Aphorisms for a New Realism Inhumanity When we see the inhuman in something, for instance in a great white shark, it is only because we can’t help but feel a connection; a connection we are apt to call human. A good example of the horror of inhumanity is the narrative of dehumanization, or othering. This is the idea that there is some practice or historical tendency or character of difference in certain broken humans—inhumans—responsible for genocide, abuse, violence, etc. In the fourth section of The Claim of Reason, Stanley Cavell argues that this explanation is in fact not accurate. We are able to commit genocide without any othering, and those discourses of dehumanization that follow are in some sense coping mechanisms or opportunities for bad faith to ignore what many people were capable of to begin with. Rather than the zombie scenario, whereby a deficit, disease, or supernatural event diminishes our humanity, true horror is that no deficit was needed in the first place. To think of it differently, perhaps that deficit has always been there. Genocide is fully human, and requires no deficit. Moral tragedy would be seeing the refugees lying on the beach and being unable to do anything to act, being too late. Moral failure would be seeing the bodies and not being able to recognize them as ‘one of us,’ and therefore being uncompelled to act. Moral horror, the horror of the inhuman as human, is that we could have done something, we did recognize them as one of us, and did nothing anyway. We live in a horrifying world, not a tragic one. Dehumanization is a lullaby we sing to each other, rather than face the horror that the suffering of others fails to awaken anything inside of us. Monstrosity The transition to something else is almost always monstrous, precisely because of its weirdness to what it is we think we are. How do we think through horror as a genre of political thought rather than as a cinematic or fictional construction? What is the real of horror, rather than the Lacanian cop-out of the horror of the real? Government programs like torture and enhanced interrogation exceed the normal feedbacks and boundaries of our consensus reality. This is not a metaphor. The gap between reality and perception of that reality is a phenomenological difference that makes the appreciation and observation of events surreal. They can only be understood as other genres, but other genres of reality. Sci-fi and horror are conceptual and phenomenological necessities, rather than ‘representational styles’ or modes of writing. Unlike the often violent flaying of the personality from the pre- personal body found in neuro-torture techniques, exploring the genres of reality holds on to the personality of the artist or thinker sufficient to the task of dilating the modes of perception to let in a little more of the real, rather than being torn asunder. Taking Liberties It turns out freedom-as-liberty is an ecological doomsday device. The enlightenment, for all of its self-congratulatory bravado, may in fact end the species. In the realm of downsides, that is a pretty big one. That the freedom experiment is turning out to be a catastrophic failure ought to demand of us something quite dramatic in the revaluation of humanities, economics, politics and the most basic conceptions of the good. Still waiting. 33