The Zombiepocalypse and Religion: Be Careful What You Wish For.

Zombies have been a mainstay in popular culture since George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Today’s most popular incarnation is The Walking Dead tv-series. While I read the Walking Dead graphic novel, I have only recently caught up on the television show. Watching the series puts me in mind of a few insights about Zombies that a religious studies perspective can bring to the phenomena as a whole. In this post, I only want to touch briefly on a few things: the apocalyptical or dystopian aspect of the zombie myth, the underlying ideology of the myth, and, of course, some observations about us that our zombie stories tell us.

First, I’d like to talk about Zombies AS myth.

Crushed by Idols

I really like this excerpt from Nietzsche. It inspires me.  Psht. Whatever, read Ecce Homo.

BAM:

One repays a teacher badly if one always remains only a pupil. And why, then, should you not pluck at my laurels?

You revere me; but what if your reverence tumbles one day? Beware that a statue does not strike you dead!

You say you believe in Zarathustra? But of what importance is Zarathustra? You are my believers: but of what importance are all believers?

You had not yet sought yourselves: then you found me. Thus do all believers; therefore all faith amounts to so little.

Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you.

– Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Philosophy as Discipline (suppliment to Philosophy as Sadism)

Philosophy as a discipline (that the irony of this word in this context has not been noticed shows how much I may be correct here) is the petty, violent sadism of last men who want to lord over the belief that they have already perfected knowledge, meanwhile convincing themselves that they are searching for it.

Just to expand a point I made in an earlier post. When I say that the discipline of philosophy is the belief that the last men have already perfected knowledge, one might think that this means that there is nothing left to know for these last men. Obviously, those doing philosophy understand themselves to be furthering knowledge. So, how can it be said that they have the belief that they have already ‘perfected knowledge’? When the procedures and technology of rationality are taken as a given, then there is nothing to add, philosophically, to how we go about knowing, to the underlying structure of thought, then yes, knowledge is perfected. All that is left is the clean up, the heavy lifting. Consequently, this conceit that we no longer need to challenge our basic assumptions (or more accurately, to determine where those assumptions lie) is covered over with the illusion that philosophers are still searching for new answers. But they are not. The answers are already there, at the end of the path laid out by the question. The task that remains is making that path more efficient: laying down the asphalt. The discipline of philosophy as a discipline tends towards this ossification when it polices itself with yeah-saying last men. The glee of the sadist petty tyrants is ambivalent though. Their ability to fully realize their sadistic rationality is curtailed by each other. In a warehouse bulging with sadists, no one sadist can dominate.  The ambivalence is tension between the will to express their rationality fully and their disappointment at being curtailed by other sadists.

Why express this view of the discipline as such? Professional philosophy, constrained by its institutional limitations, must be professional. That professionalism hardens it into a crystallized network. These institutional constraints on thought channel the discourse of philosophy in ways that constrain the limits of where one can push intellectually and still be funded, hired, accepted and not subject to exclusion, ridicule or just plain being ignored. In a discipline that prides itself on a history of challenging its predecessors, it is interesting that the complacency of professionalism for practical purposes curtails one’s ability to be challenging. Having spanned the divide between Anglo-American and Continental Philosophy, if we want to use those distinctions, it works in different ways for both sides. In a highly ironic turn, the most creative philosophers are those not even working in philosophy.

This is what I think was meant by the phrase “death of philosophy”. When philosophy becomes a discipline, and philosophizing becomes some language-game or history of philosophy within constrained methodological limits, where do we turn to for thought? If philosophy is the attempt to find the a priori conditions for knowing, or to understand the reasons why we think/do the things we do, then what does it mean when we cannot even glance at our shadows for fear of not being published or not getting the tenure track position?

Philosophy as Sadism

In “The Language of Sade and Masoch,” Gilles Deleuze discusses the differences and similarities between the writings of The Marquis du Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. “The Libertine may put on an act of trying to convince and persuade; he may even proselytize and gain new recruits (as in Philosophy in the Bedroom). But the intention to convince is merely apparent, for nothing is in fact more alien to the sadist than the wish to convince, to persuade, in short to educate. He is interested in something quite different, namely to demonstrate that reasoning itself is a form of violence, and that he is on the side of violence, however calm and logical he may be. He is not even attempting to prove anything to anyone, but to perform a demonstration related essentially to the solitude and omnipotence of its author” (19).

This small insight caught my attention. Aside from concisely elaborating post-68’ French theory’s critique of “rationality-as-given” in whatever form it comes, it also reminds me of my work in comparative philosophy and the history of Asian thought. The story of colonialism was a story of the West claiming a “rationality” over and against the irrationality of the other that justified, after the fact, colony and control. Justify might be too forceful a word. Perhaps it might be better conceived as an ideological apothecary to relieve the unpleasant symptoms of a bald grab for control. Having perused the great thinkers, the marginal thinkers, a wide variety of thought from the three most influential civilizations in the world, I am not yet convinced that there is a single universal rationality. Nor am I convinced that there isn’t. What I do know, is that the discourse of rationality has been used in the past to help legitimize power. Indeed, all rationality is the veneer that covers over brute will with flowery language. We desire, we feel, we intuit and then we talk, we rationalize it afterwards. Nietzsche pointed this out, and I have a hunch that this is what Heidegger misses in saying Nietzsche’s will to power is a further metaphysics. It seems to me that Heidegger himself falls into Nietzsche’s trap as much as he struggled against it.

But, all of the “greats” of western metaphysics have been deeply aligned with power, colony, imagined communities, justifications, rationalization after the fact for desire and will. Marx saw this, to some degree. But to bring back Sade into the discussion, reason and rationality are an intermission, a segue between the movement of forces. Or, more appropriately, rationality is the movement of force relations. Rationality is the show of violence. It is the ability of those with leisure enough to learn it, power enough to bend it, and sadism enough to use it. No matter what culture, with some exceptions who only reify the illusion that it is not the case, rationality and “great thought” is the violence of elites working through language. Even the most noble, ethical, pacifist, turn-the-other-cheek, satyagraha thinking can only happen in a language build from the productive power of a socio-political-economic system that is their opposite. In other words, the violent sadism of rationality is subtle enough to allow for it to be an opiate too (to use a Marxist analogy).

But, this is amplified in the work of philosophy and the academy in the 20^th century. The life of privilege and wealth that allowed thinking was brought under control in the form of the discipline. Modern philosophy is a zoo, regulated to produce in small spurts the opium and violence needed. Philosophers are often the most violent and most caged of the show. They want to let loose their sadism, they want to be freely sadistic. And yet, they know they are impotent. The impotence of the academy expresses itself as a more vile and petty sadism of little feuds and petty ideas only because it cannot unleash its own yearning to be a true libertine, in the Sadian sense. The older academy of apprentice and master, a pedagogy of taking care to gently ween new scholars into the Chateau has been replaced by the machine of jagged edges that culls and tears, small minutiae of pains and pleasures. The cogs—the tenured, the doctored, the post-doc, the grad student—they all tear little pieces of each other here and there. To what end? Ask Marx. Ask Nietzsche. Ask Foucault.

Philosophy as a discipline (that the irony of this word in this context has not been noticed shows how much I may be correct here) is the petty, violent sadism of last men who want to lord over the belief that they have already perfected knowledge, meanwhile convincing themselves that they are searching for it. Constructing knowledge when one thinks one has all the answers already (at the very least, the answers are all predetermined by the questions—questions, as Heidegger points out, that have nothing to do with thought—which is even more insidious) is exactly the solipsistic, omniscient sadism of a libertine.