Abstract
This chapter asks what monsters most accurately represent in our current age of global neoliberalism. Although the ravenous hunger and destructiveness of zombies capture aspects of the brutal rapacity of contemporary capitalism, this chapter argues that many recent theoretical appropriations of the figure of the zombie are either opportunistic or overly simplistic in the way they use zombies as a symptom for the evils of the neoliberal world order. Moreover, the usefulness of the zombie as a way of analyzing the current conjuncture is limited by what this chapter calls the excessive visibility of this figure; the instantaneous visual impression made by the zombies that throng popular culture hides the fact that the true monsters of neoliberalism—psychopaths—hide in plain sight by means of their bland normality.
Keywords
- International Monetary Fund
- Popular Culture
- Psychopathic Trait
- Power Elite
- Global Neoliberalism
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 140.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Preface: In a Time of Monsters,” in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), viii.
Kyle Bishop, “Dead Man Still Walking: Explaining the Zombie Renaissance,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 37, no. 1 (2009): 17.
Annalee Newitz, Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 2.
Karl Marx, “Chapter Ten: The Working-Day,” in Capital, Volume One, Marxists Internet Archive. Accessed June 2, 2015. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-ci/chio.htm.
Henry A. Giroux, Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 23.
Chris Harman, Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010), 12.
Evan Calder Williams, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2011), 78.
Quoted in Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (New York: Verso, 2011), 479.
Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis (New York: Verso Books, 2010), 91.
Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London: Profile Books, 2008), 1.
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2.
David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 10.
Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (New York: Free Press, 2004), 1–2.
Charles Ferguson, dir., Inside Job (Hollywood, Los Angeles, CA: Sony Pictures Classics, 2010), DVD.
Copyright information
© 2016 David R. Castillo, David Schmid, David A. Reilly and John Edgar Browning
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Schmid, D. (2016). The Limits of Zombies: Monsters for a Neoliberal Age. In: Zombie Talk: Culture, History, Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137567727_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137567727_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-88741-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-56772-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)