One notes that even when readers discover they cannot necessarily share the author’s position, they should register his clean sense of purpose in uncovering the atrocious. With him, we easily note the absence of ivory tower type of philosophizing and certainly no masturbation à l’infini as there lies a consistent dwelling on experience. To Haj-Saleh’ credit too, scholars will seize the understanding of those situations where evil cannot be simply banal, the way Hannah Ardent famously portrays it. The Assadist category of nihilism—the way the author helps us register—underlines an invisible constitution, paralleling colonial and totalitarian governing practices worldwide in postcolonial times. This underlines that the Atrocious as theorized by the author is never an independent totality operating outside space and time. Moreover, readers note a glamor of hope since the torturer lacks a story and the victim always has one, if he or she chooses to. This leaves a crack in the history of the atrocious wherein a change is not faintly possible but actual.