Anaesthesia.

Edited by Valentina Abenavoli. Text by Veronique Pin Fat.

Akina Books, London, England, 2016. 96 pp., black-and-white illustrations, 7½x10¼".

“Anaesthesia is a lament of several voices, a symphony of the evil in us, cinematically edited screenshots from videos, an engagement with the media, an open criticism to war and terrorism, a declaration of neutrality, an act of rebellion to the ego, where one stands alone prevented to feel anything else beyond his own finitude.

Nothing would be more painful than not suffering anymore, dropping the burden of sensations, withdrawing from living and bonding. In the lyricism of the agony of mind, in the longing for a break in the inner solitude, what is more ambiguous than the desire to feel others? When confronted with others, personal pleasure as much as personal pain become absolute and universal. What remains is the love for horror and the horror of love.” — Publisher's Statement

“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?” — Veronique Pin Fat

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