Fragments on the zombie myth: the mortification of general intellect and the half-life of the cognitariat

Toby Austin Locke — Mon, 14 Oct 2013 12:55:55 +0000

The only modern myth is the myth of zombies—mortified schizos, good for work, brought back to reason.

- Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari

The zombie is the point at which power’s domination, the domination of the state and of capital in all its shades - subjective, existential, epistemological, even ontological - has entered so completely into our communities that the unquestioning automaton is the most recurrent and common form-of-life to be encountered. It is the point at which subjectivity has been so deeply infested by the love of power, the micro-facism that is diffused across the global bio-political mass, that life only appears as a half-death, an existence the potential forms of which are predetermined, prelimited, constrained. The images of loved ones appear, but terrify; intimacy gives way to disgust, and those who break free of their cages of isolation, who demand to reclaim life from its half-death, are confronted by the utter terror that surrounds them.

through europe - zombie

Fragments on the zombie myth: the mortification of general intellect and the half-life of the cognitariat