LITCS 114
Teaching Associate: Patrick Mooney
Bldg. 494, room 160B
Fall 2015
The zombie, we feel, is a more pessimistic but nonetheless more appropriate stand-in for our current moment, and specifically for America in a global economy, where we feed off the products of the rest of the planet, and, alienated from our own humanity, stumble forward, groping for immortality even as we decompose.
an imitation of a noble and complete action, having the proper magnitude; it employs language that has been artistically enhanced […] it is presented in dramatic, not narrative form, and achieves, through the representation of pitiable and fearful incidents, the catharsis of such pitiable and fearful incidents.
tragedy is not an imitation of men, per se, but of human action and life and happiness and misery.
When there’s no more room in Hell …(Peter, ch. 17 on the DVD version) (note that this position is arguably endorsed by the movie poster's tagline)
They’re working on an analysis of this whole phenomenon from the point of view of a viral disease …(TV announcer, ch. 12)
Some kind of radiationthat a space probe brought back from Venus. (Night of the Living Dead)
Francine: What are they doing? Why do they come here?
Stephen: Some kind of instinct. A memory of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives. (DVD ch. 6)
Roger: We're in! How the hell are we going to get back?
Peter: Who the hell cares? Let's go shopping first! (ch. 8)
Stephen: You should see all the great stuff we got, Frannie. All kinds of stuff! This place is terrific! It really is, it's perfect! All kinds of things! We've really got it made here! (ch. 10)
Peter: They're after the place. They don't know why, they just remember … remember that they want to be in here.
Francine: What the hell are they?
Peter: They're us, that's all. (ch. 17)
TV Scientist: Cannibalism in the true sense of the word implies an interspecies [sic] activity. These creatures cannot be considered human. They prey on humans. They do not prey on each other. (ch. 12)
TV Scientist: Intelligence? Seemingly no little or no … reasoning power, but basic skills remain — or more remembered behaviors from, uh, normal life. There are reports of these creatures using tools, but even these actions are the most primitive. The use of such external articles as bludgeons and so forth — I might point out to you that even animals will adopt the basic use of tools in this manner. These creatures are nothing but pure, motorized instinct. Their only drive is for food. […] We must not be lulled by the thought that these are our family members or our friends. They are not. They will not respond to such on such emotions. They must be destroyed on sight! (ch. 12; ellipsis indicates spoken pause.)
Horror has two central elements:
an appearance of the evil supernatural or of the monstrous (this includes the psychopath who kills monstrously); and
the intentional elicitation of dread, visceral disgust, fear, or startlement in the spectator or reader.(Nickel 15)
Although these reactions may be unpleasant and it may be puzzling to some people why I should ever wish to experience them, they are not desensitized reactions. On the contrary, the reaction to terror appears on its face to be a morally engaged reaction.(16)
… as a sudden tearing-away of the intellectual trust that stands behind our actions. Specifically, it is a malicious ripping-away of this intellectual trust, exposing our vulnerabilities in relying on the world and on other people. […] [H]orror puts forward scenarios that through their vivid depiction threaten our background cognitive reliance on others and the world around us.(28)
[T]he intellectual backing for our practical trust, consisting in the various background beliefs we have that our environment (natural and social) will behave in regular ways, cannot be made perfectly certain.
[W]e can still go on, even in the absence of perfect certainty.
[H]orror gives us a perspective on so-called common sense. It helps us to see that a notion of everyday life completely secure against threats cannot be possible, and that the security of common sense is a persistent illusion. […] [T]he idea of security in the everyday is based on an intellectually dubious but pragmatically attractive construction.(17)
The crucial point is that the viewer is not in a position rationally to refuse the scenario of the film as impossible, and that the paranoid scenario thus threatens to annihilate the viewer.(20)
Horror often dramatizes the ordinary or everyday world gone berserk and the transmogrification of the commonplace.(18)
abjectmeans … (from dictionary.com; based on The Random House Dictionary.)
the abject…
object,though it is also appears in a binary opposition to a subject.
The abject has only one quality of the object - that of being opposed to I.(1)
Along with sight-clouding dizziness, nausea makes me balk at that milk cream.(3)
It lies outside, beyond the set, and does not seem to agree to the latter's rules of the game.(2)
skin on the surface of milk(
I experience a gagging sensation)
the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything.
The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject.(4)
A wound with blood and pus
body fluids
defilement
shit
to each ego its object, to each superego its abject.(2)
On the edge of non-existence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture.(2)
in fact recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded.(5)
Put another way, it means that there are lives not sustained by desire, as desire is always for objects. Such lives are based on exclusion.(6)
Abjection is therefore a kind of narcissistic crisis: it is witness to the ephemeral aspect of the state called(14)narcissismwith reproachful jealousy.
when I seek (myself), lose (myself), or experience jouissance--then(8)Iis heterogeneous.
I experience abjection only if an Other has settled in place and stead of what will be(10)me.Not at all an other with whom I identify and incorporate, but an Other who precedes and possesses me, and through such possession causes me to be.
In the symptom, the abject permeates me, I become abject.(11)
It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules, the liar, the criminal with a sound conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a savior . . . Any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject, but remeditated crime, cunning murder, hypocritical revenge are even more so because they heighten the display of such fragility.(4)
For the space that engrosses the deject, the excluded, is never one, not homogeneous, nor totalizable, but essentially divisible, foldable, and catastrophic.(8)
abjection is above all ambiguity.(9)
the abject confronts us, on the one hand, with those fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal.(12)
the abject is perverse because it neither gives up nor assumes a prohibition, a rule, or a law.(15)
