Zombie Theory: A Reader ed. by Sarah Juliet Lauro (review)

I have always thought that thinking about zombies in popular culture—the zombie movies and video games, the meaning of the zombie narrative—was a sideshow, the B-movie to the grown-up, art-house docudrama, the tractatus zombi-philosophicus of consciousness studies, quantum physics and speculative cognition. It was epistemology as existential thriller and none the worse for that. But now, like a bulldozer in the night, slamming sideways into the peaceful study of the philosophical zombie, comes this book, a vast collection of interdisciplinary zombie scholarship covering just about everything on zombies in the arts, society, politics, philosophy, forms of alienation and colonization, and every aspect of the human condition. I now see that there is no way we can approach the refined questions of consciousness, artificial intelligence, free will or indeed life, the universe and everything proper to a well-found zombie-theoretical ouvroir or workshop without considering what we bring to these inquiries from zombie culture. Like some echo from an alien past, zombies seem to be in our DNA, and we ignore their epigenetic influence on our philosophical evolution at our peril. The cultural zombie, what I’ll call the c-zombie, is at least as important as the p- or philosophical zombie. The two may well share more space than we’d thought.

As editor Sarah Juliet Lauro states in her introduction, the zombie is never wholly terrifying but is also pitiable. It has always been a result of and symbol for oppression. Its history stems from colonialism. Whilst it might be a palimpsest revealing layers of different kinds of alienation, there is a common thread that seems to be even greater than a common threat. We return to a duality, be it both/and or the pessimistic neither/nor. The zombie represents our worst fears. The zombie is us. OR (living or dead) becomes AND.

The zombie is not free but we, more or less, are. Sort of. That must surely be an a priori: the c-zombies don’t want to chase—rather sluggishly—humans in order to eat their flesh or brains, nor to shuffle off, brain damaged, to do slave work in the sugar cane fields. They could never catch free and running humans were it not for the doors and dead ends so vital if the creatures are ever to have their dinner. C-zombie behavior could mostly be modeled in a few lines of code, human behavior not.

But Slavoj Žižek has pointed out that the zombie is the most basic part of the human, before consciousness and so on—the zero-level of humanity. It is what we fear we might actually or merely be, or be reduced to. The c-zombie is never original. It is never a construction but a deconstruction, a ruined, putrefying, reduced person. No one is born a zombie. There is a vast difference between a mindless robot and a mindless zombie, even if their behaviors might be identical, just for this reason: the robot, the AI, might “become”; the zombie is always a once-was, a has-been, and can only be itself, perhaps forever. It can certainly never be one more than itself. There is no cure, no redemption because zombies are irredeemable, as true, dehumanized enemies must always be—or what’s the point? In movies, some zombies are mortal, able to be splattered, squished, squashed or otherwise slaughtered. Others just get up, keep calm insofar as they are able, and carry on pursuing brains to eat. Ola Sigurdson, in his article “Slavoj Žižek, the Death Drive and Zombies,” [1] points out that Žižek writes of our anxiety in the face of “an excess of undeadness,” a wonderful phrase. Zombies cannot experience that anxiety, so perhaps we envy them too. And of course if c-zombies were truly as predictable and modelable as I implied above, they wouldn’t be very frightening, and there’d certainly be...