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Popular Culture Review
in a flash of brilliance, manages to cure Sydney by confusing her, telling her that
“kiss” means “kill” and that other words do not refer to the things she had earlier
believed. They try to broadcast this over the airwaves—“swimming is
tomorrow, fidelity is monologue, ceiling is rhinoceros”—but a countdown
begins outside the church (in French) and the movie ends when the military
reaches zero, Grant and Sydney kiss, and, we presume, the bombs destroy
everything.
One of the conceits of modernity was that language functioned through
denotation. Words were thought to have meaning because they denote things in
the world—reaching out and pointing at them, anchoring themselves like signs
or labels. But postmodemity, with its critique of all meta-narrative and the naive
belief that texts have borders and the world is separate from our understanding
of it—put an end to this. In Derridean terms, words refer, but they merely refer
to each other. They hang above the world without ever reaching down to point,
supported by faith and the force of our collective and mutual will. They carve
out a world rather than describe one. In phenomenological terms, words do not
point but are one way of making things present (though present in a very absent
way). Communication thus becomes more of an ethical project than an
ontological or metaphysical one. How we speak carries with it a responsibility
for the Other. Even the word “response” and the word “ability” are hidden in
“responsibility” (in much the same way that “typo” is hidden in the middle of
“Pontypool”), for what it means to be responsible for someone is to have the
ability to respond, and to do so with care. What is right or wrong can no longer
be settled by an appeal to a correspondence theory of truth based on a belief
about there being an objective world outside. And so, the weight of language is a
heavy burden on our souls. The demands by which communication maintains
community are great. And the zombie is the breakdown of all of this. The y press
against the outside of our most sacred institutions, and we have nothing left to
say.
What it means for someone to be dead is never to be able to respond.
The dead are, to be sure, still with us. But there will never be a response. We
write to the dead, talk to them, cry out for them. And they do not answer back.
This is Emmanual Levinas’ definition of “death”: non-response; silence. And it
is a definition that Derrida defended as well. The zombie is thus a marker both
of our cultural fear about settling into the age of postmodemity bereft of the
comforts of modernism, and the fear of silence, the fear of the death of the
Other. If the zombie moans a bit it is not because he is struggling for language,
not because he is some animal on the way toward language, but because he has
passed it by—and in so doing, passed us by, passed along, passed away.
Our future lies in that direction. All around us are the markers of where
we are heading. One might ask “How can someone speak and not know what
they are saying?” But this is, perhaps, the rule and not the exception to most of
our everyday speech. In concrete terms, one need only think of people who say
the words “like” or “um” several times per sentence without any awareness that