Abstract
This chapter asks what monsters most accurately represent in our current age of global neoliberalism. Although the ravenous hunger and destructiveness of zombies capture aspects of the brutal rapacity of contemporary capitalism, this chapter argues that many recent theoretical appropriations of the figure of the zombie are either opportunistic or overly simplistic in the way they use zombies as a symptom for the evils of the neoliberal world order. Moreover, the usefulness of the zombie as a way of analyzing the current conjuncture is limited by what this chapter calls the excessive visibility of this figure; the instantaneous visual impression made by the zombies that throng popular culture hides the fact that the true monsters of neoliberalism—psychopaths—hide in plain sight by means of their bland normality.
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Notes
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 140.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Preface: In a Time of Monsters,” in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), viii.
Kyle Bishop, “Dead Man Still Walking: Explaining the Zombie Renaissance,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 37, no. 1 (2009): 17.
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Evan Calder Williams, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2011), 78.
Quoted in Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (New York: Verso, 2011), 479.
Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis (New York: Verso Books, 2010), 91.
Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London: Profile Books, 2008), 1.
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2.
David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 10.
Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (New York: Free Press, 2004), 1–2.
Charles Ferguson, dir., Inside Job (Hollywood, Los Angeles, CA: Sony Pictures Classics, 2010), DVD.
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© 2016 David R. Castillo, David Schmid, David A. Reilly and John Edgar Browning
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Schmid, D. (2016). The Limits of Zombies: Monsters for a Neoliberal Age. In: Zombie Talk: Culture, History, Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137567727_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137567727_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-88741-5
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