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We’re All Infected: Legal Personhood, Bare Life and The Walking Dead
Abstract
This article argues that greater theoretical attention should be paid to the figure of the zombie in the fields of law, cultural studies and philosophy. Using The Walking Dead as a point of critical departure concepts of legal personhood are interrogated in relation to permanent vegetative states, bare life and the notion of the third person. Ultimately, the paper recommends a rejection of personhood; instead favouring a legal and philosophical engagement with humanity and embodiment. Personhood, it is suggested, creates a barrier in law allowing individuals in certain contexts (and in certain embodied states) to be rendered non-persons and thus outside the scope of legal rights. An approach that rejects personhood in favour of embodiment would allow individuals to enjoy their rights without being subject to such discrimination. It is also suggested that the concept of the human, itself complicated by the figure of the zombie, allows for legal engagement with a greater number of putative rights claimants including admixed embryos, cyborgs and the zombie.
... For an extended analysis of personhood in law, including the tensions between the formal legal concept and the complexity of philosophical, metaphysical and religious perspectives, see for instance [27]. In a law and comics context, issues of law, selfhood and posthumanism in The Ghost in the Shell are examined in [3], and the legal personhood of zombies is considered via The Walking Dead in [31]. 20 A thinly veiled allusion to the 'man on the Clapham omnibus'-the traditional hypothetical 'reasonable man' of English law-transposed to a Mega-City context (the Sky-Rail is the main public transport system in Mega-City One). ...
... Lovecraft's work exposes the futility of the human project, and therefore the judicial project. 31 The universe is infinite, filled with powerful forces beyond our knowledge and influence. To judge in this context is futile, meaningless-and horrific. ...
... Indeed, the more I am forced to consider the implications of Anderson J's argument, the more I feel that I must turn away from it. 31 As his narrator-character states in The Call of Cthulhu: 'I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life' [19: 91]. Lovecraft's fictional method is one that, rather than simply populating our world with 'monsters', works to re-imagine the foundations of the world and thereby create a deeper, more profound horror. ...
Administrative—judgment on the nature of judgment—conflict between Judges in judicial practice—claimant (Judge Anderson) challenges the judicial capacity of respondent (Judge Dredd)—claimant open and fluid in judicial style—respondent certain and authoritative in judicial style—insights from Psi Division on the role of judgment in the universe—whether respondent is a good judge—whether judgment closes down meaning—whether respondent is inhuman—whether judges are inhuman—whether judging is horrific—insight from twentieth century fiction on the place of humans in the universe—horror of HP Lovecraft—suppression of horrific cosmic context within judicial institution—suppression for the good of society.
... Another prominent cultural point of reference was the notion of the "zombie". As a modern version of the living dead, the zombie has become an iconic figure in contemporary popular culture in horror films like George A. Romero's genre-defining Night of the Living Dead or successful television series, such as The Walking Dead (Travis, 2015). In the wake of the popularization of the dementia discourse, titles referring to corresponding ideas of liminal existence and death while alive also began to appear in the pertinent popular advice and self-help literature of the 1980s, such as Alzheimer's Disease: Coping with a Living Death (Woods, 1989) or The Living Dead: Alzheimer's in America (Lushin, 1990). ...
This contribution sets out to criticize the prominent metaphor of “death while alive” in the context of dementia. We first explain the historical origin and development as well as the philosophical premises of the image. We then take a closer look at its implications for understanding dementia and societal attitudes and behaviours towards those affected. In doing so, we adopt a life course perspective that seeks to account for the ethical significance of the temporal extension and structure of human life. According to this perspective, individual existence in time is characterized by normative standards of age-appropriate behavior, evaluative standards of a good life, and teleological notions of successful development which require theoretical analysis and ethical discussion. Such a perspective can contribute significantly to spelling out the implications of the metaphor of death while alive and to criticizing their problematic aspects. Indeed, it makes clear that this metaphor aligns dementia with a different point in the human life course, thus ultimately framing it as a kind of deviation from the biographical norm, a disruption in an assumed temporal order of existence. At the same time, the life course perspective can help to understand why this conception involves ethically problematic distortions and blind spots. The resulting considerations allow conclusions with regard to medical and care ethical debates about self-determination, surrogate decision making, and advance directives in the context of dementia. Furthermore, on a theoretical-conceptual level, they also illustrate the importance of a biography- and culture-sensitive approach to philosophical and ethical reasoning in biomedicine and the life sciences.
... See also the work of Saru M. Matambanadzo which argues for a specifically embodied theory of the corporation, drawing on and extending the metaphoric comparison with the human body [57]. 19 Travis takes-up this theme of embodiment and the nature of legal personality and reads it in relation to the figure of the 'zombie' in The Walking Dead [88]. There he argues not so much for a simply embodied account of the legal person (following Grear or Naffine), but rather, drawing on the analysis of Roberto Esposito, for an abolishing of personality altogether, tying rights then to the 'human' and not the 'person'. ...
From US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’s 1933 judgement in Louis K Liggett Co v Lee (and, before that, Mourice Wormster’s Frankenstein Incorporated) to Matt Wuerker’s satirical cartoon “Corpenstein”, the use of Frankenstein’s monster as a metaphor for the modern corporation has been a common practice. This paper seeks to unpack and extend explicitly this metaphorical register via a recent filmic and graphic interpretation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein myth. Whilst Frankenstein has been read as an allegorical critique of rights—Victor Frankenstein’s creation of a monstrous body, reflecting the figurative construction of a body by rights discourse—the metaphoric notion of reanimating a ‘soulless corpse’ resonates with Edward’s Thurlow’s description of the corporation as having ‘no soul to damn’. By exploring the figurative and optical representations of this process of reanimating the body in Scott Beattie’s film I, Frankenstein and Kevin Grevioux’s companion graphic novel I, Frankenstein: Genesis, I would like to extend this metaphoric register, by examining the theological origin and nature of the corporate form. This theology is explicitly referenced in the film and graphic novel via the battle between Gargoyles and Demons, which dominates the plot and backstory. The role of Frankenstein’s monster—now called Adam—however, is about enabling the reanimation of thousands of corpses without souls for possession by the demon hoard headed by Prince Naberius, who in his alternative persona Charles Wessex, controls the Wessex Institute and Wessex Industries. This ‘corporate baron’ himself has devoted his ‘life’ to enabling the rediscovery of Frankenstein’s ability to reanimate the dead for the purposes of gaining immortality. This mythic framing, however, renders explicitly visible the nature and purpose of the corporate form itself—of capturing and reanimating life in a form of immortality via the mechanisms of perpetual succession. This visual rendering, of a metaphoric framing goes to show the way in which the optical nature of the dominant forms of popular culture—film, television, comic books—provide a means for seeing law’s metaphorical images and for thus unpacking, interrogating and rendering them anew. It argues for a shift from the image of the corporation as a monstrous body to one which involves relations of reciprocity, gratuitousness and gift.
... Instead, the legality disclosed by bumper stickers is of the 'popular jurisprudence' variety, a recognition that in a culture drenched in legal thinking reflection on the essential nature of law is not quarantined within the specialists discourses of jurisprudence and legal theory, but rather pervades and oozes through the narratives and nuances of that culture [58: 1-10]. Within law and humanities such an approach has rendered novels [57], films [80,111], television [101], comic books [38], music [91] and computer games [79] as reflections, indeed, critiques of law [83: 495]. In moving the object of analysis from the produced narrational text (novel, film, television, etc.) and from the formal legal object (the courthouse, the traffic sign, the summons) to the situational, embedded conglomeration of sticker/vehicle/driver, opens a vista of popular jurisprudence. ...
This paper considers the popular visual jurisprudence of bumper stickers. Drawing upon a sample sticker/driver/vehicle assemblages observed at the Gold Coast, Australia in 2014, we argue that the meanings and messages projected by the assemblages have a significant legal dimension. The argument is located at the intersection of past research into bumper stickers, increased scholarly interest in the relation of law to automobility and especially recent considerations of the popular visual jurisprudence of the motor vehicle, its cultures and semiotics. In particular we argue that the sticker/driver/vehicle assemblage represents an engagement with law and legality. We suggest this goes beyond immediate denotations of brands with intellectual property or flags and the sovereign nation state to more essential engagement with consumer capitalisms law of the image, the friend/enemy distinction, the ouroboros of rights and the essential legality of living in a polis.
In this paper, I present a critical reading of the space opera television series Babylon 5 ( B5 ) (1994–98) from a Millsian radical liberal perspective filtered through a flat ontology. I argue that B5 ’s world is nonmodern, where various entities and their “gravities” affect how social forms are structured. The legal and contractual aspects of governance and politics are discussed, focusing on the issue of race. Whilst Charles Mills’s critique of racial contracts is fruitful, his political theory remains all-too human. B5 illustrates that any future republic ought to be nonmodern and rhizomatic in character, including nonhumans as elements.
The aim of this article is to clarify the content of the concept "person" as it figures in philosophical debates about personhood and personal identity. In order to do so, I will look at both specific philosophical problems that ask for a clear definition of this notion, as well as at the history of this concept's formation, and try to motivate the specific assumptions that are tightly connected to it.
Much has been written on how science fiction allows us to interrogate imagined societal changes and potential yet-to-be realised futures. It also allows those who consume such texts to reflect upon their contemporaneous societies This paper refocuses this understanding of science fiction from an original and novel perspective, arguing that science fiction texts perform an educative function and can be considered a form of public legal education. To this end, this paper argues that science fiction performs a jurisprudential function in its treatment and popular presentation of legal issues and themes. Science fiction allows audiences and consumers to conceptualise abstract jurisprudential concepts, whether they are engaged with less interactive media (such as television or film) or experimenting more actively with these concepts via dynamic media (such as video games and tabletop role-playing games). This distinction between less interactive and more interactive media draws upon previous work by Newbery-Jones in 2015 that examined the jurisprudence of video games and the phenomenology of justice. It also focuses on science fiction’s potential to contribute to formal and public legal education. Finally, this paper explains the importance of public legal education in the twenty-first century and highlights science fiction’s critical role in encouraging engagement with jurisprudential themes and legal subject matter within the shifting sociopolitical landscape of the last decade.
This thesis investigates the critical potential of the zombie figure for the enhancement of ethical debates in the areas of health and medicine, both as an illustrative intervention into current debates and as a way of provoking new ones. Situated within the emerging field of critical medical humanities, it draws on transdisciplinary theoretical precepts to conduct a close study of two types of narratives: those produced in popular zombie films and television, and those popularly generated out of scientific and public understandings of medical phenomena. Through four transdisciplinary case studies, it utilises a qualitative and experimental research approach combining methods of close textual analysis, critical discourse analysis, thought experiments, and radical qualitative comparison. These case studies analyse a series of cinematic and cultural zombie types and use them as a source of theory to critically and affectively investigate a range of biomedical topics. Through this process, this thesis develops a transdisciplinary methodology for addressing difficult ethical questions posed both in the specialised field of medical ethics and in broader public discourse. In doing so, it responds to a call in medical ethics for a more expansive approach to ethical thinking, arguing that close critical attention to popular culture broadly, and the zombie specifically, can promote feeling-inflected approaches to addressing ethical and philosophical opportunities in health and medicine. Furthermore, it argues that feeling and affect produced through popular culture constitute a strong and much-needed mechanism for ethical thinking in health and medicine. In developing this transdisciplinary, multimodal methodology and applying it to biomedical and bioethical case studies, the approach of this thesis offers a rich, flexible, and generative contribution to critical medical humanities and beyond.
The popular culture version of the zombie, developed over the latter half of the twentieth century, made only sporadic appearances in South Korean film, which may in part be attributed to the restrictions on the distribution of American and Japanese films before 1988. Thus the first zombie film Monstrous Corpse (Goeshi 1980, directed by Gang Beom-Gu), was a loose remake of the Spanish-Italian Non si deve profanare il sonno dei morti (1974). Monstrous Corpse was largely forgotten until given a screening by KBS in 2011. Zombies don’t appear again for a quarter of a century. This article examines four zombie films released between 2012 and 2018: “Ambulance”, the fourth film in Horror Stories (2012), a popular horror portmanteau film; Train to Busan (2016) (directed by Yeon Sang-Ho), the first South Korean blockbuster film in the “zombie apocalypse” sub-genre; Seoul Station (2016), an animation prequel to Train to Busan (also directed by Yeon Sang-Ho); and Rampant (2018, directed by Kim Seong-Hun ), a costume drama set in Korea’s Joseon era. Based on a cognitive studies approach, this article examines two conceptual metaphors which underlie these films: the very common metaphor, LIFE IS A JOURNEY, and the endemically Korean metaphor THE NATION IS A FAMILY.
Robert Kirkman’s comic series, The Walking Dead, depicts the odyssey of Rick Grimes and his fellow survivors as they seek to flee the living dead and find fraternity. As others have noted, the fear of a contagious otherness− and the consequent dissolution of community − is a dominant discursive strain in the post-9/11 world. These anxieties have led to the creation of containment tropes, not the least of which is the recent discourse on strategies for preventing immigration (‘I will build a great, great wall’). Such narratives always assume an ‘us’ that needs protection from ‘them’ – whether those others are immigrants, terrorists, or Ebola victims (zombies may stand in for one or all). In The Walking Dead, however, there is no question about making such distinctions – we are told that the zombie virus lies dormant within us all, waiting for our demise to burst forth. Zombiehood is now an irrefutable part of our existence. The series may be read, then, as a disquisition on the futility of constructing boundaries (socially, bodily, or otherwise). By challenging these constructions (literal and metaphorical), the text asks us to rethink the manner in which others, including the infected, are excluded – and on what grounds.
The zombie film has become an important component of contemporary popular culture. The sociological nature of the themes addressed by these films reflect prominent social concerns, and lend themselves to sociological analysis as texts themselves. This article examines the zombie film genre, its history, predominant themes, and its illustration of sociological dynamics related to identity, collective behavior, disease, contagion, and the privileges that come from social inequality. Particular attention is placed on what the zombie films, themselves, can tell us about society and how they illustrate sociological principles. First, we examine the origins and history of zombie cinema. Next, we move to a discussion of the central narrative devices around which zombie films are organized. In particular, we focus on two narratives in zombie films: those that emphasize zombie possession; and those that focus on the sociological risks of zombie pandemics. The discussion then moves to an analysis of zombies as selves, and how zombie films express cultural anxieties about selfhood, loss of autonomy, and threats of de-individualization. We then explore the roles of power and privilege in the social epidemiology of zombification, paying particular attention to how those who succumb to zombiedom illustrate the sociological dynamics of health disparities in the real world. Finally, the sociology of infectious disease is used to address how zombiedom correlates with real disease outbreaks, what we know about the social aspects of infectious disease transmission, and the sociology of pandemics.
The rise of technology in controlling and performing legal processes has created a new digital legality, signalling a transformation of law from an analog paper-based interpretative activity to an autonomous system governed by the rigidity and speed of code. This emerging digital legality converts life and living to data to be processed and catalogued. This process is exemplified and normalised within video games making them important cultural artefacts through which to identify the features and anxieties of digital legality. While video games have so far gone unrepresented in cultural legal theory, this article uses the iconic video game franchise of Super Mario to unlock the emerging features and anxieties of digital legality as involving rigidity, speed and the normalisation of self as data.
This article offers the critical concept misfit in an effort to further think through the lived identity and experience of disability as it is situated in place and time. The idea of a misfit and the situation of misfitting that I offer here elaborate a materialist feminist understanding of disability by extending a consideration of how the particularities of embodiment interact with the environment in its broadest sense, to include both its spatial and temporal aspects. The interrelated dynamics of fitting and misfitting constitute a particular aspect of world-making involved in material-discursive becoming. The essay makes three arguments: the concept of misfit emphasizes the particularity of varying lived embodiments and avoids a theoretical generic disabled body; the concept of misfit clarifies the current feminist critical conversation about universal vulnerability and dependence; the concept of misfitting as a shifting spatial and perpetually temporal relationship confers agency and value on disabled subjects.
This essay examines the shift in fictional representations of plague and viral infection in relation to technological, medial, and economic developments. Ben Jonson's play The Alchemist and Daniel Defoe's novel A Journal of the Plague Year revolve around historical visitations of plague in London. This study takes London as its constant variable; the city governs our choice of texts. They negotiate anxieties of the early modern era as mercantilism gives way to the process of accumulation tied to the developing free market as theorized by classical political economy. Two recent motion pictures, set during fictional London outbreaks, display a similar preoccupation with transforming economic spaces. In these texts, however, the relatively young figure of the viral zombie stands in place of and performs a function similar to the more venerable plague. Shaun of the Dead and 28 Days Later both serve as vehicles for expression of the ever-accelerating viral nature of global capitalism. By adopting a transhistorical approach, we demonstrate the relationship between media and plague that emerges, as the fact of infection generates not only a surrounding rhetoric of plague but also a veritable plague of rhetorics. In keeping with recent plague scholarship, this approach emphasizes the close kinship between plague and textuality by treating plague as a text to be read on the individual and political body and the structure of plague writing itself as a mirror of its subject, proliferating with a serial contagiousness.
This article studies the imagination and representation of biological disaster in contemporary popular cinema. The texts chosen are Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 film Contagion, Danny Boyle’s modern zombie-horror classic 28 Days Later (2002), Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend (2007) and Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men (2006). This article is interested in the ‘sensual elaboration’, within filmic narrative, of biological disaster, and will argue that these films not only communicate with but organize their viewers’ perceptions of biological disaster. It studies the narrativizing of the onset and consequences of biological disaster, coded as an ‘invasion’ of the individual and social body in these films. It further argues that the individual and social body in these texts form the key site of negotiating anxieties surrounding their inevitable collapse in the wake of social, cultural and economic breakdown following biological disaster.
The narrativizing of biological disaster in these films, this article will demonstrate, performs a crisis of reproducibility and reproductivity.
Abused dogs, prisoners tortured in Guantánamo and supermax facilities, or slaves killed by the state--all are deprived of personhood through legal acts. Such deprivations have recurred throughout history, and the law sustains these terrors and banishments even as it upholds the civil order. Examining such troubling cases, The Law Is a White Dog tackles key societal questions: How does the law construct our identities? How do its rules and sanctions make or unmake persons? And how do the supposedly rational claims of the law define marginal entities, both natural and supernatural, including ghosts, dogs, slaves, terrorist suspects, and felons? Reading the language, allusions, and symbols of legal discourse, and bridging distinctions between the human and nonhuman, Colin Dayan looks at how the law disfigures individuals and animals, and how slavery, punishment, and torture create unforeseen effects in our daily lives. Moving seamlessly across genres and disciplines, Dayan considers legal practices and spiritual beliefs from medieval England, the North American colonies, and the Caribbean that have survived in our legal discourse, and she explores the civil deaths of felons and slaves through lawful repression. Tracing the legacy of slavery in the United States in the structures of the contemporary American prison system and in the administrative detention of ghostly supermax facilities, she also demonstrates how contemporary jurisprudence regarding cruel and unusual punishment prepared the way for abuses in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. Using conventional historical and legal sources to answer unconventional questions, The Law Is a White Dog illuminates stark truths about civil society's ability to marginalize, exclude, and dehumanize.
In contrast to other figures generated within social theory for thinking about outsiders, such as Rene Girard's 'scapegoat' and Zygmunt Bauman's 'stranger', Foucault's Monsters and the Challenge of Law suggests that the figure of 'the monster' offers greater analytical precision and explanatory power in relation to understanding the processes whereby outsiders are constituted. The book draws on Michel Foucault's theoretical and historical treatment of the category of the monster, in which the monster is regarded as the effect of a double breach: of law and nature. For Foucault, the monster does not simply refer to a particular kind of morphological or psychological irregularity; for the body or psyche in question must also pose a threat to the categorical structure of law. In chronological terms, Foucault moves from a preoccupation with the bestial human in the Middle Ages to a concern over Siamese or conjoined twins in the Renaissance period, and ultimately to a focus on the hermaphrodite in the Classical Age. But, although Foucault's theoretical framework for understanding the monster is affirmed here, this book's study of an English legal history of the category 'monster' challenges some of Foucault's historical claims. In addition to considering this legal history, the book also addresses the contemporary relevance of Foucault's theoretical framework. Structured around Foucault's archetypes and the category crises they represent - admixed embryos, conjoined twins and transsexuals - the book analyses their challenge to current distinctions between human and animal, male and female, and the idea of the 'proper' legal subject as a single embodied mind. These contemporary figures, like the monsters of old, are shown to threaten the rigidity and binary structure of a law that still struggles to accommodate them.
What might it mean to queer the Human? By extension, how is the Human employed within queer theory? Featuring essays by international pioneering scholars in queer theory, critical theory, cultural studies and science studies, this volume reconsiders the way we think about queer theory, the category of the Human and the act of queering itself.
This article argues that scholarship on law and technology is a thoroughly speculative activity. The textual signifiers of this speculative orientation are the multiple incursions of science fiction that locate and justify lawyers writing about technology. Through a detailed examination of three law and technology literatures – on early space technology, IVF and virtual worlds – it will be shown that science fiction is the storehouse of images and imaginings that substantiate the legal projection of technological futures. When law confronts technology, science fiction is its speculative jurisdiction. The suggestion is that through a more through-going engagement with science fiction as the speculative jurisdiction, law could engage more adequately with the complexities and contingencies of technological change.
This article argues that whilst concepts of law and justice can be seen as prominent in much science fiction, the role of lawyer is mostly absent. This article interrogates these absences and asks whether they can be traced back to contemporary concerns around professional ethics. Three potential absences are noted; firstly, justice is considered as immanent. In these fictional futures lawyers have become unnecessary due to the immediacy of the legal system. The second conceptualisation portrays lawyers as intertwined with corporate interests. In these speculative moments lawyers have become culturally indistinguishable from other types of corporate entities. The final science fictive texts highlight a desire for the lawyer-hero. In these texts justice is overwhelmingly absent and shows a continuing need for legal professionals. Each of these cultural moments presents important questions for current understandings of professional ethics and the regulatory systems in which they are based. A removal of lawyers from our shared understandings of the future is indicative of potential problems with perceptions of professional ethics in the present.
Zombie literature/films tell us much more about contemporary war than we imagine. This article explains why zombies reflect the spirit of the times. In the asymmetrical wars we now fight, and the risk management strategies we pursue, we can learn much from our greatest enemy, ourselves brought back to life.
The chapter examines the gendered nature of legal rationality, and proposes that rather than deploying 'hybridity' in order to escape a binary construction, a complexity sensitive, dynamic spectrum of spectrums imagined as fully embodied, shifting and mutable is theoretically preferable, since it allows the 'spectrum-extreme' languages fundamental to political resistance to remain powerful, while unseating binary notions of sex/gender.
This article questions how legal personhood is constructed by law. Elective amputation is used as a way of interrogating the
institutional, material, and discursive relations that combine in order to suspend legal personhood. Elective amputation is
introduced in terms of medical and psychological explanations. Additionally, the perspective of self-identified elective amputees
who choose to share their stories through online blogs is utilised to gain a narrative sense of how these individuals understand
and engage with law. In particular, the areas of disability, sexuality, and rationality are used to exemplify law's continuing
commitment to normative embodiment as grounds for ascribing legal personhood.
In this article I argue for greater attention to be paid to science fiction within sociolegal scholarship. In the first half of this paper I highlight that science fiction and law are already intertwined, science fiction having been commented on in a number of judicial decisions and law having been the focus of a number of science fiction texts. I then move on to outline how the law and science fiction are further interrelated. I begin by noting how law draws upon popular culture, and discuss how, in some instances, the law can realize science fiction. I then highlight science fiction's usefulness as critique and how this feeds into the way that law draws upon popular culture. In the second half of the article, I exemplify these processes using the case of the admixed embryo. I examine admixed embryos within science fiction, using the 1995 film Species as a starting point. I explore the reciprocal relationship between popular attitudes and science fiction, then question how these factors influenced the amendments to the U.K. Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008. To conclude, I reassert the interpenetration of law and science fiction, arguing that both disciplines are inextricably tied to one another as they try to, respectively, regulate and envisage the future.
This article argues that scholarship on law and technology is a thoroughly speculative activity. The textual signifiers of this speculative orientation are the multiple incursion of science fiction that locate and justify lawyers writing about technology. Through a detailed examination of three law and technology literatures – on early space technology, IVF, and virtual-worlds – it will be shown that science fiction is the storehouse of images and imaginings that substantiate the legal projection of technological futures. When law confronts technology science fiction is its speculative jurisdiction. The suggestion is that through a more through-going engagement with science fiction as the speculative jurisdiction, law could more adequately engage with the complexities and contingencies of technological change.
I argue that zombies are inconceivable. More precisely, I argue that the conceivability-intuition that is used to demonstrate their possibility has been misconstrued. Thought experiments alleged to feature zombies founder on the fact that, on the one hand, they mustinvolve first-person imagining, and yet, on the other hand, cannot. Philosophers who take themselves to have imagined zombies have unwittingly conflated imagining a creature who lacks consciousness with imagining a creature without also imagining the consciousness it may or may not possess. Thought-experiments have played a crucial role in the recent resurgence of
Romero’s masterpiece about cannibal zombies plaguing the world is set in a US shopping center, redefining the zombie so as to infect consumer identity. The popular perception of mindless consumer as zombie is owed strictly to Dawn of the Dead (1979), and extends far beyond the film’s genre, demographics and era. This film - itself a commodity - has earned a place in the American imagination by undermining that very imagination’s dependence on commodity culture. A combination of film analysis, cultural studies and personal narrative, this essay endeavors to tell the story of the story called Dawn of the Dead by locating the postmodern zombie historically in popular culture, analyzing the film as a satire of what Romero calls ‘the false security of consumer society’, exploring Dawn as a commodity itself (one appropriated by the very consumer culture Romero sought to subvert), considering Dawn as a master tale spawning ‘rip-offs’ and hybrids, and articulating all the while the parallels between Dawn’s postmodern zombie and the North American consumer.
A robot that is functionally indistinguishable from us may or may not be a mindless Zombie. There will never be any way to know, yet its functional principles will be as close as we can ever get to explaining the mind.
The problem of `conscious inessentialism' is examined in the literature, and an argument is presented that the presence of consciousness is indeed marked by a behavioural difference, but that this should be looked for at the cultural level of speech communities.
ABSTRACT Here we address the personhood of patients in a permanent vegetative state (PVS), who fall outside categories of “alive” or “dead” and “subject” or “object.” Drawing on fieldwork in an Israeli hospital, we examine multiple and shifting approaches to PVS patients, which are articulated in the course of caring for and living with them. We argue that, alongside the institutional definition of these patients as being in a PVS, which, as Kaufman showed, evokes irresolvable confusion as to their ontological nature, there appear and disappear other senses of their personhood. Allying with other studies of cognitively impaired patients (e.g., those with dementia and Alzheimer's), we explore this relational person-concept while demonstrating its situational nature. We analyze patients’ admission to the hospital, showing how their essentialistic personhood is “emptied” and how and when their fluid, relational personhood appears and disappears, further showing how this personhood is reified by imagined life stories.
This note suggests that, viewed from a feminist perspective, the reforms contained in the Human Fertilisation and Embryology
Act 2008 represent a missed opportunity to re-think the appropriate model of regulation to govern fertility treatment and
embryology research in the UK. It argues that reform of the legislation was driven largely by the government’s desire to avoid
re-igniting controversies over the legal status of the embryo and abortion and to maintain Britain’s position at the forefront
of embryo research and related biotechnologies. It also highlights the importance of media debates, which were highly selective,
to the reform process, and suggests that in order to inject feminist values into the process of legislative reform, feminists
need to become more media savvy. In the short term, it suggests that there is little prospect of a radical re-thinking of
the appropriate ethico-legal response to the wide variety of family forms that reproductive technologies potentially enable,
much less of considering our ethical obligations to the new forms of embryos that are now permitted by the 2008 Act. In the
meantime, however, it argues that these issues provide productive opportunities for feminist legal theorists to address questions
that have been erased or obscured in the course of the 2008 reforms.
KeywordsEmbryo research-Feminist strategy-Legislative reform-Parenthood-Reproduction
The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of Italyâs most important and original philosophers, has been based on an uncommon erudition in classical traditions of philosophy and rhetoric, the grammarians of late antiquity, Christian theology, and modern philosophy. Recently, Agamben has begun to direct his thinking to the constitution of the social and to some concrete, ethico-political conclusions concerning the state of society today, and the place of the individual within it. In Homo Sacer, Agamben aims to connect the problem of pure possibility, potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a context where the latter has lost its previous religious, metaphysical, and cultural grounding. Taking his cue from Foucaultâs fragmentary analysis of biopolitics, Agamben probes with great breadth, intensity, and acuteness the covert or implicit presence of an idea of biopolitics in the history of traditional political theory. He argues that from the earliest treatises of political theory, notably in Aristotleâs notion of man as a political animal, and throughout the history of Western thinking about sovereignty (whether of the king or the state), a notion of sovereignty as power over âlifeâ is implicit. The reason it remains merely implicit has to do, according to Agamben, with the way the sacred, or the idea of sacrality, becomes indissociable from the idea of sovereignty. Drawing upon Carl Schmittâs idea of the sovereignâs status as the exception to the rules he safeguards, and on anthropological research that reveals the close interlinking of the sacred and the taboo, Agamben defines the sacred person as one who can be killed and yet not sacrificedâa paradox he sees as operative in the status of the modern individual living in a system that exerts control over the collective ânaked lifeâ of all individuals.
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Third person. Cambridge: Polity
- Roberto Esposito
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Justice framed: Law in comics and graphic novels
- Gómez Romero
- Ian Dahlman
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