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Popular Culture Review
merely a lump of meat. Of course, race is still functioning in this discourse
because race is always more than skin color. In the distinction between white
meat and dark meat, there is still division. But what Grimes seems to be getting
at is that even if there are physical differences—even if the category of race
initially is founded on some empirical quality—we must abandon the political
category of “race” in a post-apocalyptic world, realizing that there are always
differences among us. The differences on which we choose to focus and reify
into something of import become relative. The categories of “black” and “white”
have no basis in nature, but rather serve a political and ethical function.
The same, though, can be said of species. To separate a pig from a
human is possible because there are differences. But difference is everywhere.
It’s all a question of what one wishes to do with some difference once it is
noted. Having the category distinction between black and white makes it
possible to own slaves. Having the category distinction between human and pig
keeps eating pork from being an act of cannibalism. The moral question thus
does not begin with the question of how to act, but rather how to think,
conceptualize, and perceive the world before actions even become possible. If
the assumed evil of zombies is partly found in the object of their hunger, then
isn’t this our secret evil as well? We crave flesh—perhaps not our own species’
(as fictional as that category might be), but we do, indeed, want to eat the living.
And in this way, the zombie’s desire for human flesh is an ethical marker for our
own failing, for our own desire to eat meat.
Once again, we are working out our fears and our guilt by means of the
zombie. We humans are creatures capable of some degree of choice, capable of
taking part in the shaping of our worldview and thus what appears to us as good
and right. That so many of us continue to torture animals and eat their flesh is a
not-so-secret horror that haunts us as a culture.
Let us make no mistake: this is all about the flesh. It is always about the
flesh with zombies and with humans. What it means to say that a zombie is dead
is, itself, an interesting philosophical question. If one is animate, responding to
external stimuli, and capable of behavior, what more could we want to qualify as
a living thing? It seems that zombies are considered dead only because they
were once alive and stopped being alive for a time—and, perhaps, that they do
not metabolize. Something has reanimated their flesh. They are brainless, and
this indicates for most that they are consciousness-less as well.
This would certainly be the position of seventeenth-century philosopher
Rene Descartes—a man, I must say, who has always given me the creeps.
Without a mind, Descartes claimed that a being was a mere machine. For much
of his life, Descartes searched for where the mind might reside inside the human
body. He claimed that the mind, that thing that truly is the Self, is “lodged in the
body as a pilo t in a vessel,”17 but he could never quite figure out how the two
things fused so that the one could control the other. For a time, he considered the
possibility that the mind lives inside the pineal gland, but this is a rather dark
moment in the history of philosophy given that such a claim is, to put it lightly,