It is surely easy to forge a common idea of what may be called zombie mimicry. Probably, we all have in mind the recurrent image of hordes of nonliving individuals whose remarkably standardized behavior (way of walking, gestures, etc.) has become a recognizable feature. This well-known mental picture has been extensively disseminated and has shaped our contemporary visual culture in a wide range of forms: tv series, comic books, videogames, and, of course, cinema, on which we will focus. The main aim of this chapter is to take cinematographic zombies as a case study to argue that zombie mimicry might be considered part of posthuman mimesis as a relevant consequence of the mimetic turn in posthuman studies. The purpose is to analyze zombie mimicry as a defining feature of the mimetic posthuman in the sense that the ego is easily possessed, that is, hypnotized (especially in crowds) and vulnerable to becoming a phantom, permeable to contagion, in such a way that zombies constitute a perfect model of contemporary homo mimeticus 2.0, whose contagious pathos spreads over our present posthuman culture.
First, a word must be said about posthuman mimesis inasmuch as it may seem a contradiction in terms. As Nidesh Lawtoo explains, the long-established notion of mimesis and contemporary posthuman studies look in two opposed directions: The first refers to metaphysical tradition of western aesthetics which, rooted in an idealizing conception of being, deals with Platonic dialectics of representation between originals and illusory, fallacious copies, thus reducing mimesis to the logic of the Same, whereas the second challenges precisely these sorts of humanistic ideals, addressing mimesis as an immanent, relational force, affective power, or pathos.1 At this point, the mimetic turn
the mimetic turn suggests to re-turn to a different conception of mimesis that includes heterogeneous phenomena that go from mimicry to identification, mimetism to emotional contagion, influence to mirror neurons, trance to hypnosis, simulation to hypermimesis among other avatars of mimesis central to exploring the protean ramification of posthuman subjectivity in the twenty-first century.2
These procedures can be found at the core of the contemporary posthuman condition, taking part in the advent of homo mimeticus 2.0. This ontological production develops by deconstructing and decentering the metaphysical notion of unitary subjectivity as well as unconsciously imitating affective patterns in the plane of immanence that also entail cultural, visual, ideological, and consumerist practices. Theoretical references for this paradigm of the self range from Nietzsche to Deleuze, Derrida, Baudrillard, Braidotti, Tarde, and Hayles.
That said, it is precisely in this context that zombies become a perfect example of the mimetic side of posthuman subjectivity, because they show many features of the mimetic posthuman, as we will see later, such as disorganized excessive mimicry, hypnosis and trance, possession and simulation, and pathological contagion, ultimately articulated in a deconstructive notion of being that merges monstrous techno-corporalities with viral transhumanism. It is my conviction that zombies must be situated at the birth of posthuman mimesis as they constitute a significant way in which homo mimeticus takes form. Finally, a homogenous multitude of phantasmal zombies radically illustrates the very functioning of mimetic pathos: Posthuman subjects imitate both individually and collectively via unconscious mirroring, which render us open to contagion at the level of affect, or pathos. It is no coincidence that zombies reveal the double movement that defines mimetic pathos, that is, the oscillation between the contradictory feelings of terror and pleasure, called the pathos of distance.3
In a nutshell: mimetic pathos indicates that all affects are mimetic and part of the process of becoming posthuman; pathos of distance suggests a certain ambivalence, oscillation, or tension both the concepts of mimesis and of the posthuman tend to generate; and patho(-)logies reveal a fundamental diagnostic duplicity whereby a loss of embodiment, individual disconnection, and collective tribalization constitutive of posthuman pathologies can, at the same time, be put to productive use for emerging technologies to generate new connections, human/nonhuman collaborations, and vital new patho-logies.5
Such circumstances are easily located in the evolution of the figure of the zombie in cinema and the mimetic procedures at stake in each stage, which go from anthropological primitive ego to viral technozombies.
1 Genealogy of Zombie Mimicry
In their compulsive, wavering, deorganicized movements, the zombies are allegorical and mimetic figures.
steven shaviro, Cinematic Body
A brief genealogy of zombie films is in order. The first stage is usually characterized by Haitian zombies, as can be appreciated in White Zombie (1932), the film by Victor Halperin based on the novel The Magic Island (written by Seabrook in 1929), and Revolt of the Zombies (1936), set in Cambodia, also by Halperin. In this stage, the figure of the zombie is portrayed as a primitive automaton under hypnosis or voodoo, an exotic puppet in a trance state who involuntarily does the bidding of a superior criminal mind by mimetically performing their command. Without going into greater detail—in this realm a comment on racism would be necessary—the zombie that can be found in this early stage is still not the common stereotype. In fact, it is more like the somnambulist Cesare as seen in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Wiene, 1920).
However, even in this initial moment, the centrality of mimesis appears as a striking aspect in order to fully grasp the meaning of zombies. Mimicry
But above all, the Romerian zombies have been analyzed as a metaphor for consumerism. In fact, zombification could be thought of in terms of mass culture under the spell of consumer ideology. Thus, the analysis of the mimetic unconscious might take zombies as an example of mass pathology originating in hypnosis and suggestion that manages to control the collective ego under trance states. Consumerist discourse spreads like a virus and inoculates subjectivities with stereotyped mimetic patterns. This sort of contagion generates phantom egos. The contemporary subject, which is produced as a potential consumer, loses their human condition and becomes a market product, a waste, a residue of the economic and cultural strategies that legitimate such alienating system. This subject is truly living dead, inasmuch as they undergo a process of dehumanization, thereby finding a perfect expression in the zombies. In this respect, Steven Shaviro’s vision on Romero’s zombies is clear enough. He has argued that the life-in-death of the zombies is a sophisticated allegory for the inner logic of late capitalism, responsible for aggressive business practices, exploitation, and social hysteria. In this context, the zombies enact a radical refusal of value and become a detritus of industrial society. In the words of Shaviro: “The zombies mark the dead end or zero degree of capitalism’s logic of endless consumption and ever-expanding accumulation, precisely because they embody this logic so literally and to such excess.”6
Therefore, it is no surprise that zombies undertake such a subversive action by means of hyperbolic mimicry. Briefly put, Romero’s zombies are mimetic replications that embody and reproduce to excess the ontological effects of unbridled consumerism. They play the role of alter egos or avatars of human beings taking the form of a simulacrum, a distorted mirror that ironically shows humans’ true image. Hence, the living dead, under the hypnotic spell
Indeed, Romero has called to life the first postmodern zombies. … Romero’s zombies could almost be said to be quintessential media images, since they are vacuous, mimetic replications of the human beings they once were. … Zombies move slowly and affectlessly, as if in a trance, but the danger they represent is real: they kill and consume. They are slower, weaker, and stupider than living humans; their menace lies in numbers, and in the fact that they never give up. Their slow-motion voracity and continual hungry wailing sometimes appears clownish, but at other times emerges as an obsessive leitmotif of suspended and ungratified desire.9
Thus, a subject driven by a mimetic pathos (fear, anxiety, ressentiment, aggression, conspiratorial beliefs, etc.) has the power to contaminate one or more subjects with the same pathos, which can expand rhizomatically and exponentially in order to affect/infect a mass or public in the body politic crowd.14
This situation entails that zombie mimicry becomes viral, and such an unprecedented fact involves new mimetic implications that should be carefully considered: Zombification becomes a type of affective contagion that spreads like a viral infection, affecting collective subjectivation, mass emotional psychology, general conduct, and will.15 As it happens, the objective of viral zombies is no
In these circumstances, the latent risk is not merely to be afraid of the Other, that is, an external dangerous threat materialized in a multitude of famished living dead creatures that we have to escape from, but it is actually the terror unveiled by homogeneity. At this point, mimesis has been transformed into the main threat of zombification, the true risk at the core of contagion. Human beings have finally realized that the real enemy is none other than the virus of impersonal enactment that addresses problems of identification and phantasmatic-mimetic ego. As Fernández Gonzalo points out: “It is not the fear of otherness … it is fear of sameness, of being everyone infected, bitten, by that equalizing sieve which levels all of us.”17 According to this idea, mimesis has become a major danger, but could it also be a path of liberation? As Lawtoo states, “if we want to understand how humans come into being, much more theoretical attention needs to be given to the formative function of these intersubjective, unconscious, responses that give birth to the ego—out the pathos of the other.”18 Reflection on mimetic zombies can help us take this stance, which becomes imperative nowadays.
2 Parasites’ Politics
Copying the relation of man to man brings us back to parasitism.
michel serres, The Parasite
The host is not a prey, for he offers and continues to give. Not a prey, but the host. The other one is not a predator but a parasite. Would you say the mother’s breast is the child’s prey? It is more or less the child’s home.20
Then, what the parasite actually eats is the host. We may also see the parasite is a guest who is maternally nurtured by the host. Indeed, according to Serres’s metaphor, when the country rat is invited to dinner by the town rat, it realizes that the city happily feeds the rats that live within it. Ironically, every system needs its parasites. As Serres says, there is no system without parasites.21
The host welcomes its guests with pleasant hospitality. However, this is precisely the strategy used by the host to control the guests, which means to cancel the threatening danger of a plague of rats that could potentially infect it. This is because, by eating next to, the rats become neutralized, homogenized, immunized. As a result, the parasite imitates the host and proceeds like a reinforcing element that imitates the host’s inner dynamics. Thus understood, the parasites replicate the system that feeds them. Therefore, far from being a disruptive force within the organism that welcomes them, the parasites become assimilated. The parasites are parasitized. In sum, the host’s hospitality is a
We parasite each other and live amidst parasites. Which is more or less a way of saying that they constitute our environment. We live in that black box called the collective; we live by it, on it, and in it. It so happens that this collective was given the form of an animal: Leviathan. We are certainly within something bestial; we are speaking of an organic model for the members of a society. Our host? I don’t know. But I do know that we are within. And that it is dark in there.23
Trying to dissipate such darkness, the parasites—let us say, the viral zombies—entail a disruptive potential against the host, in the conviction that parasitism—or rather, zombification—should be articulated according to a different mimetic procedure. That said, the relation between the guest and the host might be reconsidered, specially bearing in mind that, as Serres remarks, “the parasitic relation is intersubjective. It is the atomic form of our relations.”24 Then, the question would be whether the alienating mimesis spread by the host can be destroyed. In this regard, Serres provides a promising alternative. In his view, the key is to abandon the conventional mimesis based on meaning and representation so as to unleash a system made up of connections and ruptures. Hence, the relation between the guest and the host would adopt the form of a short-circuited mimetic sequence that dismantles imitation. “Quite simply, what is essential is neither the image nor the deep meaning, neither the representation nor its hall of mirrored reflections, but
One way to accomplish this task is to make noise, while taking the precaution of avoiding the noise made by the host, which is already familiar to the parasites. In fact, the host actually controls its guests, not by taking away the food from them but by making noise. As Serres explains: “The city rat gets used to it, is vaccinated, becomes immune.”26 This is the procedure through which the parasites are parasitized—by means of repetition. The host plays the same tune over and over again, as if it were an unconscious power of habituation which functions via hypnotic repetition, and thus the parasites embody a specific mimetic pattern inoculated by the host. In view of this, it is due to mimetic repetition that the parasites become part of the host. However, Serres points out that such domination is canceled in the very moment in which the parasitized population makes noise in feedback.27 “Noise nourishes a new order.”28 Specifically, in order to be free, the parasites must make “white noise,” an expression that Serres coined to refer a sort of background noise. Put simply, the white noise is a space between the guest and the host where the parasite interferes, that is, the realm where new relations can be forged through connections and disconnections hôte à hôte.
Consequently, by making white noise, the guests break the previous relationship of mimetic dependence with the host. They are tired of listening to the same tune all the time and do not want to hear the invitation of the town rat anymore. Inversely, “the rats invite themselves to dinner, and that makes noise.”29 Thus, the parasites make their own noise to interrupt the continuity of the host’s mimetic model. “The country rat becomes the interrupter, like the noise. The broken relation is that of the city rat and the guest, that of the city rat and the noise.”30 This being the case, it can be concluded that the noise developed by the country rats constitutes a new kind of mimesis. Do not forget that these rats are the parasites, or virulent zombies, that have freed themselves from being parasitized by the system. Here there seems to be the possibility of setting up a distance, via noise, from the hypnotic power
It is of utmost importance to understand the action of the parasites as an infectious disease that attacks the host and disturbs its normal functioning by disrupting mimetic hospitality. Not casually, Serres claims that sickness is parasitic. In his own words: “Sickness is a parasitic noise that intercepts a function; it is a noise that mixes up messages in the circuits of the organism, parasiting their ordinary circulation.”32 At this point, Serres makes a revealing statement: Parasitism is not only to eat next to the host, but to eat inside the host. We now have a complete picture of parasites’ double nature, which suffers the host’s perverse logic but at the same time develops a new mimetic politics intended to subvert the host from within. In these circumstances, the parasites are able to disorganize Leviathan by dismantling its imitative tendency.
3 How Do You Make Yourself a “BwO”?
A BwO is made in such a way that it can be occupied,
populated only by intensities.
gilles deleuze and felix guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
Serres describes the host as a maternal womb that nurtures the guests (“Would you say that the mother’s breast is the child’s prey? It is the child’s home”),33 ultimately transforming them into parasitized individuals, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari seem to share a similar approach. In particular, they use the
It is a strange subject, however, with no fixed identity, wandering about over the body without organs, but always remaining peripheral to the desiring-machines, being defined by the share of the product it takes for itself, garnering here, there, and everywhere a reward in the form of a becoming or an avatar, being born of the states that it consumes and being reborn with each new state. “It’s me, and so it’s mine.”36
Such a fleeting idea of subjectivity addresses a weak and dispersed ontological detritus that is notoriously diverse, fragmented, and recycled. If we take into
The contents of such moments of “consummation,” moreover, are derived from the connections and disjunctions generated by the previous syntheses. … a subject emerges alongside the desiring-machines to “consume,” to enjoy or suffer, part of what has been produced. … Here the subject in fact only arises in the consuming appropriation and consummating recognition of the results of desiring-production, yet it tends to construe itself as an autonomous entity capable of taking possession of products of the processes that in fact constitute it.37
This phenomenon could be analyzed from the point of view of the country rats that invited themselves to dinner because they preferred to make their own noise, thus parasiting the host’s parasitism. Such is indeed the main consequence of eating inside the host: The parasitism developed by the rats turns against the host’s parasitic method. It is thus no coincidence that Michel Serres took rats to conceptualize his theory about parasites, inasmuch as rats have been traditionally related with infestations and plagues. Rats are parasitic by nature. Such small animals are the waste product of a bigger one, but they embody the potential destruction of the beast that feeds them. Leviathan has created its nemesis. That is why it tries to eliminate the risk by giving itself to be eaten, by letting the rats eat next to. Like zombies, rats are first of all the result of the mimetic consumption spread by the host, however they show resistance against its cannibalistic procedure. Only when rats make noise and zombies become viral, that is, parasitic, is the host dismantled.
Syntheses produce divisions. Let us consider, for example, the milk the baby throws up when it burps; it is at one and the same time the restitution of something that has been levied from the associative flux (restitution de prelevement sur le flux associatif); the reproduction of the process of detachment from the signifying chain (reproduction de detachement sur la chaine signifiante); and a residuum (residu) that constitutes the subject’s share of the whole.38
In relation to the organic disruption suffered by the socius that we have referred to as Leviathan, it is relevant to highlight that Deleuze and Guattari coined the term “Body without Organs” (BwO) to explain the general disarticulation that the larval subject spreads within any significant structure, because, as they say: “The full body [without organs] does not represent anything at all.”39 In A Thousand Plateaus (1980), the second volume of Anti-Oedipus (1972), Deleuze and Guattari wrote a chapter titled “How do you make yourself a BwO?,” in which they gave the main guidelines for the destruction of the organism.
The body without organs, the unproductive, the unconsumable, serves as a surface for the recording of the entire process of production of desire, so that desiring-machines seem to emanate from it in the apparent objective movement that establishes a relationship between the machines and the body without organs.40
Deleuze and Guattari’s invitation to become a BwO took inspiration from the Surrealist artist Antonin Artaud, who really invented the concept. In particular, Artaud is well known for his incursion into avant-garde cinema as the scriptwriter of Germaine Dulac’s The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928). But he was also an actor himself and played parts in The Passion of Joan of Arc by
Deleuze and Guattari claim that the enemy of the BwO is none other than the organism, because it is constantly trying to control the body that suffers from being organized, this is to say, transformed into an organism. Deleuze and Guattari insist that the body is disorganized by definition. However, the organism wants every single organ of the body under control, every partial object subjugated so as to run smoothly and make the system work. That said, the BwO attempts by all means to disorganize the organism. “The BwO howls: “They’ve made me an organism! They’ve wrongfully folded me! They’ve stolen my body!.””42 This could be the shout of the country rats after realizing that the host attempted to parasite them, to make them eat next to it. This would be a cry of protest in the form of white noise, given that, as parasites, the rats made every effort to counteract the mimetic replication transmitted by the host. Therefore, the mimetic mechanism set up by the organism is doomed to fail because, as we know, the desiring-machines are continuously falling apart, connecting and disconnecting, a task that is performed by the parasites. So, the larval subject, as a residuum or viral zombie, ultimately becomes a parasitic BwO.
4
Thus, then, in all these accumulated and opposing ways,
my self becomes my intruder.
jean-luc nancy, Corpus
According to Deleuze and Guattari, the BwO could be described as a cancer that destroys the organism from within. In this sense, remember that Serres pictured sickness as parasitic. Another way of putting it is that the BwO proceeds like a plague of country rats, or a multitude of viral zombies, that eats the host and corrodes its organs. Taking mental illness as a metaphor, it might be seen as the experience of people suffering from Cotard’s delusion, who think that they are dead and their internal organs are putrefying. Symptoms include hypochondriacal beliefs such as paralyzed organs, the smell of rotten flesh, or the sensation of having worms under the skin. That is why this disorder is known as “walking corpse syndrome.” Be that as it may, becoming a BwO is then a question of becoming a living dead. In such a scenario, viral zombies appear to be the perfect agent of disorganization, because they disarticulate the immunization spread by the host. To a certain extent, the living dead seem to be infiltrators. A cinematographic example of this would be The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956). Yet, the virus of zombification is not exactly an infiltrator, for the simple reason that the infectious agent does not merely come from outside and infect the organism. Properly speaking, the contagious disease comes from outside, but the infection develops inside, provided that the malicious agent is the organism that receives the virus. That is to say, the virus of zombification grows inside precisely because it is at war against the infection spread by the host. In short, the enemy of the host is actually within the host itself.
Regarding this inside-outside dynamic, people tend to think that danger comes from abroad, a threat commonly visualized as a multitude of invaders who attack our frontiers as well as our social values, which represent civilization and freedom as opposed to foreign savagery. Such a model is, indeed, that of an external virus that threatens the healthy organism. This simplistic idea has fueled fear of the Other and has propagated distrust of people who come from abroad, be they terrorists, immigrants, or refugees. Hopefully, zombies can change this paradigm. George Romero showed that the menacing force of evil hordes was born inside civilized society as a result of its own values. Later, in the third stage of zombification, the fear of the Other became the fear of being the Other. In sum, the wolf does not attack the flock of sheep coming out of the depth of the forest; the wolf is already within the fold. Then, it is time to rethink the traditional idea forged in moralizing fairytales: The evil lives
It should therefore be borne in mind that the virus lives within us, so it does not make any sense to build a separation wall to protect the healthy people from the infected population. This model vanished along with one of its most famous examples, the Greek island of Spinalonga, which by the middle of last century stopped being the last open-air prison for leprosy patients in Europe, very similar to Poveglia, the Venetian island historically used to isolate people during plagues.
An intruder is in me, and I am becoming a stranger to myself. If the rejection is very strong, I need treatments to help me resist human defenses. (This is done by means of an immunoglobulin drawn from a rabbit and then assigned, as its official description specifies, to this “antihuman” use, whose surprising effects—tremblings almost convulsive—I remember very well). … There has never been just one intrusion: as soon as one is produced, it multiplies itself, is identified in its renewed internal differences.47
The labor of the parasites is truly hard. On the one hand, they must destroy the host, but on the other hand, the host cannot live without parasites. Such a reciprocal exchange casts some doubt on the viability of the parasitic subversion.
Between the race of microbes and the race of humans there exists a total symbiosis and a radical incompatibility. One cannot say that the microbe is other to man: the two are never opposed in their essential natures, and they do not confront one another in any real sense; they are linked together, however, and this interlinking is, as it were, predestined: no one (neither men nor bacilli) can imagine things being any other way. Nor is
there any clear line of demarcation, because this link is reproduced over and over ad infinitum.50
To conclude, it could be said that parasites have developed a new pharmacology. In this sense, zombies—in other words, mimetic parasites—might be understood as a therapeutic patho-logy that, in view of its internal duplicity as both pathological and as a diagnostic logos on mimetic pathos,51 could serve, thanks to the pathos of distance, as an antidote, or pharmakon, to the mimetic pathologies that plague contemporary subjects. This new pharmacology of life is then based on a malicious agent that is not such malevolent. As Baudrillard puts it: “So if the parasite is ‘evil,’ it is so initially in this latter sense as an irritant, a ‘bad thing,’ but not ‘evil’ in the fully moral sense.”52 Parasites are not evil but cruel, in the sense of Artaud. They can be extremely irritating to the host. In effect, since the virus is intended to disorganize the host’s replicating procedure, the parasites become really annoying guests. The role played by the parasites is then similar to that of viral zombies, which is not to eat humans but to challenge the status quo. The objective is to break the chain of significant codes and disconnect holistic meaning. The parasite has two options at hand: to eat next to the host, or to eat inside the host. The first option transforms the guests into mimetic agents, however the mimicry of the second is real parasitism. As such, it might incline the host. “Often this inclination has no effect. But it can produce gigantic ones by chain reactions or reproduction. Immunity of epidemic crisis.”53 Finally, it can be stated that viral parasitism in posthuman mimesis is crucial. It is a matter of mimetic practice, a very special teckné, almost a technology of life, as Michel Foucault would say: mimicry as ethico-aesthetic paradigm. The question then is of how to produce a BwO, how to repeat the Different. Thus, we are ultimately talking about biopolitical mimesis, with the focus on the need of rethinking parasitism as a subversive attitude, because we cannot forget, as Isabella Winkler states, that “the parasite is an
As Nidesh Lawtoo puts it: “The opposition between mimesis and the posthuman is thus clearly set: a philosophy of sameness contra a philosophy of difference, anthropocentrism contra post-anthropocentrism, humanism contra anti-humanism, a past-oriented aesthetic theory contra a future-oriented technological theory.” Nidesh Lawtoo, “Posthuman Mimesis i: Concepts for the Mimetic Turn,” Journal of Posthumanism 2, no. 2 (2022): 101–14, 102.
Nidesh Lawtoo, “Posthumanism and Mimesis: An Introduction,” Journal of Posthumanism 2, no. 2 (2022): 87–100, 88.
Lawtoo, “Posthumanism,” 91.
Lawtoo, “Posthumanism,” 92.
Lawtoo, “Posthumanism,” 92.
Steven Shaviro, Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 92–93.
It is not just desire but dispossession of identity that operates at the level of pathos. In this respect, see René Girad’s notion of mimesis in Nidesh Lawtoo, The Phantom of the Ego: Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013), 46–52.
Lawtoo, Phantom, 188.
Shaviro, Cinematic Body, 84.
According to Nidesh Lawtoo, “It becomes quickly apparent that mimesis shares some important characteristics with viruses: it is linked to reproduction; it transgresses the logic of representation to affect and infect human bodies in imperceptible ways; it renders humans vulnerable to a type of contagion that is amplified by proximity with others; it challenges the binary dividing human and nonhuman agents; and last but not least, it generates effects that go beyond clear-cut categories of good and evil and cannot be contained within unilateral diagnostic.” Nidesh Lawtoo, “Viral Mimesis: The Patho(-)logies of the Coronavirus,” Paragrana 30, no. 2 (2021): 155–68, 156.
Here it would be relevant to take into account parallel reflections on crowd behavior and public opinions within the psychological structure of Fascism and Bataillean concept of “sovereign communication.” See Lawtoo, Phantom, 249.
Lawtoo, Phantom, 2.
See Lawtoo, “Viral Mimesis,” 155–68.
Lawtoo, “Viral Mimesis,” 163–64.
“There are, thus, largely unnoticed similarities between mimetic theory and crowd psychology that deserve to be revisited in an age haunted by the double specter of affective and viral contagion. Like Girard after them, both Tarde and Le Bon use the term “contagion” metaphorically to indicate an invisible transmission of emotions that spreads from self to others as a contagious sickness like the plague or the cholera would do; and yet, they do so on theoretical foundations that have hypnotic suggestion as a via regia to crowd behavior and pave the way for alternative theories of mimetic contagion that take seriously the literal danger of epidemic contamination.” Lawtoo, “Viral Mimesis,” 162–63.
Shaviro, Cinematic Body, 97.
Jorge Fernández Gonzalo, Filosofía zombi (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2011), 28–29 (my translation).
Lawtoo, Phantom, 18.
“‘Para’ as a prefix in English (sometimes ‘par’) indicates alongside, near or beside, beyond, incorrectly, resembling or similar to, subsidiary to, isomeric or polymeric to. In borrowed Greek compounds ‘para’ indicates beside, to the side of, alongside, beyond, wrongfully, harmfully, unfavorably, and among. … ‘Parasite’ comes from the Greek, parasitos, etymologically: ‘beside the grain,’ para, beside (in this case) plus sitos, grain, food. ‘Sitology’ is the science of foods, nutrition, and diet. ‘Parasite’ was originally something positive, a fellow guest, someone sharing the food with you, there with you beside the grain. Later on, ‘parasite’ came to mean a professional dinner guest, someone expert at cadging invitations without ever giving dinners in return. From this developed the two main modern meanings in English, the biological and the social. A parasite is (1) ‘Any organism that grows, feeds, and is sheltered on or in a different organism while contributing nothing to the survival of its host’; (2) ‘A person who habitually takes advantage of the generosity of others with-out making any useful return.’” J. Hillis Miller, “The Critic as Host,” Critical Inquiry 3, no. 3 (1977): 439–47, 441–42.
Michel Serres, The Parasite (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 7.
J. Hillis Miller develops a similar theory: “A curious system of thought, or of language, or of social organization (in fact all three at once) is implicit in the word parasite. There is no parasite without a host. The host and the somewhat sinister or subversive parasite are fellow guests beside the food, sharing it. On the other hand, the host is himself the food, his substance consumed without recompense, as when one says, ‘He is eating me out of house and home.’” Miller, “Critic,” 442.
Serres, Parasite, 193.
Serres, Parasite, 10.
Serres, Parasite, 8.
Serres, Parasite, 8.
Serres, Parasite, 14.
Serres, Parasite, 52.
Serres, Parasite, 127.
Serres, Parasite, 192.
Serres, Parasite, 53.
Serres, Parasite, 144.
Serres, Parasite, 197.
Serres, Parasite, 7.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 38.
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 16.
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 16.
Eugene W. Holland, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis (London, New York: Routledge, 2001), 34.
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 41.
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 85.
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 11.
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 8.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 158–59.
Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 163.
Miller, “Critic,” 446.
For more insights about plagues and the social body—pathological conceptions of organic community—in Nancy, see Jean-Luc Nancy and Nidesh Lawtoo, “The CounterText Interview: Jean-Luc Nancy. Mimesis: A Singular-Plural Concept,” CounterText 8, no.1 (2022): 23–45.
Nancy, Corpus, 170.
Nancy, Corpus, 167.
Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 138.
Canguilhem, Normal, 103.
Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena (London, New York: Verso, 1993), 162.
“Mimesis is thus always Janus-faced, operating simultaneously on both the side of reason and unreason, logos and pathos, pathologies and patho-logies —that is, critical discourses on mimetic pathos.” Lawtoo, “Posthuman Mimesis,” 110. For more information about this duplicity and the influence of Nietzschean logos, see Lawtoo, Phantom, 6–8.
Steven D. Brown, “Michel Serres: Science, Translation and the Logic of the Parasite,” Theory, Culture & Society 19, no. 3 (2002): 1–27, 24.
Serres, Parasite, 191.
Isabella Winkler, “Love, Death, and Parasites,” in Mapping Michel Serres, ed. Niran Abbas (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005), 226–42, 227.
References
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Canguilhem, Georges. The Normal and the Pathological .New York: Zone Books, 1991.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus .Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
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Fernández Gonzalo, Jorge. Filosofía zombi .Barcelona: Anagrama, 2011.
Holland, Eugene W. Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis .London, New York: Routledge, 2001.
Lawtoo, Nidesh. “Posthuman Mimesis i: Concepts for the Mimetic Turn.” Journal of Posthumanism 2, no. 2 (2022): 101–14.
Lawtoo, Nidesh. “Posthumanism and Mimesis: An Introduction.” Journal of Posthumanism 2, no. 2 (2022): 87–100.
Lawtoo, Nidesh. The Phantom of the Ego: Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013.
Lawtoo, Nidesh. “Viral Mimesis: The Patho(-)logies of the Coronavirus.” Paragrana 30, no. 2 (2021): 155–68.
Miller, J. Hillis. “The Critic as Host.” Critical Inquiry 3, no. 3 (1977): 439–47.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. Corpus .New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.
Nancy, Jean-Luc, and Nidesh Lawtoo. “The CounterText Interview: Jean-Luc Nancy. Mimesis: A Singular-Plural Concept.” CounterText 8, no.1 (2022): 23–45.
Serres, Michel. The Parasite .Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.
Shaviro, Steven. Cinematic Body .Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Winkler, Isabella. “Love, Death, and Parasites.” In Mapping Michel Serres, edited by Niran Abbas, 226–42. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005.