And Say the Zombie Responded?
7
simultaneously allows the text to come to meaning—these are claims that are
indebted to Husserlian phenomenology and the realization that we truly do
experience things that are absent. But with our dead loved-ones, the point is
literal in a different way.
If we undertake a phenomenology of death, we discover that it is never
the case that when someone we know and love dies, we then cease to experience
that person. The death of the Other is, for us, not an erasure, a lack of
experience, a non-experience. How easy mourning would be if this were not the
case. How easy it would be if one simply had less experience of the Other after
the Other’s death. But instead, she continues to be present in our life, but present
as missing, here and not-here, present as lost. Just as we can actively experience
the absence of the back of the journal when we look at the journal from the
front, just as our tongue searches out the missing tooth once it is pulled as if it
were still there because it feels as if it still sits in the gum, just as the phantom
limb can ache and itch and drive us mad with its present absence, so we directly
experience the dead Other—the Other in the mode of being absent in our life.
Every dead Other is thus necessarily an apparition of what was. We are, all of
us, touched by the death of Others, by the present-absence of those we love. It is
the mortal human condition to lose those we love, to be forced into mourning.
To be alive is to experience such loss, and thus to be alive is to be haunted.
This could thus very easily become a phenomenology of ghosts, and
though there are some good ghost movies, and possibly even some good ghosts
out there, our topic is slightly different. The ghost in Western culture is
indicative of our realization that something is gone when we lose our loved
ones, and something that is completely different and alien is now with us in their
place. But zombies suggest that there is something that is not gone—there is a
presence that is still with us that is not so different from what used to be with us,
something, however, that in its presence is horrifying simply because the
realization is horrifying. And since that presence is of a consciousness that is
always incarnate—as all consciousness always is—when we imagine ourselves
stalked by zombies in the movies and in other forms of art, we are trying to deal
with the reality of mourning.
Freud’s admonition not to love the dead is thus not so easily heeded
because the dead are not completely gone when they die. Our libido is not so
easily unattached and reeled in so that we can freely invest it elsewhere. There,
as an object of consciousness, remains the person we loved, seemingly ready to
act as a repository of our libido. But the dead, of course, cannot love us back.
And thus we are met with horror. This is why we have some ghost stories with
friendly and happy ghosts, but zombies are never friendly or happy. Zombies are
a more authentic way of thinking through our relationship with the dead. They
are still here, but they can never return our love. As such, can we truly ever
really love them? The zombie embodies the terror of unrequited love and the
realization that all love is headed this way eventually.