Horror has a face and a name... you must make a friend of horror.” To cast out the horror that has a name and a face you must give it another name and another face.*
And the naming of the intolerable is itself a kind of hope.
When something is termed intolerable, actions must follow. These actions are subject to the vicissitudes of life. But the pure hope resides first and foremost in the capacity to name the intolerable as such: and this capacity comes from afar - from the past and from the future. This is why politics and courage are inseparable. The time of the torturers is agonizingly but exclusively present.*
image: Die Orden der Nacht, 1996, Anselm Kiefer (German, born 1945), acrylic, emulsion, and shellac on canvas, 140 x 182 1/4 in. Seattle Art Museum.
*Sans Soleil, Chris Marker.
*John Berger, And Our Faces, My heart, Brief as Photos, Vintage International 1984, 18.
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