The zombie long ago shuffled out of the West African religious imagination and into popular global culture, where it has been feasting on brains and fucking with the categorical certainties of oppositional thinking ever since. For by inhabiting that indeterminable realm that is also home to queers, vampires, and cyborgs, the zombie occupies the non-space between binaries and is neither dead nor alive, but, paradoxically, both at once, without taking on the full sense of either term.
Thus the zombie cannot have its status determined within a system of metaphysical dualism. This makes the zombie the stuff of modern nightmare; for we depend for our security and conceptual coherence in a chaotic and threatening universe upon being able to make clear and unambiguous distinctions between either this or that: true or false, good or evil, friend or foe ...etc.
It's true that within such binaries there is always a privileged term set over and against its inferior opposite and that whilst each term depends upon the other for its meaning and value the nature of their relationship is therefore one of violent inequality. But, nevertheless, these pairings by enabling us to firmly organize people, things, and relations, do make human society possible.
By disrupting this operational logic, the zombie makes it difficult for us to think straight or think clearly, indicating, if you will, the very limits of our world as ultimately the distinction between life and death is dissolved and the lines between other crucial oppositions are also blurred.
Obviously, if good order is to be preserved, then the zombie needs to be defeated: but how? It isn't easy to terminate something that is already dead (whilst alive). Addressing this problem, one critic writes:
"You can't kill a zombie, you have to resolve it. It has to be 'killed' categorically, by removing its undecidability. A magic agent or superior power will have to decide the zombie, returning it to one side of the opposition or the other. It has to become a proper corpse or a true living being. At that point the familiar concepts of life and death can rule again, untroubled."
- Jeff Collins, Introducing Derrida, (Icon Books, 2000), p. 23
But of course, we know in our hearts that the zombie can never really be resolved in this manner; that it is always out there somewhere in the shadows or at the margins of this world, ready and waiting to return after dark. Or, as Derrida would say, undecidability is ever present.
Further - and finally - inasmuch as we too are made from inanimate matter, it might be argued that there's something of the zombie in all of us.
