Critical Theory Tuesdays: In Between Two Deaths with Lacan, Zizek, and Zombies

As humans, we are defined by our end. Every breath is drawn in the face of that daunting ubiquity of flesh sinking back into the earth. Each heartbeat echoes the inevitability that our remains will become the fodder for an orchestral chaos of decomposition. Every day, we are faced with the unavoidable dissipation of our bodies – our permanent expulsion from the Eden of the Real. In accordance with Lacanian psychoanalysis, however, death is far more complex than just a finite biological timeline. Lacan’s conception of life and death extends beyond the dominion of physical mortality. We die once, at the end of life, when our years have dwindled and our faculties have fallen into ruin. We die again, emblematically, in the face of our imploding Symbolic universe. It is here that ourselves, as subjects, face extermination and extinction. A living death occurs when we become excluded – ostracized – from the symbolic order. Without the property of a subject, without an identity, we can no longer exist for the Other. The recognition of this symbolic death has manifested itself through our obsession with the undead.

In the abyss between symbolic death and actual death, a space emerges. This space consists of pure death drive – a paradoxical drive without desire. The primary disparity between desire and drive is that, while both remain insatiable, desire remains as such because that persistent lack acts as a catalyst. Desire is defined by that very lack. Desire emerges obsessively in search of an object to fill the absence. This is an object that, by nature, cannot and does not exist. Conversely, drive understands the prevalence of this lack and is pleasured by the act of attempting to fill it. In the symbolic realm, the insatiable cannibalism of Zombies represents the death drive as incessant consumption without satisfaction. Drive is about the Sisyphean motions, not the false ideal of ultimate fulfillment. In Lacanian terms, the death drive is defined as the innate impulse to return to the immaculate state of quiescence that precedes birth. According to Zizek, this cavernous void between the two deaths is filled by manifestations of the monstrous, the beautiful, and the grotesque.

This death-driven compulsion is blatantly cannibalistic. Freud argues in his later writings (Beyond the Pleasure Principle) that humans are drawn to repeat painful or traumatic events, despite an apparent contradiction to the human pleasure instinct. The traumatized individual, like a zombie devouring flesh, attempts to consume the trauma. This allows the subject to return into a state of quiescence – a limbo between the finality of death and the reality life. In this “undead” state, the binary opposition between dead and alive is undone. Zombies are symbolically representational of humans existing in the space of the death drive – they are neither dead nor alive, and they are simultaneously both dead and alive. In this fashion, zombies reject all meaning. Zombies represent precisely what is impossible to represent within the complex sphere of human nature: they resist any stable signification through paradoxically signifying too much.

-- J. Henry, Feb 2011