"ON ZOMBIEHOOD"

'From the power to transform him into a thing by killing him there proceeds another power, and much more prodigious, that which makes a thing of him while he still lives. He is living, he has a soul, yet he is a thing. A strange being is that thing which has a soul, and strange the state of that soul. Who knows how often during each instant it must torture and destroy itself in order to conform? The soul was not made to dwell in a thing, and when forced to it, there is no part of that soul but suffers violence.'--Simone Weil, "The Iliad, Poem of Might" (in: The Simone Weil Reader, ed G A Panichas, 1977)

1. Zombies are vampires without the poetry. Nobody wants to be a zombie. If the secret of the zombi myth has already been discovered, sensationalized, then cast into oblivion, there remains, beyond the kitsch of zombiedom, a metaphor that still has us in its teeth.

2. Descartes thought animals lacked feelings & defenestrated a cat to "prove" it; the practice of infant circumcision depends upon a similarly-unsubstantiated idée fixe; zombies, of all adversaries, feel nothing--not even the pain of their final rendering. They are empty vessels animated by what appears to be blind hatred, a tireless compulsion to attack. Immediately one is reminded of that archetypal predicament, a driver among other drivers in traffic, whose communications are limited to feint & honk, & whose desires seem to have dwindled to a futile but incessant effort to get past the driver ahead. The driver will never finish his race. The zombie will never be satiated.

3. Zombies come out of nowhere, they don't remember how they got that way, or what their name is now. And the assembly of zombies is a tribe without a history. Their zombieness is a given. How is this any different from the consumerist monad, faced from day one with a landscape composed of dollars & packaged things with prices? Whether puffer fish venom, voodoo, a virus unknown to science, or the invisible hand of the market, something set this army on the march.

4. Why don't zombies fight each other? Zombies are like the separate ants of an anthill. Together they embody a single tyrannical will, a will that cannot be dissuaded, only overwhelmed by superior force. The zombie tide. The proliferation of zombies is a parody of procreation. By killing people, zombies make more zombies to kill more people. It is obvious that in a world with zombiehood, ordinary nature is at a standstill. The paralysis of nature is the triumph of the zombies. Though zombies may be defeated for now, there will always be another zombie movie.

5. The betrayal of love is the anguish of the zombie movie. This anguish is only quelled through murdering the loved one. Zombification is stronger than love, but murder is stronger still. Love exists only to be betrayed or at least threatened with betrayal. This radical disquiet outlasts the zombies' defeat. Forever after, a kiss will echo the bite of the teeth of the zombie. The only certainty in a world gone mad is the act of murder.

6. To flee from the devourer is ancient instinct & a primal necessity. But zombification is not natural selection because it contains no procreation. It is nature's antithesis. To imagine the true counter to zombification is to imagine the reclamation of human beings from zombiehood. This possibility does not exist in the myth of the Zombie. Just as Capitalism does not envision any alternative save other devourers, to be defeated by capitalistic means. Everyone is a zombie, or else food for zombies.

7. But people do have feelings, even as unwilling components on an assembly line. Most of all, it is by their fears & insecurities that they are made to act as competitors. In every worker & in every moment of consuming, there is a contest between zombification (giving in to rapacity) & a truly human response. For "zombies" are only the way humans in aggregate are seen to behave; in fact, as a corporation (which is incapable of discerning individuals) sees us. The myth of the Zombie is a story about how we seem to our creation, the capitalistic corporation; & while this is true for the corporation, it is utterly false for humans. The myth of the Zombie is an exile-myth which does not contain the existence of any (social) condition to be exiled FROM.

8. What solace is it to harbor, even for the length of a movie, the myth of the Zombie? Its principal audience is teenagers, whose condition--of bodily alienation combined with their ordained role as nonproductive consumers--makes it easy to conflate metaphorically the two. It seems to authorize the process they are undergoing; & its catharsis is to allow them to vent their revulsion toward their own terrible desires & powerlessness.

9. By identifying with the humans who are able to defeat individual zombies, they can believe that in this universe of infinite zombification, there is yet shelter for another kind of consciousness. But zombies, who have no language, force their opponents to engage them at the same rudimentary level; to become, also, killing machines.

'Suicides prefigure the far-off fates of humanity. They are harbingers, and as such we must respect them. Their hour will come; they shall be celebrated, given public homage, and we shall say that they alone, in the past, had envisaged all, had divined all.' --E M Cioran, The New Gods (tr Richard Howard, 1969)

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