Zombies as Posthuman: A Line from Slavoj Zizek

In Enjoy Your Symptom, Zizek argues:

"The living dead are not in-between or undecidable.  In fact, they are more living than we the living because they have access to the life substance prior to its symbolic mortification”(116). 

Zombies, that is, are liberated from language, from society, from culture--what theory calls the "symbolic." They are raw matter, life as matter, as the "Real."  

In one possible future, the deflation of humanocentric beliefs and concepts and perhaps changes in the human body itself (replacement parts, cyborgs, possible "reanimations") may show us something we would call "posthuman."  The zombie figure may index our conscious and unconscious fears and desires about such a future.