Zombie Reflections: Afterwards, Bodies in Ruin

In this digital residency in collaboration with Érudit, Abby Maxwell explores zombies as figures of the living-dead in archives, a reflection of human and social anxieties. Zombies disrupt the boundaries of language, time and humanity, acting as broken mirrors of a ruined world and an unstable “I”.

The archive is a habitat for the undead—a site of extended being, in which a thing or an event does not end but proliferates onward. Its condition of withering is what is prolonged. The archive is a house of terminal decay.

Zombies exist in the archive as they are reproduced in cinema, art, and literature. The zombie affects/infects art: the figure’s genre mutates and swarms, both reflecting and transmitting certain aesthetics within the broader social sphere. Following the zombie along its varied formal and sensory trajectories trails those of the living—of the human; of thought; of being and its ends.

In probing the Esse and Érudit collections, I ask: how does an archive contain or reveal the undead? And, what can we learn about the living through inspecting zombies in archives, as well as the relationship across these two structures?

ZOMBIE 101 

The zombie finds its roots in seventeenth-century Haiti, where tales circulated of reanimated corpses, enslaved eternally, personifying the sheer violence of the French, and then the US, occupation. But the archetype of the zombie has been whitewashed over time, morphing from a victim-subject of colonial exploitation into a vector of otherness, reinforcing the centrality and sovereignty of the white, human subject.

George A. Romero’s movie Night of the Living Dead (1968), one of the earliest visual renderings of the undead, is a point of origin for many character traits of the canonical zombie and its evolving genre. Zombies are described in the film as “things that look like people but act like animals,” whose “sole urge is the quest for human flesh.”¹ 1 - George A. Romero, Night of the Living Dead, 1968. The primary means of destroying the Romerian zombie is burning its body. Fire is the only thing that inhibits its otherwise infinite, ravenous pursuit of human prey.

In “The Rezort (2015): Zombies, Refugees and B Protocols,” published in Cinémas, Emilio Audissino interrogates the distinct forms of meaning produced within the post-zombie-apocalypse film The Rezort. He suggests that it can be read as a prefiguration of Brexit, which would take place a year after its release, arguing, “Monsters are ‘meaning machines’ … and consequently horror films can be a telling barometer of the society that produced them.”² 2 - Emilio Audissino, “The Rezort (2015): Zombies, Refugees and B Protocols,” Cinémas 30, no. 3 (2024): 101. The zombie, in its contemporary reproductions, acts as a mirror for the paranoia of the living. Its body, an unkempt mass of “dirt, gore and human tissue,”³ 3 - Ibid. carries a weighty archive of state anxieties: colonial paranoias, red scares, AIDS and other epidemics, refugee “crises,” and so on. The zombie is represented as a viral threat that maps directly onto histories of “social contagion,” a phrase encompassing all that might permeate a state’s perimeter and claim to legitimacy. The zombie-mirror reflects the deterioration of all bodies—of any entity that anxiously draws (and redraws, and redraws) lines around itself in order to exist.

In an interview by Gary M. Kramer for Monstrum, Canadian filmmaker Bruce LaBruce speaks to “the whole doppelgänger thing” present in horror persons such as vampires and zombies. “They are in human form, and they are a reflection of the living. Something that is corrupt within everyone resides in these monsters.”⁴ 4 - Bruce LaBruce, in Gary M. Kramer, “Bruce LaBruce on His Explicit Radical Cinema of Seduction, Otto; or, Up with Dead People, L.A. Zombie, and The Visitor,” Monstrum 7, no. 1 (2024): 31. The wary intimacy between zombie and human is crucial to the genre; beloveds are infected, becoming vectors themselves. A zombie reeks of death: the secret of its condition of decay is exposed, exteriorized: its lost limbs gather in heaps. Its flesh rots. The periphery of the human is dead, too—the skin that contains it sheds, becoming dust. The human body is a convoluted matrix of living and dying, not one and then, finally, the other. The zombie’s proximity to death (and death’s beyond) is essentially our own.

EATING

LaBruce explains that “despite being disaffected characters who have no emotions, [zombies] are remarkably voracious in their appetites.”⁵ 5 - LaBruce, in Kramer, “Bruce LaBruce,” 31-32. The zombie is propelled only by its profound hunger for human flesh—a cannibalistic drive, if the figure’s full arc of existence, its having-been human, is considered. Cannibalism is the absorption of life into un-death (exponentially, since a zombie’s prey becomes undead in turn).

The slippery dynamics of cannibalism—or, maybe, every act of consumption—are explored in “Cannibal Actif: The Artist Book as Threshold for Material Encounters.”⁶ 6 - Joëlle Dubé and María Castañeda-Delgado, “Cannibal Actif: The Artist Book as Threshold for Material Encounters,” Esse arts + opinions no. 101 (2021), accessible online. Co-authors Joëlle Dubé and María Castañeda-Delgado interpret Rochelle Goldberg’s bookwork as a gutter, a place of encounter, a threshold at which bodies and other substances commingle. A work of intra-action, as conceptualized by Karen Barad, Cannibal Actif inhabits “the line between consuming and being consumed, transforming and being transformed, preying on and being preyed upon.”⁷ 7 - Ibid. All of the relationships at stake in the work are characterized by permeability, “the loss of a stable distinction between self and other.”⁸ 8 - Leah Pires in ibid. According to art historian Leah Pires, quoted by Dubé and Castañeda-Delgado, permeability also “characterizes digestive networks, where the predator integrates the prey as part of itself, obscuring any clearly defined boundaries.”

This is the paradox of eating—this integral, lytic encounter between eater and eaten. The zombie consumes that which it once was: here, the unparseability of predator/prey is magnified. But all consumption derives from this relation. Eating, that absorption that sustains forms of life, is a primal threat to the enclosure of “human”; every feeding is a crack in the foundation. Out of this crack grows the human’s other, its shadow: “the mirror [that] touches back.”⁹ 9 - Dubé and Castañeda-Delgado paraphrasing Pires.

ENDING

Zombies are associated with endings: their existence and spread cleaves a new temporal plane beyond life and death, signalling apocalypse. The end of the world. But, zombies simultaneously trouble the finality that death promises—the end of all ends, which adheres meaning to the very notion of time. The zombie proliferates in culture because it collapses structures of meaning. Its body is a threshold opening toward other times; a means to other ends.

What exists, remains, or grows at the end of the world?

In “Fukushima’s Animal,” the Berlin-based writer, critic, and art historian Carlos Kong explores the temporality and aftermath of nuclear disaster through the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Powerplant breakdown provoked by the Great East Japan Earthquake and its resultant tsunami in March 2011. The sheer magnitude of such a disaster “challenges narratives of crisis,”¹⁰ 10 - Carlos Kong, “Fukushima’s Animal,” Esse art + opinions,no. 87 (2016), accessible online. Kong argues. In fact, the immensity of its destruction inhibits any possible narrative—it precludes the very act of writing; precludes all language, refusing to be “digested, normalized, and forgotten.” Kong traces the visual representations of the animal survivors remaining in/after Fukushima in Pierre Huyghe’s film Untitled (Human Mask) (2014) and Yasusuke Ōta’s photographic series The Abandoned Animals of Fukushima (2011).

In this void of (human) language, in whatever time protrudes from this world-ending catastrophe, emerges the animal to “unwrite the possibility of moving beyond it.”¹¹ 11 - Ibid. Still here, albeit in the gap of human recognition, the animal’s body remains and reminds, a force that is a record of what has taken place.

These animals are undead: proliferations of something in the aperture cleaved by the very notion of ending. Representing the animal decentres the human as the core of what is to be archived and rejects the normalizing violence of disaster narratives, forging space beyond the human’s end(s). And, following Jacques Derrida’s L’Animal que donc je suis, Kong argues that writing the animal “undermines language by doubly positioning the animal as both the mirror of the human and that which the human always follows, evolutionarily and philosophically.”¹² 12 - Ibid. These undead are, to the human, both mirror and possibility: exceeding ending, in which all meaning is disarticulated, a reflection and an opening. These are the animals that “je suis,” as both “I am” and “I follow.”

Ōta’s photographs reveal Fukushima’s “animals and landscapes in parallel states of slow death.”¹³ 13 - Ibid. It is a survival that is also a prolonged expiry; this existence extends the middle, the decay, which gathers at all edges of a death. These quieter processes belong to the world; the unhuman and the undead.

ARCHIVE: ash, shard

Jorge Luis Borges’s The Library of Babel (1941) drafts the design for a universal “Library,” the ultimate archive, so vast as to contain every possible book, including all those yet to be written. In meticulous detail, Borges describes its hexagonal galleries and spiral stairways, producing an infinitely unfolding structure. This archive of archives, which purports to contain the entirety of the world, produces in its wake another kind of archive: the shadow of what is written—all that cannot be expressed in language.

This shadow archive is “the very ash of the archive”:¹⁴ 14 - Jacques Derrida, in Akira Mizuta Lippit, “The Shadow Archive (A Secret Light),” Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 9-10. the archive is constituted through its own burning. In flames, this other archive is produced, revealing the secrets of its former self. In considering Borges’s Library, the film scholar Akira Mizuta Lippit wonders, “Is the archive of the uninscribable, unwritable, and unrepresentable possible only as the destruction of the archive? … Which archive survives in the end? Which one remains, the archive or its shadow?”¹⁵ 15 - Lippit, Atomic Light, 8–9.

Lippit writes, “Under the shadow, another form of life emerges, excluded from the archive that includes everything.”¹⁶ 16 - Lippit, 7. Death is ultimately unwritable—the nothing that all other nothings skew toward. In attempting to write such endings, this official archive pre-dicts and pre-scribes its own approaching disaster. Whereas the zombie is the disaster of the human, fire is the disaster of both zombie and archive.

The zombie drags death into the realm of the living, at once a force of ruination and a figure of the insatiable desire to preserve, to render a form of impermeable life. But the desire to preserve unfolds as death’s perpetuity. As Lippit notes, the archive’s temporality is “final and finite, but also infinitely pointed toward the end, toward finitude, virtually final, infinal.”¹⁷ 17 - Ibid., 5. The emphasis is Lippit’s. Much like this archive in ruin, our recurrent mirror—this surface that is both reflection and beginning; a mirror that touches back—comprises fracture.

In “I am in animal,” the Vancouver-based artist and art historian Marina Roy explores this titular phrase and its almost-palindromic form.¹⁸ 18 - Marina Roy, “I am in animal / L’animal émoi,” Esse arts + opinions, no. 87 (2016), accessible online. The I’s capitalization is required both for the illusion of this false palindrome and for the compartmentalization of the human subject, another illusion, from the animal: the “I” in possession of itself. Roy writes, “Humans recognize themselves only through viewing the animal, not by viewing themselves in a mirror.” The human—a category notoriously in flux—produces its self as “I” against the notion and imagined body of the animal.

“But in the case of ‘I am in animal,’” Roy writes, “there exists a slight warp or fracture in that mirror.”¹⁹ 19 - Ibid. This broken mirror’s shards reveal the deception required for the human to believe itself innately distinct from the animal. Perhaps the zombie is a shattered mirror, then; its shards lay bare the inexorably fractured condition of whatever peers in. Zombies emerge as the disasters of leaking cannibals and the creatures that animate and retain space for an entire world’s grief. Following the zombie through the archive traces out a map of fissured, blurred relations across the living (all that which inscribes itself as such, all that hungers to write into order the animality of death) and all the rest.

Links to the articles cited: Emilio Audissino Gary M. Kramer Joëlle Dubé & María Castañeda-Delgado Carlos Kong Marina Roy