Fourth lecture for my students in English 165EW, "Life After the End of the World," winter 2013 at UC Santa Barbara. Course website: http://patrickbrianmooney.nfshost.com/~patrick/ta/w13/

1. Lecture 4: The Abject Zombie
English 165EW
Winter 2013
16 January 2013
And no-one proved right
And no-one was wrong
We weren’t left alone
And we didn’t belong
When the end of the world came
It passed like an awkward remark.
— The Jane Austen Argument, “When the End of the
World Came” (2012)

2. The word “abject” means ...
1. utterly hopeless, miserable, humiliated, or
wretched: abject poverty.
2. contemptible; despicable; base-spirited: an
abject coward.
3. shamelessly servile; slavish.
4. Obsolete. Cast aside.
From dictionary.com; based on the Random House Dictionary.

3. For Julia Kristeva, “the abject” ...
● incorporates all of the elements of the previous
definition.
● is not the same as an “object,” though it is also
appears in a binary opposition to a subject.
“The abject has only one quality of the object – that
of being opposed to I.” (1)
● is fundamentally related to embodiment and the
horrors of that state.
“Along with sight-clouding dizziness, nausea makes
me balk at that milk cream.” (3)

4. ● “skin on the surface of milk” (“I experience a gagging
sensation”)
● “the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a
border that has encroached upon everything.”
“The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is
the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject.” (4)
● “A wound with blood and pus”
● “body fluids”
● “defilement”
● “shit”
(except where noted, all are from pp. 2-3)
Some examples of the abject

5. Some characteristics
● “It lies outside, beyond the set, and does not
seem to agree to the latter’s rules of the game.”
(2)
● Serves as a referent that helps to position the
superego by being an integral part of its
definition through a binary opposition.
“to each ego its object, to each superego its abject.”
(2)
… and therefore: “On the edge of non-existence and
hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it,
annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my
safeguards. The primers of my culture.” (2)

6. ● The experience of abjection is “in fact recognition
of the want on which any being, meaning,
language, or desire is founded.” (5)
● Among other things, this is an effect of recognizing the
relative scale of the individual life and the vast network
of relationships in which it is entangled.
● “Put another way, it means that there are lives not
sustained by desire, as desire is always for objects.
Such lives are based on exclusion.” (6)
● Abjection results, in part, from partial exclusion of
repressed material from conscious mental activity.
(7)
● “Abjection is therefore a kind of narcissistic crisis:
it is witness to the ephemeral aspect of the state
called ‘narcissism’ with reproachful jealousy.” (14)

7. ● Abjection is also related to the recognition that
the self is not a totalized, organic, monadic
unity.
● “when I seek (myself), lose (myself), or experience
jouissance--then ‘I’ is heterogeneous.” (8)
● “I experience abjection only if an Other has settled
in place and stead of what will be ‘me.’ Not at all an
other with whom I identify and incorporate, but an
Other who precedes and possesses me, and
through such possession causes me to be.” (10)
● “In the symptom, the abject permeates me, I
become abject.” (11)

8. “the law”
“It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that
causes abjection but what disturbs identity,
system, order. What does not respect borders,
positions, rules, the liar, the criminal with a sound
conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who
claims he is a savior . . . Any crime, because it
draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject,
but remeditated crime, cunning murder,
hypocritical revenge are even more so because
they heighten the display of such fragility.” (4)

9. Repression
● For psychoanalysts, repression is always
present in the human psyche as a necessary
component of the structure of consciousness
itself.
● Repressed content is dealt with by various
mechanisms depending on the structure of the
psyche:
Neurosis → Denial
Psychosis → Rejection
Abjection → Transgression

10. Troubled borders
“For the space that engrosses the deject, the
excluded, is never one, not homogeneous, nor
totalizable, but essentially divisible, foldable,
and catastrophic.” (8)
“abjection is above all ambiguity.” (9)
“the abject confronts us, on the one hand, with
those fragile states where man strays on the
territories of animal.” (12)
“the abject is perverse because it neither gives
up nor assumes a prohibition, a rule, or a law.”
(15)

11. George Romero’s zombies …
● are not particularly interested in eating
brains.
● are never explained in a way that is
fully endorsed by any of Romero’s
Dead movies.
● Some explanations proposed in Romero’s
Dead movies:
– “When there’s no more room in Hell
…” (Peter, ch. 17)
– “They’re working on an analysis of this
whole phenomenon from the point of
view of a viral disease …” (TV
announcer, ch. 12)
– “Some kind of radiation” that a space
probe brought back from Venus.
(Night of the Living Dead)
Romero as TV producer at the
beginning of Dawn of the Dead.

12. Romero’s zombies are probably best
seen in terms of class and consumerism

15. Francine: What are they doing? Why do they come here?
Stephen: Some kind of instinct. A memory of what they
used to do. This was an important place in their lives.
(ch. 6)
Roger: We’re in! How the hell are we going to get back?
Peter: Who the hell cares? Let’s go shopping first! (ch. 8)
Stephen: You should see all the great stuff we got,
Frannie. All kinds of stuff! This place is terrific! It really
is, it’s perfect! All kinds of things! We’ve really got it
made here! (ch. 10)
Peter: They’re after the place. They don’t know why, they
just remember … remember that they want to be in
here.
Francine: What the hell are they?
Peter: They’re us, that’s all. (ch. 17)

17. TV Scientist: Cannibalism in the true sense of the word
implies an interspecies [sic] activity. These creatures cannot
be considered human. They prey on humans. They do not
prey on each other. (ch. 12)
TV Scientist: Intelligence? Seemingly no little or no reasoning
power, but basic skills remain – or more remembered
behaviors from, uh, normal life. There are reports of these
creatures using tools, but even these actions are the most
primitive. The use of such external articles as bludgeons
and so forth – I might point out to you that even animals will
adopt the basic use of tools in this manner. These creatures
are nothing but pure, motorized instinct. Their only drive is
for food. […] We must not be lulled by the thought that
these are our family members or our friends. They are not.
They will not respond to such on such emotions. They must
be destroyed on sight! (ch. 12)
Roger: You’ll take care of it, won’t you, Peter? […] I don’t want
to be walking around like that. (ch. 17)

19. “The individual is entirely nullified in the face of
the economic powers. These powers are taking
society’s domination over nature to unimagined
heights. While individuals as such are vanishing
before the apparatus they serve, they are
provided for by that apparatus and better than
ever before. In the unjust state of society the
powerlessness and pliability of the masses
increase with the quantity of goods allocated to
them.”
– Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, preface
to Dialectic of Enlightenment (xvii)

20. A final question
How shall we handle the Adams this quarter?

21. Media credits
● Stills from Dawn of the Dead are probably under
copyright, but have been selected for their unique
value as a teaching tool, and are low-resolution
copies not suitable for producing quality
reproductions. They also account for only about a
dozen of the film’s tens of thousands of frames
and thus constitute a tiny fraction of the film. I
believe that, taken all together, these stills fall
under the rubric of “fair use.”