Precisely because spectacles of bloodshed so often leave us mute, unable to do other than gasp or gape, we require vocabularies of violence. But are our received categories adequate to violence's many forms, and especially those that, today, appear to have no obvious historical antecedent? Is it possible, moreover, that these categories are peculiarly ill-equipped to express the reality of violence from the perspective of those who suffer it? And might this incapacity be amplified in a nation, such as the United States, where so much punitive violence is animated by vengeful impulses that cannot be openly acknowledged without threatening its collective self-image? Indeed, is it possible that such an order will continue to inject injustice into the heart of its judicial practices so long as it fails to confront the rage that must remain in the shadows if punishment is to sustain its claim to a foundation in what John Locke called “calm reason”?

These are the sorts of questions that are posed in this pair of disturbing books. For Adriana Cavarero, it is the severed head of Medusa, ringed with serpents, that provides a graphic emblem for the violence she seeks to distinguish; and it is Medea, as she butchers her blameless children, who illuminates its distinct prey. To this form Cavarero gives the name “horrorism.” With this category, she invites us to think of violence not from the vantage point of its perpetrator, whether dubbed a “warrior,” a “terrorist,” a “combatant,” or a “martyr,” but from the perspective of those who are its defenseless victims. Or, perhaps more accurately, since the dead have no voice, she seeks to give to those of us who witness but survive such violence a terminology that enables us to speak and thereby do some measure of justice to scenes of carnage that threaten to incapacitate us, indeed to render us “frozen” (p. 7).

Cavarero's principal concern in the early chapters of Horrorism is to counter the deficiencies she identifies in the vernaculars of “war” and “terrorism.” The vernacular of war, she argues, remains ultimately rooted in the vision of a duel, even if that contest takes the form of a battle between uniformed combatants acting as agents of opposed states. The vernacular of terror, because it acknowledges obliteration of the boundary between warrior and civilian, is better suited for her purposes; but it, too, proves insufficient insofar as “terrorism” names a cluster of strategic acts, and specifically acts whose end is to murder, maim, and generate mayhem in order to secrete within the quotidian a pervasive anxiety about what can neither be confidently anticipated nor definitively thwarted but may explode at any moment.

In the later and most powerful chapters of the book, Cavarero's aim is to put the category of “horrorism” to work in rendering real “the peculiarly repugnant character of so many scenes of contemporary violence” (p. 29). This is not to deny that horrorism has been a chronic feature of collective violence in the past: “Women raped and killed, civilians run through, innocent people mortally wounded are all part of the homicidal violence of all wars, from Homer to our day, constituting its classic horrorist aspect” (p. 93). However, in recent decades, Cavarero insists, horrorism has assumed especially fiendish form.

The present variant of horrorism is anticipated by the mass slaughter of World War I, and it achieves its caricatured realization “in the imbecile and idiotic form of the leer” (p. 115) seen in the infamous photographs of Abu Ghraib. The archetype of contemporary horrorism, though, is the suicide bomber, and this appears to be so for at least three reasons. First, the victims of such violence are casualties in the specific sense that their achievement of this status is so utterly casual; each victim “is as good as the next in the abstract role of example” (p. 75). Anticipated by the living dead of the concentration camp, these misfortunates become interchangeable victims of a violence that aims not to kill per se but to erase singularity, to reduce a human being to a dismembered thing. Second, horrorism of this stripe is accomplished by means of a weapon, which, unlike those employed by the terrorist, is self-annihilating, a “body that blows itself up in order to rip other bodies to pieces” (p. 29). In striking contrast to the reality of much contemporary warfare, whose high-tech machinery “transforms the body of the warrior into a peripheral element of its mechanism,” the shahid, to use the term Cavarero often employs, offers a “radically biological version of thanatology” (p. 95). Third, and finally, what perfects the horrorism that was imperfectly realized in the Holocaust is its dispersion beyond the confines of the camp and into the “everyday dimension of the everywhere” (p. 75) where, in addition to destroying familiar spatial designations, it “annuls the dimension of time” (p. 103), insofar as its violence is radically unappealable, releasing its perpetrator from any imperative to answer for this crime.

There is much to be said for Cavarero's move to shift away from the warrior's perspective in thinking about violence in order to ground her account of horrorism in the “criterion of the defenseless” (p. 70). Certainly, her decision to privilege the experience of those who simply happen to find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time is superior to any account predicated on the euphemism of “collateral damage”; and, clearly, our ability to distinguish between those who do violence and those who suffer its undeserved ravages is necessary for any effort to judge, to assign guilt, and, where possible, to punish.

That said, is it possible that the perspective commended by Cavarero effectively generates a troublesome dichotomy between the purely innocent and the absolutely guilty? Her characterization of horrorism's victims moves well beyond an appeal to their “vulnerability,” which suggests a liability, a susceptibility, to be wounded, harmed, even killed. Instead, she gives pride of place to the figure of the “absolute and unilateral” (p. 27) helplessness of the casualty, a figure she analogizes to the newly born, and that in turn invites a characterization of horrorism's perpetrators as apolitical embodiments of pure evil. Doing so, is it possible that Cavarero infantilizes horrorism's victims and encourages us to situate its agents beyond the realm of political intelligibility? Moreover—and this moves into admittedly fraught ethical territory—does her account veil the dynamics of complicity, a dynamic that does not obviate the need to declare judgments of responsibility and even guilt, but does render more problematic the ability to draw an unambiguous line between those who inflict violence and those who endure it? Finally, is it possible that a category predicated on the unqualified impotence of the victim, however unwittingly, bolsters the putative prowess of the perfectly omnipotent killer?

If the emblem of Cavarero's book is Medusa, the emblem of Terry K. Aladjem's text is the Furies of Aeschylus's Oresteia. For it is the Furies that symbolize that “knot of grief and rage that demands a remedy and will not let go” (p. 10), and it is the Furies that teach us more than we perhaps wish to know about the failure of the liberal project of justice, especially in the United States. Aladjem argues that a deeply rooted culture of vengeance explains the harshness of America's penal practices. The collective pathology that defines this culture finds its roots in liberalism's inability to acknowledge, and so to answer, the grief, the wrath, the rancor, and the resentment that are spawned by “unendurable memories of loss” (p. xiii) on the part of those who once loved but now find their loved ones violently harmed or, in the case of murder, wrested from them altogether. This incapacity of liberalism is, in turn, grounded in its faith that the problem of vengeance can be “tamed by reason or transformed into justice” (p. xv). No matter how opposed they may be in other respects, this faith is equally present in utilitarian and retributivist justifications of punishment. Each seeks to subordinate the passion for revenge in an appeal to the just deserts meted out to criminal agents, whether on the ground of societal utility or the respect we owe them as rational agents; each believes that it is possible in principle to determine a calculus that will tell us how much pain we should justly impose on those who have offended; and each believes that the liberal state can punish without itself becoming contaminated by the furor of vengeance and the burden of inconsolable loss.

When these premises are incorporated within judicial practices and institutions, at least in principle, the irrational underbelly of punitive desire is removed to liberalism's private sphere. Even there, though, it cannot help but work its poison. As Nietzsche teaches and Aladjem reminds us, a key moment in the mutation of the human animal into a civilized creature is the transformation of vengeful impulses into the bad conscience, which, of course, engenders new furies that may be directed against the self as so much masochistic cruelty, or projected outward against so many imagined foes. Given this roiling dynamic, it is perhaps no surprise that in the United States today, “the ill-founded attempt to rationalize punishment and to deny its vengeful aspect has reached a point of intolerable stress” (p. 46). The Furies, in short, have refused to remain below the ground, as Athena ordered, when she created a deliberative jury of citizens in order to bring to a halt the cycle of blood vengeance.

The return of the Furies not as a “wild beast that has been barred from entry” but “more like the uninvited guest at a masquerade” (p. 10) is apparent, for example, in broad support for “three strikes” legislation, mandatory minimum sentences, the criminalization of offenses whose only victims are their own perpetrators, the return of penalties that take the form of public shaming, and, most obviously, the swelling prison-industrial complex necessitated by our unprecedented rates of incarceration. Most emphatically, though, Alajdem cites as an example America's abiding infatuation with capital punishment. He does so, first, because the recent constitutional legitimation of victim-impact testimony during the penalty phase of capital trials demonstrates that liberalism has failed in its struggle to ensure that private grief remain where it allegedly belongs; and, second, because the judgments that culminate in death sentences are predicated on a kind of legal and factual certainty, a claim to infallible absolutism, that is revelatory of the imperious logic of vengeance. And yet, when the Furies dress in liberal garb, as they do in these examples, they are unable to bring us the catharsis for which we so viscerally long. The rationalism that is key to this masquerade is ill-equipped to respond to liberalism's profound loss of structures of collective meaning, most typically religious, that might otherwise render suffering endurable, reconcile us to grief, and furnish some sense to the scenes of slaughter recorded by Cavarero.

To Aladjem, “The idiom of vengeance thus expresses a wish to make justice meaningful again, a reversal of the reversal, or inversion of justice, that would mend broken attachments, address devastating loss, and more broadly reestablish the meaning of meaning” (p. 69, Aladjem's emphasis). But, if this is so, then perhaps we have reason to be skeptical of the exhortations that Aladjem advances in his final chapter. To his credit, he does not respond to the “moral vacuity of liberalism” (p. 86), as so many on the political Right do, with a nostalgic plea to revive old moral and theological codes, a plea that can be fulfilled only by summoning up new manifestations of cruelty and revenge. Instead, he appeals to a fuller incorporation of democratic sensibilities into our institutions and practices of justice, for a state that “no longer teaches its subjects lessons by punitive threats or coercion or imposes its morality by fear and intimidation” (p. 159), and for courts that consider their judgments as “matters of provisional agreement that are subject to doubt and disagreement” (p. 159). But such appeals fail to take into consideration the fact that these same political and judicial institutions are egged on by a public that, on Alajdemn's own analysis, rages against its injuries, whether real or imagined, and that seeks to cope with forms of unquenchable loss for which liberalism can provide little if any consolation.

If the Furies no longer remain interred below ground, if they have burrowed out of the private sphere to which liberalism sought to confine them, then it is not clear that a call to recreate our judicial practices in accordance with the virtues of “mercy,” “forgiveness,” and “acceptance” (p. 169) is likely to gain much footing. Nor is it clear why we should expect to witness much sentiment in favor of policies of restitution instead of incarceration, public service projects rather than the infliction of hurt, and the replacement of punishment by the making of amends. If the Furies remain very much among us, then it seems improbable that their next of kin, Medea and Medusa, will soon disappear from our midst.