Undead

Is Marx a zombie? Capitalism seems to have vanquished it's warring twin; yet the fall of Communism has been followed by a decline in the free market. Perhaps Western culture is pervaded by ghosts and omens of death because it is built on the exorcism of any alternative to itself. This paper applies Derrida's Specters of Marx thesis to art, film and cultural theory to explain just why the undead refuse to leave us alone.

The identification of deviant burials as those of ‘vampires’ is a feature of excavated skeletons from sites across Eastern, Central and Southern Europe as well as the Balkans. Based on a close reading of historic and folkloric sources researchers have sought to match features of excavated sites with narrative descriptions drawn from vampire legend and myth. This study critically reviews the recent claims based on sites in Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Greece, Italy, Poland and Slovakia. Whilst it is found that there was a widespread belief in vampires across Europe, it is argued that it is difficult to make absolute claims for ‘vampire’ burials on archaeological grounds as in most cases there are alternate and equally compelling interpretations of the data.

KEYWORDS
ARCHAEOLOGY, HISTORY, SIXTEENTH CENTURY, SEVENTEENTH CENTURY, VAMPIRE, DEVIANT BURIAL, PLAGUE, BLACK DEATH, FOLKLORE, PAGAN, BURIAL, WITCH, BALKANS, EASTERN EUROPE, CENTRAL EUROPE, SOUTHERN EUROPE, BULGARIA, CZECH REPUBLIC, POLAND, GREECE, ITALY, SLOVAKIA, LESBOS, VENICE, APOTROPAIC, VAMPIRIDZHIJA, PERPERIKON, SOZOPOL, PROSTEJOV, CELAKOVICE, DRAWSKO, GLIWICI, SOUTHWELL, KILTEASHEEN, LAZZARETTO NUOVO, NACHTZEHRER, KAMIEN POMORSKI

Deadgirl (2008) is based around a group of male teens discovering and claiming ownership of a bound female zombie, using her as a sex slave. This narrative premise raises numerous tensions that are particularly amplified by using a zombie as the film’s central victim. The Deadgirl is sexually passive yet monstrous, reifying the horrors associated with the female body in patriarchal discourses. She is objectified on the basis of her gender, and this has led many reviewers to dismiss the film as misogynistic Torture Porn. However, the conditions under which masculinity is formed here – where adolescent males become "men" by enacting sexual violence – are as problematic as the specter of the female zombie. Deadgirl is clearly horrific and provocative: in this article I seek to probe implications arising from the film’s gender conflicts.

"Representations", N. 129, Winter 2015.

The essay analyzes the project of maintaining the body of V. I. Lenin in the Mausoleum in Moscow for the past ninety years, focusing on the unique biological science that developed around this project, and the unexpected political role this body has performed.

Written and submitted as the final piece of my master's degree study, this dissertation explores the complex relationships between death, dying, and belief about undeath in the Medieval world. Utilising interdisciplinary approaches and employing an array of written, visual, and archaeological evidence, this piece attempts to shed light upon the frequently unorthodox and intensely personal beliefs and attitudes held by communities in the Middle Ages towards death and dying. Inspired by contemporary attitudes towards death and dying alongside current historiography and scholarship, I aim to inject a measure of humanity into our ancestors who, throughout the study, I argue perhaps are not as different from us as we may think.

This piece won the University of East Anglia's Larry Butler Prize for Best Dissertation 2017.

Between 1724 and 1760, in the frontier area of the Habsburg empire waves of a hitherto unknown epidemic disease emerged: vampirism. In remote villages of southeastern Europe, cases of unusual deaths were reported. Corpses did not decay and, according to the villagers, corporeal ghosts were haunting their relatives and depriving them of their vital force. Death occurred by no later than three to four days. The colonial administration, alarmed by the threat of an epidemic illness, dispatched military officers and physicians to examine the occurrences. Soon several reports and newspaper articles circulated and made the untimely resurrection of the dead known to the perplexed public, Europe-wide. ‘‘Vampyrus Serviensis’’, the Serbian vampire, became an intensively discussed phenomenon within academe, and thereby gained factual standing. My paper depicts the geopolitical context of the vampire’s origin within the Habsburg states. Secondly, it outlines the epistemological difficulties faced by observing physicians in the field. Thirdly, it delineates the scholarly debate on the apparent oxymoron of the living dead in the era of enlightened reason. Fourthly, the early history of vampirism shows that ghosts and encounters with the undead are not superstitious relics of a pre-modern past, or the Enlightenment’s other, but intimate companions of Western modernity.

Abstract:
In a blazing assault on the foundations of enlightenment values and rationality, Lacan’s Kant avec Sade attempts to read D.A.F. de Sade, the infamous French Marquis, as the consummate Kantian and in doing so, uncover the structural logic (and inconsistencies) underpinning both the virgin philosopher of old Königsberg and the libertine novelist’s ethics.
Published just 8 years after Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir details the depraved acts inflicted by a band of libertines on their virtuous and beautiful victim Eugénie de Mistival, and is, Lacan argues, not just an extension of Kant’s ethics, but in fact its completion. Sade shows us the disturbing truth of Kantian ethics that Kant himself had failed to recognize or admit. For Kant the ultimate objective of the moral law is the realization of the supreme good, the point at which virtue and happiness coincide. But by renouncing all emotional factors as “pathological” in the moral realm, Kant paved the way for a system of ethics which exposed the true and hideous face of jouissance and its structuring as the other side of the law.
Nearly 60 years later and in light of our increasingly technologically mediated relationships, the question of sexual enjoyment and ethics has become ever more problematized. As cultural fantasies about “robotic sex” draw closer to our grasp, we must ask what the future entails for these new configurations of sexuality and Artificial Intelligence? Lacan’s groundbreaking contribution to the ethical debate Kant avec Sade whilst well-used in the literature on psychoanalytic ethics, has yet to be employed in relation to the (female) robot and its significance in human relationships. As sex becomes further “technologized” we are forced to inquire after the structure of enjoyment that drives it.
This paper will attempt to imagine how a reading of Kant avec Sade alongside Rupert Sanders’ 2017 film Ghost in the Shell can decipher the foundations of a future ethics that will derive from  relationships with forms of embodied Artificial Intelligence, given that the law and jouissance are for Lacan inexorably connected. Furthermore, Ghost in the Shell, reveals the Sadean universe residing inside the seemingly most innocuous fantasies of robot bodies that prevail in contemporary culture.
As developers and research units seek to legislate for Artificial Intelligence and “Robot Ethics”, the other side of the law as human jouissance, comes conspicuously into view. If Sade’s libertines’ fantasies of a perpetual victim grow out of their fascination with the “second death”, the inescapable law of castration, how would the “immortality” of the female robot body, and potential for endless torment, feature as a mode of fantasy for the desires of the libertines? What kind of ethics can be built around the assumption of a subject who does not know castration and who, supposedly, cannot suffer? And is the “sex-robot” the Sadean ethical imperative incarnate? This reading crucially allows us to stage the mutual haunting of two diametrically opposed philosophers through the fantasy of the female robot as undead subject.

Erotic Nights of the Living Dead (1980) may have featured both animated corpses and hardcore sex scenes, but only recently have Re-Penetrator (2004) and Porn of the Dead (2006) managed to fully eroticise the living dead, allowing these creatures to engage in intercourse. In doing so, the usually a-subjective zombie is allotted a key facet of identity - sexuality. This development within the sub-genre needs accounting for outside of the contexts of porn studies, where it has only been briefly touched upon in relation to its "extremity".

Moreover, the gendering of the undead opens a discussion which expand the horizons of zombie studies away from the overt critiques of capitalism, race and psychoanalysis that have pervaded analyses of these narratives. The dichotomy of binary oppositions so often associated with psychoanalytic approaches dictates that "passive (non-phallic) = female", and "active (phallic) = male". In these terms, the zombies are feminine - soft-bodied and passive, despite their murderous intent (which has been accounted for, by Barabara Creed (1993) amongst others, by invoking the vagina-dentata motif). Humans (active) are deemed masculine, not least since they tend to dispatch zombies with "phallic guns". Taking this logic to an extreme, the zombie may be read as allegorising feminism: the "feminised" figures (zombies) become fearsome in their will to exert themselves despite their seeming disempowerment in the face of "masculine" hegemony. Ultimately, by grouping together as a force, they overthrow or at least significantly damage that "normality" (an ideological paradigm usually read in terms of race, class and economics).

This paper takes the undead as the fundamental condition of biopolitics. The first part offers a critical survey on the undead in the context of modern political theology and the body politic and contemporary biopolitics. Then, I will examine the avatars of the undead in psychoanalysis, such as the superego, the Neighbor, and the death drive, and how life conceptualized through them always already receives wounds and, therefore, is densely biopolitical. Then, in light of Žižek's elucidation, I will apply Lacan's " University discourse " to disentangle the complication of bureaucratic knowledge, surplus-enjoyment and contemporary uncertain, risky, anxiety-provoking capitalist biopolitical conditions. The last part of this paper proposes some ways to look at the undead as a potential, albeit ambiguous and indeterminate, site of radical possibilities. What I aim at is not so much any survival kit for contemporary * This paper is a partial fulfillment of my NSC research project " The Undead, the Limit of Experience and the Politics of Redemption " (NSC 100-2410-H-003-143-MY2). Special thanks go to the anonymous reviewers' invaluable critical suggestions for revising this paper. 1 In Wagner's Parsifal, Parsifal's " the wound is healed only by the spear that smote you " addresses Amfortas, the King of the Grail who is hurt by his own Holy Spear and suffers a wound as well as shame that does not heal. The miraculous moment of healing happens at the short circuit of the ab-andonment of all hope and God's grace, a moment that is equal to, put in biopolitical lexicons, the state of exception of sovereign jouissance. Žižek takes this statement to be the emergence of perverse subjectivity, which is already implicit in Kant: the perverse subject emerges when he willingly assumes the role of the instrument to accomplish " the crime which paves the way for the Good " (Tarrying 195). In his " The Politics of Redemption, " Žižek relegates it to the paradox of the revolutionary process, in which the existing violence can only be overcome by violence. My take on this allusion is slightly different from, albeit not diametrically opposed to, Žižek's in that I see the wound of shame as a moment of ontological dislocation that shares the same form with messia-nic suspension.

The Corrector, that is, the nineteenth book of Burchard of Worms’s Decretum, is widely recognized as one of the essential sources for the study of pagan survivals around the year 1000 A.D. in Germany – more specifically, in the Rhenish Hesse. The Decretum is in itself an important collection of canon law of its time, but the Corrector in particular has drawn the attention of scholars because of its peculiarities. Most interestingly, despite being partially based on previous penitentials and council canons, book nineteen of the Decretum was also partly written originally by the Bishop of Worms himself, and thus turns out to be a fundamental penitential text for the understanding of pagan survivals at the time and in the place of its composition. The source proves all the more useful for scholars interested in beliefs concerning death, the “undead”, and the likes, even though terminology can be deceptive: for this reason, modern and
anachronistic taxonomies such as “ghost”, “undead”, “revenant”, etc. will be discarded, in favour of an emic approach which aims at respecting the text and imposing as fewer filters as possible. As a matter of fact, Burchard mentions many kinds of otherworldly entities which recall our modern notions of “ghosts”, “spirits” and “undead”, but often does not attach further details to identify them – either because he did not deem them worthy of his attention, or because he might have not known folk beliefs in detail. In any case, Burchard’s Germany appears to be densely populated: people share their space with hordes of “spectres”, seem to be aware of it, and often believe to be able to join them. The aim of the present contribution is then to analyze those folk beliefs which involve otherworldly entities, in order to critically discuss their characteristics and understand their implications among the people of Hesse around the year 1000. Attention will be specifically focused on the relationship between the living and the dead/undead, and will cast light on a series of related aspects such as: 1) the bias against women – who were held naturally predisposed to credulity; 2) positive/negative interactions between man and otherworldly entities; 3) attributes associated to said entities (persistent, wicked, benevolent/malevolent, etc.); 4) the fear of the darkness due to the supposed activity of evil spirits in the night hours; 5) the role of otherwordly entities at the service of the living; 6) the fear that the dead may rise again and harm the living.

Amongst what CLR James famously dubbed the " mariners, renegades and castaways " of Melville's fiction are numerous figures of living death. While they resist the imposition of single meanings, they are recurrently associated with the dehumanizing effects of labour exploitation, with overtones of racial domination. Crossing between industrial and plantation settings, they also blur the boundaries of North and South. In this, Melville's undead anticipate the idea of the zombie that crossed into mainstream U.S. culture during the United States' military occupation of Haiti (1915-1934). Distinct from the predatory zombie of contemporary horror film, this Haitian-American zombie was effectively a walking corpse, raised from the dead or deadened in life, and made to work for a zombie master. Exploring these connections  reminds us that nineteenth-century writers were already using figures of living death to express and explore some of the anxieties to which the word “zombie” later became attached, and that the advent of the Haitian-derived zombie slave in American literature and popular culture was a moment of continuity more than rupture. A longer, more detailed version of this essay with extended notes is available on request.

The undead is a crime against the religious and the sacred; it always troubles our received topologies and distinctions between body and soul, life and death, culture and nature, the human and the nonhuman, animate and inanimate, organic and inorganic, etc. It has always been preoccupying, or haunting, writers and thinkers in the fields of philosophy, ethics, theology, and literature. Especially in contemporary biopolitical discourse, where the conditions and essence of life are fervently debated, problematized, and rethought, the undead comes to the fore and calls for our critical attention. This paper begins with a brief critical review of Hannah Arendt's contribution to biopolitical discourse. By way of some psychoanalytic perspectives, I explicate how the " strange logic of the undead " works in such signature Agambenian categories as the " threshold " and " zone of indistinction, " and in the context of the saturation of life in the political field. Then, I turn to the homo sacer and the Muselmann who, as figures of the undead, inhabit the threshold of political life and bare life, and embody the zero degree of humanity as beings that have been deprived of human communitarian and identitarian registers, while opening a site where new ethical material might appear. The last part of this paper carries the logic of the undead a step further in order to address Agamben's intervention in contemporary theological theories, and his contribution to the politics of emancipation and redemption through his revitalization of Paul and messianic thinking.

Las Maravillas de Fródá (Fróðárundr) es uno de los pasajes más variadamente discutidos en la Saga de los habitantes de Eyr (Eyrbyggja saga), una obra islandesa datada en el siglo XIII. En este pasaje narrativo, una suerte de epidemia de no-muertos infesta una granja, llevándola al borde de la desolación. En este artículo, comentaremos, primero, algunos elementos significativos, para a continuación exponer una de las teorías interpretativas más consistentes hasta el presente. Por último, discutiremos la posibilidad de que el esquema cristiano de pecados y virtudes se encuentre en la raíz de la pestilencia.

The zombie apocalypse is now such common currency that the American Center for Disease Control has enlisted it, tongue-in-cheek, in its campaigns to raise preparedness for pandemics (presumably of the non-zombie variety). What explains the rise of this once-niche horror genre to cultural prominence? Reading The Walking Dead in conjunction with the employee self-help manual Who Moved My Cheese? (WMMC?, hereafter), I argue that the zombie apocalypse genre employs an updated version of the becoming-subject under capitalism. Like the “little people” of WMMC?, the zombie apocalypse hero (ZAH, hereafter) must engage in brutal sacrifices in order to survive: the ZAH must kill their recently-zombified loved-one before (it) can kill or zombify them. I argue that this killing is better seen as a double-murder, directed both against the ties of affection that thwart capital’s circulation, as well as against the bourgeois subject’s past, which capitalism constantly seeks to obliterate from memory. As with the worker-mice of WMMC?, the ZAH must forge a new identity based on flux rather than stability. The zombie apocalypse thus explains the modern subject to herself, through a mythic depiction of the internal disposition that capital demands from its increasingly deracinated workers. Without the tendrils of affection or the roots of a past, the subject is left sufficiently destabilized to be tractable to the pressures, dislocations, and anxieties of global capital.

The purpose of this article will be to examine the lives of different Icelandic and Continental Scandinavian saints in biskupasögur and compare them to the uniquely Icelandic revenant known as a draugr found mainly-but not limited to-the Íslendingasögur category. The morphology of the saint and the draugr will be analysed through the scope of the physical, behavioural, and supernatural motifs apparent in each literary figure. This approach will be useful to better understand a comparison between how each figure reconciles the concept of death and the afterlife, as well as their liminal grasp of corporeality which displays their similarity.

"Great Stagger, Minimal Politics: Outlining a Political Aesthetics of Recent Zombie Film"
This essay deals with recent zombie cinema. The films at issue belong to cycles of zombie horror films released around 1980 and during the years 2004-2010. Looking at these periods, US films made by George A. Romero (Dawn of the Dead, 1978; Land of the Dead, 2005) can be regarded as respective focal points, although this essay also touches upon Italian, French, German, Austrian, Canadian and British productions (most notably, Shaun of the Dead). The films are approached in a perspective that blends cinema studies with contemporary political theory of a post-fundamentalist and radical democratic orientation. Aiming at a sketch of a political aesthetics of recent zombie cinema, this essay highlights the films´ dissensual potentials, while at the same time analyzing and criticizing the maximalism, purism and apocalyptic truth-effects inherent in some of the political imaginations circulating in them. In these contexts, the surprising degree of self-consciousness manifested by cinema´s staggering brain-dead is investigated along with their motoricity and temporal logics, and with constructions of national history, class relations and security regimes in zombie film.

Monsters of the Norse Mythology: Draugr Norse mythology has its roots in Norse paganism and it is the mythology of the North Germanic nations. It tries to explain the creation of the universe and the end of the world. In Norse mythology, there is a variety of monsters. It is possible to separate them into groups: Wolves include Fenrir, who defeated Odin at Ragnarök, Moongarm, who swallowed the moon at Ragnarök, and the ones who chased the sun and the moon, Sköll and Hati. Serpents include Jörmungandr, who encircled the earth with its giant body, Nidhogg, who chewed the roots of Yggdrasill, and Fafnir, a human in the form of a dragon. In cows, there is only Audumla, a cow that nourished Ymir. Lastly, the undead known as "draugr." This paper will focus on the undead in Scandinavian culture and explain what the word draugr means and what draugar are, analyse its types and explain the methods used to prevent their reanimation and the ways of getting rid of them. To begin with, there are two different meanings of the word draugr, one is "a dry log," and the other is "the dead inhabitant of a cairn" (Guerrero 20). The Norse creation myth and draugar have a strong connection with the first meaning. In the myth, Odin, Lodurr and Hoenir find two logs through the seashore and they create the first man and woman out of them. Later, they give them gifts. Odin gives them "qnd" and Guerrero translates the word as "breath," "life" or "soul" and says that breath is linked with the capability of speaking or producing "guttural noises" (27). Lodurr gives them "lá," meaning "blood" or "the ability to feel" and "lito góða," meaning "human appearance," and Hoenir gives "óð," meaning "mind, Bozer 2

Doing research on fishery commodities in Portugal led us to an enigma: for a dead fish to be fresco (fresh) it must be alive. This paradox manifests at a popular, commercial, and legal level. It denotes the interruption of the difference between being dead and being alive in the commodity form. In Portugal, we suggest, the commercialization of peixe fresco (fresh fish) is based on the production and consumption of edible
‘zombis’: seafood corpses technologically and symbolically crafted as undead. An open concept, ‘edible zombis’ is part of an experimental vocabulary that foregrounds the productive agency of undeadness, both biological and commercial, in the seafood economic complex. It relates to the ordinary practice of necromancy in the commodity-based world. Edible zombis are commodity fetishes that fetishize their producers and consumers, suspending them from the capitalist system in which they live.

A proposal to the worlds regarding how to approach the concept, phenomenon, and institutions of education. I offer a brief history of education, locating its origins in the Inquisitions and Witch Hunts of Europe and detail its contemporary role in spreading addiction to money as a mechanism of colonial control. I bring some concepts together from various authors toward a more functional and flexible framework of how liberation-minded people(s) might navigate in and outside of education toward a world of relations not controlled by capitalism, empire, and money. The concept of (Under)Commons of this piece is influenced by the title of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney's book "The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Studies" and also maintains an appreciation for the more widely studied concept of the Commons. "Preliminary Notes v1.0" denotes this as a work in progress that I hope to involve in wide conversation amongst a variety of audiences with stakes in life on earth as I continue to develop further versions until it becomes a complete book. As per the title, "Playing to Live, Not Living to Pay" is the primary goal here.
Please send any feedback to playingtolivenotlivingtopay@gmail.com

A proposal to the worlds regarding how to approach the concept, phenomenon, and institutions of education. I offer a brief history of education, locating its origins in the Inquisitions and Witch Hunts of Europe and detail its contemporary role in spreading addiction to money as a mechanism of colonial control. I bring some concepts together from various authors toward a more functional and flexible framework of how liberation-minded people(s) might navigate in and outside of education toward a world of relations not controlled by capitalism, empire, and money. The concept of (Under)Commons of this piece is influenced by the title of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney's book "The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Studies" and also maintains an appreciation for the more widely studied concept of the Commons. "Preliminary Notes v1.0" denotes this as a work in progress that I hope to involve in wide conversation amongst a variety of audiences with stakes in life on earth as I continue to develop further versions until it becomes a complete book. As per the title, "Playing to Live, Not Living to Pay" is the primary goal here.
Please send any feedback to playingtolivenotlivingtopay@gmail.com

From the publisher's website:

The perfect introduction to the world of all things eerie, inexplicable and otherworldly. From Most Haunted to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, from Underworld to Twilight, from Doom to Resident Evil, The Brief Guide to the Supernatural goes in search of the unearthly with unexpected results; combining history, science, psychology and myth he explores the allure of the paranormal - why so many people still believe in ghosts and angels - as well as the many ways people have tried to contact and record the impossible.

Paperback
320 pp
Published 16th Feb 2012
ISBN: 9781849016759

Comments from some readers you may be familiar with:

It’s not just the truth that’s out there – to quote an iconic TV series – the paranormal is, too. It really is. In your town. In your street. Maybe in your own home. The weird and inexplicable happens to ordinary people somewhere in the world every single day. Before you go in search of it, though, you will need a guide. How lucky for you that you have this excellent one in your hands.
– Richard Holland, Editor UncannyUK.com, former editor of Paranormal Magazine and author of Haunted Wales

From Borley to Baal, and everything in between, Leo Ruickbie’s latest work is a ghoulish glossary of facts, figures and fictions. A Brief Guide to the Supernatural is the perfect introduction to the world of all things eerie, inexplicable and otherworldly, whether you seek spirits, demons or angelic audience, this book gives an entertaining and informative overview equally suited to the experienced or amateur spook spotter.
– Jason Dexter Karl, co-presenter of Most Haunted, author of 21st Century Ghosts and founder of Ghost Research Foundation International

Very well written. Exciting, enjoyable and thought-provoking. Packed with interesting and intriguing ideas.
– Rev. Lionel Fanthorpe, President of the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena and author of over 250 books

It is a pleasure to read such a well-researched and documented guide to the major fields of interest in the paranormal, covering how we have experienced different phenomena and entity contacts, and how we have attempted to understand and explain them. Dr Leo Ruickbie has created a work of tremendous value to readers and researchers alike.
– Rosemary Ellen Guiley, author of The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits

A first-class piece of work!
– Nick Redfern, author of The Real Men in Black

The un-dead fascinate us, because we are profoundly bound to the understanding of death as a force of individuation and difference. We are spontaneously Heideggerians in that we understand death as the ultimate horizon of the totality of human existence: They can take our property, our livelihood, indeed our lives—but they can never take away our death. Isn’t that precisely why we are so fascinated by ideas that seem to challenge this perspective? Why do we fear the living dead, such as famously portrayed in late George A. Romero’s classic horror film Night of the Living Dead (1968), or more recently in the ongoing TV series Game of Thrones? The un-dead are the ultimate threat to the individual human being: they do not come simply to take our property, they do not come simply to take our life—they come to take our death itself!

A proposal to the worlds regarding how to approach the concept, phenomenon, and institutions of education. I offer a brief history of education, locating its origins in the Inquisitions and Witch Hunts of Europe and detail its contemporary role in spreading addiction to money as a mechanism of colonial control. I bring some concepts together from various authors toward a more functional and flexible framework of how liberation-minded people(s) might navigate in and outside of education toward a world of relations not controlled by capitalism, empire, and money. The concept of (Under)Commons of this piece is influenced by the title of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney's book "The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Studies" and also maintains an appreciation for the more widely studied concept of the Commons. "Preliminary Notes v1.0" denotes this as a work in progress that I hope to involve in wide conversation amongst a variety of audiences with stakes in life on earth as I continue to develop further versions until it becomes a complete book. As per the title, "Playing to Live, Not Living to Pay" is the primary goal here.
Please send any feedback to playingtolivenotlivingtopay@gmail.com

In accordance with Jameson and Zizek's oft-quoted observation that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, the rise of post-apocalyptic fiction is said to reveal the limitations of the social imaginary in late capitalist societies. Adorno and Benjamin, however, suggest a subtly different explanation. In a conversation about the shrinking of utopian consciousness in technologically advanced societies, Adorno claims that it is our identification with death that goes beyond even our identification with existing social conditions. Here, perhaps, in our attitude towards the corporeality of death and the question of its overcoming (questions Benjamin associated with a different utopian will, concerning first rather than second nature) we run up against the real limits of the social imaginary. 

Taking such a suggestion as a cue, this paper will examine the question of the social imaginary through an analysis of the living dead as a socio-political category within contemporary culture. Specifically, it will seek to address what the morphological transformations of the zombie reveal about contemporary society. Whereas other discussion have concentrated on the increasing speed exhibited by zombies in recent fiction, this paper will primarily focus on their shifting mode of being of the zombie itself, using as a guide the various film incarnations of Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I Am Legend. Initially characterized as vampire-like, the fictional monsters of these films develop over time into the more familiar zombies of Francis Lawrence's 2007 re-make. The alternative endings of this film reveal, I want to argue, the beginnings of a more recent trend towards the humanization of the zombies that is given fuller expression in series such as The Returned (2012) and In the Flesh (2013). Here, zombies take on a mode of being closer to that of a "haunting" more characteristic of ghosts and spectres. Reworking Benjamin's suggestion that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, this paper will examine what this attempt to re-integrate the monstrous figure of the zombie back into the social imaginary of the everyday in post-apocalyptic fiction - by humanizing, individualizing and empathizing with the undead - reveals about the conditions of life, work, death and apocalypse in contemporary capitalism.

Walsers Dramolett „Schneewittchen“, von Benjamin als „eines der tiefsinnigsten Gebilde der neueren Dichtung” beschrieben, stellt paradigmatisch die Figur des Untoten in der Kunst und der Literatur vor. Diese Figur ist zunächst in der Gestalt des Schneewittchens zu finden, literarisches Paradebeispiel des Lebens im Tod und des Todes im Leben, die bei Walser als Emblem einer jungfräulichen und sterilen bzw. toten oder – buchstäblich – winterlichen Schönheit auftaucht. Diese immerhin typische Figur entpuppt sich bei Walser auch implizit als eine Verkörperung und Verwirklichung des Paradoxes des Schönen im philosophischen Idealismus, worin Schönheit eigentlich das lebhaft Anorganische und Unlebende sein darf, damit sie nichts an ihrer essentiellen Schönheit einbüßen muss. Die tote Jungfrau, die sich über ihre eigene jungfräuliche Totheit beklagt, bietet also gleichzeitig ein komisches Aktivwerden des (toten) Kunstobjekts zusammen mit dem Lebloswerden der Kunst selbst dar, und zwar insofern, als das Leben der Kunst vom Lebendigmachen des toten Objekts abhängig ist.