Afterword: The Horror of Love

“Anaesthesia presents us with moments of horror; it unflinchingly confronts ‘us’ with ourselves and our modes of encounter with others. It seemingly demands that you—the viewer-reader—engage with spectacles of violence and ask who your ‘self ’ might be such that it desires a clear separation from the apparently monstrous ‘other.’ The work is haunted by the suspicion that horror might be the name we give “to the perception of the precariousness of human identity, to the perception that it may be lost or invaded, that we may be, or may become, something other than we are, or take ourselves for; that our origins as human beings need accounting for, and are unaccountable” (Cavell 1999: 419).
In short, the editorship of moments of horror announces the fear that we may be vulnerable to the
recognition of our own monstrousness in scenes of annihilation and with it, the precariousness of the distinction between self and other, ‘them’ and ‘us’, ‘good’ and ‘evil’. If horror is indeed what is at stake, is it any wonder that we would rather not experience it?”