Taking the Zombie Seriously: State of Nature and Contemporary Pessimism

Abstract

This paper seeks to observe the distinctive traits of the zombies' movies, and the image of apocalypse they evoke, which can offer to social sciences a metaphoric approach allowing to clarify different aspects of contemporary society. In order to do this, the paper follows Georges Balandier's proposal about the capacity of science fiction to project the current conditions into far futures from which one can generate a different perspective to think our present times. The image of the devastated humanity, namely represented by uninhabited urban spaces as the images of London in 28 Days Later, will be incorporated into an analysis of the notion of the sublime following Kant and the problematization of the death drive following Freud. This will offer an approach to the desire of destruction of the present system and its coercion on individuals, which find in the fiction of an apocalyptic world, the feeling of freedom and the break with the state of passivity imposed by institutions.