discourse that, from Levinas to Butler, through Arendt and Agamben, has philosophically interrogated the historical and ontological specificity of the new figure of the helpless “absolute victim.” Making a comparison between “ontological crime” and Primo Levi’s tale of the process of annihilation endured in the camp this etude addresses Levi’s reflection on power arguing that it marks the distance between a political philosophy of the “normality of evil” and the so called post-Auschwitz philosophy of “radical evil,” to which a relational ethics, to some extent, still belongs.